pav alexander

The loss is there, an old wound never fully healed. My disappointment was certainly personal, made deeper by the awareness that many thousands of young Americans, and far more Vietnamese and other Asian citizens, were going to and did lose their lives with the Nixon administration’s continuation of the war.

And I was upset that my supporters would carry the burden of the loss, too — something that has weighed on me all these years. I wanted to win for them, just as I wanted to win for the soldiers I planned to bring home quickly, and for an economy I hoped to redirect toward peace and domestic investments.

Is such a mode sustainable, over the long haul, and not just for one project, by people other than the handful of Special Cases like Doctorow and Coulton and Zoë Keating? That’s what we’re all waiting to find out. We need more data points to plot this graph, to see what shape the line makes — which means that we need more people to (a) make the jump into DCE [digital culture entrepreneur] mode and (b) report what happens. You first.

Craig Mod, in an essay reflecting on how we come to know ourselves through our networked collected data, discovers a new kind of tragedy as he uses a Fitbit to track his steps and stair-climbs through Paris:

Staring out, I traced my walk from so far above. I thought of the staccato data at the beginning of my adventure as I flitted between cafes, stopping for coffee and hot chocolate. The soft lull in the data as I lingered in front of Stein’s apartment. The explosive push to the base of the [Eiffel] tower—a leg of my activity graph punctuated by only a small dip as I stopped to buy water. And finally those stairs—all the stairs climbing up the tower …

I thought of the aggregate—a small corner of my projected hologram. How I would look back on my total data and today would explode out as an outlier and I would remember and replay the walk in granular detail.

Curious as to what the actual numbers were, I reached into my right pocket to check.

Emptiness.

Emptiness followed by dread.

Dread followed by denial.

I looked in the other pocket. I looked in my bag. And then I remembered, with dull thud to the gut—I changed trousers before leaving my room. The Fitbit was back at the hotel, clipped to my jeans, motionless, recording nothing.

That afternoon, looking up from below, you’d have seen a man’s heart sink off the tower. All of the lost data: It tore at the preservationist within. My hologram rendered somehow less complete. A broken stream in the data mind.

All of this new effort, this delight in walking, was a result of tracking his steps with a device. Knowing himself, and then bettering himself, because of his awareness of the data.

This rang true for me in a kind of oblong way; in the way I have always handled my music listening habits since the arrival of iTunes. I had listened to mp3s and digital music before I entered the Apple ecosystem, but iTunes’ desktop app circa 2003 had been the first time it had been so easy to see at a glance how many times I had listened to a given song, and, if I had rated it (with 1 to 5 stars), how I felt about it.

What was at first a nifty curiosity became something of an obsession as I discovered the smallest trace of utility from that data. Every time I listened to a track, either on my computer or my iPod, iTunes would add it all up. I could then build playlists based on the tracks I played the most, or hadn’t yet gotten to. By rating them, I could build playlists of my favorites, so I’d always have a set of songs that fell within the parameters of my pre-approval. One list for 5-star songs, near-guaranteed enjoyment, and another for 4 and 5-star songs, for a broader range of feelings and styles.

I cultivated this data meticulously. If I wasn’t entirely sure what rating a song warranted, I’d leave it unlabeled. 5-star songs were agonized over — do I really like Billy Joel’s “Only the Good Die Young” that much, or was it just its connection to a play I was in as a kid that makes it mean something more than it ought? That kind of thing. (It still has 5 stars to this day.)

But there were problems. As time for music listening grew shorter, I found myself gravitating to the 4 and 5-star songs almost exclusively, leaving a huge chunk of my library un-listened-to, and therefore, never to be rated, doomed to sit on a hard drive platter, spinning kind of like a record, but never heard.

Also, a quirk of iTunes and iPods is that a listen is not tallied unless a track is played all the way through to its very end, so if I listen to 90% of a track, and skip its fade-out, the listen is never marked by the software. As soon as I realized this, I made a habit of scrolling to the end of songs I did not intend to let finish, so that they would pass to the next track, giving the software the chance to tally one more play.

