Darwin and Wallace

Puzzled by the geographical distribution of wildlife and fossils he collected on the voyage, Darwin began detailed investigations and in 1838 conceived his theory of natural selection.[11] Although he discussed his ideas with several naturalists, he needed time for extensive research and his geological work had priority.[12] He was writing up his theory in 1858 when Alfred Russel Wallace sent him an essay which described the same idea, prompting immediate joint publication of both of their theories.[13] Darwin's work established evolutionary descent with modification as the dominant scientific explanation of diversification in nature.[5] In 1871 he examined human evolution and sexual selection in The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, followed by The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. His research on plants was published in a series of books, and in his final book, he examined earthworms and their effect on soil.[14]

Revelation: the seven seals

John, finding himself before the Throne of God, sees a lamb, an image of Christ, who receives a scroll sealed by seven seals. The seals are broken in order, each revealing a mystical vision: a hundred and forty-four thousand “firstfruits” eventually are saved as servants of God—the famous “rapture.” Seven trumpets then sound, signalling various catastrophes—stars fall, the sun darkens, mountains explode, those beasts appear. At the sound of the sixth trumpet, two hundred million horsemen annihilate a third of mankind. This all leads to the millennium—not the end of all things but the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth—which, in turn, finally leads to Satan’s end in a lake of fire and the true climax. The Heaven and Earth we know are destroyed, and replaced by better ones. (There are many subsidiary incidents along the way, involving strange bowls and that Whore of Babylon, but they can be saved, so to speak, for the director’s cut on the DVD.)

Revelations

he Bible, as every Sunday-school student learns, has a Hollywood ending. Not a happy ending, certainly, but one where all the dramatic plot points left open earlier, to the whispered uncertainty of the audience (“I don’t get it—when did he say he was coming back?”), are resolved in a rush, and a final, climactic confrontation between the stern-lipped action hero and the really bad guys takes place. That ending—the Book of Revelation—has every element that Michael Bay could want: dragons, seven-headed sea beasts, double-horned land beasts, huge C.G.I.-style battles involving hundreds of thousands of angels and demons, and even, in Jezebel the temptress, a part for Megan Fox. (“And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.”) Although Revelation got into the canonical Bible only by the skin of its teeth—it did poorly in previews, and was buried by the Apostolic suits until one key exec favored its release—it has always been a pop hit. Everybody reads Revelation; everybody gets excited about it; and generations of readers have insisted that it might even be telling the truth about what’s coming for Christmas.
In a new book on those end pages, “Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation” (Viking), Elaine Pagels sets out gently to bring their portents back to earth. She accepts that Revelation was probably written, toward the end of the first century C.E., by a refugee mystic named John on the little island of Patmos, just off the coast of modern Turkey. (Though this John was not, she insists, the disciple John of Zebedee, whom Jesus loved, or the author of the Gospel that bears the same name.) She neatly synopsizes the spectacular action. John, finding himself before the Throne of God, sees a lamb, an image of Christ, who receives a scroll sealed by seven seals. The seals are broken in order, each revealing a mystical vision: a hundred and forty-four thousand “firstfruits” eventually are saved as servants of God—the famous “rapture.” Seven trumpets then sound, signalling various catastrophes—stars fall, the sun darkens, mountains explode, those beasts appear. At the sound of the sixth trumpet, two hundred million horsemen annihilate a third of mankind. This all leads to the millennium—not the end of all things but the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth—which, in turn, finally leads to Satan’s end in a lake of fire and the true climax. The Heaven and Earth we know are destroyed, and replaced by better ones. (There are many subsidiary incidents along the way, involving strange bowls and that Whore of Babylon, but they can be saved, so to speak, for the director’s cut on the DVD.)
Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back. All the imagery of the rapt and the raptured and the rest that the “Left Behind” books have made a staple for fundamentalist Christians represents contemporary people and events, and was well understood in those terms by the original audience. Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look. “When John says that ‘the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth,’ he revises Daniel’s vision to picture Rome as the worst empire of all,” Pagels writes. “When he says that the beast’s seven heads are ‘seven kings,’ John probably means the Roman emperors who ruled from the time of Augustus until his own time.” As for the creepy 666, the “number of the beast,” the original text adds, helpfully, “Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person.” This almost certainly refers—by way of Gematria, the Jewish numerological system—to the contemporary Emperor Nero. Even John’s vision of a great mountain exploding is a topical reference to the recent eruption of Vesuvius, in C.E. 79. Revelation is a highly colored picture of the present, not a prophecy of the future.
What’s more original to Pagels’s book is the view that Revelation is essentially an anti-Christian polemic. That is, it was written by an expatriate follower of Jesus who wanted the movement to remain within an entirely Jewish context, as opposed to the “Christianity” just then being invented by St. Paul, who welcomed uncircumcised and trayf-eating Gentiles into the sect. At a time when no one quite called himself “Christian,” in the modern sense, John is prophesying what would happen if people did. That’s the forward-looking worry in the book. “In retrospect, we can see that John stood on the cusp of an enormous change—one that eventually would transform the entire movement from a Jewish messianic sect into ‘Christianity,’ a new religion flooded with Gentiles,” Pagels writes. “But since this had not yet happened—not, at least, among the groups John addressed in Asia Minor—he took his stand as a Jewish prophet charged to keep God’s people holy, unpolluted by Roman culture. So, John says, Jesus twice warns his followers in Asia Minor to beware of ‘blasphemers’ among them, ‘who say they are Jews, and are not.’ They are, he says, a ‘synagogue of Satan.’ ” Balaam and Jezebel, named as satanic prophets in Revelation, are, in this view, caricatures of “Pauline” Christians, who blithely violated Jewish food and sexual laws while still claiming to be followers of the good rabbi Yeshua. Jezebel, in particular—the name that John assigns her is that of an infamous Canaanite queen, but she’s seen preaching in the nearby town of Thyatira—suggests the women evangelists who were central to Paul’s version of the movement and anathema to a pious Jew like John. She is the original shiksa goddess. (“When John accuses ‘Balaam’ and ‘Jezebel’ of inducing people to ‘eat food sacrificed to idols and practice fornication,’ he might have in mind anything from tolerating people who engage in incest to Jews who become sexually involved with Gentiles or, worse, who marry them,” Pagels notes.) The scarlet whores and mad beasts in Revelation are the Gentile followers of Paul—and so, in a neat irony, the spiritual ancestors of today’s Protestant evangelicals.
Pagels shows persuasively that the Jew/non-Jew argument over the future of the Jesus movement, the real subject of Revelation, was much fiercer than later Christianity wanted to admit. The first-century Jesus movement was torn apart between Paul’s mission to the Gentiles—who were allowed to follow Jesus without being circumcised or eating kosher—and the more strictly Jewish movement tended by Jesus’ brothers in Jerusalem. The Jesus family was still free to run a storefront synagogue in Jerusalem devoted to his cult, and still saw the Jesus or “Yeshua” movement within the structure of dissenting Judaisms, all of which suggests the real tone of the movement in those first-century years—something like the gingerly, ambiguous, now-he-is, now-he-isn’t messianic claims of the Lubavitchers’ Menachem Schneerson movement, in Brooklyn. “On one side are movement officials who say the promotion of Judaism throughout the world is the heart of continuing Schneerson’s work,” the Washington Post reported several years ago. “On the other are the messianists, whose passion is preparing the world for the coming of Schneerson himself. They are two distinct missions from within one movement—each in the name of the same man.” Apparently, when you have made up your mind to believe that your rabbi is God, neither death nor disappearance will discourage you. His presence is proof; his non-presence is proof; and non-presence can be conjured into presence by wishing it to be so. (“At recent Sabbath services, an older woman along the front row of the women’s section smiled and pointed to the chair. ‘He is Moshiach,’ she said, using the Hebrew word for messiah. ‘We can’t see him with our eyes, but that doesn’t mean he’s not here. He is.”) The two approaches—the Pauline, which says he’s already here in our visions; the “Johannine,” which says he’ll come back if we stay true to our practice—seem to be the pillars of any messianic movement.
agels is an absorbing, intelligent, and eye-opening companion. Calming and broad-minded here, as in her earlier works, she applies a sympathetic and subtly humane eye to texts that are neither subtle nor sympathetically humane but lit instead by schismatic fury. Yet the project of draining the melodrama from Revelation may scant some significant things even as it draws attention to others. It is possible to draw too sharp a boundary between prophetic and merely symbolic images, between mad vision and coded cartoon. Allegorical pictures of contemporary events have a way of weaving in and out between the symbolic and the semi-psychotic. This is close to an eternal truth of art: one person’s editorial cartoon is another’s weird nightmare. James Gillray, the late-eighteenth-century English cartoonist, meant his gallery of grotesques—armed skeletons and demonic imps and Brobdingnagian heads—as satiric images of contemporary British politics, but they became the image pool for Goya’s “Caprichos.” Even if there is some twist of satire to every wacky turn in Revelation, the writer’s appetite for lurid imagery—the prophetic side we sense in it—is surely part of the book’s intended effect.
Pagels may also underestimate the audience appeal of pure action: it’s possible for a popular narrative to be susceptible to an allegorical reading and still be engaging mostly for its spectacle. Some patient academic of the future will, on seeing “Transformers 2,” doubtless find patterns of local topical meaning—portents of the Arab Spring in the fight over the pyramids, evidence of the debate over the future of the automobile industry, and a hundred other things. But people just like violent otherworldly stuff, and give it a lot of non-allegorical license to do its thing. The fact that a religious book has a code in it doesn’t mean that it doesn’t also have an aura around it. Spiritual texts are the original transformers; they take mundane descriptions of what’s going on and make them twelve feet tall and cosmic and able to knock down pyramids.
fter decoding Revelation for us, Pagels turns away from the canonic texts to look at the alternative, long-lost “Gnostic” texts of the period that have turned up over the past sixty years or so, most notably in the buried Coptic library of Nag Hammadi. As in her earlier books (“The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis”; “The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters”; “The Gnostic Gospels”), she shows us that revelations in the period were not limited to John’s militant, vengeful-minded one, and that mystic visions more provocative and many-sided were widespread in the early Jesus movement.
As an alternative revelation to John’s, she focusses on what must be the single most astonishing text of its time, the long feminist poem found at Nag Hammadi in 1945 and called “Thunder, Perfect Mind”—a poem so contemporary in feeling that one would swear it had been written by Ntozake Shange in a feminist collective in the nineteen-seventies, and then adapted as a Helen Reddy song. In a series of riddling antitheses, a divine feminine principle is celebrated as transcending all principles (the divine woman is both whore and sibyl) and opening the way toward a true revelation of the hidden, embracing goddess of perfect being who lies behind all things:

I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
       and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
       and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom . . .
Why, you who hate me, do you love me,
       and hate those who love me?
You who deny me, confess me,
       and you who confess me, deny me.
You who tell the truth about me, lie about me,
and you who have lied about me, tell the truth about me.

