Alan Jacobs

If one team is good enough to warrant beating another in 55% of its games, the weaker team will nevertheless win a 7-game series about 4 times out of 10. And if the superior team could beat its opponent, on average, 2 out of 3 times they meet, the inferior team will still win a 7-game series about once every 5 match-ups. There is really no way for a sports league to change this. In the lopsided 2/3-probability case, for example, you’d have to play a series consisting of at minimum the best of 23 games to determine the winner with what is called statistical significance, meaning the weaker team would be crowned champion 5 percent or less of the time. And in the case of one team’s having only a 55-45 edge, the shortest significant ‘world series’ would be the best of 269 games, a tedious endeavor indeed! So sports playoff series can be fun and exciting, but being crowned 'world champion’ is not a reliable indication that a team is actually the best one.

Most type designers are understandably proud of their work. But Thomas Cobden-Sanderson, the maker of the beautiful Doves type, was so taken by it, and so keen that his former business partner shouldn’t use it after his death, that he resolved to drown every letter in the Thames. In 1916 he began loading up his bicycle under cover of darkness and throwing his font under Hammersmith bridge. He made more than 100 separate trips, a large undertaking for a man of 76. And much of it still remains in its watery grave, forming itself into such words as the tide dictates.

The odds of any given venture succeeding are, of course, low. But it’s rational to invest $1 million in a business that will fail nine out of ten times, as long as the tenth time will earn least $10 million. Nye is talking about irrational bets: investing $1 million on a one in 50 shot of $10 million. An entrepreneurial culture encourages those crazy bets as well, and a few startups get lucky. We should, Nye suggests, think of ‘the entrepreneur as the valiant, but overoptimistic investor rather than the heroic seer.’

Entrepreneurship is not, in this view, a rational risk calculation. It is, as critics of capitalism sometimes charge, a bit like gambling. The few big winners are usually people who shouldn’t have bet their time, money, and ideas. They overestimated their chances of striking it rich. But they beat the odds — to everyone’s benefit. These 'lucky fools’ create new sources of wealth, new jobs, new industries offering less-risky opportunities, and new technologies that improve life. Society plays the role of the casino, enjoying the spillover benefits from foolish bets.

The poet Jo Shapcott used a nice phrase recently about confessional writing: ‘chasing your own ambulance’, she called it. I am guilty of that. In my defence I can say that I am fascinated by the line between writing and physical survival. In the days after the procedure I was sometimes so exhausted by movement that I would wait patiently for someone to come in and give me a paper cup of pills that was almost, not quite, out of my reach. But somehow, I would always contrive to get my pen in my hand, however far it had rolled; my mood was even, despite uprushes of shame, and the only thing that would really have upset me was running out of paper. The black ink, looping across the page, flowing easily and more like water than like blood, reassured me that I was alive and could act in the world. When Virginia Woolf’s doctors forbade her to write, she obeyed them. Which makes me ask, what kind of wuss was Woolf? For a time, into September, my religious preoccupations continued, as if the operation had been on my brain and not my guts, as if the so-called ‘God spot’ had been stirred up by a scalpel. Even now I am content that the unconscious should continue to empty itself into waking life, like some constantly flushing lavatory. ‘Are we somebodies?’ the voice on my right asks. ‘Yes, we are somebodies,’ comes the reply. ‘The church counts us all. But very few of us are saved.’

amplified authorship

Much of what I have read on Plato reads much as though he, to whom the whole of subsequent philosophy is said to be so many footnotes, were in effect a footnote to himself and were being coached to get a paper accepted by the Philosophical Review. And a good bit of the writing on Descartes is by way of chivying his argumentation into notations we are certain he would have adopted had he lived to appreciate their advantages, since it is now so clear where he went wrong. But in both case it might at least have been asked whether what either writer was up to can that easily be separated from forms of presentation that may have seemed inevitable, so that the dialogue or meditation flattened into conventional periodical prose might not in the process have lost something central to those ways of writing.

And my saddened sympathies to colleagues at Virginia Theological Seminary, whose chapel burned down yesterday afternoon. The grief from such losses shows that maxims about ‘church not being about buildings,’ though true as far as they go, don’t get to every important human dimension of how our imaginations collaborate across time and space to make a sensuous expression of our joy in God’s glory, and of our solidarity with the communion of saints. God does not need us to build a house, nor do we need a designated shelter to celebrate the sacraments — but we build for God anyway out of a deep, persistent sense that this is one particularly apt way of committing our faith to stone and wood, brick and glass. May all the saints whose lives honoured God in Immanuel Chapel uphold and console one another during these sorrowful days.

The internet currently has two very different models of social networking. There is, of course, Facebook – a massive sprawl of friends and acquaintances that allows us to keep track of people we know in real life. I’m “friends” with my grandmother, a bunch of second cousins and it seems like most of my high school class. The defining feature of this network is its focus on “social closeness” – I want to keep track of these people because I have some kind of connection to them. We are all part of the same “clan”.

The second model of online social networking is Twitter. The interesting thing about Twitter is that it encourages us to follow people who we have no social connection to at all. If I follow Ashton Kutcher or LeBron James or Margaret Atwood it’s not because I know them from high school, or because I met Ashton at a party last week. Instead, it’s because we share a set of common interests and beliefs. In other words, our connection is abstract – it’s rooted in perceptions of social similarity, and not literal social closeness.

I can’t really counter all the claims made about the Kindle by the true believers. It really is handy. It can hold ten million books and fifty million magazines (I think). It is portable and very easy to use. So convenient. Yes, yes, yes, yes, everything they say about the Kindle is true and great. I think there is even a religious movement dedicated to the Kindle. However, what the Kindle cannot do, and why I will never own one even if it allows me to hold all the books of the Library of Congress in my pocket for the cost of a penny is that it doesn’t allow for discovery…for an epiphany. For the first time in a very long time I was absolutely seduced by a book I hadn’t heard anything about until I happened to be walking by the store on a rainy evening. Being able to go into the Harvard Book Store and touch the book, browse its pages,as well as become engrossed in its words will never happen with a Kindle. A Kindle is a storage device. Usually when I go into bookstore I am just looking around. I don’t really care if I find something or not but I am always of a mind to get something if I can. Last night, a book caught me off guard and believe me when I tell you that I wasn’t in the “spending $28 on a 100 page hardcover” mood. Once I got the book in my hand, however, I just had to. Everyone I have shown the book to in the last 12-15 hours has also been completely in its thrall. So there, after all my public denunciations of the Kindle, my final rejection of it comes from an anecdote not a point by point dismantling. The Kindle will never give me an spot in time, that fleeting moment when everything else is shut out around you…it just isn’t capable of that in the way that an unknown book by an unknown author about a subject I , myself, didn’t know I was so interested in, on the shelf of the local bookstore I love did. Perhaps that isn’t the Kindle’s mission but if not, that’s sad since that is ultimately the whole point of a discovering a book you didn’t know you’d love - lighting the fire of an idea in your mind while wandering the streets in search of a beer.

Some writers, though, scribble and tap more fruitfully than others. Next month brings with it the scent of rose petals, cushions and lapdogs: all heralding the re-publication of Barbara Cartland’s first novel, Jig-Saw. She was a 19-year-old ingénue when she wrote it in 1920; by the time she died, nearly 80 years later, she had produced 722 much-loved, mostly romantic works of fiction. In case you thought you’d read that number wrongly, I’ll spell it out: seven hundred and twenty-two. By my calculations, that means Cartland cracked out a book pretty much every 40 days.