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Jane Jacobs Remembered

Some transformative books change your life by opening up new vistas, or giving you new tools to make sense of the world, or simply by moving you emotionally. But some books change your life by building bridges between regions of your intellectual life that you'd imagined to be separate. About ten years ago, when I first started sketching out the ideas that would ultimately become my second book, Emergence, I started following a hunch about a potential connection between complexity theory and the organization of cities. I'd seen a few allusions to the idea in some of the complexity books I'd read, but had encountered almost nothing directly relevant in any of the urbanist readings I'd been pursuing. And then I got around to reading Jane Jacobs' Death and Life of Great American Cities. From page one, I felt like all the ideas I'd been shuffling around in the dark were suddenly illuminated by Jacobs' account of how dense urban neighborhoods worked. And when I got to the conclusion, where she explicitly invokes Warren Weaver's visionary essay on "organized complexity" from 1958, I remember feeling this amazing shock of recognition and connectedness. So my little trail of bread crumbs was actually leading somewhere after all, and it was Jacobs who ultimately persuaded me to keep following them.

As many of you probably know, Jacobs died yesterday at 89. The best thing I can think of to say about her is to quote the words I wrote at the end of the acknowledgments for Emergence, a book that I would never have written had I not been exposed to her ideas:

Nearly four years ago, days after Alexa and I moved into our apartment in the West Village, I finally got around to reading Jane Jacobs's Death and Life of the Great American Cities. I knew Jacobs had lived in the Village while writing the book, but I didn't know the exact whereabouts. From the very first chapter it was clear that she must have lived somewhere nearby. About a hundred pages in, with the help of the web, I tracked down her actual residence: no more than three blocks from our apartment. All through the writing of this book, I could see the roof of Jacobs's old building from the study I was working in. I could see the rooftops and the sidewalks of the whole West Village sprawled out below me, the urban ballet that Jacobs had written about so powerfully forty years before. If books like this one require acknowledgements, they have to start -- or end -- with that great, shifting energy, and its connective powers. This is a city book, both in subject matter and in inspiration. If you're reading these words in a comparably thriving city, put the book down, step outside into the roaring streets, and make your own connections.

The Numbers Game

I meant to point to John Heilemann's excellent piece on the steroids controversy, "Let Juice Loose," when it ran two weeks ago, and not just because it had a nice shout-out to my elective surgery piece from Wired last year. John makes some great points about the records mythology of baseball:

Elective surgery will also pose knotty problems for another of the arguments deployed in defense of bans on doping: that in a sport such as baseball, where history matters—where, indeed, records are revered as sacred—letting players juice would make it impossible to compare performances over time. This is why Bonds, as he approaches Hank Aaron’s home-run record, has ginned up so much consternation. But is it really possible that if a player known to have had laser eye surgery were to surpass, say, Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak, that baseball would contemplate placing an asterisk next to his name in the record books (as some are suggesting should be Bonds’s fate if he surpasses Aaron)? If not, why not? The truth is that all the talk in baseball about the sacredness of its records is little more than another tactic in the long-running campaign waged by its overseers to mystify the game.

I'd add one other point to the debate, which has no doubt been said a million times in discussing this issue: the primary reason why records shouldn't be considered so sacred is that they don't factor in the obvious increase in overall competitiveness in the sport. Barry Bonds might have used steroids to help him hit 13 more home runs than Babe Ruth ever managed in a single season, but Ruth had a huge advantage over Bonds in that the pool of pitching talent he was facing was drawn entirely from white Americans. No doubt there was a Pedro Martinez or a Mariano Rivera throwing rocks at 95 MPH in the Dominican Republic or Panama back in the 1920s, but Ruth didn't have to face them because they had no way to make it into the major leagues back then. When Ruth played, there was a potential talent pool of about 10 million people; now, the number is in the hundreds of millions, and the system for discovering and nurturing new talent is vastly more efficient than it was then.

When you factor in the increased training regimes, non-elective surgical techniques, computerized analysis of batter/pitcher history, and the accumulated strategic wisdom of playing a sport for seventy-five years -- it should be clear that the bar of competitiveness has been raised significantly since Ruth hit his 714 homers. We don't see clear evidence of this trend because the batters have been improving alongside the pitchers, so it tends to even out. (Though we do see it in the decline of .400 hitting, as Stephen Jay Gould explained in Full House.) But if the problem with steroids is -- at least in part -- that it makes it unfair to compare one era's hitters with another era's, why isn't the increase in the overall quality of play equally problematic? Even without steroids, I wager Bonds would have hit 73 home runs -- if not more -- off the pitching of the 1920s. Maybe Ruth should have the asterisk.