Astonishingly, the text of this mystic masterpiece was—a bit of YouTube viewing reveals—recently used by Ridley Scott as the background narration for a gorgeous long-form ad for Prada perfumes. The Gnostic strophes, laid over the model’s busy life, are meant to suggest the Many Mystifying Moods of the Modern Woman, particularly while she’s changing from one Prada outfit to another in the back seat of a sedan. (One feels that one should disapprove, but surely the Gnostic idea of the eternal feminine antitheses is meant to speak to the complicated, this-and-that condition of actually being a woman at any moment, and why not in Prada as well as in a flowing white robe?)
Pagels’s essential point is convincing and instructive: there were revelations all over Asia Minor and the Holy Land; John’s was just one of many, and we should read it as such. How is it, then, that this strange one became canonic, while those other, to us more appealing ones had to be buried in the desert for safekeeping, lest they be destroyed as heretical? Revelation very nearly did not make the cut. In the early second century, a majority of bishops in Asia Minor voted to condemn the text as blasphemous. It was only in the three-sixties that the church council, under the control of the fiery Athanasius, inserted Revelation as the climax of the entire New Testament. As a belligerent controversialist himself, Pagels suggests, Athanasius liked its belligerently controversial qualities. “Athanasius reinterpreted John’s vision of cosmic war to apply to the battle that he himself fought for more than forty-five years—the battle to establish what he regarded as ‘orthodox Christianity’ against heresy,” she writes. John’s synagogue of Satan came to stand for all the Arians and other heretics who disagreed with Athanasius, and John’s take-no-prisoners tone was congenial to a bishop who intended to take no prisoners. Once the Roman Empire had become the Church’s best friend, the enemy in Revelation had to be sought elsewhere. Only a few years earlier, the Emperor Constantine, Athanasius’ sometime ally, decided that, in the words of Eusebius, “certain people had to be eliminated from humanity like a poison.” The Jews whose purity John had originally been campaigning for now became “killers of the prophets, and the murderers of the Lord.”
erhaps what most strikes the naïve reader of the Book of Revelation is what a close-run thing the battle is. When God finally gets tired of waiting it out and decides to end things, the back-and-forth between dragons and serpents and sea monsters and Jesus is less like a scouring of the stables than like a Giants-Patriots Super Bowl. It seems that Manichaeanism—bad god vs. good god—is the natural religion of mankind and that all faiths bend toward the Devil, to make sense of God’s furious impotence. A god omniscient and omnipotent and also powerless to stop evil remains a theological perplexity, even as it becomes a prop of faith. It gives you the advantage of clarity—only one guy worth worshipping—at the loss of lucidity: if he’s so great, why is he so weak?
You can’t help feeling, along with Pagels, a pang that the Gnostic poems, so much more affecting in their mystical, pantheistic rapture, got interred while Revelation lives on. But you also have to wonder if there ever was a likely alternative. Don’t squishy doctrines of transformation through personal illumination always get marginalized in mass movements? As Stephen Batchelor has recently shown, the open-minded, non-authoritarian side of Buddhism, too, quickly succumbed to its theocratic side, gasping under the weight of those heavy statues. The histories of faiths are all essentially the same: a vague and ambiguous millennial doctrine preached by a charismatic founder, Marx or Jesus; mystical variants held by the first generations of followers; and a militant consensus put firmly in place by the power-achieving generation. Bakunin, like the Essenes, never really had a chance. The truth is that punitive, hysterical religions thrive, while soft, mystical ones must hide their scriptures somewhere in the hot sand.
John of Patmos’s hatred for the pagan world extended from its cruelties to its beauties—the exquisite temple at nearby Pergamon was for him the Devil’s Altar, worthy only of destruction. For all that, Pagels tells us, many claim to have found in John “the promise, famously repeated by Martin Luther King Jr., that the ‘arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ . . . This worst of all nightmares ends not in terror but in a glorious new world, radiant with the light of God’s presence, flowing with the water of life, abounding in joy and delight.” Well, yeah, but this happens only after all the millions of heretics, past and present, have been burned alive and the planet destroyed. That’s some long arc. It’s like the inevitable moment in an apocalyptic blockbuster, “Independence Day” or “Armageddon” or “2012,” when the stars embrace and celebrate their survival. The Hans Zimmer music swells, and we’re reassured that it’s O.K. to rejoice. Millions are annihilated, every major city has been destroyed, but nobody you really like has died. It’s a Hollywood ending in that way, too. ♦

Jews

For Jewish people, there's only two ways to have an argument: either you yell and scream and die of a heart attack, or you suffer in silence, martyr yourself (Me? Angry?), and die later of cancer anyway. This was a hybrid argument: my Mother would shout at/to third parties, but refuse to discuss it with Vera and expect her to know, psychically why she was annoyed.

Also, people don't really HAVE arguments, they MAKE them, like a cup of tea. I guess a verbatim translation from Yiddish, but none of the passivity of an English argument. Just like you don't THROW a party, you MAKE one. Being Jewish is very proactive.

Eskimos might have 127 words for snow (apparently an urban myth, by the way, or a skiers myth?) but Jewish people have 613 words for an argument. A broigus is pretty low key, and wears off without ever being resolved. Sometimes it's not even an argument, just Being Annoyed. Like if you get seated by the band at your friend's child's wedding.

A ferribul is more long term, it's a status. "What a ferribul I had with her. We didn't talk for… I don't know HOW long". And a gefrunzel? People have been arguing over the meaning of that one forever.

Talking to my friends about the fruit scenario I discover that Gary has never met his uncle or cousins because there had been a crockery-ferribul over his grandmother's fleishig best. And my brother, a Barrister noch has two significant specialisms; Fitted Kitchen Litigation and Package Holiday Litigation.

Looking back, my childhood was drama-driven. Everyday conversation happened at breakneck speed and maximum volume. I don't think anyone in my family has finished a sentence in three generations. I remember the Friday Night dinner table pregnant with unfinished conversations hanging in the air. We want to get heard but not necessarily to listen. You've got to be quick, defend yourself, take no hostages. After all, they might come and get you at any minute. 

Tone deaf Romneys

when Mitt was in college, the two of them were so financially strapped that they had to liquidate some of their stock portfolio to get by. At the time Mrs. Romney said that she was engaged in a “struggle” to bring up her children, the family was living in a seven bedroom, six-and-a-half-bathroom mock-Colonial mansion in Belmont, Massachusetts, while spending summers at their five-thousand-square-foot vacation home, which sits on eleven lakefront acres in New Hampshire.

Tone deaf Romneys

when Mitt was in college, the two of them were so financially strapped that they had to liquidate some of their stock portfolio to get by. At the time Mrs. Romney said that she was engaged in a “struggle” to bring up her children, the family was living in a seven bedroom, six-and-a-half-bathroom mock-Colonial mansion in Belmont, Massachusetts, while spending summers at their five-thousand-square-foot vacation home, which sits on eleven lakefront acres in New Hampshire.

Buchanin on Zimmerman

Obama's Zimmerman problem
by Patrick J. Buchanan04/13/2012

Comments
God save me from my friends; I can take care of my enemies.
   
That thought must be coursing through the mind of President Obama right now as his White House rigs for silent running in the murder trial of George Zimmerman.
   
Obama foolishly inserted himself into this volatile case weeks ago, and injected the issue of race. Expressing empathy with the family of Trayvon Martin, Obama flashed a signal of racial solidarity:
   
"If I had a son, he would look like Trayvon."
   
Obama also implied that he shares the liberal perspective that America is a country where black kids must walk in daily fear of white racist vigilantes.
   
"All of us have to do some soul-searching to figure out how does something like this happen. And that means that we examine the laws and the context for what happened, as well as the specifics of the incident."
   
Translation: The death of Trayvon tells us something is wrong with America.
   
To most Americans, this is a slander against their country, refuted by the statistics on interracial crime. Obama, however, buys into it.
   
Angela Corey, the special prosecutor, says that the charge against Zimmerman of second-degree murder was based on evidence and not influenced by the weeks of demonstrations, demands and threats from black leaders.
   
Perhaps. But from what the pubic knows, a charge of second-degree murder, which carries a sentence of 25 years to life, does not seem to stand up.
   
To convict, prosecutors must convince all 12 members of a jury that not only was Zimmerman in no danger of bodily harm, he did not believe he was in danger of bodily harm. He simply killed Martin in a "depraved" state of mind.
   
Nothing revealed so far seems to support that theory.
   
Zimmerman saw a tall stranger, hooded and acting suspiciously. He called the cops. He did not tell them the man was black. They had to ask him whether the suspect was black, white or Hispanic.
   
"He looks black," said Zimmerman.
   
The CNN report that Zimmerman, on the call to the cops, used a racial slur, "(bleeping) coon," has been withdrawn. What Zimmerman said was that it was "(bleeping) cold" outside.
   
Came then the fight. Two eyewitnesses say they saw Zimmerman on his back being beaten and screaming for help.
   
A cop at the scene said Zimmerman had a bloody nose and a gash on the back of his head. Zimmerman's family says Trayvon banged George's head on the sidewalk. Film of Zimmerman entering the police station that night shows bruising on the back of his head.
   
Trayvon was found lying face down. If Zimmerman had been on top and shot him, would not Trayvon have been found on his back?
   
Zimmerman's family says Trayvon started the fight with a fist to the nose, and George went down. Trayvon is not here to tell his story. But a natural question arises:
   
Why would Zimmerman, with a holstered gun to protect himself, close with and start a fistfight with a teenager half a head taller? A grown man with a gun his adversary does not know he has -- would he not more likely stand some distance away, to pull it out if needed?
   
The prosecutors must have discovered new evidence to indict for murder. For all of the testimony from Zimmerman's side and the eyewitnesses seems to create more than a reasonable doubt that he committed a murder.
   
Where is Obama's political problem?
   
With the election on, the case has begun to divide the nation along racial lines. And Obama's allies are doing it. It is Jesse Jackson and the Black Caucus crying that Trayvon was "hunted down like a rabid dog in the street," that he was "murdered and martyred," that it was a "hate crime."
   
"It's a disgrace that man (Zimmerman) hasn't been shot yet," says Mike Tyson. The New Black Panther Party has put out a poster offering a $10,000 reward that reads, "Wanted: Dead or Alive."
   