It became bizarrely important to me, critical, that these play counts be accurate, and this is where I really feel sympathy with Mod. I began to feel a new anxiety that is admittedly extremely strange: I would become uneasy if I heard a song over the radio when out and about, or if my wife played a CD in the car, because I knew that the playing of those songs was not being tracked. The data was lost, as it was with Mod’s forgotten Fitbit. I’d hear the songs, but there would be no record of the hearing. As I say, it really is odd, but the anxiety over that loss was, and remains, real, and it’s almost an entirely invented anxiety.

It’s only now, now that I have two children and a demanding job and essentially no time to listen to music, save for the rare late night or perhaps a reading session in which ambient music is in the background, that this discomfort has begun to wane. It’s a remarkable reform for me that I can even listen to a station on Pandora and mostly shrug off the lost data.

Mostly.

Here’s some breaking news: the kind of people who choose to watch a vice-presidential debate instead of baseball or football or a cooking show are not sensitive souls who curl up into a ball at the first sign of disagreement between politicians. People who choose to watch political conflict can deal with it. Those who can’t—or just aren’t interested in the first place—are watching something else. Research by political scientists Kevin Arceneaux and Martin Johnson shows this.

The e-ink Kindles are designed to do one thing really well: display long-form text. Page-turning is at the heart of the Kindle reading experience. An active Kindle reader is going to go to the next page hundreds — in some cases, I’m sure, even thousands — of times every week. There should not just be buttons for page-turning, but great buttons. Buttons exquisitely designed and engineered to be perfectly placed and delightfully clickable. The problem with using the touchscreen to turn pages is that you have to move your thumb, from the bezel to the display and then back to the bezel after tapping, each time. With page-turning buttons on the bezel, like on the old pre-touchscreen Kindles, you never had to move your thumbs while reading. Not having to move your thumbs is one way a dedicated e-reader could hold an advantage over tablets like the iPad and Kindle Fire — a missed opportunity here. It’s a little thing, but as always, it’s the details that matter.

I am sorry that the president finds debating before the public to be annoying. And I am very sorry that more Americans don’t delve into the footnotes of position papers. And I am very sorry that Mitt Romney was mean to the moderator, and lied to the viewers. And I am especially sorry that Barack Obama was evidently shocked — shocked! — to find the party of poll-taxing, evolution-disputing, and climate-change denying engaging in such tactics. But this is the war we have. And this president has signed up to lead the fight. I think he understands that. Over the past four years Obama has proven to be very slow, but very deadly. I doubt that’s changed.

Thousands of Years of Religious Slaughter in One Cartoon

The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

One final debate note: I’m not a fan of “both sides do it” journalism, but to be fair, while there’s no equivalent of economic birtherism on the left, there is a kind of ”debate trutherism,” where fervent Obama supporters, especially on Twitter, explain that the president was once again playing 18th-dimensional chess and intentionally blowing the debate only to win it somewhere down the line, drawing out Romney’s lies with his somnolent performance. Um, no. Obama blew it, big time.

The president seemed unable to concentrate or focus throughout the debate, mouthing occasional numbers and assorted caveats to points he could never really complete. When it came to the issues, he offhandedly conceded much of the Republican worldview, something he is now apt to do at anytime, without warning.

What caused the financial crisis? Well, it had something to do with the banks. But Obama also had to admit it was poor people “who took out home mortgages they couldn’t afford.”

Physically, he looked shamefaced, even guilty. Whenever Romney made some point, he would drop his head, purse his lips, and nod, like a prisoner in the dock admitting to some shabby crime.

There is no reasonable explanation—no acceptable explanation—for such a performance.

On The Page this morning, Mark Halperin (disclosure: he was my boss when I was an intern at ABC News, and I’ve defended him on this site) asks some basic and important “Questions After Denver” following Mitt Romney’s drubbing of President Obama in the debate last night. For shits and giggles (well, more shit, less giggle) I’m going to try and answer them.

Do the media fact checks change the perception of how Romney did?

