The Problem With Big Tech

Fox White Nationalist Tucker Carlson's biggest worry about the slaughter last week in New Zealand-- by a confessed Trump supporter-- was worry that social media might curtail "free speech" by blocking further broadcasting of live gun massacres. Facebook can't seem to figure out how to prevent the live streaming of mass murders, another in a long list of problems for the tech giant, problems that are rankling the public and bringing the industry front and center politically.

Nancy Scola did a piece for Politico Sunday asking how the Democrats running for president turned against tech-- a big change for the party. Scola sees evidence that "Democrats running for president see big tech companies as enemies of the progressive agenda, rather than the allies they once were. Warren’s complaint last week that the social media giant 'has too much power' might have been a shock coming from a prominent Democrat just a few years ago, when Barack Obama’s public appearances with CEOs like Mark Zuckerberg and Twitter’s Jack Dorsey were typical for a party seeking to boost its appeal to tech-savvy young voters.

The hard turn against the technology industry from prominent Democrats represents a major cultural change in the party-- and a real threat to Silicon Valley’s political influence with liberals who may share tech workers' political sensibilities but are diverging from the industry on fundamental issues about privacy, business practices and taxes. For the industry, the danger is that the next president could espouse policies harmful to tech’s bottom line, from pushing for tougher antitrust action to restricting government contracts for companies unwilling to change their ways.

Klobuchar sounded the theme at the very start of her campaign, during the announcement speech in February where she stood in blowing snow in Minneapolis.

“For too long the big tech companies have been telling you ‘Don’t worry! We’ve got your back!’ while your identities are being stolen and your data is mined,” the Minnesota senator said.

Even Cory Booker, a Stanford grad with close ties to Silicon Valley, used a recent NPR interview to lump tech in with other powerful lobbies that need to be reined in. "We need to make sure that whether it's Silicon Valley or the pharma industry or the big ag, we need to hold people accountable for their actions," he said.

...Warren has taken the hardest line of all, calling for the federal government to shrink and split up industry giants like Amazon, Facebook, and Google. “To restore the balance of power in our democracy, to promote competition, and to ensure that the next generation of technology innovation is as vibrant as the last, it’s time to break up our biggest tech companies," she wrote in a blog post this month.

The Massachusetts senator later singled out Facebook after Politico reported that the social media company had taken down Warren campaign ads calling for its breakup. Facebook soon restored the ads, but Warren said the episode only underscored the need for "a social media marketplace that isn't dominated by a single censor."

Republican Texas Sen. Ted Cruz publicly took Warren’s side in that dispute-- a rare occurrence that underscores the bipartisan populist appeal of the tech backlash. A Morning Consult/Politico poll earlier this month found that near-identical pluralities of Democrats and Republicans agreed with the statement, "Technology companies have too much power and the federal government should step in to regulate more."

A few days ago, former Labor Secretary Robert Reich penned an article for Salon explaining why Warren is right about busting up big tech. It's all about monopolies. Did you know, for example, that:

• Nearly 90% of all internet searches now go through Google.
• Facebook and Google together account for 58% of all digital ads
• 93% of Americans get their news online-- and Facebook and Google is where many of them go for it
• Amazon is now the first stop for a third of all American consumers seeking to buy anything.

Reich explains that "With such size comes the power to stifle innovation. Amazon won’t let any business that sells through it sell any item at a lower price anywhere else. It’s even using its control over book sales to give books published by Amazon priority over rival publishers. Google uses the world’s most widely used search engine to promote its own services and Google-generated content over those of competitors, like Yelp. Facebook’s purchases of WhatsApp and Instagram killed off two potential rivals."

Such size also confers political power to get whatever these companies and their top executives want.

Amazon-- the richest corporation in America-- paid nothing in federal taxes last year. Meanwhile, it’s holding an auction to extort billions from states and cities eager to have its second headquarters.

It also forced Seattle, it’s home headquarters, to back down on a plan to tax big corporations like itself to pay for homeless shelters for a growing population that can’t afford the sky-high rents caused in part by Amazon.

Facebook withheld evidence of Russian activity on its platform far longer than previously disclosed. When the news came to light, it employed a political opposition research firm to discredit critics.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who holds the world’s speed record for falling from one of the most admired to the most reviled people on the planet, just unveiled a plan to “encrypt” personal information from all his platforms.

The new plan is likely to give Facebook even more comprehensive data about everyone. If you believe it will better guard privacy, you don’t remember Zuckerberg’s last seven promises to protect privacy.

Google forced the New America Foundation, an influential think tank it helped fund, to fire researchers who were urging antitrust officials to take on Google.

And it’s been quietly financed hundreds of university professors to write research papers justifying Google’s market dominance.

What to do? Some argue the tech mammoths should be regulated like utilities or common carriers, but this would put government into the impossible position of policing content and overseeing new products and services.

A better alternative is to break them up. That way, information would be distributed through a large number of independent channels without a centralized platform giving all content apparent legitimacy and extraordinary reach. And more startups could flourish.

Like the robber barons of the first Gilded Age, those of the second have amassed fortunes because of their monopolies-- fortunes that give them unparalleled leverage over politicians and the economy.

The combined wealth of Zuckerberg ($62.3 billion), Bezos ($131 billion), Brin ($49.8 billion) and Page ($50.8 billion) is larger than the combined wealth of the bottom half of the American population.

A wealth tax (also proposed by Warren) would help.

Some of the robber barons of the first Gilded Age were generous philanthropists, as are today’s. That didn’t excuse the damage they did to America.

Let’s be clear: Monopolies aren’t good for anyone except for the monopolists.

In this new Gilded Age, we need to respond to them as forcefully as we did the first time around. Warren’s ideas are a good start.

As we suggested earlier, a Bernie/Warren ticket would be a great idea to put up against Trump in 2020. One way Amazon, for example, has been able to exert influence over politicians is through substantial campaign contributions, substantial enough so that it's absolutely impossible to see them as anything other than bribes. Last year alone, Google and its executives poured $13,536,034 into electoral races (and that doesn't count the $27,400,000 they spent on lobbying in the last cycle). Amazon's biggest contribution-- by far-- went to the conservative-leaning With Honor Fund, which spent massively to elect Michael Waltz (R-FL), Dan Crenshaw (R-TX), Brian Mast (R-FL), Steve Watkins (R-KS), Donald Bacon (R-NE). They spent $1,744,822 on Waltz and $863,616 on Crenshaw, so we're not talking about nominal contributions here. The only Democrats who were elected with significant help from the PAC were Jared Golden (ME), Mikie Sherrill (Blue Dog-NJ) and Gil Cisneros (New Dem-CA). Amazon was their biggest contributor-- more than all other contributor combined-- and their second biggest was the Bezos Family Foundation ($2,004,324).