The face on the poster is George Zimmerman.
   
Trayvon is the victim here, but George Zimmerman is beginning to look like a victim -- of lynch law and mob rule.
   
With the Panthers and Tyson calling for vengeance and vigilante justice, where is Attorney General Eric Holder? Out congratulating Al Sharpton for bringing political pressure on Florida to indict.
   
Is this how justice is advanced in Obama's America?
   
Mayor Michael Bloomberg has denounced Florida's "Stand Your Ground" law -- which may be Zimmerman's defense -- as "a license to murder" and an excuse for "vigilante justice."
   
Bloomberg seems about to lead a crusade against the National Rifle Association and for repeal of stand-your-ground laws in the two dozen states that have enacted them.
   
Given their huge emotional investment in this case, how will black leaders and black America react if Zimmerman walks?
   
And how will the rest of America react to that reaction?
  
And if Zimmerman, Trayvon, race, guns and stand-your-ground become voting issues this fall, how good is that for Barack Obama?

Conservatism vs. Calvinism

I find this fascinating because it reflects what one might call a conservative truth: we become what we do. We are not Etch-A-Sketches, blank slates on whom a new abstract idea can simply and easily be applied to turn our lives around. We are constantly evolving organisms, each choice leading to another fate and another choice and all of these creating us, slowly, by will and habit. One is reminded of Orwell's assertion that "at age 50, every man has the face he deserves" (something he conveniently avoided by dying in his forties). I'm also reminded of Pascal's rather controversial dictum that merely practicing faith will instill it. Acts become thoughts which become acts, and habits become personality which becomes character. There can be no total rupture - which is why I am not a fan of "born-again" Christianity. It only takes if it reorients practice.

Glamour Profession

6:05
Outside the stadium
Special delivery
For Hoops McCann
Brut and charisma
Poured from the shadow
where he stood
Looking good
He's a crowd pleasing man
One on one
He's schoolyard superman
Crashing the backboard
He's Jungle Jim again
When it's all over
We'll make some
calls from my car
We're a star
It's a glamour profession
The L.A. concession
Local boys will
spend a quarter
Just to shine the silver bowl
Living hard will take its toll

Illegal fun
Under the sun

All aboard
The Carib Cannibal
Off to Barbados
Just for the ride
Jack with his radar
Stalking the dread moray eel
At the wheel
With his Eurasian bride
On the town
We dress for action
Celluloid bikers
Is Friday's theme
Find more similar lyrics on http://mp3lyrics.com/LHVN
I drove the Chrysler
Watched from the
darkness while they
danced
I'm the one

It's a glamour profession
The L.A. concession
Local boys will
spend a quarter
Just to shine the silver bowl
Living hard will take its toll

Illegal fun
Under the sun

Hollywood
I know your middle name
Who inspires your fabled fools
That's my claim to fame

Jive Miguel
He's in from Bogota
Meet me at midnight
At Mr. Chow's
Szechuan dumplings
After the deal has been done
I'm the one

It's a glamour profession
The L.A. concession
Local boys will
spend a quarter
Just to shine the silver bowl
Living hard will take its toll

Illegal fun
Under the sun

Glamor Profession

6:05
Outside the stadium
Special delivery
For Hoops McCann
Brut and charisma
Poured from the shadow
where he stood
Looking good
He's a crowd pleasing man
One on one
He's schoolyard superman
Crashing the backboard
He's Jungle Jim again
When it's all over
We'll make some
calls from my car
We're a star
It's a glamour profession
The L.A. concession
Local boys will
spend a quarter
Just to shine the silver bowl
Living hard will take its toll

Illegal fun
Under the sun

All aboard
The Carib Cannibal
Off to Barbados
Just for the ride
Jack with his radar
Stalking the dread moray eel
At the wheel
With his Eurasian bride
On the town
We dress for action
Celluloid bikers
Is Friday's theme
Find more similar lyrics on http://mp3lyrics.com/LHVN
I drove the Chrysler
Watched from the
darkness while they
danced
I'm the one

It's a glamour profession
The L.A. concession
Local boys will
spend a quarter
Just to shine the silver bowl
Living hard will take its toll

Illegal fun
Under the sun

Hollywood
I know your middle name
Who inspires your fabled fools
That's my claim to fame

Jive Miguel
He's in from Bogota
Meet me at midnight
At Mr. Chow's
Szechuan dumplings
After the deal has been done
I'm the one

It's a glamour profession
The L.A. concession
Local boys will
spend a quarter
Just to shine the silver bowl
Living hard will take its toll

Illegal fun
Under the sun

Memorize this to destroy religion, if you want to.

You want to have things both ways: your faith is reasonable but not in the least bound by reason; it is a matter of utter certainty, yet leavened by humility and doubt; you are still searching for the truth, but your belief in God is immune to any conceivable challenge from the world of evidence. I trust you will ascribe these antinomies to the paradox of faith; but, to my eye, they remain mere contradictions, dressed up in velvet.

Tattoo

In 1936 the Hollywood mogul David O Selznick bought the Swedish movie Intermezzo, signed up its star Ingrid Bergman and remade it in 1939 under the same title with Bergman repeating her original role in an otherwise British and American cast. During pre-production he sent a three-page memo to his chief producer about such adaptations. "I want to impress on you strongly," he wrote, "that the most important saving to be effected in remaking foreign pictures – a saving that more than offsets the doubtful foreign markets that have been used up by the original version, and that makes these remakes uniquely desirable – is in the shooting, by actually duplicating, as far as possible, the [earlier] film." And he added: "Granted a good cast, direction as good as Molander's on the original, a somewhat faster tempo than his, for I think the pace is much too slow for an Anglo-Saxon audience, and some cuts – we can duplicate the picture."
The producer Scott Rudin could have sent a near identical memo to Steven Zaillian and David Fincher, respectively the screenwriter and director of this swift remake of another Swedish movie, the political thriller The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, a version of the first novel in Stieg Larsson's bestselling Millennium trilogy. In the original film, directed by the Danish film-maker Niels Arden Oplev, an investigative journalist from a leftwing magazine, Mikael Blomkvist, is hired by a wealthy retired business tycoon, once head of a major family-owned conglomerate, to find out what happened to a much loved grand-niece who suddenly disappeared as a teenager 40 years earlier. As his search becomes increasingly complex, Blomkvist engages an assistant, the fiery bi-sexual punk goth Lisbeth Salander, a brilliant computer hacker who's been made a ward of the state due to her violent, antisocial activities. Together they uncover a series of grisly killings at the black heart of their elderly client's family.
The temptation to transpose this story to the dark California of Raymond Chandler and Ross Macdonald must have been considerable, especially as Fincher, one of the most gifted directors at work today, has made two remarkable serial-killer movies, the futuristic Se7en and the semi-documentary Zodiac based on an actual series of Californian murders. But instead Rudin, Zaillian and Fincher have more or less followed Selznick's advice, though less as a means of saving money than of recognising that the movie's strength comes from the Scandinavian setting. A certain tradition of books, plays and films dealing with corrupt, family-dominated business empires stretches from Hamlet through the plays of Ibsen and the financial scandals of the pre-war Swedish tycoon Ivar Krüger up to such recent Danish films as Festen and Melancholia. And of course Larsson's novels, which are partly inspired by the rich, secretive Swedish dynasties that made a suave accommodation with the Social Democrats and the trade unions, exploited the nation's neutrality during the second world war and have cupboards stacked with skeletons. This is essential to the film's dramatic fibre and political tensions and is embodied in Blomkvist and Salander.
The film has been shot on well-chosen locations in rainy Stockholm and the frozen north, and a major, and wise, decision was to have the characters speak an informal, rather neutral English with a slight Swedish inflection. The only Swedish actor with a major role (he plays the CEO of the family business) is that ubiquitous figure in contemporary cinema Stellan Skarsgård. Daniel Craig is suitably rumpled as the idealistic Blomkvist and Rooney Mara is sensationally good as Salander, one of the most remarkable creations in recent crime fiction. The actors who created these roles, Michael Nyqvist and Noomi Rapace, are not well served in blockbusters that opened this past month, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows.
Ultimately, this brisk, intelligent thriller lacks social and political commitment. Fincher is not passionately engaged by the Swedish scene, and I feel that had he re-created Larsson's book in California it might have achieved an illuminating anger that matched Ivan Passer's Cutter's Way, a film with significant parallels with The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. No one could fail to enjoy this movie, but it's the product of an art and an industry that went in different directions with the coming of sound, and popular English-speaking audiences never became accustomed to reading subtitles.

Fun rights

Zimmerman, who has a concealed weapons permit even though he'd once been charged, though not convicted, of assault on a police officer, has claimed that he acted in self-defense, and police originally let him go, finding no probable cause to arrest him. Last week, a Jacksonville prosecutor appointed by Governor Scott filed an arrest warrant against Zimmerman for second-degree murder charges. Zimmerman will have a chance to plead self-defense under Stand Your Ground to a judge before any jury trial happens.

Related stories

In Pictures: American Gun Culture

Second Amendment Quiz
Bill Cosby says Trayvon Martin case is about gun ownership, not race
Trayvon Martin case reveals confusion over how Stand Your Ground works
Last week, Michael Yaki, a member of the US Civil Rights Commission, said he would ask the federal agency to investigate the Stand Your Ground law, ostensibly to identify whether there is a racial dimension to how it's applied.

And on the legislative front, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), a 40-year-old conservative advocacy group that supplies legislators with ready-written legislation, announced that, because of pressure from corporations that support its operations, it’s disbanding its Public Safety and Elections taskforce, which supplied states like Florida with its Stand Your Ground law.

ALEC’s decision to end their gun rights advocacy “may be the most important thing politically in terms of legislative effect” in the aftermath of the Trayvon shooting, says Professor Cook at Duke.

Gun control advocacy groups say the Trayvon shooting has given a lot of Americans pause about the expansion of concealed-carry rights – as many as 10 million Americans now have concealed carry permits, compared to a few hundred thousand a decade ago – and about the growing numbers of places where Americans can carry guns, including, in some states, restaurants, statehouses, even city parks.

“Possibly the determining issue here is that now a lot of people who have felt they’re not affected by gun violence or [looser gun laws] recognize that, ‘This could have been my kid,’ and they’re seeing the effects of these laws in the real world, and I think that’s something that’s different from past high-profile incidents,” says Josh Sugarman, founder and executive director of the Violence Policy Center in Washington, which advocates for stricter gun laws and more complete and accurate gun-tracking data.

