Hyde Park Blvd

In case you missed the original piece in the May 11, New Yorker, Gladwell weaves his usual thoughtful red thread across the ages, linking contrarian approaches to battlefields and basketball.

In the course of his wandering, Gladwell lights on Vivek Ranadive and the implications of his real-time processing work (most visible in the successful business he created, TIBCO):

The world runs in real time, but government runs in batch. Every few months, it adjusts. Its mission is to keep the temperature comfortable in the economy, and, if you were to do things the government’s way in your house, then every few months you’d turn the heater either on or off, overheating or underheating your house.” Ranadivé argued that we ought to put the economic data that the Fed uses into a big stream, and write a computer program that sifts through those data, the moment they are collected, and make immediate, incremental adjustments to interest rates and the money supply. “It can all be automated,” he said. “Look, we’ve had only one soft landing since the Second World War. Basically, we’ve got it wrong every single time.”

You can imagine what someone like Alan Greenspan or Ben Bernanke might say about that idea. Such people are powerfully invested in the notion of the Fed as a Solomonic body: that pause of five or eight weeks between economic adjustments seems central to the process of deliberation. To Ranadivé, though, “deliberation” just prettifies the difficulties created by lag. The Fed has to deliberate because it’s several weeks behind, the same way the airline has to bow and scrape and apologize because it waited forty-five minutes to tell you something that it could have told you the instant you stepped off the plane.

Robert Frost at Breadloaf (via New Yorker)

In his review of Mark McGurl’s “The Program Era” (New Yorker, June 8), Louis Menand reflects on an oversupply of navel-gazing about college writing programs and their relative merit.  He offers a perspective that has resonance for another would-be poet who benefited from the entrepreneurial environment of a would-be writing program, not to mention the mentorship of terrific teachers, writers, and friends, among them William Alfred, Elizabeth Bishop, Tony Hecht, Jane Shore, and Kathleen Spivak:

For, in spite of all the reasons that they shouldn’t, workshops work. I wrote poetry in college, and I was in a lot of workshops. I was a pretty untalented poet, but I was in a class with some very talented ones, including Garrett Hongo, who later directed the creative-writing program at the University of Oregon, and Brenda Hillman, who teaches in the M.F.A. program at St. Mary’s College, in California. Our teacher was a kind of Southern California Beat named Dick Barnes, a sly and wonderful poet who also taught medieval and Renaissance literature, and who could present well the great stone face of the hard-to-please. I’m sure that our undergraduate exchanges were callow enough, but my friends and I lived for poetry. We read the little magazines—Kayak and Big Table and Lillabulero—and we thought that discovering a new poet or a new poem was the most exciting thing in the world. When you are nineteen years old, it can be.

Did I engage in self-observation and other acts of modernist reflexivity? Not much. Was I concerned about belonging to an outside contained on the inside? I don’t think it ever occurred to me. I just thought that this stuff mattered more than anything else, and being around other people who felt the same way, in a setting where all we were required to do was to talk about each other’s poems, seemed like a great place to be. I don’t think the workshops taught me too much about craft, but they did teach me about the importance of making things, not just reading things. You care about things that you make, and that makes it easier to care about things that other people make.

And if students, however inexperienced and ignorant they may be, care about the same things, they do learn from each other. I stopped writing poetry after I graduated, and I never published a poem—which places me with the majority of people who have taken a creative-writing class. But I’m sure that the experience of being caught up in this small and fragile enterprise, contemporary poetry, among other people who were caught up in it, too, affected choices I made in life long after I left college. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

I didn’t see much mention of Nick Paumgarten’s May 18 New Yorker piece The Death of Kings (audio available here).  Overall a useful, if sobering, perspective.  He talks to Columbia University Prof Bruce Greenwald:

He explained that we are, in some respects, the victims of a structural imperative reaching back to the waning days of the Second World War.  The Great Depression in Britain, he said, started in the late 1920s, owing to structural deficits in the nation’s balance of payments, a result of the pound sterling’s traditional role as the world’s reserve currency.  Breton Woods, the global economic conference in New Hampshire in 1944, repalaced the pound with the dollar.

This meant that debts tended to be denominated in dollars, and other nations had to hold dollars in reserve, to pay them off.  Not having dollars would expose your country to the risks of currency fluctuation.  And so other countries coveted dollars.  Toget them, they sold goods.  There was, therefore, in the Bretton Woods arrangement, a structural demand for current-account surpluses, and for someone to eat up all those surpluses.  We had to be the consumer of last resort.  “We’ve been living beyond our means for the sake of the world,” Greenwald told me.  “Where else would all that crap go?”

They make, we take.  And then, we find ways to pay for it all.  Our prime asset, over time, became our financial acumen.  It represented an ever greater part of our economy, our political system, and our interaction with the world.  “What’s our best export?” Leib said (Barclay Leib, derivatives trader and hedge-fund consultant).  “Scrap metal?  No.  Hedge-fund managers.  Financial creativity.  We’re good at it.  We keep the cycle of money going.”

Ultimately, Paumgarten looks at both sides and seems to edge efficient market-ward:

The market scolds saw the positive signs (in stock market prices) as jabberwocky, or else mere accounting tricks.  The skeptics worried that the crisis was mutating into a virulent strain of delusion, a pretext for the preservation of the old status quo.  The presumption was that staving off near-term pain would lead to ever more spectacular collapse.  But who knows?  Maybe it won’t.  Divination is fraught, fact being merely what we make of them.

Our dreams of normalcy are just that.  We will have to create something new; propping up what exists in hopes of reclaiming what was isn’t going to work.  But I think we all know that, or I hope we do.

This week’s cover
Despite prepping with the Kennedys, Bo arrives and the Obamas have their hands full. PWDs require a lot of attention, training, love. In the best of circumstances, they are engaging, funny, mouthy, needy. Their puppyhood extends beyond three years.
Roscoe at Bo’s age.
Roscoe, HPBlvd mascot, is just about three. Would that Bo turn out as well.

Meanwhile, this is a small breed that depends on quality breeders. Keeping PWDs away from puppy mills and the inevitable demand will be a chore. We can hope for the best.