Amazon also gave significant money to the DCCC ($138,331), the DNC , the DSCC and the NRCC. As for individual campaigns, their dozen biggest contributions went to:

• Beto O'Rourke (New Dem-TX)- $75,751
• Kim Schrier (New Dem-WA)- $74,860
• Maria Cantwell (D-WA)- $59,970
• Heidi Heitkamp (D-ND)- $44,037
• Lisa Brown (New Dem-WA)- $37,357
• Jacky Rosen (New Dem-NV)- $35,828
• Bob Casey (D-PA)- $33,615
• Cory Gardner (R-CO)- $31,950
• Claire McCaskill (D-MO)- $31,391
• Suzan DelBene (New Dem)- $29,500
• Doug Jones (D-AL)- $28,674
• Kyrsten Sinema (Blue Dog-AZ)- $23,814

That's a list of mostly conservative candidates, Lisa Brown being the only exception. On top of that was the money that flowed from the company PAC, in House races, $533,500 to Republicans and $475,500 to Democrats. There were 12 House candidates they maxed out to ($10,000 each):

• Mike Bishop (R-MI)
• Gerry Connolly (New Dem-VA)
• Suzan DelBene (New Dem-WA)
• Jeff Denham (R-CA)
• Will Hurd (R-TX)
• Derek Kilmer (New Dem-WA)
• Zoe Lofgren (D-CA)
• Nancy Pelosi (D-CA)
• Scott Perry (R-PA)
• Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA)
• Paul Ryan (R-WI)
• Adam Smith (New Dem-WA)

Amazon Rips Off 238 Cities, States and Provinces, Then Builds in NYC and DC

Andrew Cuomo's priorities (source)

by Gaius Publius

The world's leading monopolists, Jeff Bezos and Amazon, after much thought (or in fact, very little thought) have picked two cities for their new HQ2, their second national headquarters. Those two cities, of course, were the obvious choices from the start, the only two that made any sense at all.

If you were the world's richest greediest person, looking to re-headquarter what aspires to be the world's most powerful monopoly in cities with prime access to the nation's greatest concentration of money and its greatest concentration of power, in which cities would you build?

New York City and Washington, DC, of course.

Amazon Plans to Split HQ2 Between Long Island City, N.Y., and Arlington, Va.

SEATTLE — After conducting a yearlong search for a second home, Amazon has switched gears and is now finalizing plans to have a total of 50,000 employees in two locations, according to people familiar with the decision-making process.

The company is nearing a deal to move to the Long Island City neighborhood of Queens, according to two of the people briefed on the discussions. Amazon is also close to a deal to move to the Crystal City area of Arlington, Va., a Washington suburb, one of the people said. Amazon already has more employees in those two areas than anywhere else outside of Seattle, its home base, and the Bay Area.

Amazon executives met two weeks ago with Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo in the governor’s Manhattan office, said one of the people briefed on the process, adding that the state had offered potentially hundreds of millions of dollars in subsidies. Executives met separately with Mayor Bill de Blasio, a person briefed on that discussion said. Long Island City is a short subway ride across the East River from Midtown Manhattan.

The announcement of Amazon's new HQ2 sparked a "frenzied bidding war" among cities eager to be taken to the cleaners by Bezos and his company, and there are dozens stories about those offers, all cast as outrages. For example, one of the losers — Atlanta, Georgia — offered this:

What Georgia offered Amazon: A state-funded academy to train its employees. An exclusive lounge - with free parking - at the world’s busiest airport. A dedicated car on MARTA. And more than $2B in publicly-funded incentives. #gapol https://t.co/cyG7ME6qhN

— Greg Bluestein (@bluestein) November 14, 2018

The winners were not the highest bidders, but nevertheless, they offered quite a bit more, beyond mere privileged access to the world's greatest pool of money and its most plentiful supply of corrupt politicians.

New York is giving, among other things, massive capital gains tax cut to Amazon investors ... and, of course, a helipad. Arlington, Virginia added something more politically useful, advance warning of FOIA requests so the company could file for pre-emptive "protective orders."

But the biggest prize in this story is the data delivered to Amazon itself by everyone involved in the bidding process. Keep in mind, 238 states, provinces and cities sent bids to Amazon. Here's what those bids contained:

The big prize #Amazon has gotten out of its #HQ2 stunt is not the PR value of a bunch of city leaders singing its praises, or even the billions of $ in subsidies that it will extort from public coffers.

It’s the data. 1/

— Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) November 6, 2018

Dozens of cities have shared reams of data with Amazon that their own citizens do not have access to. This includes intel on future infrastructure investments, land use patterns, planned policy changes, and so on. 2/

— Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) November 6, 2018

Amazon will use this data to build out its empire: To site stores, warehouses, etc. To get in early on the right real estate. To beat out competitors because it knows things they don’t. 3/

— Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) November 6, 2018

In other words, America’s city leaders are accomplices to a monopolist. 4/

— Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) November 6, 2018

This includes many political leaders who profess to be champions of equality and justice. 5/

— Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) November 6, 2018

This is not about 1 city or 2 cities. It’s about a corporation that’s extending its tentacles in every direction -- to extract wealth, insert itself, dominate. 7/7

— Stacy Mitchell (@stacyfmitchell) November 6, 2018

Amazon exists, not just to sell its products, but to acquire data that gives them monopoly control of additional markets in which it has no current presence. More from David Dayen writing at In These Times:

But the biggest suckers on HQ2 aren’t New York and Virginia; it’s the other 236 cities that bid on a headquarters they were never going to get. Those bids didn’t just include the size of the bribe; they included a wealth of important data about plans for transportation, housing, education and workforce development. Amazon now has a treasure trove of non-public information about America’s future, in addition to knowing how much cash cities are willing to part with to land an Amazon facility. And it got all that, along with a giant PR benefit from the bidding war, for free.

If you knew a city was going to build a road in a particular place, you could make a lot of money buying up the real estate there. Imagine that on a national scale and you can see how Amazon will grow far wealthier from the data it collected than even the raw dollars extracted from HQ2’s big winners. In fact, this was the real reason Amazon orchestrated the whole charade....

It can even potentially sell this data to other companies who long for similar deals, or at least start up a new business line in negotiating deals between companies and municipal governments.