“The fact is that the exact scenarios that [gun rights] advocacy groups said would never happen do happen – that concealed carry handgun holders do kill and not just in self-defense situations, but in road rage, domestic shootings, arguments, and bar fights.”

Gun rights groups, meanwhile, say they believe gun rights, including the concealed carry reciprocity law, will continue to expand, in part because they believe the justice system will find that Zimmerman had the right to defend himself the night he shot Trayvon. They also contend that a plurality of Americans ultimately understand that laws like concealed carry and Stand Your Ground act as deterrents to crime.

“If Gov. Rick Scott wants to know the effect of these laws, he’ll find out that they’ve resulted in a 16 percent reduction in Florida’s homicide rate,” says Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, in Virginia. “You’ve got a real dilemma if you’re on the anti-armed self-defense side, that [you believe] the people are so stupid they keep voting for this stuff.”

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Andrew Sullivan is delusional

Even today, as I type these words, I look on my desk and see the sign I bring with me everywhere: his cross. When I go to dinner later, a small cross will come with me, in my wallet. In my study at home, a fourteenth century wooden carving of Jesus stares down at me from the wall. He is alive in me and millions of others after all this time, sustaining, nurturing, inspiring not just me but countless more. Even if you do not believe in him in the way I do, surely you must acknowledge that something very special has been going on here, something truly remarkable, something beyond the norm of much else in human history.

I have a rational, empirical explanation for this. It is that those who saw Jesus saw something so astonishing, so utterly unlike anything that had ever occurred before, that they became on fire with this new truth. They saw God. It was a contingent expression of God - how could it not be if humans were to witness it? But it was also an eternal expression, so that today some will still say: I know this Jesus as well as anyone ever knew him. And Jesus grasped this paradox of contingent-eternity that is the core mystery of the Incarnation. "Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe."

What is your explanation? How do you account for why one person out of the billions who have ever lived had this impact? How probable is it that all these countless followers were all deluding themselves completely? And if Jesus wasn't nothing, what was he in your eyes? What secret did he hold that so many others haven't?

That is an empirical question. And it merits an empirical answer.

Final words

You want to have things both ways: your faith is reasonable but not in the least bound by reason; it is a matter of utter certainty, yet leavened by humility and doubt; you are still searching for the truth, but your belief in God is immune to any conceivable challenge from the world of evidence. I trust you will ascribe these antinomies to the paradox of faith; but, to my eye, they remain mere contradictions, dressed up in velvet.

If God loves the world, he has a terribly noncommittal way of showing it. Why rig a silly game in which only the poorly educated and mentally unbalanced are perfectly tuned to glimpse the truth of your existence, while smart, well-adjusted, and well-educated people (like yourself) must wrestle with doubt, barricade themselves behind euphemism, and cling to spurious "mysteries" to keep from tumbling into unbelief? You beckon me to a world in which George Bush and James Dobson have an effortless bead on the deepest conceivable truth; meanwhile, 93 percent of the members of the National Academy of Sciences may well be doomed for eternity by their skepticism. It's hard for me to imagine that this scenario seems even remotely plausible to you--but this is Christianity at a glance. I am not the first to notice that it is a strange sort of loving God who would make salvation depend upon a person's ability to believe in him on bad evidence.

Religion

While you admit to being "a little evasive" about the details of your Christianity, I think this has been less of an issue than your not addressing many of the points I've raised which are (in my view) quite damaging to the case you have made for faith. Of course, a certain amount of slippage is inevitable in any exchange like this, and I have surely compounded the problem by going on at such length. But in re-reading our exchange, I've come to feel that you have generally pirouetted around my main points, often as a result of a misunderstanding. Here are a few of the issues that I don't think you've addressed adequately:

Moderation v. fundamentalism: There appears to be no principled separation between religious moderation and religious fundamentalism other than a facility for (and an inclination to) doubt. But how much doubt is too much? Why not doubt the whole shebang, as I do? The pope seems to believe many things which you doubt. Do you have reason to believe that the pope is mistaken about the true doctrine of Christianity, or do you just not like the social consequences of some of his beliefs? Can you justify the intermediate position you've taken with respect to Catholicism in terms of truth and falsity (rather than consolation and its lack)? And if you disagree that the truth of an idea can be neatly separated from its consolations, what does the phrase "wishful thinking" mean to you?

The inadequacies of the Bible: What is the intellectual justification for considering the Bible to be the inspired word of God, given how much bad stuff (like slavery) is in there, and how much good stuff (like all of science) isn't? Do you really think that no mere mortals could have written Mark, Matthew, John and Luke? Not even the combined talent of a first-century Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy? It seems to me that this textual claim really lies at the core of the matter: either the Bible is a book like any other great work of literature, or it's a magic book. Once one accepts it to be a magic book, I agree that a wide range of religious implications follow; but if one doesn't accept this claim, it seems to me that the basis for being a Christian (as a opposed to anything else) evaporates. Would it really surprise you if God told you that the Bible was a product of fallible, human minds? And if this wouldn't truly astound you (in the way that finding out that George Washington never existed presumably would), how can you claim to be so certain of the doctrine of Christianity?

Ontological fancy footwork: All that business about God being "definitionally" the creator of the universe, outside of space and time, etc. just doesn't wash. The "marzipan at the center of the sun" is definitionally at the center of the sun. Does this mean there is marzipan at the center of the sun?

The contingency of your own faith: As you said, if you'd been raised a Buddhist, you'd probably be a Buddhist. And yet, you also believe that Christianity is really true. This seems to entail that, by sheer accident of birth, you were raised and culturally conditioned to believe the one true faith. Do you really believe this? Doesn't it seem more likely that you just happen to subscribe to the religion into which you were born (as most people do) because of social pressure, emotional consolation, attachment to tradition, etc.?

The troublesome example of other religions: Don't you think Mormons and Muslims have similar stories to tell about feeling consoled in the presence of death, hearing voices, etc.? Can't both Mormons and Muslims use the same argument you have used about the cultural success of their faiths to vindicate their own truth claims? How is it that you reject their claims, and how is it that in rejecting them you don't find your own religious beliefs coming under pressure?

The argument from cultural success: Apart from the fact that the argument from cultural success would vindicate any religion that has millions of subscribers, it's also just plain false. The success of Christianity (or any faith) is not an argument for its truth. While dialogue and consensus (and, therefore, cultural success) play a role in our knowledge gathering, we don't do epistemology by plebiscite. The majority of people really can be wrong-as are the majority of American Christians about the age of the universe and about the evolution of life on this planet.

Ancient miracles are less compelling than modern miracles (and modern miracles don't compel you): Christianity is predicated on the reliability of the gospel account of the miracles of Jesus. And yet, there are modern books cataloguing the miracles of Hindu adepts, written by educated Westerners. Why not grant these testimonials even more credence than the gospel? I would bet that you are not even inclined to read this literature, much less organize your life around it. Then why not view the gospel with the same skepticism?

These are just a few of the areas in which I think your defense of faith breaks down. I summarize them here, not as a demand that you answer each question sequentially, but to give you and our readers a sense of where I am left unconvinced by what you have written thus far.

Religion

Thank you very much for your latest post. It was clarifying for me - and forced me to think hard about how to respond. I even communicated with my Imaginary Friend about it. You raise a blizzard of points, but there is one above all that needs to be addressed, because it cuts to the chase, and shows, I think, that we are closer than might appear.

Your fundamental point is the following, it seems to me. I can say that the revelation I have embraced is true, but because it cannot be proven by the robust standards of scientific empiricism, I cannot prove it to be true to your satisfaction. If I cannot prove Christiannation it to be true, in empirical fashion, then my faith must be excluded from rational discourse. In fact, if I understand you right, it must not only be excluded, it must be stigmatized. It must be ridiculed. It must end. Even if religion were to mean that everyone loved one another for ever (which, I readily concede, it obviously doesn't), that still would not be relevent for judging its truth. And the truth of a religious claim is the most fundamental thing about it. If I cannot prove this, I should shut up. As you rightly say, with self-fulfilling precision:

"You can call me 'intolerant' all you want, but that won't make unreasonable claims to knowledge sound any more reasonable; it won't differentiate your claims to religious knowledge from the claims of others which you consider illegitimate; and it won't constitute an adequate response to anything I have written or am likely to write."
I agree with all of that, except the last phrase. I believe I can offer an adequate response. It may not be adequate to you; but it is adequate to me, and to many, many others - in fact, to the vast majority of human beings who have ever lived. My response rests on an understanding of truth that is not exhausted by empiricism or materialism. I do not believe, in short, that all truth rests on scientific premises and can be 'proven' by empirical or scientific methods. I believe science is one, important, valuable and respectable mode of thinking about the whole. But there are truth questions it has not answered and cannot answer. What I found insightful about your book was your openness to this possibility. You repeat that openness in your recent posting:
"While I spend a fair amount of time thinking about the brain (as I am finishing my doctorate in neuroscience), I do not think that the utter reducibility of consciousness to matter has been established. It may be that the very concepts of mind and matter are fundamentally misleading us."
So you allow for a space where the logic of science and of materialism does not lead us toward truth, but may even mislead us about it, and lead us away from it. This is a big concession, and it undermines the certainty of your entire case. Such an argument must rest on a notion of ultimate truth that is deeper than science, beyond science. It must rest on a notion that allows for the rational legitimacy of my faith.
It might even include an appreciation of other modes of rational discourse that are not empirical in origin or form. Take, for example, the question of historical truth. You rely in your books on a lot of historical facts to buttress your empirical case. But these facts are not true - and could never be proven true - by the scientific method that is your benchmark. There are no control groups in history. There are no experiments. But there is a form of truth. Discovering that historical truth is the vocation of a historian - and it is a different truth than science, and reached by a different methodology and logic.

Similarly, mathematics can achieve a proof that has no interaction with the physical world. It may even be the closest to divine truth that human beings can achieve. But it is still logically separate from empirically verified truth, from historical truth, and even from the realm of human consciousness that includes aesthetic truth, the truths we find in contemplation of art or of nature.

My point here is to say that once you have conceded the possibility of a truth that is not reducible to empirical proof, you have allowed for the validity of religious faith as a form of legitimate truth-seeking in a different mode. The reason why you are not like some other, glibber atheists is that you recognize this. I might say that God has already been in touch with you on the matter.

But that is not the sum of your argument. You argue further that even if you concede the possibility of a legitimate form of religious truth-seeking, the content of various, competing revelations renders them dangerous. They are dangerous because they logically contradict each other. And since their claims are the most profound that we can imagine, human beings will often be compelled to fight for them. For if these profound matters are not worth fighting for, what is?

