Jonah Burke

I’m reading Secrets by Daniel Ellsberg, the economist, former State Department staffer, and self-described “cold-warrior” who leaked the Pentagon Papers. The book is a memoir of the Vietnam War era. It chronicles how the Johnson administration deceived the electorate, escalated the war despite public opposition, and cultivated in the Executive a culture of secrecy and subordination that ensured the conflict would drag on. Given our current entanglements in Iraq and Afghanistan and the seemingly ever-present voices calling for even more war, I have found the book very relevant to our time. I wish I had read it sooner.

In particular, Ellsburg quotes from a Defense Department memo to which he contributed in 1964 that argued against the so-called “Rostow approach,” a strategy advocated by hard-liners who wanted to open the wider war with an intense and unprovoked campaign of bombing–the 60’s equivalent of “shock and awe.” Ellsberg writes:

Application of the Rostow approach risks domestic and international opposition ranging from anxiety and protest to condemnamtion, efforts to disassociate from U.S. policies or alliances, or even strong countermeasures. . . . Currently, then, it is the Rostow approach, rather than the measures it counters, that would be seen generally as an “unstabilizing” change in the rules of the game, an escalation of conflict, an increasing of shared international risks, and quite possibly, as an open aggression demanding condemnation . . .

This seems to be a cogent rejoinder to the Bush Doctrine. And in 1964, at least initially, it was heeded: the Johnson Administration pursued a less aggressive policy than Rostow, gradually escalating the bombing in the hopes that, if necessary, it could be terminated. In Iraq, of course, we did no such thing. I wonder, did Rumsfeld, or Bush himself, consider Ellsberg’s logic in 2003, the year after his book was published?

While Ellsberg’s old memos are fascinating, the most interesting aspect of the book, in my mind, is not the discussion of policy but the exposition of Washington’s inner workings: how officials manipulate the bureaucracy, and especially the press, to further their own agendas. Of his boss at the Defense Department, Assistant Secretary John McNaughton, Ellsberg writes:

As he got into areas where he had to be especially untruthful or elusive, his Pekin, Illinois, accent got broader till he sounded like someone discussing corn at a country fair or standing at the rail of a riverboat. You looked for hayseed in his cuffs. He simply didn’t mind looking and sounding like a hick in the interests of dissimulation. My future boss in Vietnam, Edward Lansdale, had the same willingness to appear simpleminded when he wanted to be opaque . . .

Most people thought Bush was an idiot, but I always thought he was a lot smarter than he looked. He was no puppet. He had a strong hand in lots of decisions, now attributed to Cheney and Rumsfeld, that led us into the war. His apparent slowness, I would guess, was effected for the same reasons as McNaughton’s: to ingratiate, to head off deeper inquiry.

Now that we have a less hickish President who seems less evil, many of Ellsburg’s lessons seem, for the time being, less relevant. But the following passage, which discusses how decisions were made in the frantic days between the 1964 election and the initiation of major combat, reminded me of the predicament Obama finds himself in today:

The image that often came to mind as I watched John [McNaughton] . . . move from one caller to another on the phone, one crisis to another, was that of the juggler in a circus who keeps a dozen plates spinning in the air . . . I asked myself more than once: Can they really get away with decision making like this? . . . Can men even as brilliant and adroit as these . . . manage safely and wisely so many challenges at once, with so little time to acquire more than a shallow understanding of any one? Can you really run the world this way?

I hope, for everyone’s sake, that Obama develops a better way to make policy than did Johnson, McNamara, McNaughton, and the rest of the crew that got us into Vietnam. What Ellsberg makes plain is that if he doesn’t, we may find ourselves fighting yet another needless war.

Last weekend, my dad and I stopped at Northampton Coffee. I was waiting for my customary decaf americano, perusing the muffins, when it hit me: “Hey, I’m supposed to be boycotting this place!” You see, about a year ago, my brother Matt had gone into the same cafe and asked whether the beans were fair trade. “Fair trade?!” the owner scoffed. “That’s not my problem!” Knowing my feelings about non-fair coffee, Matt told me the story, and we knew what we had to do. The boycott was on.

We may not have been so quick to retaliate had we not already waged one successful campaign. In 2005, not long after Matt moved to Seattle (when I was still living there), he got a job at a restaurant called Local. He was happy because it seemed like a cool spot, and finding a job in a new city is always hard. But the joy would not last. Upon reporting for his first day of work, Matt was informed that he had already been fired. No justification. They had just hired too many people. Oops!

