Alan Jacobs

One of the two Republican senators to vote for the Udall Amendment yesterday was Sen. Rand Paul, who quoted Thomas Jefferson: “The means of defense against foreign danger historically have become instruments of tyranny at home.” No. Truer. Words. At this moment in America we seem to be so fond of dividing Americans into us and &them that we have created all sorts of intriguing new legal double standards for the thems. Don’t think for a minute that these new powers will be used only against suspected terrorists. We already know that suspected illegal immigrants, suspected environmental activists, and suspected protesters have very different legal rights—which is to say, far more limited rights—than anyone else. And as Benjamin Wallace Wells detailed last August, the landmark anti-terror legislation known as the Patriot Act has, in the 10 years since its passage, been used in 1,618 drug cases and 15 terrorism cases. You’d never know it from watching the GOP hopefuls joyfully demonize women, immigrants, the poor, the prisoners, OWS protesters, and union members, but at some point, them always becomes us.

• Biggest reason: I couldn’t find a comfortable way to hold the darn thing. The narrow bezel requires you to hold the device at its edges, or else you’ll turn pages or do something else on the touchscreen you don’t want to do. Also, the on-off switch is on the bottom, so if you use part of your hand to support it from below you’re always in danger of turning it off. So I could only read by holding it quite delicately in both hands. My Kindle 3 is far easier to hold. (The physical keyboard actually helps in that regard: you can’t touch the keys, of course, but the surrounding space gives you more places to put your thumb. I can also turn pages on the Kindle 3 while holding it with one hand.)
• Along the same lines, the Fire weighs about the same as the much larger iPad, so it feels really heavy for its size. I couldn’t quite get used to that.

• The web browser sometimes worked quickly, but stalled out way too often. Also, the touchscreen feedback was inconsistent: sometimes I would touch and get an immediate response, sometimes the response would be delayed, and sometimes it wouldn’t respond at all. I was never sure how long to wait before trying again. (To be fair, I occasionally had this problem with the iPad too.)

• Navigating between programs is considerably slower and more awkward than with the iPhone or iPad. If I had anything even the slightest bit productive to do — adding a reminder to Remember the Milk, jotting down something in Simplenote, sending a quick email, even reading a document in Instapaper — I found it far easier to whip out my iPhone for the task.

• While it’s nice to be able to read in the dark or dim without turning on a light, I can’t read on a backlit screen for very long without my eyes starting to ache.

• I think the iPad screen is a great size for watching video, but the Fire screen seems too small to me.

In general, for reading the e-ink Kindles are infinitely better than the Fire, while for anything else my iPhone is better. I came to see, in just a couple of days, that I would simply never use the Fire. And it doesn’t make sense to pay two hundred bucks for something that’ll just sit around gathering dust.

It goes without saying that YMMV. I have a MacBook Air for work, a Kindle for reading, and an iPhone for general life management; I don’t see the need for a fourth device. (Which is why I also gave my iPad to my mom, even though it’s a far superior device to the Fire.)

Legislation is helpless against the wild prayer of longing that rises, day in, day out, from all these households under my protection: “O God, put away justice and truth for we cannot understand them and do not want them. Eternity would bore us dreadfully. Leave Thy heavens and come down to our earth of waterclocks and hedges. Become our uncle. Look after Baby, amuse Grandfather, escort Madam to the Opera, help Willy with his home-work, introduce Muriel to a handsome naval officer. Be interesting and weak like us, and we will love you as we love ourselves.”

Penn State lost a university president, a legendary head football coach, an athletic director, and a school administrator because they heard allegations of sexual abuse and did nothing to investigate or follow up. Who, I wonder, at ESPN—the network, the magazine, or the website—had knowledge of the Syracuse allegations—allegations of boys being raped—and decided not to pursue them? Who at ESPN is the equivalent of a board of trustees who will now step in and do the right thing by firing those responsible? Because this time boys weren’t raped just because the good old boys looked the other way. This time, boys were raped because the good old boys who were supposed to be watching the good old boys looked the other way.

The enigmatic Voynich manuscript, now online.

At bottom, he says, the Germans were blind to the possibility that the Americans were playing the game by something other than the official rules. The Germans took the rules at their face value: they looked into the history of triple-A-rated bonds and accepted the official story that triple-A-rated bonds were completely risk-free. This preternatural love of rules, almost for their own sake, punctuates German finance as it does German life. As it happens, a story had just broken that a division of a German insurance company called Munich Re, back in June 2007, or just before the crash, had sponsored a party for its best producers that offered not just chicken dinners and nearest-to-the-pin golf competitions but a blowout with prostitutes in a public bath. In finance, high or low, this sort of thing is of course not unusual. What was striking was how organized the German event was. The company tied white and yellow and red armbands to the prostitutes to indicate which ones were available to which men. After each sexual encounter the prostitute received a stamp on her arm, to indicate how often she had been used. The Germans didn’t want just hookers: they wanted hookers with rules.

What is notable about these would-be writers is how crest-fallen they are when their first writing efforts emerge from the editors’ hands. A typical piece might bear the handiwork of two editors, one junior and one more senior. And even though the pieces are short, much has been done to them to improve them. And so, on a typical day, I might find an intern bawling in the ladies’ room moments after I have turned back to her the edited version of her copy. No one has ever told her before that she isn’t perfect. And yet, the recent crops of interns seem to learn less and less from the edited copy turned back to them for perusal. I tell them that the reason for changes should be self-evident and to ask about a change if the reason isn’t apparent, but seldom does anyone inquire. You mean they might have something to learn. What a quaint idea.