I agree that this is a central problem for religion in the world. It has always been so. it will always be so. This is not a new problem. It is arguably the oldest human debate. Whether one reads Pascal or Spinoza, Locke or Montaigne, Hobbes or Leo Strauss, the religious question always prompts a political question. I think the problem is eased - if never fully solved - by a critical move that I unpack in my book, "The Conservative Soul." That move is rooted in skepticism. Hobbes put it best, as he often did:

"For the nature of God is incomprehensible; that is to say, we understand nothing of what he is, but only that he is; and therefore the attributes we give him, are not to tell one another, what he is, nor to signify our opinion of his nature, but our desire to honor him with such names as we conceive most honourable amongst ourselves."
In my book, excerpted in Time Magazine here, I put it this way:
If God really is God, then God must, by definition, surpass our human understanding. Not entirely. We have Scripture; we have reason; we have religious authority; we have our own spiritual experiences of the divine. But there is still something we will never grasp, something we can never know - because God is beyond our human categories. And if God is beyond our categories, then God cannot be captured for certain. We cannot know with the kind of surety that allows us to proclaim truth with a capital T. There will always be something that eludes us. If there weren't, it would not be God.
I don't think you're far away from this. That's why you've gone on retreats, explored Buddhism, experimented with psilocybin, as I have. You see: we are closer than you might think. But you differ with me on how this translates into life. You ask legitimately: how can I, convinced of this truth, resist imposing it on others? The answer is: humility and doubt. I may believe these things, but I am aware that others may not; and I respect their own existential decision to believe something else. I respect their decision because I respect my own, and realize it is indescribable to those who have not directly experienced it. That's why I am such a dogged defender of pluralism and secularism - because I believe secularism alone does justice to the profundity of the claims of religion. The attempt to force or even rig laws to encourage others to share my faith defeats the point of my faith - which is that it is both freely chosen and definitionally dealing with matters that cannot be subject to common consensus.
And that brings me to the asymmetry of our positions. We both accept that there may well be a higher truth beyond empirical inquiry or proof. I respect your opinions in this matter, and feel informed by them. You regard my opinions as inadmissible in public debate, ludicrous, a form of lying, and irrational. Yes, you are being intolerant. More, actually. The entire point of your book is intolerance. Where I respect your position, you refuse to respect mine.

Or maybe, now that I've unpacked it, you respect my position a little more. Let me know,

Religion

Anyone who thinks he knows for sure that Jesus was born of virgin or that the Qur'an is the perfect word of the Creator of the universe is lying. Either he is lying to himself, or to everyone else. In neither case should such false certainties be celebrated.
What if I told you that I am certain that I have an even number of cells in my body? What are the chances that I am in a position to have actually counted my cells (there are on the order of 100 trillion) and counted them correctly? Would it be unfair (or worse, "intolerant") of you to dismiss my assertion as either a product of self-deception or outright dishonesty? Note that this claim has a 50% chance of being true (unlike claims about virgin births and resurrections), and yet it is patently ridiculous. Some claims to knowledge-even about facts that have a high order of probability--immediately brand their claimants as intellectually dishonest. Please forgive me for saying that it is extraordinarily obvious that neither you, nor the pope, nor any other Christian is in a position to know that Jesus was actually born of a virgin or that he will one day return to earth wielding magic powers.

I'd like to point out that you have not rebutted any of the substantial challenges I made in my last post. Rather, you have gone on to make other points, most of which I find unsurprising and irrelevant to the case I have made against religious faith. For instance, you claim that many fundamentalists are tolerant of dissent and capable of friendship with you despite their dogmatic views about sex. You also remind me that many devoutly religious people do good things on the basis of their religious beliefs. I do not doubt either of these propositions. You could catalogue such facts until the end of time, and they would not begin to suggest that God actually exists.

---- Sam Harris

Graven images

Consider the possibility of improving the Ten Commandments. This would appear to be setting the bar rather high, as these are the only passages in the Bible that the Creator of the universe felt the need to physically write himself. But take a look good look at commandment #2. No graven images? Doesn't this seem like something less than the-second-most-important-point-upon-which-to- admonish-all-future-generations-of-human-beings? Remember those Muslims who recently rioted by the hundreds of thousands over cartoons? Many people wondered just what got them so riled up. Well, here it is. Was all that pious mayhem nothing more than egregious, medieval stupidity? Yes, come to think of it, it was nothing more than egregious, medieval stupidity. Almost any precept we'd put in place of this prohibition against graven images would augment the wisdom of the Bible (Don't pretend to know things you don't know? Don't mistreat children? Avoid trans fats?). Could we live with all the resulting problems due to proliferating graven images? We'd manage-somehow.

Best atheism argument

How does one "integrate doubt" into one's faith? By acknowledging just how dubious many of the claims of scripture are, and thereafter reading it selectively, bowdlerizing it if need be, and allowing its assertions about reality to be continually trumped by fresh insights-scientific ("You mean the world isn't 6000 years old? Yikes"), mathematical ("pi doesn't actually equal 3? All right, so what?"), and moral ("You mean, I shouldn't beat my slaves? I can't even keep slaves? Hmm"). Religious moderation is the result of not taking scripture all that seriously. So why not take these books less seriously still? Why not admit that they are just books, written by fallible human beings like ourselves? They were not, as your friend the pope would have it, "written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost." Needless to say, I believe you have given the Supreme Pontiff far too much credit as a champion of reason. The man believes that he is in possession of a magic book, entirely free from error.

Nest atheism argument

How does one "integrate doubt" into one's faith? By acknowledging just how dubious many of the claims of scripture are, and thereafter reading it selectively, bowdlerizing it if need be, and allowing its assertions about reality to be continually trumped by fresh insights-scientific ("You mean the world isn't 6000 years old? Yikes"), mathematical ("pi doesn't actually equal 3? All right, so what?"), and moral ("You mean, I shouldn't beat my slaves? I can't even keep slaves? Hmm"). Religious moderation is the result of not taking scripture all that seriously. So why not take these books less seriously still? Why not admit that they are just books, written by fallible human beings like ourselves? They were not, as your friend the pope would have it, "written wholly and entirely, with all their parts, at the dictation of the Holy Ghost." Needless to say, I believe you have given the Supreme Pontiff far too much credit as a champion of reason. The man believes that he is in possession of a magic book, entirely free from error

Stay ar home moms

WASHINGTON -- Poor women who stay at home to raise their children should be given federal assistance for child care so that they can enter the job market and "have the dignity of work," Mitt Romney said in January, undercutting the sense of extreme umbrage he showed when Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen quipped last week that Ann Romney had not "worked a day in her life."

The remark, made to a Manchester, N.H., audience, was unearthed by MSNBC's "Up w/Chris Hayes," and aired during the 8 a.m. hour of his show Sunday.

Ann Romney and her husband's campaign fired back hard at Rosen following her remark. "I made a choice to stay home and raise five boys. Believe me, it was hard work," Romney said on Twitter.

On Sunday, Romney spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg told The Huffington Post in an email, "Moving welfare recipients into work was one of the basic principles of the bipartisan welfare reform legislation that President Clinton signed into law. The sad fact is that under President Obama the poverty rate among women rose to 14.5 percent in 2011, the highest rate in 17 years. The Obama administration's economic policies have been devastating to women and families."

Mitt Romney, however, judging by his January remark, views stay-at-home moms who are supported by federal assistance much differently than those backed by hundreds of millions in private equity income. Poor women, he said, shouldn't be given a choice, but instead should be required to work outside the home to receive Temporary Assistance for Needy Families benefits. "[E]ven if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work," Romney said of moms on TANF.

Recalling his effort as governor to increase the amount of time women on welfare in Massachusetts were required to work, Romney noted that some had considered his proposal "heartless," but he argued that the women would be better off having "the dignity of work" -- a suggestion Ann Romney would likely take issue with.

"I wanted to increase the work requirement," said Romney. "I said, for instance, that even if you have a child 2 years of age, you need to go to work. And people said, 'Well that's heartless.' And I said, 'No, no, I'm willing to spend more giving day care to allow those parents to go back to work. It'll cost the state more providing that daycare, but I want the individuals to have the dignity of work.'"

Regardless of its level of dignity, for Ann Romney, her work raising her children would not have fulfilled her work requirement had she been on TANF benefits. As HuffPost reported Thursday:

As far as Uncle Sam is concerned, if you're poor, deciding to stay at home and rear your children is not an option. Thanks to welfare reform, recipients of federal benefits must prove to a caseworker that they have performed, over the course of a week, a certain number of hours of "work activity." That number changes from state to state, and each state has discretion as to how narrowly work is defined, but federal law lists 12 broad categories that are covered.
Raising children is not among them.

According to a 2006 Congressional Research Service report, the dozen activities that fulfill the work requirement are:

(1) unsubsidized employment
(2) subsidized private sector employment
(3) subsidized public sector employment
(4) work experience
(5) on-the-job training
(6) job search and job readiness assistance
(7) community services programs
(8) vocational educational training
(9) job skills training directly related to employment
(10) education directly related to employment (for those without a high school degree or equivalent)
(11) satisfactory attendance at a secondary school
(12) provision of child care to a participant of a community service program

The only child-care related activity on the list is the last one, which would allow someone to care for someone else's child if that person were off volunteering. But it does not apply to married couples in some states. Connecticut, for instance, specifically prevents counting as "work" an instance in which one parent watches a child while the other parent volunteers.

The federal government does at least implicitly acknowledge the value of child care, though not for married couples. According to a 2012 Urban Institute study, a single mother is required to work 30 hours a week, but the requirement drops to 20 hours if she has a child under 6. A married woman, such as Romney, would not be entitled to such a reduction in the requirement. If a married couple receives federally funded child care, the work requirement increases by 20 hours, from 35 hours to 55 hours between the two of them, another implicit acknowledgment of the value of stay-at-home work.
Romney's January view echoes a remark he made in 1994 during his failed Senate campaign. "This is a different world than it was in the 1960s when I was growing up, when you used to have Mom at home and Dad at work," Romney said, as shown in a video posted by BuzzFeed's Andrew Kaczynski. "Now Mom and Dad both have to work whether they want to or not, and usually one of them has two jobs."