Not to the folks that matter, the uninformed undecideds, for whom this is all they’re ever going to see other than ads.

Does Romney see bigger crowds, better fundraising, and/or bulked up absentee/early voting support?

Probably not on crowds, because he’s just not that interesting. But you better believe his machinery oils up as a result. He’ll look shinier and more like a winner, and therefore a good investment for money and time.

Can Romney keep up this level and style of performance in other formats?

Yes. Even in something that’s folksier like a townhouse hall debate, Romney can fake sincerity and caring if he wants to. He never fails because he’s unprepared for a format. Romney may not be an Everyman, but Obama isn’t much better, and now we know that he’s capable of blowing a chance to use his likability even when it counts.

Does Chicago take something page-turning out of the oppo research closet and throw it over the transom?

They’d better.

Do any prominent Democrats inside or outside the Obama tent break ranks and say the President messed up?

Only if the polls show things weakening for the president. Until then, expect to see a more O’Malley-esque tack of “he was dignified and presidential.”

How does Denver impact debate prep for Biden and Ryan?

You bet. Biden will already be prepped to kneecap Ryan and Romney with a smile, but they’ll be more deliberate this time, since the stakes for making Joe seem aggressive and unlikable are low. He may be their best messenger, given the preciousness with which the Obama campaign views the president’s likability.

Do Capitol Hill Republicans go back to being bullish on Romney’s chances?

Yes.

Does the press begin a love affair with Romney?

No, they still hate him, but they will, however, turn on the president anew, which is just as good for Romney.

Most of all: Do the state and national polls move?

Probably, but I would bet not by much given electoral and demographic realities. But “not by much” may be enough for Romney.

David Frum on the first debate:

Obama, by contrast, rarely looked at Romney. He looked down at his podium, which meant that the audience saw closed eyes and a frowning mouth. Again and again, Obama allowed himself to be dragged into a tangle of facts and figures – failing to realize that confusion is Romney’s friend. The Republican base saddled Romney with a hugely unpopular economic plan. The clearer and more specific the discussion gets, the more danger Romney is in. Unlike his supporters in the conservative media, Romney clearly understands this. The president must surely know it too, but he failed to act on that knowledge. He was professorial, elliptical, vague, abstract; Romney appeared plausible, concerned, compassionate, and energetic.

It was unbearable. Obama still has the realities of the swing states’ demographics on his side, but he just blew a walk to reelection and turned it into a race. Almost unforgivable.

Dana Milbank Belittles the Atheist Movement and Edwina Rogers

So the Afghan army is trying something new: a guide to the strange ways of the American soldier. The goal is to convince Afghan troops that when their Western counterparts do something deeply insulting, it’s likely a product of cultural ignorance and not worthy of revenge.

The pamphlet is intended to “strengthen our understanding of our [NATO] counterpart,” according to an English translation of the pamphlet that was provided to The Washington Post. But in doing so, it also reveals seemingly minor — and rarely acknowledged — cultural faux pas that have created palpable tension between the two forces.

“Please do not get offended if you see a NATO member blowing his/her nose in front of you,” the guide instructs.

“When Coalition members get excited, they may show their excitement by patting one another on the back or the behind,” it explains. “They may even do this to you if they are proud of the job you’ve done. Once again, they don’t mean to offend you.”

For some reason, though, The Next Generation awakened in me a feeling of terrible and suffocating yearning — that hopeless childish escape wish that’s the wake of a certain kind of fantasy. That feeling that in a different world you’d be happy… .

why, then, that yearning? No one lies awake at night longing to be transported to a convincing imaginative representation of early-’90s social themes, or if they do I have yet to find their chat rooms. It’s obviously the case that the great subject of almost all American television — family — is also at large on the bridge of the Enterprise. Like The West Wing, the show offers a fantasy of smart friends working together and supporting each other that’s designed to make you want to join them. When you’re a skinny 13-year-old who’s scared a third of the time and bored another third, the idea of roaming the constellations with Captain Picard, whom adventure follows like a shadow and who always knows what to do, will obviously have a certain appeal.