Monetizing of this new data trove will yield untold billions of dollars in value. It will also embed Amazon deeper and deeper into American life, committing politicians at the state and federal level to become human shields for the company. For example, no senator from New York or Virginia, with Amazon in its backyard, will want to speak too loudly about Amazon’s monopoly attempts. And no mayor or city council member, eager to secure that next warehouse, will have much to say either. [emphasis added]

There's no question that Amazon is evil. The only question is, was it born evil? To answer that, consider this Jeff Bezos story from 1995, the year after Amazon's birth:

Was Amazon born evil? The answer appears to be yes.

GP
 

To Many Movers And Shakers, Where Amazon Puts It's New Headquarters Is The Most Important Thing In The World

Amazon released the short list-- 20 cities-- they say they're considering for a second headquarters. Here's the list, not in alphabetical order, but in order of how many flights per day go to that city from Seattle, which doesn't seem all that important to me since if there's more demand, the airlines will put in more flights, but Geek Wire thinks this is a crucial consideration (and a reason to buy stock in Alaska Airlines). In any case, L.A. has 45 flights a day (and on 6 different airlines, which probably is something of a plus) and Columbus and Pittsburgh have no flights, although Alaska says they are adding a Seattle to Pittsburgh flight next fall.

• Los Angeles
• Chicago
• New York
• Newark
• Dallas
• Denver
• Washington, DC
• Montgomery County, MD
• Northern Virginia
• Atlanta
• Boston
• Miami
• Austin
• Nashville
• Philadelphia
• Raleigh
• Toronto
• Indianapolis
• Columbus
• Pittsburgh

Interestingly, the Washington Post ran with a story by Andrew Van Dam on Saturday morning that looks at the momentous decision in terms of politics. Why is it important politically? 50,000 jobs. A new headquarters," wrote Van Dam, "would pack enough of an employment and economic punch that it could have a measurable effect on presidential elections. To estimate that effect, we need to understand who Amazon’s workers will be, and how they’ll vote. OK, they want young, educated workers, with a strong university system in the area and an "ability to recruit talent to the area."

Think about Pennsylvania. Trump’s 44,292-vote margin is smaller than the number of new Amazon employees if the company picks Philly or Pittsburgh. A Miami headquarters could shake up Florida, already a swing state. Ditto for Raleigh, North Carolina.

Which one predominates in practice? We can’t venture a guess, but the answer would significantly affect the political impact of Amazon’s decision. Outside workers are presumably more likely to change a city’s political mix than residents, but the arrival of a major new employer would help a city retain the sorts of workers that, in a previous era, might have moved away.

The group Amazon seems to regard as its hiring pool, college graduates younger than 40, leans heavily Democratic. In the 2016 election, the national network exit poll found 56 percent of them voted for Democrat Hillary Clinton vs. 35 percent for Trump.

But will there be enough of them working at Amazon's new headquarters to swing any states? Let’s try running some numbers.

It’s easy enough to count the workers. Amazon says it will hire as many as 50,000 people at its new hub over the next 10 to 15 years, as well as create “tens of thousands” of additional jobs through direct investment. In Seattle, it pegs that additional-job number at 53,000. We’ll use that figure in our back-of-the-envelope math,to obtain a high-side estimate.

That starts us out at 103,000 theoretical Amazon and Amazon-adjacent workers.

To estimate how many voting family members those workers might bring along, we can use a 2015 Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data that finds a marriage rate of about 65 percent for adults age 25 or older.

That brings us up to 169,950 workers and spouses. Caveat: We have no idea how many Amazonians married each other. The government doesn’t release that info.

Not all of those are eligible voters. Some may be felons, while many more won’t hold citizenship in the United States. For our estimate, then, we’ll count only 92 percent of the total-- roughly the percentage of adult U.S. residents who, according to the Census Bureau, held citizenship in 2015. That drops it to 155,844.

And not all those who are eligible to vote go to the polls. According to the census, voter turnout was 64.1 percent for bachelor’s degree holders ages 25 to 44 in 2016. That drops our number to about 99,896.

Based on our assumptions, the Democrats would capture about 55,942 of those voters and Republicans would get 34,964, making for a total Democratic margin of 20,974.

That’s more than Trump’s 10,704 margin in Michigan and close to his 22,748 margin in Wisconsin, but it’s not big enough to flip any of the states on the Amazon shortlist.

Ours is already a high-end estimate of Amazon’s impact-- it accounts for both Amazon’s hiring and the jobs it claims to directly create, and assumes that all such jobs will be new to the region. A more conservative set of assumptions would result in a margin of less than half that size. But neither model captures everything.

Specifically, the cities clamoring for the online retail giant’s attention are counting on a salubrious knock-on effect. They hope that Amazon’s economic activity and stamp of approval will draw in other tech companies and help their city become the next Seattle or San Jose.

If that happens, all of the political effects here will be multiplied, perhaps to the point where the state hosting the chosen city will tip from one party to the other-- unless Toronto wins, in which case all our assumptions are bunk because it's in Canada.

These cities are begging to have their economies transformed by Amazon, but not all of them, particularly those in red and purple states, may realize that it could transform them politically as well. After all, U.S. tech hubs end up following a similar political pattern.

Even if the city’s presidential pick doesn’t change, their new Amazonian voting bloc is likely to upend local and congressional elections.

And isn't Apple talking about opening some major new campus or campuses-- not exactly a headquarters, but something big? Des Moines, where Apple is almost surely building a $1.375 billion data center in the Des Moines suburb of Waukee, is already imagining...

Worst President Ever Wants To Raise Taxes On The Internet To Get Even With The Washington Post's Owner

The vindictive asshole Trump's supporters elected looks like he may be headed towards letting them down again-- this time over taxes. Who ever thinks about Republicans raising taxes. An effective multi-decade p.r. effort has persuaded Americans that Republican don't raise taxes-- although they certainly do. Trump's inclination to raise taxes on internet purchases, though, does't have anything to do with economics, just with his war against the muckraking journalists at the Washington Post, which is owned by Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos.

Yesterday, at a Financial Services subcommittee hearing (Senate Appropriations Committee), Joe Manchin (D-WV) asked Trumpist Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin about internet taxes. As anyone who has bought anything on Amazon knows, Amazon does charge sales taxes-- at least in the 46 states that have sales taxes. But the Trump Regime claims that third party vendors on Amazon don't charges sales taxes. The Putin-placed ignorant and irrational asshole in the White House refers to that on Twitter as an "Amazon no-tax monopoly.