The Shining opening title

"I sent my soul through the invisible, some letter of that afterlife to spell: and by and by my soul returned to me and answered, ‘I myself am Heaven and Hell.’" - Omar Khayyám (from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyám)

A spectral camera soars languidly through a deep valley, conjuring up images of the American frontier: towering mountains, evergreen trees, and serene water lucidly captured through a wide-angle lens. Sweeping across the landscape, the camera begins to follow a tiny yellow VW Beetle making its way up a winding road carved into the steep mountain cliffs. The lens frequently relegates the car to only a fraction of the frame, revealing how minuscule the vehicle is against the grandeur on which it is trespassing. This bird’s eye chase foreshadows the events that await the Torrence family and the film’s harrowing themes of isolation and madness.

After being offered The Exorcist and its sequel, Exorcist 2: The Heretic, the iconoclast filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick, declined both and opted instead to adapt a story from Stephen King’s novel, The Shining. The title sequence introduces viewers to Kubrick’s unorthodox vision of horror, as haunting landscapes and unnerving score combine to cause an ineffable unease. By discarding genre tropes such as creaking doors, spiderwebs, dark corridors, and excessive blood, the title sequence outperforms convention.

The stunning mountain ranges were filmed by Greg McGillivray (from MacGillivray Freeman Films), a cameraman personally chosen by Kubrick.

From the book Kubrick by Michel Ciment:

Stanley Kubrick: “It was important to establish an ominous mood during Jack's first drive up to the hotel -- the vast isolation and eerie splendour of high mountains, and the narrow, winding roads which would become impassable after heavy snow. In fact, the roads we filmed for the title sequence are closed throughout the winter and only negotiable by tracked vehicles.

I sent a second-unit camera crew to Glacier National Park to shoot the title backgrounds but they reported that the place wasn't interesting. When we saw the test shots they sent back we were staggered. It was plain that the location was perfect but the crew had to be replaced. I hired Greg McGillivray, who is noted for his helicopter work, and he spent several weeks filming some of the most beautiful mountain helicopter shots I've seen.”

The aerial shots share many characteristics with the hotel footage filmed using the Steadicam, a stabilizing camera mount pioneered by Garrett Brown. Kubrick’s innovative use of the Steadicam on The Shining was considered groundbreaking, and the seemingly effortless gliding motions and long takes afforded by the system closely echo the title sequence. This hitherto untested stylistic choice imbues every move of the camera with a sense of tension and dread. Unaware of what lies around the next curve in the road or hallway corridor, viewers are lured deeper and deeper into the world of the film.

Unusually, the title sequence for The Shining also employs rolling credits, a design element normally reserved for end credits. When paired with the unsettling musical score, the austere Helvetica typeface — cryptically colored a hot blue — seems immediately at odds with the pristine wilderness.

Dies Irae (Latin for Day of Wrath) is the name of the 13th century Gregorian chant re-envisioned by composers Wendy Carlos and Rachel Elkind for the title sequence. Their modern take establishes the haunting atmosphere using the sounds of an electronic synthesizer — a common trope in many subsequent horror films. The synth fades in and out periodically, allowing a Native American ritual hymn to enter. The shrill wail of sirens pierce the vast sky and add to the uncanny mood.

Like many of cinema’s most notable title sequences, the introduction to The Shining touches on themes later addressed in the film. For a celebrated and chronicled filmmaker such as Kubrick — known for his trenchant observations and perfectionism — myriad readings can be taken from viewing this opening. Jack Torrence’s ascent into the celestial Rocky Mountains is also a descent into the depths of his own personal hell; the lonely and strangely claustrophobic mountain road is the first of many labyrinthine constructs the film forces the Torrence family into. Here Kubrick introduces the viewer to an uncharacteristic form of horror: the domestic kind. When stripped of its supernatural elements, The Shining is an all too familiar tale of abuse, alienation, and paranoia.

WRITER: Shaun Mir
© Art of the Title, 2011

Lyndon Johnson

Johnson scored his very greatest successes by infuriating ideological opponents into self-destructive fury. He scored big legislative wins in 1963–64. But those wins were dwarfed by the score he put on the board in 1965–66. It was the 1965–66 Congress that would pass the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and the other programs of the Great Society.

What made the difference between 1963–64 and 1965–66? Short answer: the calamitous miscalculations of Johnson’s conservative opponents.

The 1964 civil-rights bill finally escaped imprisonment inside the House Rules Committee (chaired by a segregationist Southerner), and departed for the House floor in early February 1964. As of that date, the leading contender for the 1964 Republican nomination was New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

Party conservatives had vested their hopes in Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater. Those hopes seemed forlorn, however. In every election since the coming of the New Deal, the Republican Party had rejected the preferred candidate of its conservative wing. By every ordinary calculation of politics, Goldwater was a hopeless, even reckless, candidate.

But the stunning progress of the Civil Rights Act upset the ordinary calculations of politics. While Rockefeller and Scranton strongly supported the ’64 act, Goldwater opposed it. In fact Goldwater would be one of only six Republican senators to join the 21 Southern Democrats to vote “no” until the very end—and he would ride that “no” all the way to the Republican nomination for president.

The result was total disaster, of course, and not only for Goldwater. (Although, in a portent of things to come, Goldwater became the first Republican in history to carry the Deep South: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.) Democrats swept races down the ballot, adding 32 new representatives and two senators to their already large majorities in both houses. The defeated Republicans mostly represented moderate suburban districts in the North and Midwest. They were replaced by liberal Democrats—so many liberal Democrats that they could run Congress with a free hand for the first time since the New Deal.

It’s hard not to detect in these pages an unspoken critique of Barack Obama. Yes, certainly, Obama shares Lyndon Johnson’s gift for driving opponents crazy, if it is a gift. But the use of power Caro so vividly describes is not something that comes naturally to our current president. The constant searching for opportunities; the shameless love-bombing of opponents; the endless wooing of supporters; the deft deployment of inducements and threats—these are the low arts that led to Johnson’s high success. You can see why a high-minded leader like Barack Obama would recoil from the Johnson style and embrace Kennedyesque rhetorical grandeur instead. Such presidents contribute great phrases to quotation books, but they tend not to add lasting laws to the statute books—or enduring change to the history books.

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Lyndon Johnson

Emerging from JFK's shadow, Lyndon Johnson wielded power ruthlessly—and delivered big results for liberals. In this week's Newsweek, David Frum on what Obama could learn from Robert Caro's new biography.

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A great work of history is never only about the past.

The fourth volume of Robert Caro’s great biography of Lyndon Johnson—The Passage of Power—tells a story from seemingly long ago. Page after page conjures up a vanished world: a world in which labor unions had clout and lunch counters were segregated. Yet it’s also a world deeply familiar to us: a world in which urgent national problems go unaddressed year after year, and Americans despair over the paralysis of their government.


AP

This fourth volume spotlights a moment when suddenly that government moved, fast and decisively. For three years under President John F. Kennedy, the cause of civil rights inched forward, if it moved at all. Then, suddenly, Kennedy was dead—and seven months later, so too was legal segregation.


To this day, the mystique of John F. Kennedy lingers. One third of Americans rate Kennedy a great president, and professional historians typically bestow generous accolades on him as well. And yet on the day he was murdered, President Kennedy had accomplished astonishingly little of his domestic program. He could plausibly claim to have prevailed over the Soviets in Cuba and Berlin. Yet in Congress, it was his opponents who had bested him—and his most effective opponents were found inside his own party, the conservative Southern Democrats who controlled the switching points of power in the House and Senate.

It was the graceful Kennedy’s ungainly successor who transformed Kennedy’s soaring rhetoric into legal reality. It was Johnson, not Kennedy, who pushed through Congress the laws that overthrew legal segregation in the South. It was Johnson, not Kennedy, who gained Southern blacks the right to vote. It was Johnson, not Kennedy, who created Medicaid and Medicare. It was Johnson, not Kennedy, who protected wild rivers. It was Johnson, not Kennedy, who passed the great tax cut that carries Kennedy’s name to this day.

For nobody, perhaps, is this turn of history more challenging than for Robert Caro himself. Over more than 2,500 pages of powerful prose, Caro has summoned Lyndon Johnson to vivid, intimate life. We come to know him better, thanks to Caro’s remorseless research, than almost any of Johnson’s contemporaries could have hoped to do. It’s not an attractive picture. Caro’s Johnson is a bully and braggart, a wheedler and manipulator, a man of bad personal morals and worse business ethics.

And it is this, frankly, monstrous character who realized more of Caro’s liberal ideals than any politician in modern times, Franklin Delano Roosevelt very much included—and vastly more than the charming, winning, but domestically ineffectual JFK.

In a story already rich with drama, this tension between author and subject—between Caro’s loathing of Johnson and his reverence for Johnson’s accomplishments—is the tensest drama of all.

How did Johnson do it?

Here is Caro’s disconcerting message: Johnson didn’t do it by inspiring or exhorting. He did it by mobilizing political power, on a scale and with a ruthlessness that arguably surpassed all other presidents, before or since.

To intensify this message, Caro narrows his focus. The fourth volume covers an unexpected range of years—the period from the spring of 1959 to the spring of 1964: from Johnson’s fitful and bungled run for the 1960 Democratic nomination to his triumphant passage of Kennedy’s domestic program—stopping just before Johnson launched his own reelection campaign in 1964, and leaving for a future Caro book the largest part of the Johnson presidency.

The book gives equal space to the three humiliating years of the Johnson vice presidency—years in which Johnson was isolated, belittled, and ultimately threatened (as Caro convincingly argues) with exclusion from the 1964 ticket—and the seven months in which Johnson passed the 1964 Civil Rights Bill and the “Kennedy” tax cut. In those seven months, Johnson wielded power in a way that few presidents ever have, and that John F. Kennedy never did.

As Caro tells it, Johnson instantly understood how to put to maximum political use the public grief over the Kennedy assassination. Johnson was not reckless enough to say aloud, “Never let a good crisis go to waste.” But he certainly acted on that maxim.

Johnson led the nation in its mourning for Kennedy, opening his first speech to Congress: “All I have I would have gladly given not to be standing here today.” Then he picked one out the late president’s many fitfully advanced causes and seized on that cause as the one and only fitting memorial. Johnson chose civil rights—his passion much more than it had ever been Kennedy’s. “[No] eulogy could more eloquently honor President Kennedy’s memory than the earliest possible passage of the civil-rights bill for which he fought so long.” Unsaid: Kennedy had to fight so long for that bill because he did not fight anywhere near so effectively as the man who followed him.

Caro quotes Johnson’s own words, spoken years later to Doris Kearns Goodwin: “Everything I had ever learned in the history books taught me that martyrs have to die for causes. John Kennedy had died. But his ‘cause’ was not really clear. That was my job. I had to take the dead man’s program and turn it into a martyr’s cause.”


