Alan Jacobs

I’m obsessed with why our heroes are not making it past 50. I already gave my whole band the speech. We gotta live different. Lack of sleep, not watching what we eat, extra patron in the rider. No more. I wanna be old. This is a wake-up call like no other. And I’m obsessed with the health of everybody I know in this industry. I’m not worried about bullets, I’m worried about strokes. Strokes are the new bullets.

To my astonishment over 560,000 people have put me in their Google circles. That is over half a million strangers who want to hear what I say on Google. That crowd is far greater than the number of people subscribing to Wired magazine during the years I was editing it.

Where did these half million people come from? And who are they? Because they are starting to post a lot of spam in the comments. You the reader don’t see much of this spam because Google does a fantastic job of suppressing it so it’s invisible to readers. But as host I see the hidden spam grayed out so that I have the opportunity to undo it in case an entry is legit, but that has happened only once so far. All the other times Google has expertly and accurately removed spam before it displays.

Still, there is enough comment spam that it got me to wonder: how many of my circlers are spammers? With the help of my research assistant Camille Cloutier, we randomly sampled my great circle to see who was there. I’ll tell you our conclusion and then how we got there.

Conclusion: Most of the half million people following me on Google are ciphers. They have signed up, but have not made a single public post, or posted their own image or a profile, or made a comment. They aren’t home. The only place you’ll see people are in the same small set of 100 “recommended” people they follow, of which I am one.

It is not, as it turns out, necessary to be a micromanaging psychopath with narcissistic personality disorder (or even to pretend to be one) if you just hire smart people and give them real authority. The saddest thing about the Steve Jobs hagiography is all the young “incubator twerps” strutting around Mountain View deliberately cultivating their worst personality traits because they imagine that’s what made Steve Jobs a design genius. Cum hoc ergo propter hoc, young twerp. Maybe try wearing a black turtleneck too. For every Steve Jobs, there are a thousand leaders who learned to hire smart people and let them build great things in a nurturing environment of empowerment and it was AWESOME. That doesn’t mean lowering your standards. It doesn’t mean letting people do bad work. It means hiring smart people who get things done—and then getting the hell out of the way.

Regular readers of this tumblelog will know that I’ve linked to several recent essays in the Guardian of London about Milton’s Paradise Lost. The essays, by Jessica Martin, are little marvels of insight, and genuinely illuminate the experience of encountering a poem that many know about, some study, but very few actually read.

So I am especially pleased to see that those essays have been collected as a brief Kindle book called How to Read Paradise Lost. If you’re in the U.S., you may get the book here; in the U.K., here. You should buy it; it’s great.

In 1962, Arthur C. Clarke published a collection of prophetic writings called Profiles of the Future. His intent, he wrote in an introduction, was not “to describe the future, but to define the boundaries within which possible futures must lie.” In one chapter he predicted the creation of a high-speed worldwide communications network (he thought it would be satellite-based) and discussed some of its probable consequences. The physical mail system, he wrote, would be replaced by “an orbital post office,” which “will probably make airmail obsolete in the quite near future.” The new system will “of course” raise “problems of privacy,” though these “might be solved by robot handling at all stages of the operation.”

The revolution in communication won’t be limited to correspondence, though: “Perhaps a decade beyond the orbital post office lies something even more startling - the orbital newspaper.” News reports would come to be transmitted to video screens in homes. To get “your daily paper,” you’d need only “press the right button.” Moreover, each reader would be able to create a personalized bundle of stories: “We will select what we need, and ignore the rest, thus saving whole forests for posterity. The orbital newspaper will have little more than the name in common with the newspaper of today.”

Seventeenth-century calligraphic exercise, via Bibliodyssey, of course.

From the point of view of the rural Irish themselves, however, this may look very different. The greenness of Ireland is a false greenness, after all. Not that it isn’t green — the place can still make you have to pull off and swallow one of your heart pills. It’s that the greenness doesn’t mean what it seems. It doesn’t encode a pastoral past, much less a timeless vale where wee folk trip the demesne. The countryside is not supposed to look like that, to be that empty. Ireland was at one time one of the most densely populated places in Europe. In the 1830s, there were more people living there than today. What you see in the open spaces the island is famous for are hundreds and hundreds of years of Irish dying and fleeing in large numbers. Famines, wars, epidemics and a wretched postcolonial poverty drove them through the ports by the millions. It’s perhaps not so strange that such a people, experiencing their first flush of disposable income, would undergo a mania of home building and land development. Perhaps in a way, the houses were meant for returning immigrants even before they became ghost estates. They were built for the diaspora.

[Rabbi Jeffrey] Fox believes that e-readers - like other electrical appliances that don’t generate light and heat - are technically permissible on the Sabbath but should not be used because they are a step away from forbidden activity and because, in epitomizing our weekday existence, aren’t appropriate for the Sabbath.

Rabbi Daniel Nevins, dean of the rabbinical school at the Conservative Movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, says that even if an e-reader is invented that adheres to Jewish law, he worries such a device could undermine the Sabbath’s values.

‘The Torah says you shouldn’t leave your place on the seventh day,’ Nevins explains. 'You can say Judaism is creating a local ideal that you experience Shabbat in a place with people and don’t go out of those boundaries … The problem with virtual experiences is they distract our attention from our local environment and break all boundaries of space and time. Shabbat is about reinforcing boundaries of space and time so we can have a specific experience.’

On Bible translation and mobile tech

But the book does not exist to restore humanity to an ‘undercity’ (Boo’s word) that others simply haven’t yet noticed. It is also, symptomatically, a book about the failure to notice.

Boo is not in the business of making class-based accusations, but Behind the Beautiful Forevers eats into the hazy but persuasive confidence widely harboured about urban growth. The elite embarrassment over ‘Slumbai’ is often secretly accompanied by the perverse notion that this blatantly public view of inequality, specific to Mumbai, is in some way its own solution. The contradiction of this visibility is that it softens the idea of real and deep divides into abstraction. That is why the Erase-X and the suppurating hands of scavengers will come as a shock to few Indian readers and almost no Mumbaikar.

Boo attacks this narrative obfuscation, not to deflate expectations, but to better understand the challenges of these expectations. The story is not just that growth fails to be inclusive; it is about the ways in which the excluded negotiate these failures. The story is these lines from the book’s last quarter: 'Among the poor, there was no doubt that instability fostered ingenuity, but over time the lack of a link between effort and result could become debilitating. “We try so many things,” as one Annawadi girl puts it, “but the world doesn’t move in our favor.”’