Alan Jacobs

Saturday, July 28, was the final day of a remarkable three-day process to reinvent Kepler’s Books in Menlo Park, Calif. Some 80 booksellers, community leaders, publishers, authors and customers sat in a large conference room in the Oshman Family JCC, buzzing with new determination — even a touch of anger.

Armed with dozens of strips of paper, masking tape and glue sticks, the participants quickly distilled their previous 14 hours of discussion to eight foundational principles and activities. The new Kepler’s Books must:

1. Be financially sustainable.

2. Have a clearly defined mission.

3. Be dedicated to community outreach.

4. Serve as a gathering place for creative events and social events.

5. Support life-long learning and literary education.

6. Sell books in any form, on any platform.

7. Maintain a virtual presence, with technology fully integrated into the store.

8. Provide a carefully curated selection of books.

I have plenty of friends in and from California, but I don’t think California is fundamentally a friendly place. It’s open – it’s easy to become part of the community (inasmuch as there is a community), much easier than in New England or, I suspect, the South – but that’s not the same thing as friendly.

Now New York, my hometown, that’s a friendly place. And open – it’s relatively easy to join the community, and there is a community. We’re certainly not polite – we’re frankly rude – but we’re open and friendly.

Four dichotomies:

Open versus Closed: how easy is it to join the community?

Friendly versus Cold: is the community mutually supportive and warm to outsiders, or the opposite?

Tolerant versus Conformist: does the community expect everyone to be the same, or can you fly your freak flag with relative impunity?

Polite versus Rude: does the community enforce codes of deference, courtesy and respect, or is socially abrasive behavior the norm?

I would call New York Open, Friendly (more friendly than people think), Tolerant (but not as tolerant as people think) and Rude. I am not as familiar with the South, but from my experience and from what I hear, I’d call it Closed, Friendly, Tolerant and Polite. California I’d call Open, Cold, Tolerant and Rude.

Old Swiss farmhouse-turned-office

That said, many of these film adaptations have something in common—they’re based not on full-length novels but on short stories or novellas, which give the director and his or her screenwriters the chance to expand and elaborate, rather than condense and truncate, the literary source. “Benjamin Button” takes a bare-bones story with a surprising span and locates the grand historical fresco it implies; whereas, when filming “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” Fincher was obviously limited by the literal storytelling that the familiar novel dictated (and he did well to make his illustrations so mercurial). Writing here recently about Hawks’s “To Have and Have Not,” I noted the ruthless extraction and abstraction to which he submitted Hemingway’s novel in order to make a good movie from it.

Social science in many ways depends on moral philosophy. In deciding how to measure causation and what to control for you’re making judgments about which causal mechanisms you are willing to consider and which situations you consider equivalent. By acting as if social science can replace moral philosophy we’re not only being weirdly blithe about the philosophical work which goes into constructing a good study. We’re also placing way too much cultural and political pressure on social scientists. And we can, as Ralph Lewis notes, make it sound like we’re taking on a philosophical stance we should abhor: that there’s no such thing as good-enough parenting.

But what happened to me exposes vital security flaws in several customer service systems, most notably Apple’s and Amazon’s. Apple tech support gave the hackers access to my iCloud account. Amazon tech support gave them the ability to see a piece of information — a partial credit card number — that Apple used to release information. In short, the very four digits that Amazon considers unimportant enough to display in the clear on the web are precisely the same ones that Apple considers secure enough to perform identity verification. The disconnect exposes flaws in data management policies endemic to the entire technology industry, and points to a looming nightmare as we enter the era of cloud computing and connected devices.

Reinventing medical care could produce hundreds of innovations. Some may be as simple as giving patients greater e-mail and online support from their clinicians, which would enable timelier advice and reduce the need for emergency-room visits. Others might involve smartphone apps for coaching the chronically ill in the management of their disease, new methods for getting advice from specialists, sophisticated systems for tracking outcomes and costs, and instant delivery to medical teams of up-to-date care protocols. Innovations could take a system that requires sixty-three clinicians for a knee replacement and knock the number down by half or more. But most significant will be the changes that finally put people like John Wright and Armin Ernst in charge of making care coherent, coördinated, and affordable. Essentially, we’re moving from a Jeffersonian ideal of small guilds and independent craftsmen to a Hamiltonian recognition of the advantages that size and centralized control can bring.

Then again, almost every American religion sooner or later becomes a Gospel of Wealth. Forced into a corner by the Feds, Young’s followers put down their guns and got busy making money—just as the Oneida devotees who made silverware for a living ended up merely making silverware. (The moneymaking activities of the major churches hardly need outlining.) Christmas morning is the American Sabbath, and it runs, ideally, all year round. The astonishing thing, and it would have brought a smile to Nephi’s face as he and his tribe sailed to the New World, is that this gospel of prosperity is the one American faith that will never fail, even when its promises seem ruined. Elsewhere among the Western democracies, the bursting of the last bubble has led to doubts about the system that blows them. Here the people who seem likely to inherit power are those who want to blow still bigger ones, who believe in the bubble even after it has burst, and who hold its perfection as a faith so gleaming and secure and unbreakable that it might once have been written down somewhere by angels, on solid-gold plates.

mwfrost:

The story I mentioned the other day about my daughter at the TSA checkpoint? It ended with the officers scanning a plastic sack of her vomit.

Ever vigilant.

here