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Italic Ist Verboten!

I have a professional interest in finding alternatives to MS Word on OS X, particularly alternatives that are tailored to a book writer's needs, as opposed to a memo writer's needs. And so I enjoyed playing around the trial version of Ulysses, a newish Cocoa application from the European Blue Technologies Group. Here's how they describe the software in the help guide:

Ulysses wants to set focus on the only thing that counts: the text and its content.

Ulysses wants to enable the writer to fully concentrate on the story he wishes to tell, without hobbling his creativity by means of unnecessary burden and distraction. Someone who at least once in his life spent hours in a document searching for the correct way of formatting instead of using the time to tweak a title or heading, knows what it's about.

Ulysses wants to free the writer from the need to deliver and develop his text in predefined structures. Instead, the writer should be given the ability to form his own preferred structures -- both within the text and in organising things.

Sounds intriguing, but the actual program is a little dictatorial in the way it "frees" the writer. My favorite example: the software will not allow you to use bold or italic type as you write. Using italics would only be a distraction, apparently. Now, I hate Word's formatting system as much as the next guy, but I've never been all that puzzled by the italics function. And I use it quite often.

This reminds me of one of my favorite typographic stories from college. (Sounds good already, no?) One of my more, um, enthusiastic friends was applying to be a Rhodes Scholar. This was a very smart guy who may have had his intellectual energies dialed up just a few notches too high. (He once printed out 200 copies of his mid-term paper in a Nietzsche lecture we were taking, and handed them out to the entire class.) When you apply for the Rhodes, you write a two-three page personal statement explaining why they should consider you for this great fellowship. If you're lucky, you get asked back for a couple of interviews. My friend sends in his statement and other materials, and then a month or two later gets called in for an interview. Usually, this is a good sign. But in this case, the committee sat him down, and handed him a piece of paper, and asked him if he recognized anything on the page.

He looked at it for a few seconds, and said, "Yes, this is a list of fifty or sixty words that you've randomly selected from my personal statement."

The committee chair shook his head. "Not random. Those are all the words you italicized in your personal statement."

If he'd only been using Ulysses, that guy might be a Rhodes Scholar today.

My Head, Talking

I have a few entertaining SBJ media appearances to note, before disappearing into the vortex of the Johnson family Christmas. First, for those of you who get The Science Channel, I've taped a special two-hour show on the top science stories of 2004, hosted by my friend Steve Petranek, the editor-in-chief of Discover Magazine. I'm one of four panelists, and if you tune in, you can see me pontificating on subjects about which I am a world-renowned expert: molecular chemistry, prime numbers, global warming, etc. (You can see airtimes here.)

Almost a year ago, I taped an interview for a documentary on the scientific and philosophical roots of The Matrix. Apparently, Emergence is in the Wachowski Brothers' library -- that's right, it's me and Baudrillard! This filled me with great pride, until I did the math and realized that if I'd had any influence over those films, it had to be only the Reloaded and Revolutions sequels, and not the brilliant original, since Emergence came out after the first one. Still, it was a delightful interview, and the final film, which is available as part of the massive collector's edition DVD, is a wonderful documentary, featuring a number of my friends and heros: Kevin Kelly, Brewster Kahle, Stewart Brand, Will Wright, Esther Dyson, and many more.

Front Wheel Drive

Roy Christopher was nice enough to invite me to do a short interview on the wonderful Front Wheel Drive zine, joining a long list of friends and favorites of mine that they've interviewed in the past. It's a quick read, but a fun one. I particularly enjoyed this exchange:

As long as we're talking about interfaces, what about branding? What about the homogenization of the landscape where big box retailers are concerned? This is a personal pet peeve, but I like to see different things in different places when I travel. I hate to see the same four stores, or the same coffee shop in every town. Is there any company out there you think is respecting regional culture even as they move in and set up shop?

I'm sympathetic to what you're saying, but I think there's a risk of sentimentality here as well. I mean, Starbucks is everywhere, which means by a certain standard the world has gotten more homogeneous. On the other hand, the world is now filled with far more places where I can order a triple-shot iced lattee with good espresso. Ten years ago the number of places serving a wide range of coffees was pretty small, outside the ten biggest cities and maybe a dozen college towns. But thanks to Starbucks, even airports and shopping malls now have a huge palette of coffee options to choose from. Same goes for Barnes and Noble. Their outlets regularly carry Interface Culture in stores, despite the fact that it never came close to being a bestseller. But you would have been very hard pressed to find a book like that in a non-metropolitan/academic bookstore ten years ago. (And then there's the whole Amazon phenomenon, where everyone with a web connection now has access to the most obscure titles in print.)