Trump is still furious at the Washington Post for making him into more of a laughingstock by exposing the fake Time Magazine covers he has hanging on the walls of his cheesy resorts and golf clubs. He;s pressuring Mnuchin to do something to cause Bezos pain.

Getting the feeling that Trump's time in the White House is likely to expire soon? BuzzFeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith penned a piece yesterday, Trump Is Failing As A President. But He’s Succeeding As Reality TV that gets right to the meat of the matter. When Señor Trumpanzee "was just starting out as a candidate for the presidency," he wrote, "he used to confuse ratings and polls. It was a meaningless eccentricity from a showbiz candidate going nowhere, a sign of the unreality of his campaign and of his own strange place in American culture. Now, it’s clear how badly a cosmopolitan media that may not have watched The Apprentice missed Trump’s continuous appeal. The sneers of New York tycoons who considered Trump a fraud, and of their media friends, couldn’t drown out the volume of the television, of The Apprentice and later the Celebrity Apprentice."

This isn’t an accident. Trump’s late publicist Jim Dowd recalled that, as a television actor, Trump, paid particular attention to markets in the midwest and south. "The Donald Trump post-first season of The Apprentice all of a sudden became a very popular figure on Main Street, U.S.A.," Dowd told Frontline. "So it was Wall Street before, and then it became Main Street to the point where we showed up in Denver for an event, and we had to have a separate room just for The Apprentice fans."

Jeff Zucker, Trump's erstwhile benefactor-- then of NBC, now leading #FakeNews CNN-- bet on The Apprentice in the waning days of the network's upscale, white Must-See-TV Thursday lineup, which included Friends and Will & Grace. But Trump, who Dowd said once served him and Apprentice creator Mark Burnett Oscar Mayer bologna so they could toast to a successful day of publicity with the sandwich meat, proved to have an unexpected appeal.

Trump wasn’t quite as bad a businessman as his detractors like to think-- their calculations of this return-on-investment typically leave out the staggering sums he dropped on his lifestyle. But he was a truly great publicist, and, it turned out, stellar television actor.

Now Trump is failing as a president by every measure-- popularity, global influence, a basic grasp on the levers of power. Perhaps most fatally, his incoherence has prevented him from projecting power through the federal government. He has been essentially irrelevant to the Republican health care agenda, except to draw out the process when Congress might have otherwise put the issue aside after the first disastrous attempt in the spring.

But the same instincts that have scuppered his presidency made for unbelievable, tremendous television.

"I’d be lying if I said I didn’t feel a frisson of anticipation when logging into Twitter early in the morning, knowing that the president of the United States could be tweeting about literally anything, no matter how strange or self-sabotaging,” the Trump critic and conservative writer who goes by the name Allahpundit wrote recently. "Is he going to start riffing on Obama’s birth certificate again? Might he be ready to flame Rosie O’Donnell?...Increasingly, The Trump Show isn’t a distraction from the Trump presidency. It is the Trump presidency.”

The ratings for the Trump show bear this theory out. They are, in a word, terrific: Fox News is still No. 1, even in its post-Bill O'Reilly incarnation; CNN, Zucker's kingdom, and Trump's stated enemy, keeps hitting quarterly highs in ratings; and MSNBC has directly benefited from Fox News' implosion, coinciding with Rachel Maddow's rise as the #resist hero. (Here’s a litany of other beneficiaries.) The television executives who felt qualms about syndicating the unfiltered Trump show through the Republican primaries are now cleansing their consciences with episode after episode of The Americans, produced for free by the American government.

This is classic reality television, down to its defining conventions. Perhaps the most memorable trope of reality TV-- popularized in the United States by Trump’s old Pygmalion, Burnett-- is the confessional interview. Those are the moments when a cast member directly addresses the camera, to tell us how they really feel. This is what happens on a Bachelorette date, when Rachel turns to the audience to say she needs Peter to assure her that he'll be ready for marriage at the end of this, or when one of the Real Housewives is filmed in formal dress in an ornate room and snipes about the lies of her castmates.

That moment-by-moment insight into the inner lives of the cast of Survivor: White House doesn’t always include those on-camera revelations, though Trump’s public disappointment with Jeff Sessions-- in interviews, on TV, at the White House and always with tension or even a tease about what could happen-- fits the genre perfectly.

More often, the confessionals come through leaks from the supporting characters: We know about Steve Bannon’s enmity for Jared Kushner, and his complex and shifting relationship with Reince Priebus. We know about Sean Spicer’s frustration, Rex Tillerson’s pique. Everyone is mad at Don Jr.! It’s an emotional mess.

And that twisting, ever fluid dynamic extends to each breaking news development. The country has been rapidly conditioned to wait for the drama of the emotional reaction-- the kind of torqued up authenticity on which reality TV thrives.

The White House reality show goes off the rails when it shifts into more scripted moments. In June, cabinet members heaped stilted praise on Trump for the cameras, and the audience winced.

"To me, that cabinet meeting, that was scripted,” one Emmy-nominated reality producer told BuzzFeed News. “It felt unreal, it felt fake, it felt inauthentic, it felt produced."

The ratings though-- the ratings are terrific. Better, in fact, than on The Apprentice as it aged. Jim Dowd, whose job as a publicist required he tell Trump about the show's diminished numbers, found himself unable to do it: "There’s about 10 people who cover ratings in terms of the publications that matter most," Dowd said. "And he would want to make sure I called all those 10 people and told them, 'No. 1 show on television, won its time slot,' and I’m looking at the numbers and at that point, say Season 5, for example, we were No. 72. I can’t tell that to him. I can’t say that. Maybe I should have, maybe I should have gotten Jeff Zucker involved, but he became kind of a monster when it came to these ratings."

Here, however, it’s hard to turn away.

And the recent rise of Anthony Scaramucci marks a kind of recognition that this is a show. Scaramucci is a television figure, a money manager known best for a conference he organized, and who played the role of hedge fund titan as Trump played real estate baron. A former talk show host who seemed to be working toward a CNBC show, he was hired for his cocksure grace in front of the camera.

Scaramucci recently suggested he’ll be adding an over-the-top morning show (as we say in the biz! BuzzFeed News recently announced one!) to the lineup. There could be “a desk on the White House lawn.” But that’s a crowded space. And the biggest TV show in history is already happening.

The rise of Trump has so many roots. Pundits routinely understate, though, the centrality of his television celebrity. And they miss its continuing power: Trump may not, yet, have figured out how to be president-- but he has monopolized our attention, dominated the narrative and the story, and it would be mistake to dismiss that power. A president doesn’t have to accomplish traditional things (policy, programs, reforms) to change the culture. What if once we start viewing major American institutions as players in the Trump Show, we can’t stop?

