Alan Jacobs

Every generation gets the fantasy it deserves. Victorians had the stark realities of life and death depicted in George McDonald’s At The Back of the North Wind. The interwar generation could escape to Neverland, but the cost of not growing up was always clear in the work of JM Barrie. The Baby Boomers would inherit the world, just as CS Lewis promised in the works of Narnia. Thank God Thatcher’s children could rely on Roald Dahl to show them the truth of a world dominated by the selfish, callous and cruel.

In Harry Potter, the Millennial generation has a fantasy that reflects its own obsessions. Harry’s problem is not so much that he is an orphan; rather, his real predicament is being trapped in a stifling lower-middle-class upbringing. Imagine if Harry hadn’t been lucky enough to have powerful friends to help him get to private school and a top-class education. Instead of becoming the world’s most powerful wizard, he’d have had to settle for a place at the local comp and, if he was lucky, a job in a call centre or, very lucky, as an estate agent. What if Harry had been left behind on Platform 9 and ¾ at Kings Cross? Forsaken to live a (possibly longer) mundane life, with only a dull sense of existential despair to keep him company as Hermione and Ron continued on to magic and adventure?

Melbourn Village College – not far from Cambridge – has decided to ditch its Latin motto: “Nisi dominus frustra”. And I guess you can see why. It’s a contraction of the first line of Psalm 127, “Unless the Lord builds the house, those who build it labour in vain”… so you might translate the three Latin words of the motto something like “Without the Lord, frustration”, I guess. A touch pious you might think, and a bit Judaeo-Christian. But I can’t see that any world faith could seriously disagree and, anyway, it’s served the city of Edinburgh well enough for the last few hundred years.

They have replaced it (after a student vote, it seems) with what sounds to me more like an advertising jingle: “Inspiring Minds” (which is bound to look “so 2011” in a few years time that it too will soon be ditched). According to the Acting Principal, they wanted a motto that was more relevant to the students. In the current economic climate, Latin was “largely irrelevant” in helping the students find work.

It was once thought that paywalls would work only for business-oriented papers like the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, but smartly constructed paywalls, which strike the right balance in supporting both ad-subsidized consumption and subscription consumption, are now showing signs of success for mainstream papers as well. (See, for instance, Felix Salmon’s piece on the New York Times’s “porous paywall.”) And a growing number of papers and other publications are testing paywall variations, which will help the industry gain a better sense of what works and what doesn’t. Newspapers are also getting smarter about distinguishing between the more fungible and the less fungible elements of their products - and focusing their talents and investments on the former. Less fungible means more distinctive, and distinctiveness in written news can manifest itself in many forms, from news analyses, to human-interest narratives, to smartly written editorial columns, to editorial skill in creating a bundle of stories, to compelling packages of local news and event coverage. Finally, and crucially important, the huge overabundance of supply in the news market, a consequence of the collapse of geographical boundaries that traditionally separated newspapers, is slowly ebbing as journalists are laid off and newspapers go under. The pruning of supply is ugly, but, from a business standpoint, it’s both inevitable and necessary.

Is the technology industry finished? Is engineering finished? Is the military finished? I haven’t even mentioned that men hold the lion’s share of dangerous, dirty, and necessary jobs that few women seem to want. Men tend to be the truck drivers, builders, oil-rig workers, roofers, loggers, coal miners, taxi drivers, and window washers. Are those jobs passé?

Why, then, are we even having a debate about man’s demise? Because we’re living in a society that’s enamored with the “WAW”, or “Women are Wonderful” phenomenon. WAW, a kind of reverse female chauvinism, is everywhere. Magazines, TV shows, newspapers, and even scholarly journals run endless stories and articles claiming women are the better sex. Women, we are told, are superior leaders and communicators. They’re also more charitable, empathetic, and noble than men. The rules of the WAW game make it impossible for men to win: If women do something better than men, that is evidence of their superiority. If men outperform women, that’s proof of invidious discrimination against the fairer sex.

To violate the spirit of WAW is to invite havoc. Suggest, as Larry Summers did, that men may have some innate advantages in science and math, and prepare to change your job. Write a book or article titled Are Men Necessary?, “The End of Men,” Man Down, or Women are From Venus, Men are from Hell, and the gods smile.

I know Michael Moore and Bill Maher think this is a great line: “I went into the polls voting for the black guy, and what I got was the white guy…”

But it really isn’t. In fact, it’s racist, and Michael Moore would do well to stop repeating it. It really is no better than the Kenyan anti-colonial bit, and in fact is good deal worse. I said this yesterday on twitter, but it would be as if my Jewish accountant messed up my taxes and I said, “Dude, you’re Jewish, what the hell?!?!”