So for the people outside the urban centers, I think the chains have largely been a force for more diversity, not less. The question is whether the chains are killing off the diversity in the cities themselves. I don't think anyone has done a convincing study of this yet. My hunch would be it's pretty much a draw: Soho is filled with JCrew and The Gap now, but five blocks over in NoLiTa there are more small designers in one-room shops than there ever were in Soho. There are fewer indie bookstores now, but frankly, I don't need indie bookstores with Amazon. And there are like a thousand Starbucks in NYC, but all the classic small coffee shops I know of are still thriving.

Question Time

"VKNYC" writes in to the comments area for the last post with two interesting questions. First:

why would a famous (as in avant-garde intelligentsia famous not US magazine smut famous) author be forced to purchase his own book?

Well, as a famous author of course, it's not strictly speaking me who is doing the purchasing on Amazon -- it's one of the many assistants, butlers, or bodyguards that I have in my employ. But I get the gist of the question.

No, the straight answer is that you get a certain number of free copies of the book (something like 50) after which you have to pay some super-discounted amount to get copies in bulk. But the difference between Amazon's price and their price isn't that big, and it's just a lot easier to one-click it from Amazon than it is to go through the bureaucracy at the publisher.

Out of insatiable why-did-i-go-into-finance-instead-of-becoming-a-writer curiosity, it prompted me to wonder...when you complete a work (whether articles, novel or otherwise) at publication, have you reached an impenetrable saturation point with respect to absorbing or actively acquiring further information (in the way of further developments etc.) regarding said work's subject matter?

That's a really interesting question. The short answer is that it goes in waves. For me, by the time a book comes out, particularly once I've finished the publicity tour, I'm really sick of the topic. So there's a period of escape, where you're actively avoiding whatever it is you just finished writing about. After Mind Wide Open came out, I really couldn't bear to read anything more about the brain, which is funny because I'm constantly being asked what the latest news is in neuroscience and I have to say, "I have no idea!" But then that backlash subsides, and you start getting interested again. Partially because of all the political/blogosphere happenings this year, I probably spent more time following Emergence-related issues than Mind Wide Open ones.

But I suspect other authors would have a different story to tell, because the relationship between their books is different from the relationship between mine. It has always seemed to me that, when you look at sequences of books, and not just single titles, there are two kinds of non-fiction writers. Some writers create bodies of work that look like this...

...where the books all surround some kind of common theme, each time approached from a fresh angle. Larry Lessig's books have been like this, as have Steven Pinker's. My books have looked more like this...

... where there's a small seed of the next book in the current one, but each book ends up arriving at a totally different place: from interfaces, to ants, to brains, to pop television shows.

This is the difference between being an expert/scholar and being an interloper/critic. They're both wonderful approaches of course, and the advantange of the former is that you get to totally own a space. When people talk about intellectual property issues and the net, Larry Lessig's name has to come up. It's almost mandatory. But when people talk about self-organization or brain science, I'm hardly a mandatory name to drop.

Of course, what I like about my approach is that I get to visit a lot of very different worlds with each book. And it allows me to burn out on topics without necessarily damaging my credibility. I imagine it would be harder for Steve Pinker to say, "Oh man, don't ask about me about that evolutionary psychology stuff -- I am SO over that." But for dilettantes like me, it's a lot easier.

Mind Hacks

Amazon's email recommendations have historically worked very nicely for me -- about a third of the time, they're notifying me of something that I'm genuinely interested in. (Almost every other automated sales pitch I receive is useless.) But every now and then, they get a little too cute. Today, for instance, I received this in the mail:

Dear Amazon.com Customer:

We've noticed that customers who have purchased Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software by Steven Johnson also purchased books by Tom Stafford. For this reason, you might like to know that Tom Stafford's Mind Hacks (O'Reilly's Hacks Series) is now available in paperback.

Now, first of all, this is funny because not only have I purchased Emergence, I also, well, wrote Emergence. I'm not sure if there's the same correlation between Emergence writers and Tom Stafford readers, but of course, the sample size is quite small.

Actually, I suppose there is a correlation there, though Amazon seems not to be aware of it, because I also wrote the introduction to Mind Hacks. If only "Tom Stafford" was a pen name I used for side projects, this might well have been the most self-referential automated recommendation in history.

P.S. The one piece of genuinely useful information in this email is that Mind Hacks is out! Go buy it! It's really a wonderful book, filled with experiments that you can do on your brain in the safety of your own home.