He’s failing at what used to be thought of as the presidency, but succeeding at reality television like no one ever has before. The question is whether there’s still a difference.

Why Ursula Le Guin's National Book Award Is A Thing

I've never read any of Ursula K. Le Guin's futuristic books, not The Lathe of Heaven, nothing from the Earthsea series, nothing from the Hainish cycle, not Hugo Award winners, The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed or The Word for World is Forest or any of the many others. After hearing her acceptance speech on radio at the National Book Awards this week (above), I decided to remedy that. In the speech-- a lifetime achievement award-- she went right after Amazon and its deleterious effect on literature through commodification. Her speech was wildly cheered-- by everyone but the Amazon contingent, who seem themselves differently from the way most authors and literature lovers see them. "We need writers who know the difference between the production of a commodity and the practice of an art," she told her peers. "Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship. Yet I see sales departments given control over editorial; I see my own publishers in a silly panic of ignorance and greed, charging public libraries for an ebook six or seven times more than they charge customers. We just saw a profiteer try to punish a publisher for disobedience and writers threatened by corporate fatwa, and I see a lot of us, the producers who write the books, and make the books, accepting this. Letting commodity profiteers sell us like deodorant, and tell us what to publish and what to write... I think hard times are coming. We will need writers who can remember freedom. Poets, visionaries, the realists of a larger reality... We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings."

Two more videos: Le Guin's interview with Bill Moyers two years ago:



And... two acts from an operatic adaptation of her novella Paradises Lost by American composer Stephen Andrew Taylor and Canadian librettist Marcia Johnson. The opera premiered April 26, 2012 on the campus of the University of Illinois:

Online-Comments Watch: Are people just stoopid, or helpless, or what?

I'm not saying there aren't better Blu-ray players on the market, but my eerily compact, incredibly inexpensive region-free Orei BDP-A3 does everything I can imagine asking it to do and is working just fine, thank you! The remote control too. Some of those online commenters really need help.

by Ken

I'm realizing that after all these years, I may have acquired something like religion, the object of my worship being Amazon Gold Box Specials. Well, mostly the video offerings thereof. Let me see, there were DVD offerings of the complete Dick Van Dyke Show, Route 66, Columbo, M*A*S*H, Larry Sanders Show,X Files, Friday Night Lights, Friends -- those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. Shows of which I have fond memories, which became irresistible at the offered prices.

And then came the fateful offering: the complete James Bond films, all 23 from Dr. No through Skyfall, for (as I recall) $100. All in their digital remasterings, with boatloads of special features. A lot of the later ones I'd never even seen, since I'd pretty much lost interest somewhere about midway through the slog. Which is to say I didn't have enough interest to pony up the asking price for a first-run movie in my neck of the woods, and while they all turned up on TV, and I tried to watch parts of couple of them, on a 31-inch CRT TV Bond films are just silly. For the same reason, I had never bought a Bond film in any home video medium -- not even the earlier ones of which I had happy recollections.

Now, however, I had not just my first HD TV, a lovely Samsung LED 40-incher, but my new Toshiba LED 50-incher. Still not ginormous by contemporary standards, I realize, but a medium in which it seemed to it might just be possible to have at least a low-end-ish Bond film experience. And so, with my now-familiar lack of resistance to Gold Box video offerings, I hit the "order now" button and dispatched the remaining formalities. (See "Blu-ray Watch: Pick a James Bond film, any James Bond film," December 6.)

The only problem was that I now had my first 23 Blu-ray discs on order, with no device to play them on. But I knew how to deal with that. I just had to get the appropriate "order now" button in range of my mouse-button-clicking right index finger! I did some quick online poking to see what I might be able to score in a multi-system model, since I have so many British DVDs. (It's not just the obvious British TV series and films that I've found not just available but significantly cheaper on amazon.co.uk than -- where they're available -- on amazon.com. Like I've got Seasons 1 and 2 of Mad Men, all there were at the time, on PAL DVDs.)

And I found a model, startlingly inexpensive, that claimed to play not just foreign DVDs but foreign Blu-rays as well. I had no idea whether I would be acquiring foreign Blu-rays, but it was nice to know that I would be able to play them if I did. And to my amazement, without doing any further investigating, I went ahead and ordered the machine, produced by a company, Orei, I'd never even heard of. I mean, with the Amazon Bond-film order already being processed, the clock was ticking. I had to have a Blu-ray player!

Indeed I wound up having my 23 Bond films a number of days before the Blu-ray player. (This is not meant as a plug, but Amazon tends to be very speedy with those orders.) Meanwhile, I went back and did some after-the-fact remedial research, trying to find out whether I'd done something irreparably stupid.

Sure enough, I found a heap of online reviews of the player I'd ordered. And sure enough, there was the expectable mix of buyers reporting that the unit is a marvel (dream-come-true) and that it's a piece of garbage (save-your-money).

I'm coming to understand the logic of those evalutaion-analysis systems that start by throwing out the highest and lowest scores. In the case of user reviews, I don't doubt that they reflect the evaluators' experience with the product, but they seem to reflect the standard range of human experience rather than the kind of experience an average user is likely to have with it. Of course if the reviews are overwhelmingly weighted to either the dream-come-true or save-your-money end, that may tell you something. But otherwise, I'm probably better off trying to extract some plausible information from the mass of in-between reviews.

What got me to writing tonight, however, is those low-end reviews of the Blu-ray player, which I admit made me a little jumpy, with the thing already in the processing-and-shipping pipeline. There were repeated complaints, for example, about the remote, which was claimed to be a piece of junk. There was at least one review that carried the piece-of-junk remote analysis to the whole damned unit, saying it worked fine out of the box but the next day stopped working and had to be returned.

What I didn't see was any mention of the fact that, at least as far as I can tell, the thing can't be operated except via the remote. I admit that I've never looked inside the small manual (I know it's around somewhere, but don't ask me where), but I haven't even found a way to get the disc tray to open or close without the remote. I don't know that this would have dissuaded me from the machine, but I wouldn't have minded knowing about it.

No doubt the absence of controls on the unit itself, again at least as far as I can find, seems clearly a function of its size -- it's terrifyingly tiny, maybe the size of a not-very-thick book. The space-saving feature isn't of much use to me, at least now, but I'm sure it's a real attraction for some users.