Nevertheless, Les Dorr, a spokesman for the F.A.A., said the agency would rather err on the side of caution when it comes to digital devices on planes. He cited a 2006 study by the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics, a nonprofit group that tests and reports on technical travel and communications issues. The group was asked by the F.A.A. to test the effects of cellphones, Wi-Fi and portable electronic devices on planes.

Its finding? “Insufficient information to support changing the policies,” Mr. Dorr said. “There was no evidence saying these devices can’t interfere with a plane, and there was no evidence saying that they can.” I’m not arguing that passengers should be allowed to make phone calls while the plane zooms up into the sky. But, why can’t I read my Kindle or iPad during takeoff and landing? E-readers and cellphones can be easily put into “Airplane Mode” which disables the device’s radio signals.

Hollywood uses copyright law to shut down pirate movie theaters. Apple uses copyright law to shut down unauthorized clones of its hardware products. Even Red Hat relies on copyright law to help it enforce the GPL license, which prohibits third parties from incorporating open source code into proprietary products. The fact that these businesses have chosen monetization strategies that don’t involve selling copies of content directly to the general public doesn’t mean they don’t benefit from copyright protection.

Yet while these business models rely on copyright, they’re not particularly vulnerable to the scourge of online file sharing. I’m sure you could get a pirated copy of Apple’s iOS on the Internet, but it’s not going to do you much good without an iPhone to run it on. You can get a copy of the latest Hollywood blockbuster on BitTorrent, but the experience isn’t the same as seeing it on the big screen with your friends.

So copyright isn’t dying. All that’s happening is that a particular strategy for monetizing creative works is becoming less viable. That’s a shame, and it’s creating real dislocations for people who have built businesses around that strategy. But luckily there are lots of other companies around who don’t rely on it, and copyright is serving them just fine.

So I (and several others) had a debate on Twitter today with Megan McArdle about children on airplanes. Megan’s basic argument, as expressed in this tweet and elsewhere is that, out of courtesy for others, parents of small children should avoid bringing them onto airplanes except when absolutely necessary. Here’s why Megan is wrong:

1. The vast majority of small children on airplanes make no noise at all, or make easily ignored noise, or cry at takeoff and landing because their ears hurt. None of those is a big deal for anyone. It’s only the worst-case scenario, the child crying throughout the duration of a long flight, when the inconveniencing of others becomes a significant consideration. But among all the small children who fly, what percentage cry through a whole flight, or even much of it? My guess, based on thirty years of flying, is maybe one-tenth of one percent. Do we really want to recommend a policy for everyone based on what happens a tiny fraction of the time? Hard cases make bad law, and bad ethics too. It’s what you might call TSA logic.

2. Megan says that when a child cries through a whole flight, “The bulk of the cost of a screaming baby is born by the fifty-to-three-hundred other passengers, not parents.” First of all, even a screaming child won’t be heard throughout the plane, and will be a significant annoyance for, say, fifty people on a full flight. That’s a lot of people, you might say, but let’s be careful about how we calculate these things: we don’t want to say that fifty people suffering some frustration is fifty times worse than one person suffering it, or else we’ll have to end up agreeing that the net amount of pain American commuters go through on the highways each day equals the pain experienced in the Armenian genocide. Fifty people (or for that matter 300) being annoyed during their flight doesn’t amount to all that much suffering. And the number of people affected will be diminished if some of the passagers have headphones or earplugs. (By the way: why don’t more people bring earplugs on flights? The same reason that people don’t think to bring crash helmets when they drive: the kind of problem that Megan wants to avoid happens so rarely that they don’t think to.)

3. But let’s say that I know that my child is going to cry through a whole long flight. (No one in fact knows that, and again, the chances of that happening are very small indeed, but I’ll grant the next-to-impossible for the moment.) Should I refrain from flying in order to avoid inconveniencing my fellow travelers? I suppose that would depend on why I am traveling. Let’s consider a common scenario: We’re going to Disney World. To avoid subjecting people to a crying child on a flight to Orlando, we could stay home; or we could choose a different vacation destination; or we could drive to Orlando. All of those choices impose a pretty significant cost on my family — even driving, which Megan seems to recommend. If the problem she wants to avoid is children crying on a long flight, then almost by definition Orlando is going to be beyond reasonable driving distance. If it takes us two days to drive to Orlando and two days to drive back, we’re losing a good chunk of our vacation. Should we do that in order to avoid making people on the plane listen to our screaming child? Would that be “common courtesy”? That’s setting an extremely high bar for the “common.” (It would be interesting to poll the people affected — our fellow passengers — on this point. Would most fliers think that parents who know their child is going to cry for an entire flight have a moral obligation to refrain from flying? to stay home? to go somewhere for vacation they don’t really want to go? to leave the children with … someone and take a vacation on their own?)

The one time I can remember having to listen to a child cry on an airplane for hours and hours came on a transatlantic flight. It was pretty miserable; it went on and on and on. But again it was a transatlantic flight, which means that (a) there were no other reasonable transportation options — should the family have taken the Queen Mary? — and (b) they weren’t likely to be traveling on a lark. And though I sat quite close to the family I didn’t suffer nearly as much as the poor parents did, who tried everything possible to quiet their child and were evidently shattered by the time we touched down. So yes, it was miserable, but it was a freak situation, and just tough luck for everyone concerned. These things happen. You don’t tell millions of people they shouldn’t fly because there’s some tiny chance, not of catastrophe, but of mere annoyance. That’s just absurd.

Also, I can’t believe I’ve written so many words about this.