This gets it exactly right:.

As annoying as this announcement will be to those who live there, Brooklyn has become an adjective, a shorthand for a certain style of living. It’s mostly Manhattan’s fault, of course; real-estate ridiculousness over the past ten years has forced the young, the creative, and people who want separate bedrooms for their kids to embrace 718. But what was once a reluctant move has become an enthusiastic, don’t-look-back migration to a place with more space—and thus, literally, more open to change, risk, experimentation. Real communities (the kind where neighbors invite each other over for dinner) have coalesced, and so has the style we’re calling Brooklynism: looser and more playful than its Manhattan counterpart, homey and ironic, comfortable but always conscious of its looks, and often of its politics (green and recycled are key). It’s not just limited to home design: In the following pages, you’ll see Brooklynism in all its manifestations, from the growing new-cuisine movement to the close-knit fashion-design community to the increasingly potent product-and-furniture-design gang, who’ve become an international force in just a few years.

I knew it! Reading is bad for you.

The two research groups monitored the behavior of 241 drivers in 100 vehicles for more than a year. During the 2 million miles of the study, the drivers were involved in 82 crashes and 761 near-crashes. Reaching for a moving object multiplied the risk of a crash or near-crash by nine times, according to the study. Reading, applying makeup, or dialing a handheld device tripled the risk.

Now, I realize that I live in a pedestrian-centric city, and perhaps I'm a little out of touch with what's going on in the rest of the country. But are people actually reading while driving now? How do you even do that?

Brooklyn in Bloom

I've been on the road for most of the past two weeks, between the Lisbon trip, a couple of speeches, and then a quick family vacation to Florida -- hence the relative lack of activity on the blog. But now I'm home for a long stretch, and I have to say I couldn't be happier about it. Park Slope is truly intoxicating this time of year. Everything is in full bloom; everyone's hanging out on the sidewalk or the playground or the park. (I just snapped this pic looking down the street from our front stoop this morning.) The basic neighborliness of the place -- already very high by most standards -- climbs a few more notches, because you're constantly running into people, and spontaneously taking the kids out for a joint trip to the meadow or the dog beach. Or people are out front working on the front gardens, and you get into conversations about what they're planting, or how they got their gas lantern to work, or who's moving in across the street. In a funny way, the weather makes everything smaller, because all the lingering sidewalk conversations draw you into the local grain of the neighborhood and the street. Instead of hustling, head down to the subway, you're chatting on the stoop, enjoying the sun.

Thanks for all the Lisbon tips. I'm sad to report that I barely got to see the city. It was like last spring all over again. I got in at 6 AM, after sleeping maybe three hours on the plane, managed to get another hour of sleep at the hotel before the interviews started. I did 11 interviews that first day -- they stretched all the way to 8PM (1 AM NYC time.) The next day, I did another five, before my publisher finally let me leave the hotel -- to take me to do a bookstore talk in a giant mall!

Finally, we did get to have a lovely dinner on the river and I got to see a bit of Lisbon, and I had a great time getting to meet my publishers. The next day I was able to ramble around a bit, and it was fun to pick up a few of the local papers and see all the coverage that the book was getting. But still, I don't feel that I really got to see the city in anything but the most cursory way.

More and more, whenever Apple does something interesting, I find myself eagerly waiting to see what John Gruber has to say about it. His take on Bootcamp -- Windows: The New Classic -- is a perfect example why:

The old equation -- decades old -- is that most computers ran Windows (or, if you go back far enough, DOS) and some other ones, the ones from Apple, ran Mac OS. As of today, the new equation is that all computers can run Windows, but some, the special ones from Apple, also run Mac OS X. (Including other PC operating systems like the various Linux distributions doesn't really change the equation.)

The distinction between these two equations may strike you as
subtle, but the difference is potentially momentous. The point is
that it recasts Macs from being "different" to being "special".
Instead of occupying a separate universe from that of PC hardware, it's now a superset of PC hardware.

On the disease front, check out this new simulation from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Watch the QuickTime, and notice what happens between around day 55 and day 70. That's a little scary.

Simulation of a pandemic flu outbreak in the continental United States, initially introduced by the arrival of 10 infected individuals in Los Angeles. The spatiotemporal dynamics of the prevalence (number of symptomatic cases at any point in time), is shown on a logarithmic color scale, from 1 or fewer (blue) to 100 or more (red) cases per 1,000 persons. Without vaccination, antiviral drugs, or other mitigation strategies, the entire nation becomes infected within a few months.

I'm leaving later today for a quick trip to Lisbon for the Portugal release of Everything Bad. Never been before. Any tips?

Whoa. This happened faster than I thought it would. Good for Apple.