The tension between Caro’s loathing of Johnson and reverence for his accomplishments is the tensest drama in the book., Jake Chessum for Newsweek

Having chosen his cause, Johnson started to assert his authority. The conservative Democrats who dominated Congress in the early 1960s had perceived Kennedy as weak. They pushed against him—and usually won. Within days of taking office, Johnson went looking for a way to push back. He found his opportunity in a battle over grain exports to the Soviet Union. Conservatives in Congress had introduced an amendment limiting presidential authority to permit such sales.

As Caro writes: “‘I hope that [bill] gets murdered,’ Johnson snarled, and, sitting in the Oval Office, he kept telephoning senator after senator, cajoling, bullying, threatening, charming, long after he had the majority, to make the vote overwhelming.” Why? To teach Congress the lesson that Johnson could not be rolled.

The lesson was learned.

And so Johnson went to work building his own personal coalition in Congress. Since the elections of 1938, Congress had sometimes had a Republican majority and sometimes a Democratic majority, but it was always a conservative majority. Southern Democrats and Midwestern Republicans worked together, against northern and Californian members of their own parties.

To enact civil-rights legislation, Johnson assembled a new majority of Republicans and liberal Democrats—proportionally more Republicans than Democrats. That arithmetic made the Senate Republican leader, Everett Dirksen, indispensable to Johnson, and Johnson willingly paid the price for Dirksen’s support. As Johnson told the civil-rights bill’s Senate manager Hubert Humphrey in a tape-recorded phone conversation, “You’ve to let him have a piece of the action. He’s got to look good all the time.”

When Dirksen went lukewarm on civil rights in the spring of 1964 under pressure from conservatives in his own party, Johnson and Humphrey did not turn on him. On the contrary, Humphrey worked even harder to woo Dirksen. Appearing on NBC’s Meet the Press, Humphrey insisted: “He [Dirksen] is a man who thinks of his country before he thinks of his party...and I sincerely believe that when Senator Dirksen has to face the moment of decision...he will not be found wanting.”

In a phone call to Humphrey after the show, Johnson said: “Boy, that was right?...You’re doing just right now. You just keep at that...You get in there to see Dirksen! You drink with Dirksen! You talk to Dirksen! You listen to Dirksen!”

At the same time as Johnson wooed Republican opponents, he also gained the support of refractory Democrats. The liberal Keynesians in the Kennedy administration wanted to spur economic growth with a big tax cut. But the Southern conservatives who chaired the relevant Senate committees did not believe in Keynes. Plus they preferred tax loopholes for favored constituencies over tax cuts that would benefit everybody, Republicans as well as Democrats.

The most obdurate of those Southern conservatives was Virginia’s Harry Byrd, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. Byrd never said “no.” He just did not act. The Kennedy people convinced themselves that they were gradually moving Byrd—that he might finally get around to acting sometime before November 1964. Johnson knew they were kidding themselves.

Johnson had cultivated Byrd for years when they served in the Senate together. He flattered Byrd outrageously. He attended the funeral of Byrd’s beloved daughter—one of only two senators to do so. And he learned Byrd’s demand: deliver a budget that cut spending below $100 billion, and Byrd would relent on the tax cut.

The liberal Keynesians disdained Byrd’s insistence on budget cutting. But Byrd’s demand was the price of the tax cut, from the one man with the power to deliver the tax cut—and so Johnson made it happen.

Harry Byrd was the first senator invited to eat with the new president at the White House. Byrd arrived in the White House car that had been sent to fetch him. And when the budget number demanded by Byrd was finally reached, here’s how Johnson delivered the news: “I’ve got a surprise for you, Harry. I’ve got the damn thing down under one hundred billion...way under. It’s only 97.9 billion. Now you can tell your friends that you forced the President of the United States to reduce the budget before you let him have his tax cut.”

If the price of being the winner was to look like the loser, Johnson would pay. As Caro writes, Johnson’s “grasp in an instant of the reality that underlay the haggling over the budget, that Byrd had to be given what he wanted...and most important, his ability to take advantage of the affection and trust of an older man, to ‘get’ the ungettable Harry Byrd—these were the crucial elements in breaking a deadlock that, before November 22, had seemed all but unbreakable.”


The Kennedy's threatened to exclude Johnson from the ticket in 1964, but after the assassination, he led the nation in mourning., Corbis

That kind of human knowing is a rare gift. Johnson’s great enemy, Bobby Kennedy, who possessed a very different form of the gift, disdainfully said of Johnson: he “does not know how to use people’s talents, to find the very best in them and put the best to work. But more than any other man, he knows how to ferret out and use people’s weaknesses.”

Caro repudiates the first sentence of that quote. But he amply confirms the second. Johnson knew people. He also knew the rules—knew them and knew how to use them.

And there is one more lesson encoded in Caro’s story, a lesson not adumbrated in this volume but that waits for readers in the promised and indispensable fifth—and it is this last lesson that is perhaps most relevant of all to the politics of our own day.

Johnson scored his very greatest successes by infuriating ideological opponents into self-destructive fury. He scored big legislative wins in 1963–64. But those wins were dwarfed by the score he put on the board in 1965–66. It was the 1965–66 Congress that would pass the Voting Rights Act, Medicare, Medicaid, and the other programs of the Great Society.

What made the difference between 1963–64 and 1965–66? Short answer: the calamitous miscalculations of Johnson’s conservative opponents.

The 1964 civil-rights bill finally escaped imprisonment inside the House Rules Committee (chaired by a segregationist Southerner), and departed for the House floor in early February 1964. As of that date, the leading contender for the 1964 Republican nomination was New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller.

Party conservatives had vested their hopes in Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater. Those hopes seemed forlorn, however. In every election since the coming of the New Deal, the Republican Party had rejected the preferred candidate of its conservative wing. By every ordinary calculation of politics, Goldwater was a hopeless, even reckless, candidate.

But the stunning progress of the Civil Rights Act upset the ordinary calculations of politics. While Rockefeller and Scranton strongly supported the ’64 act, Goldwater opposed it. In fact Goldwater would be one of only six Republican senators to join the 21 Southern Democrats to vote “no” until the very end—and he would ride that “no” all the way to the Republican nomination for president.

The result was total disaster, of course, and not only for Goldwater. (Although, in a portent of things to come, Goldwater became the first Republican in history to carry the Deep South: South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.) Democrats swept races down the ballot, adding 32 new representatives and two senators to their already large majorities in both houses. The defeated Republicans mostly represented moderate suburban districts in the North and Midwest. They were replaced by liberal Democrats—so many liberal Democrats that they could run Congress with a free hand for the first time since the New Deal.

It’s hard not to detect in these pages an unspoken critique of Barack Obama. Yes, certainly, Obama shares Lyndon Johnson’s gift for driving opponents crazy, if it is a gift. But the use of power Caro so vividly describes is not something that comes naturally to our current president. The constant searching for opportunities; the shameless love-bombing of opponents; the endless wooing of supporters; the deft deployment of inducements and threats—these are the low arts that led to Johnson’s high success. You can see why a high-minded leader like Barack Obama would recoil from the Johnson style and embrace Kennedyesque rhetorical grandeur instead. Such presidents contribute great phrases to quotation books, but they tend not to add lasting laws to the statute books—or enduring change to the history books.

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David Frum is a contributing editor at Newsweek and The Daily Beast and a CNN contributor.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