We called an impromptu brothers’ meeting in the front seat of his Honda. Clearly we couldn’t patronize the restaurant, but was there anything else we could do? Yes, there was. We resolved not only to tell people the story of Local’s bad behavior but also, and more importantly, to open the car window every time we drove past the offender and scream what became our rallying cry: “LOCAL SUCKS!”

In the waning days of 2005 and throughout 2006, a pedestrian near the intersection of Olive and Denny in Seattle would no doubt hear that exhortation–”Local sucks!”–as a gray Civic SI with a robot dashboard ornament or a blue VW Golf with a vestigial Howard Dean bumper sticker zoomed by. We hurled the insult while driving south, while driving north, with music playing, with stereo silent, out of front window, rear window, and sunroof. When we got on the highway, when we needed a $4 juice from Whole Foods, when we set course for the Space Needle or Pike Place Market or the Puerco Lloron or that weird vegan hot dog place next to the convention center–any place that might take us past our nemesis–we threw the bomb: “LOCAL SUCKS!”

In early 2007, I was ascending Olive Way in my hatchback cum bomber, preparing for a raid. I dutifully opened the ordinance hatch (rolled down the driver’s window), turning my head to the left. My mouth was open and my vocal cords abuzz when I saw it: the steaming rubble of a thwarted enemy base. Local was dark. We had won.

Two years later, as I stared at a bran muffin, I knew I had made a grave mistake. Never in our campaign against Local had we even stepped foot inside. Now, by purchasing an americano at Northampton Coffee, I had committed the cardinal sin. All I could do was hope for a stroke of luck, a divine reprieve. I asked the barista, “Where do you get the beans?” Cheerily, she replied, “We get them from Barrington Coffee. It’s a more-than-fair-trade kind of thing.”

“Say what?” I thought. Had Matt been wrong? Had he led us into this fight based on false intelligence, leaving us the shameful choice between an admission of our incompetence and the prosecution of a war under false pretenses? “It can’t be!” I told myself. “Matt would never be so cavalier. He would never waste our powers on an illusory threat. Not my brother.” But back in the car, with my dad, my mind was not on the rich, dark asset I now possessed but on how we got into this mess and how we would get out.

My dad, who has won many a battle himself (in the 90’s, he got smoking banned at the offices of Monarch, a large insurer where we worked), and whom I credit with giving me and my brother whatever genes control indignation and perseverance, had not heard the Local story and, indeed, was not aware of the pending cafe boycott. I told him everything.

“Jonah,” he said, “Don’t you see?”

“See what, Dad?”

“Matt was never wrong. They did serve normal coffee before. They changed because of you.”

His words were like a revelation: I never expected to hear it, but when I did, I knew it to be true. My brother and I had won, again.

When I was a kid, I used to go to my friend Dan Stern’s house every Wednesday after school. We’d play Castlevania, make vinegar and baking soda rockets, attack each other with rakes, concoct oozes from the stuff in his parents’ pantry and watch them burn in the oven, and do all kinds of stupid things. Like Bill Bryson wrote in his memoir Thunderbolt Kid, childhood now seems short, but those were long pre-adolescent afternoons, and we would do anything to fill them.

One oddly clear memory I have of those times is sneaking into Dan’s kitchen to get my hands on a Tiger’s Milk bar. These were little sugary bricks of peanut butter coated in carob and wrapped in foil. So many snacks were hard to get at–Handi-Snacks, Fruit Roll-Ups–but a Tiger’s Milk wrapper would yield satisfyingly. And the texture! That’s what I really remember. Somewhere between a Three Musketeers and a Watchamacallit, a Tiger’s Milk would resist your bite just enough.

When I moved to New York last January, I noticed that amidst the array of energy bars now on display in all delis was my childhood friend. At first I bought them infrequently, as a treat, a little nostalgia pill. But recently, I’ve been buying one almost every day, finishing lunch with it. That is, until yesterday. That’s when I ate my last Tiger’s Milk ever.

Yesterday I turned the wrapper over, lifted the flap, and read the ingredients list. Now, I had read the nutrition facts before, and they stack up all right: it’s not a head of lettuce, but for what is essentially a candy bar, it’s not bad. Moreover, I always assumed Tiger’s Milk was healthy because Dan’s parents used to give us good food from Cornucopia, the little natural foods market in our home town.

Boy, was I wrong. The ingredients read like a Michael Pollan hit list. Top ingredient: high-fructose corn syrup. And farther down were all the hallmarks of processed non-food: partially hydrogenated oil, soy protein isolate, a bunch of chemicals you can barely pronounce. I have a firm policy of not eating not-food, and so, grudgingly, I decided never again to eat a Tiger’s Milk.