As it happens, I did have the experience of finding the player "locked" the second day it was plugged in. I realized, though, that I hadn't turned it off the day before, figuring it would do an auto shutoff, and I suspected that I may have put it through a quick series of shifting commands at the end of that first use. So I thought perhaps it simply needed to be reset. I didn't know whether there was a "reset" button, so I applied the low-tech solution: I unplugged the damned thing. And when I reconnected it, it was fine. That has happened once since, when I also had left the unit on rather than shutting it off manually. And again, as soon as it was "reset," it was fine. Since then, I've taken the precaution of shutting it off when it's not in use. I haven't had any further problems with it.

As for the remote, it too is very small -- roughly palm-size. That hardly means that it's a piece of junk, though. And I suspect that a lot of users will consider its microsity a plus. One thing it does mean is that the device requires AAA batteries, which I've only encountered once, with a really cheap portable-audio-device amplifier that sounded so horrible, I never had occasion to replace the batteries. I almost always have A and AA batteries on hand, but not AAAs. But you know what I did? I bought some and socked them away in the refrigerator for future use. That's even lower-tech than the unplugging-the-player trick.

It's also true that the remote is highly directional, again I'm guessing a function of its compactness. You really have to point it right at the player. But I have other remotes that are also highly directional. I love it when they aren't, when I can just point the remote more or less in the general direction of the unit in question and have it work. Still, I don't think it requires special brain function or manual dexterity to point the thing in the right direction.

Similarly, a couple of buttwipes were denouncing the poor little remote as shoddy because, they claimed, you had to press the buttons too long, or maybe it was that you couldn't press the buttons too long, I forget which. Again, though, how stupid do you have to be to not grasp that every remote is programmed to interpret a certain length as a single "click," and for every remote you use, you have to adjust to its requirements? Most of us quickly learn to do this automatically, even with different timings for different remotes.

Do I have to add that, the above adjustments made, the player has been working just fine? Who knows, maybe it'll die tomorrow. But I've started watching my Bond films, and the complete Downton Abbey Season 1-3 Blu-rays (supposedly in the UK edition, although it's issued by PBS) I ordered on a later Gold Box Special look just wonderful. (I see that the British edition of Season 4 is already out -- luckily at a price I'm much too cheap to pay, especially considering that that's without the presumably just-aired Christmas Special, for which amazon.co.uk was taking pre-orders.)

Still waiting for a chance to get into the little Blu-ray machine are all three seasons of the sublime Canadian series Slings and Arrows (I had the first two seasons on DVD, and before I got around to ordering the third, I loaned out the first and never got it back, so I was probably going to order the Season 1-3 box on DVD anyway; I see that my Blu-ray set has lots of special features, which my individual-season DVDs didn't have at all!), and fresh out of the mailbox today the Blu-ray set of all three Godfather films in Francis Coppola's restored edition. I had the three films on VHS and Laserdisk, and I can hardly wait to see them in Blu-ray on the 50-inch TV.

The irony isn't lost on me, as I believe I may already have mentioned: that here I was, so soon after lambasting the masters of the Breaking Bad video release for making the great collector's edition of the complete series with all those neat extras and special features, as well a bunch of kitschy schlock, in Blu-ray only ("As of now, the message from "Breaking Bad" to non-Blu-ray fans seems to be: Drop dead!," September 30), and now not only have I slithered over to the Blu-ray side but I did it apparently too late to snag a copy at a vaguely human price.

Well, there's bound to be a "regular" complete Breaking Bad release, on both DVD and Blu-ray. And so far I feel no need to replace my DVDs, which I have to say are looking pretty good through my Pioneer multisystem DVD players as well as the Orei Blu-ray player. (For the record, the Orei player switches automatically for non-NSTC DVDs, but it has to be manually selected for Zone B and C Blu-rays -- the codes for which were included by my dealer.)

Just what I needed in my life: incentive to watch more TV!

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Now that Garry Trudeau's "Alpha House" TV show is (sort of) on the air, we're finally getting new "Doonesbury"s

[Click to enlarge (a little)]

by Ken

I don't know why I'm so uncomfortable now that Garry Trudeau's DC TV-fantasy is, well, not on the air, but in the Intertubes (it's Amazon's debut series). As the master of Doonesbury, Trudeau is a veritable god to me, and as a case in point I offer today's strip, from the "recap" series with which GT is apparently weaning us off the summer's and fall's reruns, while he's been playing with his TV show. (I really haven't even been able to complain about the reruns, because Doonesbury reruns are pretty terrific. And there were new Sunday strips.)

To go with today's strip, here are the concluding paragraphs of a newyorker.com "News Desk" post, "The Republican War on Competence," by Jeff Shoals, a onetime speechwriter for President Bill Clinton.

[A]s Obama is finding, it's hard for one party to make government work when the other party is determined to make government fail. Yes, the healthcare.gov debacle is manifestly "on us," as Obama had to concede last week. But it happened in the face of a relentless campaign by the G.O.P. to do everything possible to prevent the law from taking effect, or from working if it did. Congressional oversight, particularly as practiced by Representative Darrell Issa, is just another theatre in the war on efficacy. On occasion, we hear of Republican reforms to the Affordable Care Act, but these are offered in the spirit of the vandal who blithely assures you that your car will run better with two wheels rather than four, so would you please hold his jacket while he removes your rear axle.

If there is any ambiguity left to the G.O.P. reform agenda, let it be put to rest by Michael F. Cannon, the director of health-policy studies at the Cato Institute and a former Republican Hill staffer: "The only way to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse in a governmental activity," he testified before a House subcommittee in 2011, "is to eliminate that activity." When you see virtually every governmental function, a priori, as wasteful, fraudulent, and abusive, from disaster relief to early-childhood education, the only way to save the village, to paraphrase a U.S. military officer in Vietnam, is to destroy it. This, one fears, they can do quite competently.

As I understand it, the official rollout of Alpha House happened last Friday, so I do want to be sure that note is taken of it. I guess I'm just nervous about the transferability of Trudeau's genius. I guess I'm also not thrilled about learning a new way to watch TV series with this Amazon offering. If it means that GT has had less mindless interference than would have been the case if the show had been done for an actual TV entity, that's all to the good. And I seem to recall that Amazon is offering the first few episodes free, so I suppose I'll take the plunge at some point.

ABC's This Week's preview of Alpha House


Meanwhile, on the chance that there's somebody who might want to read the NYT's Alessandra Staley on, well, anything at all, here's her review at no click-cost to you. (I only glanced at it and quickly withdrew at sight of an admiring reference to HBO's Veep. I assume there are critics who noticed that Veep is flesh-crawlingly horrible, but I don't care enough to research the subject. I actually stuck out the whole gosh-darned first season, and still feel weighed down by the lingering psychic sludge.)