In fact, I’d be getting exactly what I deserved. If you paid more attention to Obama’s skin color, than to his speeches, the voluminous amounts of journalism noting his moderation, his two books which are, themselves, exercises in moderation, than you have chosen to be ignorant.

You are now being punished for that ignorance. No one should feel sorry for you. Try not being racist.

So take a look at your bookshelves. Do you have all—better make that any—of the books on the Columbia University undergraduate core curriculum? It’s not perfect, but it’s as good a list of the canon of Western civilization as I know of.

Let’s take the 11 books on the syllabus for the spring 2012 semester: (1) Virgil’s Aeneid; (2) Ovid’s Metamorphoses; (3) Saint Augustine’s Confessions; (4) Dante’s The Divine Comedy; (5) Montaigne’s Essays; (6) Shakespeare’s King Lear; (7) Cervantes’s Don Quixote; (8) Goethe’s Faust; (9) Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; (10) Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment; (11) Woolf’s To the Lighthouse.

Step one: Order the ones you haven’t got today. (And get War and Peace, Great Expectations, and Moby-Dick while you’re at it.)

Step two: When vacation time comes around, tell the teenagers in your life you are taking them to a party. Or to camp. They won’t resist.

Step three: Drive to a remote rural location where there is no cell-phone reception whatsoever.

Step four: Reveal that this is in fact a reading party and that for the next two weeks reading is all you are proposing to do—apart from eating, sleeping, and talking about the books.

Welcome to Book Camp, kids.

But offering words of apology is not enough. Christopher Hitchens once wrote: ‘If you don’t want to sound like the Pope, who apologises for everything and for nothing, then your apology should cost you something.’ I agree. So first, even though I stand by the articles which won the George Orwell Prize, I am returning it as an act of contrition for the errors I made elsewhere, in my interviews. But this isn’t much, since it has been reported that they are minded to take it away anyway. (I apologise to them for the time they’ve had to spend on this.) So second, I am going to take an unpaid leave of absence from The Independent until 2012, and at my own expense I will be undertaking a programme of journalism training. (I rose very fast in journalism straight from university.) And third, when I return, I will footnote all my articles online and post the audio online of any on-the-record conversations so that everyone can hear them and verify they were said directly to me.

wwnorton:

William Faulkner’s second novel, Mosquitoes, was written during the summer of 1926 and first published in the spring of 1927. It was recently re-issued by Liveright Publishing Corporation in August. Check out the evolution of the cover art over eighty-four years in print.

Have you ever noticed that while small businesses wish they were bigger, big businesses dream about being more agile and flexible? And remember, once you get big, it’s really hard to shrink without firing people, damaging morale, and changing the entire way you do business. Ramping up doesn’t have to be your goal. And we’re not talking just about the number of employees you have either. It’s also true for expenses, rent, IT infrastructure, furniture, etc. These things don’t just happen to you. You decide whether or not to take them on. And if you do take them on, you’ll be taking on new headaches, too. Lock in lots of expenses and you force yourself into building a complex businesss—one that’s a lot more difficult and stressful to run. Don’t be insecure about aiming to be a small business. Anyone who runs a business that’s sustainable and profitable, whether it’s big or small, should be proud.

Lawrence Lindsey, who was head of Bush’s Council of Economic Advisors, warned a few months ago that if the interest the Treasury pays to borrow money simply rises to the 20-year average of 5.7 percent, this will add another $4.9 trillion to the national debt in the next decade – more than wiping out the savings the congressional “supercommittee” is supposed to agree upon.

Lindsey’s is a credible voice. Before the invasion of Iraq, when Lindsey was working in the Bush White House, he said an American occupation of that nation would cost about $200 billion a year. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called Lindsey’s estimate “baloney.” At that time President Bush was asserting an irresponsible fiction that an attack on Iraq would be quick and cheap. Bush wanted to run the war entirely on borrowed money, thus foisting the cost onto future generations – not to raise taxes for war, the honorable course, as was done during World War II and Vietnam. Bush fired Lindsey shortly after he issued his cost estimate, because Lindsey said something the president and defense secretary did not want the public to hear. So far, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the Iraq occupation has cost about $1.3 trillion over eight years, about what Lindsey predicted. Every penny of that cost, under Bush and now Obama, has been billed to the young, so the reckless men and women running Washington can spend without accountability.

In recent years, Bush and Rumsfeld have tried to argue away their blunder in Iraq by saying they had no way of knowing how costly it would be. They claim this even though the White House chief economist warned them! If interest rates rise, and the national debt skyrockets owing to debt-service expenses, look for Obama and Nancy Pelosi to claim they had no way of knowing that could happen.