I’m sure that my body will thank me, but in all honesty, I’m sad. I feel like I’ve discarded something that made me happy and severed a connection to my childhood. When we’re choosing what to eat, is the food itself all that matters?

MG Siegler, TechCrunch toady, recently published an article entitled What’s In A Name? That Which We Call An “iPhone 3GS” By Any Other Name Would Smell As Sweet. This, of course, is a reference to Act II of Romeo and Juliet, wherein Juliet says:

What’s in a name? That which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet.

Unfortunately, Siegler’s valiant, if fleeting, attempt at erudition falls flat as a cowpie. Set aside the fact that Siegler’s title, with its five-syllable replacement of “rose,” disrupts the couplet’s rhythm just a tad. And ignore that the article, far from an analysis of the new product’s name, meanders through speculation and concludes, in typical Siegler style, with a revelation of the author’s wet dreams: “A 20% boost [in battery life] … would be most welcomed.”

No, the real problem here is that Siegler has not read his Shakespeare. The article laments the name “iPhone 3GS,” which Siegler proclaims “kind of lame.” Underlying these observations is the premise that the name really matters: Siegler is sad that he will be “stuck with a clunky iPhone 3GS name.” But wait. Didn’t Juliet mean the exact opposite? Why, yes, she did. If she were here today, she would probably acquire the iPhone 3GS with nary a name-related whimper.

Siegler, I know you’re no Faulkner, but come on, man, do you have to drag Shakespeare into your tech-writing morass?

The other night, en route to meet a friend in the West Village, I passed a bar called Blind Tiger. Then I strolled past the Slaughtered Lamb. Then, crossing Hudson, we spotted the White Horse Tavern (where Dylan Thomas drank the whiskey that killed him). We got to wondering, “What is up with all these animal bars in a city where you can scarcely find a squirrel?” The following question of utmost importance also crossed my mind: What is the most common animal in NYC bar names?

Last night, I marshaled my extreme programming skills and put my six-figure, Ivy League education to use. I siphoned off Citysearch’s database of New York city bars and sifted through them searching for animal names. The verdict? HORSE is the winner, with 7 bars. BULL places with 6, and, with 5, MONKEY shows.

For those with too much time on their hands, like me, here is the complete list. True alcoholics may protest the omission of Spotted Pig and other haunts. These, according to Citysearch, are not bars but restaurants, and so I omitted them. Maybe next time.

For a while now, my roommate has been getting Women’s Health. We’re not sure why. She never ordered it, and she doesn’t subscribe to any other magazines. Where did they get her her address, and why would send her a free copy? We don’t know. And yet there it is every month, on top of the mail pile, gleaming.

Last Tuesday night, it poured. I was in the living room listening to the rain pound against the skylight. The lights were low, and outside, I could see the eerie red glow of the overcast city sky. A cool breeze came in through the cracked windows. The interloper, Women’s Health, lay on the table.

Just then, I heard a shriek. The bathroom door was thrown open, and out burst my roommate. “Roach!” she screamed. I could see it all the way from the couch. It was on the bathroom wall above the towel rack, and it was big … real big. Frantically, I searched for a WaMu application packet, a John Mayer box set, Michael Chabon’s last book: anything — anything! — I could use to vanquish the beast.

And then I saw it: the 178 pages of content-free heft, the beatific cover-girl yet unblemished, the slight curl of the pages suggesting cylinder. There it lay, shining, coaxing.

Aragorn-like, I snatched up the monthly, ripped off the scabbard (plastic wrap), and fashioned my weapon. I took two giant strides, crossing the bathroom threshold, and raised the fearsome instrument. An atavistic compulsion seized me! I could not falter, I could not fail! I executed a swift downstroke, attacking the menace with the women’s lifestyle periodical. I heard a squelch, and I knew I had prevailed.

I turned and there stood my roommate. A tear rolled down her cheek. We nodded at each other knowingly.

My friend Dan Stern and I like to run the Komen Race for the Cure. Most participants are women running leisurely, having fun, in support of breast cancer research. Not me and Dan. We are testosterone-filled men, running our hardest, trying to destroy each other. All the breast-cancer hullabaloo is a distraction from the task at hand: running the shit out of that 5k course.

We ran our first Komen in Seattle in 2007 (I think). Dan beat me by a good margin, but I was sick, and he had cheated big time by drinking coffee before the race. I challenged him to a rematch, and later that year (I think), he beat me again on the streets of Portland. This race was more competitive. Epic, really. Dan jetted out to a big lead, but I caught him in mile two on the downhill through downtown Portland. Heading into the last mile, we were neck and neck. The lead changed hands again and again, and with a half-mile to go, I tried to pull ahead. But I didn’t have it. Dan overtook me, and his spindly little legs carried his undersized frame to a 30 second victory. After the post-race hug, I challenged Dan to best 3 out of 5. In true Komen-racer spirit, he accepted.