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Was Jeff Bezos's purchase of the Washington Post really just a gigantic "online shopping error"?

Close your eyes and make a wish, Chris: Here is washingtonpost.com's Chris Cillizza's view of "The future of the Washington Post -- in 2 tweets." Well, this is one view.

by Ken

I really intended to write about, and share, a piece from the washingtonpost.com poltical blog "The Fix," "Why you shouldn't underestimate Elizabeth Warren." But once the subject of the Washington Post came up, I felt I couldn't let it pass without saying something about yesterday's stunning development, the announcement that the Graham family is sellilng the paper, along with its smaller regional papers, to Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos.

It's not as if I have any special insight, especially as i's still not clear what's happening within the Graham family and what that may have had to do with the decision, apparently made primarily by Donald Graham, who has passed on the running of the paper to his niece, Katharine Weymouth, but remains chairman and chief executive of the Washington Post Company, to sell the papers, with a view to providing a relatively stable future for the Post. This is something that continued family ownership presumably couldn't assure, especially in the context of a publicly traded company that has to answer to the sharks of Wall Street. Nor is it at all clear how Jeff Bezos is thinking about the property he has acquired. The $250 million he's paying for it makes it not an especially big deal for a guy said to be worth $25 billion, but in the world of American media the name of the Post still counts for something.

Certainly Bezos qualifies as an owner rich enough to be able to run the paper however he sees fit. We just don't know how he will see fit. The issue isn't just the paper's survival, but its survival as a journalistic entity whose survival matters. It seemed pretty unlikely that the paper could survive as a provider of meaningful journalism under the governance of Katharine Weymouth (who is of course the granddaughter of legendary publisher Katharine Graham, and for that matter the great-granddaughter of the family patriarch, Eugene Meyer, who bought the Post out of bankruptcy 80 years ago).

To be sure, Weymouth has told the staff that Bezos "has asked that I remain as your Publisher and CEO," and she is "honored to do so, " and has "asked the entire senior management team to continue in their roles as well." And it may be that, if she gets real support from the new owner, she will show new vitality in restoring the Post to journalistic credibility. But I think it's safe to say that, going forward, the governing vision is going to be Jeff Bezos's.

Naturally, everybody and his brother and sister will be chiming in, with or without special knowledge of what's going to happen. Obviously the "story" is going to include speculation about the future of the Boston Globe under the stewardship of its presumably benevolent new rich-guy owner, Boston Red Sox principal owner John Henry. And then there's the threat of the Los Angeles Times falling into the clutches of the Koch brothers -- a reminder that rich-guy owners come in an assortment of flavors. Nobody knows whether papers like the Post and the Globe and the L.A. Times can survive in a form that makes them matter -- or what form this might be.

To illustrate the range of speculation already being unleashed, newyorker.com already has:

* New Yorker editor David Remnick's curiously noncommittal report (bolstered by some presumed inside sourcs from his decade working for the Post);

* Matt Buchanan's notion of "Why Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post";

* John Cassidy's "Skeptic's View":

I have a nagging, if possibly unfounded, suspicion that his primary motivation in buying the Post is to protect Amazon's interests in the political battle, which is sure to come, over the company's monopolistic tendencies. Why do I suspect that? In part, because I am a skeptic. But also because it's just about the only explanation that makes sense.

* and, perhaps most informatively, another stunning revelation from newyorker.com's crack investigative arm, The Borowitz Report:

August 6, 2013

Amazon Founder Says He Clicked on Washington Post by Mistake

Posted by Andy Borowitz

SEATTLE (The Borowitz Report)—Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com, told reporters today that his reported purchase of the Washington Post was a "gigantic mix-up," explaining that he had clicked on the newspaper by mistake.

"I guess I was just kind of browsing through their website and not paying close attention to what I was doing," he said. "No way did I intend to buy anything."

Mr. Bezos said he had been oblivious to his online shopping error until earlier today, when he saw an unusual charge for two hundred and fifty million dollars on his American Express statement.

After investigating with the credit-card company, he was informed that he had been charged for the purchase price of the entire Washington Post, which, he said, was "pure craziness."

"No way in hell would I buy the Washington Post," he said. "I don't even read the Washington Post."

Mr. Bezos said he had been on the phone with the Post's customer service for the better part of the day trying to unwind his mistaken purchase, but so far "they've really been giving me the runaround."

According to Mr. Bezos, "I keep telling them, I don't know how it got in my cart. I don't want it. It's like they're making it impossible to return it."

TOMORROW: From the grand speculation about the future of newspapers back to the narrow confines of today's Washington Post: What the Villagers are saying about Elizabeth Warren.

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Great Last-Minute Gift Ideas (Well, Maybe Not)

by Noah

Lately, in a desperate last-minute search for gifts for the few friends I have left, I have been perusing Amazon.com in search of inspiration. For those who don’t know, Amazon has recently been a great target of spoofers who are addicted to writing satirical reviews of both real and fictional products. The fictional products are, of course listed by second-party vendors, not by Amazon per se. They merely appear as secondary offers. I suspect that most of the perpetrators are recently graduated college students who can’t find a real job. Hmmm. Maybe if Amazon had physical stores or didn’t farm out all of its grunt work to India. . . .

To the corporate world at large: If you don’t give Americans jobs, you will become fair game. It’s up to you. You’ve brought this upon yourselves. All that said, here’s some of what I have found in Amazon’s sleigh full of goodies.


CAN OF URANIUM ORE

It’s only $29.95 and, as you can see in the photo up top is nicely packaged, complete with a nice graphic hazard label. It’s a real product; used for Geiger counters. But it’s the reviews that really matter. One buyer, who claims to have bought it to power his home-made submarine, is very glad to have the ore, declaring himself: “So glad that I don’t have to buy this from Libyans in parking lots at the mall anymore.” One customer says he is using the ore to speed up evolution. Another put it in his wife’s makeup to give her that “radiant glow,” while several users have claimed to use the ore for the self-medicating of tumors, and more than one has, predictably, used it to threaten his neighbors. Isn’t that just human nature!