Dan and I are currently planning the 2009 series. To aid us in this task — nay, this duty — I created a Google map of the 2009 Komen races. I even made the place markers that cute little ribbon logo! To other Komen racers out there, competitive or not, enjoy.

p.s. For those interested, I created this map by writing a script, in Ruby, to convert the komen.org HTML to KML, Google’s file format for location data. I used Geokit to resolve place names to geographic coordinates.

p.p.s. The truth is that we do support breast-cancer research. My grandmother is a survivor, and we’ve had other scares in my family. But I’m still wicked manly!

I posted a comment on a TechCrunch article by MG Siegler. Today I noticed it was gone!

Why did TechCrunch delete it? Probably because, like most of my online exegesis, it was snarky. The article in question discussed the Google Holodeck, a life-size, full-motion version of Google Street View: You stand in a room with screens for walls, and you’re whisked along any street in the world. While the device is amazing, I was still surprised to see the article end with this bit of sycophancy:

Google’s Holodeck isn’t quite as cool as the Star Trek Holodeck, but give them a few years, I’m sure they’ll figure out how to do that as well.

Sensing an opportunity for justified snideness, I commented:

You TechCrunch reporters are such toadies.

Which is true, isn’t it? An impartial reporter wouldn’t kiss the ass — or, to put it in TechCrunch parlance, lick the Ferengi ear — of a company he’s covering. Objectivity is the foundation of journalism, blah blah blah.

The comment briefly appeared on the site, but by this morning, it had been deleted. I wouldn’t be so bothered except lots of flames make it through the TechCrunch gauntlet. For example:

props for the pic of Data and Geordi!

It works well. Go crawl back in your cave doorknob.

shut it google fanboy

get a life.

Come on! Mine is no worse than these. Well, I guess I’ll just have to state my opinion here, where nobody can touch it. MG Siegler, TechCruch “reporter,” is a toady, and a cowardly one at that.

One thing I like about the New Yorker is that it usually presents things in simple terms. Joan Acocella, for example, makes dance accessible to the layperson without dumbing it down (which is especially useful for me because my sister, a dancer, is always impressed when I can say something). And so, when I started reading Outsmarted, John Lanchester’s review of several books on the causes of the financial crisis, I expected, finally, a clear explanation of all those arcane instruments — credit-default swaps, CDOs, etc. — that made the economy go bust.

Alas, I was disappointed. Lanchester succumbs to the same problems that so many financial writers do: vagueness, jargon, imprecision. He uses common words — like “sell” — in ways only understood by finance guys, and he makes logical leaps too large for anyone unfamiliar with the concepts he is trying to illuminate. Consider this passage:

[J.P. Morgan] could sell the risk that a borrower won’t be able to pay back his debt.

I would wager that very few readers really understood this sentence, for two reasons. First, it is not immediately apparent what it means to transfer risk, or even that risk can be transferred at all. Even a reader with an insurance policy — a financial instrument whose express purpose is to transfer risk — probably wouldn’t describe it in those terms. Lanchester could make this passage more accessible by developing the analogy with insurance that he touches on earlier.

Second, and more importantly, it simply does not make sense, using the traditional meaning of the word “sell,” to talk about “selling risk.” Risk is a bad thing, a liability. Nobody’s buying. Finance types think of assets like mathematicians think of numbers: there are positive ones and negative ones. Adding a positive number is like subtracting a negative one; buying an asset is like selling a liability. In this world, selling negative things makes sense: you give someone the negative asset, and you get some negative money, i.e. you pay someone to take something bad off your hands. Confusing? Yes. And yet Lanchester plunges into this lexicon without even a warning.

In the real world, we only buy and sell positive things. Lanchester should write with that in mind, describing transactions in terms of assets instead of liabilities. For example, the passage above could become:

J.P. Morgan could buy insurance against a borrower defaulting on his debt.

In this construction, the flows of money are the same — J.P. Morgan is paying someone to take on a risk — but they are described in terms of positive numbers (buying assets) instead of negative ones (selling liabilities). My version might not smack of Wall Street, but I bet a lot more readers would understand it.

As the article continues and the financial instruments become ever more arcane, Lanchester’s treatment becomes ever more opaque. Take this passage discussing that famous yet peculiarly-named device — no, not the Snuggie — the credit-default swap:

Bill Demchak, a “structured finance” star a J.P. Morgan, took the lead in creating bundles of credit-default swaps — insurance against default — and selling them to investors. The investors would get the streams of revenue, according to the risk-and-reward level they chose; the bank would get insurance against its loans, and fees for setting up the deal.

There are numerous confusing or erroneous bits in this excerpt. First, to the layperson, it is not immediately apparent which party to a swap is the buyer and which is the seller. Even if you understand the flow of payments, Lanchester leaves you wondering, what does it mean to sell one of these things? Lanchester should clarify: the party assuming the risk is the seller; the other party, who makes periodic payments, is the buyer. Not surprisingly, the same convention is used in insurance: you buy an insurance policy just like Goldman Sachs bought credit-default swaps from AIG.

This clarification highlights Lanchester’s second and more grave error. He states that J.P. Morgan sold swaps yet “[got] insurance against its loans.” Clearly, he has confused the parties to the contract. It took me a while to unravel this problem. I’m sure most readers just ignored it and moved on, confused. This is the sort of error that seems innocent on face but in fact erodes the foundation, the consistency of basic concepts, that a novice reader requires.

I think I’ve bashed Lanchester enough, so let me give him a reprieve. A big source of confusion in financial writing isn’t the writers but the concepts themselves. They’re baroque, and they’re poorly named. The credit-default swap is a prime example. Even if you understand typical swap contracts, which involve two people trading (swapping) similar assets — for example, two series of loan repayments — you probably won’t understand a credit-default swap without some investigation. That’s because in normal swaps, the assets exchanged are similar; in a credit-default swap, they’re not: one party makes a series of payments while the other makes a single payment only if an event occurs (default on a loan). This instrument, really, shouldn’t be called a swap any more than me buying a sandwich should. Sure, I’m swapping money for sustenance, but that’s beside the point. Credit-default swaps should be called what they are: insurance!

I’m going to concede that my explanations, like the one above, aren’t as fun to read as the New Yorker with its lyrical style. But function trumps form. I’m still waiting for the financial writer that can achieve both.

CNN reports that Newt Gingrich has called Sonia Sotomayor, Obama’s nominee for Supreme Court Justice, “racist.” To support his allegation, Gingrich draws on the following line from a speech Sotomayor delivered in 2001:

I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experience would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life.

Gingrich interprets the above as an assertion that ethnicity per se may lead to better decisions, or, to paraphrase his inflammatory, ham-handed retort, that Sotomayor’s Latina-ness makes her better than a white man.

Rush Limbaugh, of course, jumped aboard the slander train, his sides jiggling, calling Sotomayor not just a “racist” but also a “party hack.” (In fact, Limbaugh used the term “reverse racist,” which I find even more offensive because it implies revenge.)

It is hard to believe that Sotomayor, who is, by all appearances, a deliberate, fair, and intelligent woman, would say what Gingrich and Limbaugh are suggesting. And if we read Sotomayor’s statement with a clear mind, without the Arby’s-derived bile that must course through Limbaugh’s veins, another interpretation jumps out, one that is reasonable and certainly not racist.

I think what Sotomayor is saying is that experience regardless of race makes a better judge: that a Latina woman may indeed decide better than a white man if she has more experience, “richer” experience, to support her decisions. Sotomayor could have reversed the ethnicities–”a wise white man with the richness of his experience …”–without changing her point. The only reason, I would guess, that she made a Latina woman the subject is that she was addressing a Hispanic group and wanted, more than merely to make a theoretical point, to motivate her audience.

What pushes me toward this interpretation are the phrases “with the richness of her experience” and “who hasn’t lived that life”: parts of the statement that Gingbaugh ignores. These phrases limit the scope of what Sotomayor is discussing: she is not comparing all white men with all Latina women. If she were, she would have omitted those clauses. Instead, she is drawing a contrast between two people with different amounts, or qualities, of experience. The races of the people are included not to emphasize the importance of race in decision-making, as Gingbaugh suggests, but quite the opposite: to assert that experience trumps race.

Most of the liberal commentariat is tiptoeing around Sotomayor’s statement, saying, “Oh, she must have meant x or y.” Instead, let’s do what we always must do against the likes of Gingbaugh: reveal their simplistic interpretations for what they are, and argue with the honest truth.

Addendum: Robert Gibbs, one of my least favorite Obama lackeys, responded to Gingrich with this gem of passive-aggressive obfuscation:

I think it is probably important for anybody involved in this debate to be exceedingly careful with the way in which they’ve decided to describe different aspects of this impending confirmation.

In other words, he said nothing. Gibbs, you are worthless! Shut up, Gibbs!