UFO DETECTOR

Now this is a practical gift for the friend that either has everything or is obsessed with being abducted and probed by aliens. It may cost $149, but according to several purchasers it’s more than worth the price. The very first reviewer speaks for many when he says:

I purchased this item and am blown away by its effectiveness. I started this device up and immediately detected not one, not two, but five separate UFOs in my immediate area. I am currently working on a way to communicate with what I assume is an intelligent species visiting our planet, but so far, I have been unsuccessful. I am waiting to see if this company will be selling a UFO communications device in the near future. If it is anything like this detector, I will be extremely happy. Thank you for a great product !

Warning, though: One customer complains that his microwave, TV, etc. interfere with the device’s effectiveness, saying that he has been abducted twice since making his purchase! Bummer, dude.

My favorite UFO Detector review, however, is the one written by an extraterrestrial who claims to need help in making a very confidential monetary transaction involving the transfer of a huge sum of off-world currency to a foreign account. It just goes to show that the aliens may look different from us, but they have the same needs and problems . . . and scams.


TUSCAN WHOLE MILK, 1 GALLON, 128 fl. oz.

With over 1100 reviews, this one may be the king of all of the Amazon spoofs. It’s certainly been widely circulated. The first review is a takeoff on Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven,” but the most special one may be a mini-romance novel titled One Friday, Without Milk:

He always brought home milk on Friday.

After a long hard week full of days he would burst through the door, his fatigue hidden behind a smile. There was an icy jug of Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz in his right hand. With his left hand he would grip my waist -- I was always cooking dinner -- and press the cold frostiness of the jug against my arm as he kissed my cheek. I would jump, mostly to gratify him after a time, and smile lovingly at him. He was a good man, a wonderful husband who always brought the milk on Friday, Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz.

Then there was that Friday, the terrible Friday that would ruin every Friday for the rest of my life. The door opened, but there was no bouyant greeting -- no cold jug against the back of my arm. There was no Tuscan Whole Milk in his right hand, nor his left. There came no kiss. I watched as he sat down in a kitchen chair to remove his shoes. He wore no fatigue, but also no smile. I didn't speak, but turned back to the beans I had been stirring. I stirred until most of their little shrivelled skins floated to the surface of the cloudy water. Something was wrong, but it was vague wrongness that no amount of hard thought could give shape to.

Over dinner that night I casually inserted, "What happened to the milk?"

"Oh," he smiled sheepishly, glancing aside, "I guess I forgot today."

That was when I knew. He was tired of this life with me, tired of bringing home the Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon, 128 fl oz. He was probably shoveling funds into a secret bank account, looking at apartments in town, casting furtive glances at cashiers and secretaries and waitresses. That's when I knew it was over. Some time later he moved in with a cashier from the Food Mart down the street. And me? Well, I've gone soy.

LAPTOP STEERING WHEEL DESK

This has to be my personal favorite. Be sure to click on all of the product images, which can serve as a warning to those who misuse the product. This is a real product, a portable desk that clips onto your steering wheel, but, as you will see if you click on the link, the majority of the reviewers used the product incorrectly. Using it to change diapers while you drive (your kid’s not $enator Vitters?), using it as a minibar while bar-hopping, and using it to hold your dinner and cut your steak while you drive -- probably none of these is a good idea. More than one reviewer has claimed trying to adapt the product to his/her motorcycle handlebars. Others have used it to convert their car or pick up into an office on wheels, finding it a real time-saver and recommending it to those who want to really impress the boss and get ahead. Just mount a printer on the dash and you're all set for corporate advancement! No more wasting valuable get ahead time while driving on the interstate.

If your're dreaming of a last Christmas, this could be the one product you should consider buying for yourself. I, however, project my hostility outward. I’ve already bought several at $18.95. I just gave one to Joe Lieberman and one to Ben Nelson, and will be sending one to Sarah Palin tomorrow. They have to read those loophole filled-$enate bills sometime! I was going to send one to Rush Limbaugh, but then I realized that there just wouldn’t be enough room for both the desk and his ballooning gut.

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More book notes: (1) Do you write Amazon reviews for the books you've enjoyed? (2) Say it ain't so: No more reviews from the great Russell Baker?

While I'm on this crusade to support the books written by "our" writers, my attention has been called to an unanticipated (by me, anyway) reality of modern-day book publishing: Publishers like to see Amazon reviews. It's possible that quantities of them actually do help sell books, presumably on the theory that prospective book-buyers gain confidence through seeing lots of encouraging reviews. (Isn't this pretty much the way Dickens sold his books? Or maybe not.)

Or it could be that seeing lots of reviews merely boosts the morale of publishers. Apparently they do, and this seems to hold true from the hardiest independents all the way up to the mightiest publishing juggernauts. I don't know about you, but I've never written an Amazon review in my life. I guess I'm going to have to change that.


OH NO, NO MORE RUSSELL BAKER REVIEWS?!

When I proposed Russell Baker as an obvious first choice to review Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, I was still entertaining the hope that he would be doing so in the New York Review of Books, where he has been doing far-too-occasional reviewing for some years now. He has obviously been exceedingly picky about the material he's let himself be persuaded to review (which no doubt has a good deal to do with why each of his reviews is such an occasion), and the subject matter is obviously right up his alley.

I'm afraid my Baker-NYRB fantasy has gone down the drain, though. Rick himself informs me that RB has retired from the book-reviewing gig. Man, if anyone has earned his freedom (and I hope it's a matter of choice on his part), he's it. (Over the years I acquired a small collection of exceedingly gracious replies to gushy fan letters I wrote him. Well, at least two, anyways.) But man, am I depressed!

Give me a moment here, would you?

Okay, I'll do some more moping later, on my time. Meanwhile, I had actually planned to throw out two names from my the top of my list of 100 candidates the NYT Book Review could have considered to review Nixonland before any of the editors should have reached the level of desperation where one of them suggested, however pathetically, "Um, about [mumbling], you know, Will?" (To which the answer in any case should have been, "Don't be stupid, Penrose!")

You know, it occurs to me that it could all have been a sad misunderstanding. Maybe what Penrose mumbled wasn't "Will," but "Wills"! And he was shy about it, not because he thought it was a contemptible suggestion, but because he was surprised, even embarrassed, that nobody higher up on the NYTBR food chain had thought of maybe the foremost political essayist writing today, Garry Wills.

Garry Wills's name, actually, was the other one I meant to propose, and now that's my NYRB fantasy for Nixonland -- for the simple reason that I would love to read that review.

By the way, Rick also informs me that Russell Baker in fact reviewed his first book for NYRB. I don't know how I didn't remember that. Maybe the same way I don't remember more and more of the stuff I once knew. But I offered him belated congratulations -- what a way to launch a book-writing career!