iPad

n the morning of January 27th—an aeon ago, in tech time—Steve Jobs was to appear at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, in downtown San Francisco, to unveil Apple’s new device, the iPad. Although speculation about the device had been intense, few in the audience knew yet what it was called or exactly what it would do, and there was a feeling of expectation in the room worthy of the line outside the grotto at Lourdes. Hundreds of journalists and invited guests, including Al Gore, Yo-Yo Ma, and Robert Iger, the C.E.O. of Disney, milled around the theatre, waiting for Jobs to appear. The sound system had been playing a medley of Bob Dylan songs; it went quiet as the lights came up onstage and Jobs walked out, to the crowd’s applause.
In the weeks before, the book industry had been full of unaccustomed optimism; in some publishing circles, the device had been referred to as “the Jesus tablet.” The industry was desperate for a savior. Between 2002 and 2008, annual sales had grown just 1.6 per cent, and profit margins were shrinking. Like other struggling businesses, publishers had slashed expenditures, laying off editors and publicists and taking fewer chances on unknown writers.
The industry’s great hope was that the iPad would bring electronic books to the masses—and help make them profitable. E-books are booming. Although they account for only an estimated three to five per cent of the market, their sales increased a hundred and seventy-seven per cent in 2009, and it was projected that they would eventually account for between twenty-five and fifty per cent of all books sold. But publishers were concerned that lower prices would decimate their profits. Amazon had been buying many e-books from publishers for about thirteen dollars and selling them for $9.99, taking a loss on each book in order to gain market share and encourage sales of its electronic reading device, the Kindle. By the end of last year, Amazon accounted for an estimated eighty per cent of all electronic-book sales, and $9.99 seemed to be established as the price of an e-book. Publishers were panicked. David Young, the chairman and C.E.O. of Hachette Book Group USA, said, “The big concern—and it’s a massive concern—is the $9.99 pricing point. If it’s allowed to take hold in the consumer’s mind that a book is worth ten bucks, to my mind it’s game over for this business.”
At the Yerba Buena Center, it took a while for Jobs to mention books, and when he did he said that “Amazon has done a great job” with its Kindle. “We’re going to stand on their shoulders and go a little bit farther.” It would probably have been more accurate to say that Jobs planned to stand on Amazon’s neck and press down hard, with publishers applauding. The decision to enter publishing was a reversal for Jobs, who two years ago said that the book business was unsalvageable. “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty per cent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.” But if reading books was low on the list of things that the iPad could do, it was nonetheless on the list, which meant that Amazon had become a competitor. “There’s a lot of heat between Apple and Amazon and Google,” an adviser to Jobs said. “Steve expresses contempt for everyone—unless he’s controlling them.” An Apple insider said, “He thinks Amazon is stupid, and made a terrible mistake insisting that books should be priced at $9.99.”
Onstage, Jobs made it clear that he would present Amazon and its C.E.O., Jeff Bezos, with a serious challenge. He told the crowd that five of the “big six” publishers had agreed to sell their e-books through Apple’s iBooks store, which would open in April. And he said that Apple, through its iTunes and Apple stores, had access to a hundred and twenty-five million credit cards, which would make it easy for consumers to buy books on impulse. The iPad was clearly a more versatile device: it would provide color and full audio and video, while the Kindle could display only black-and-white text.
After Jobs’s presentation, guests were ushered into an adjoining building to test the iPad. Among them was Carolyn Reidy, the president and C.E.O. of Simon & Schuster. Smiling broadly, Reidy said, “It’s fabulous! I want one!” The new device, she hoped, would “put digital books in front of one hundred and twenty-five million people.” It would also “create a competitor” for Amazon, she said—and provide publishers with leverage as they tried to raise the price of books above ten dollars.
Jobs, circling the room, stopped at one of several tables piled with iPads to talk with Walt Mossberg, the Wall Street Journal’s personal-technology columnist. Onstage, Jobs, demonstrating how Apple would sell books, had selected Edward Kennedy’s “True Compass” and clicked on a “buy” icon with the price $14.99 next to it. Why, Mossberg asked, should consumers “pay Apple $14.99 when they can buy the same book from Amazon for $9.99?”
“That won’t be the case,” Jobs said, seeming implacably confident. “The price will be the same.” Mossberg asked him to explain. Why would Amazon increase prices, when consumers were buying so many books? “Publishers may withhold their books from Amazon,” Jobs said. “They’re unhappy.”
he next day, a Friday, John Sargent, the C.E.O. of Macmillan, a publishing conglomerate that includes Farrar, Straus & Giroux and St. Martin’s Press, flew from New York to Seattle to meet with Amazon. Macmillan is the smallest of the big-six publishers, which produce sixty per cent of all books sold in the U.S. Like its peers, Macmillan relies heavily on Amazon, which sells about fourteen per cent of its trade books and the vast majority of its e-books. But Sargent was determined to force Amazon to change the way it does business.
Traditionally, publishers have sold books to stores, with the wholesale price for hardcovers set at fifty per cent of the cover price. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about fifteen per cent of the cover price. A simplified version of a publisher’s costs might run as follows. On a new, twenty-six-dollar hardcover, the publisher typically receives thirteen dollars. Authors are paid royalties at a rate of about fifteen per cent of the cover price; this accounts for $3.90. Perhaps $1.80 goes to the costs of paper, printing, and binding, a dollar to marketing, and $1.70 to distribution. The remaining $4.60 must pay for rent, editors, a sales force, and any write-offs of unearned author advances. Bookstores return about thirty-five per cent of the hardcovers they buy, and publishers write off the cost of producing those books. Profit margins are slim .*
Though this situation is less than ideal, it has persisted, more or less unchanged, for decades. E-books called the whole system into question. If there was no physical book, what would determine the price? Most publishers agreed, with some uncertainty, to give authors a royalty of twenty-five per cent, and began a long series of negotiations with Amazon over pricing. For months before Sargent’s visit, the publishers had talked about imposing an “agency model” for e-books. Under such a model, the publisher would be considered the seller, and an online vender like Amazon would act as an “agent,” in exchange for a thirty-per-cent fee. Yet none of the publishers seemed to think that they could act alone, and if they presented a unified demand to Amazon they risked being charged with price-fixing and collusion.
In Seattle, Sargent met with Russ Grandinetti, the vice-president in charge of Kindle Content, and told him that if Amazon would not accept the agency model Macmillan would restrict the publication of its e-books. Sargent was giving an ultimatum: Amazon had built its business on comprehensiveness, and if Macmillan withdrew its books it could no longer claim to be the world’s best-stocked bookstore.
Amazon did not react as Sargent had hoped. Before he stepped off the plane, back in New York, that Friday evening, it had stopped selling all of Macmillan’s titles. But, as Jobs hinted, four other major publishers—Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins, Penguin, and Hachette—were quietly planning to follow Sargent’s lead. On Sunday afternoon, Amazon reversed course and announced on its Web site, “We will have to capitulate and accept Macmillan’s terms because Macmillan has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.”
This was a somewhat cryptic statement—doesn’t every company have a monopoly over its own products?—and publishers interpreted it in various ways. One executive said that Amazon capitulated in order to show that “pricing is out of its control”—that is, to blame publishers for higher prices. The head of another house said, “Amazon was incandescent with rage. They switched because they figured out that if all publishers withdrew their books Amazon’s business was dead.” Whatever the explanation, Amazon’s announcement was good news for publishers. John Sargent had called negotiations with Amazon a “chess game,” and he seemed to have won the opening gambit.
Even though Sargent’s tactics had worked, publishers seemed uncertain that they were sustainable. “I’m not sure the ‘agency model’ is best,” the head of one major publishing house told me. Publishers would collect less money this way, about nine dollars a book, rather than thirteen; the unattractive tradeoff was to cede some profit in order to set a minimum price. “Amazon forced us,” one publisher said. “They chose to do something irrational—lose money—in order to gain a monopoly. That was destructive to publishers and retailers and authors. They brought this on themselves.”
Publishing exists in a continual state of forecasting its own demise; at one major house, there is a running joke that the second book published on the Gutenberg press was about the death of the publishing business. And publishers’ concerns about Amazon are reminiscent of their worries about Barnes & Noble, which in the eighties began producing its own books, causing publishers a great deal of anxiety without much affecting their business. Unlike Barnes & Noble, though, Amazon generates more than half of its revenues—which total about twenty-five billion dollars a year—from products other than books. Many publishers believe that Amazon looks upon books as just another commodity to sell as cheaply as possible, and that it sees publishers as dispensable. “Don’t forget,” the chief of a publishing house said, “Bezos has declared that the physical book and bookstores are dead.”
mazon.com opened for business in Seattle in July, 1995. Although sales were brisk, it took seven years to generate a profit, and analysts made a sport of predicting its collapse. Bezos was unmoved by criticism. When Charlie Rose, in 2009, asked him to describe his outstanding talent, he said it was his focus on the long term and a “willingness to be misunderstood.” Like other successful Internet companies, Amazon emphasized winning the trust of consumers. “Our vision,” Bezos has said many times, is to be “the world’s most customer-centric company.” Part of the appeal to consumers was low prices; Amazon sold many books, particularly best-sellers, for little more than the wholesale price, or even at a loss. In the long term, Bezos believed, lower prices would expand Amazon’s market share, its stock price, and its profits.
Amazon had a profound effect on publishers’ business, creating a place where customers could reliably find books that were no longer being promoted in stores. Backlist books—those which sell reliably over time—are vital to publishing houses. At Random House, more than fifty per cent of revenue is generated from books like “The Prophet” and “Mastering the Art of French Cooking,” which provide steady profits that allow editors to make more adventurous gambles on new books. With Amazon, “people could find backlists,” David Young, of Hachette, said. “You were no longer hoping and praying that you would find that spine on a shelf.” Carolyn Reidy said that in a three-month period online venders typically sell copies of twenty-five hundred Simon & Schuster titles that bookstores don’t stock.
Bezos had devised a more efficient way to buy books. And, with the arrival of electronic books, he began to think of ways to replace paper entirely. E-books had undeniable advantages for publishers. There would be no more returns, warehouse fees, printing expenses, or shipping costs. The obstacle was that no one knew how e-books should be read. Computer screens weren’t portable enough, and for many readers cell phones were too small. E-books remained a niche market, mostly neglected by large trade publishers.
Late in 2007, Amazon released the Kindle, which presented a decent simulacrum of printed pages and could wirelessly download a book in sixty seconds. Arthur Klebanoff, the co-founder and C.E.O. of the e-books publisher RosettaBooks, said that, once the Kindle became available, “it took Amazon ninety days from launch to generate more revenue from my hundred-book backlist than I was getting from all my other distribution platforms combined.” There are now an estimated three million Kindles in use, and Amazon lists more than four hundred and fifty thousand e-books. If the same book is available in paper and paperless form, Amazon says, forty per cent of its customers order the electronic version. Russ Grandinetti, the Amazon vice-president, says the Kindle has boosted book sales over all. “On average,” he says, Kindle users “buy 3.1 times as many books as they did twelve months ago.”
But publishers also recognize the similarity between Amazon’s strategy and that of iTunes. One publisher said, “Get market share, and when you get far ahead it is hard to catch up. Bezos’s game, like Jobs’s before him, is to get the device and get eighty-to-ninety-per-cent distribution on the device, and you own the game.”
he analogy of the music business goes only so far. What iTunes did was to replace the CD as the basic unit of commerce; rather than being forced to buy an entire album to get the song you really wanted, you could buy just the single track. But no one, with the possible exception of students, will want to buy a single chapter of most books. Publishers’ real concern is that the low price of digital books will destroy bookstores, which are their primary customers. Burdened with rent and electricity and other costs, bricks-and-mortar stores are unlikely to offer prices that can compete with those of online venders. Roxanne Coady, who owns R. J. Julia Booksellers, an independent bookstore in Madison, Connecticut, said, “Bookselling is an eight-inch pie that keeps getting more forks coming into it. For us, the first fork was the chains. The second fork was people reading less. The third fork was Amazon. Now it’s digital downloads.”
According to the American Booksellers Association, the number of independent booksellers has declined from 3,250 to 1,400 since 1999; independents now represent just ten per cent of store sales. Chains like Barnes & Noble and Borders account for about thirty per cent of the market, and superstores like Target and Wal-Mart, along with clubs like Costco, account for forty-five per cent, though they typically carry far fewer titles. As a result, publishers, like the Hollywood studios, are under enormous pressure to create more hits—more books like “Twilight”—and fewer quiet domestic novels or worthy books about poverty or trade policy.
Bookstores, particularly independent bookstores, help resist this trend by championing authors the employees believe in. “In a bookstore, there’s a serendipitous element involved in browsing,” Jonathan Burnham, the senior vice-president and publisher of HarperCollins, says. “Independent bookstores are like a community center. We walk in and know the people who work there and like to hear their reading recommendations.”
But the cost of maintaining knowledgeable staff and browsable store space contributes to higher prices, which many consumers are unwilling to pay. A best-selling hardcover that is seventeen dollars at Amazon.com commonly sells for as much as twenty-eight dollars at a bookstore. The Apple adviser said, “The Internet makes everything available and cheaper. I compare bookstores to video stores ten years ago. Now I use Netflix or I download movies.” Book buyers understandably want both the convenience of the Web site and the intimacy of the store. But this obliges publishers to essentially run two businesses at once: a traditional publisher that sells bound books to stores and an electronic business that sells e-books online. “I think consumers, like publishers, are living in parallel universes,” Burnham says. “Consumers are educated to have a multiplicity of choices. They still like to go to a bookstore, while they also want everything available online.”
Tim O’Reilly, the founder and C.E.O. of O’Reilly Media, which publishes about two hundred e-books per year, thinks that the old publishers’ model is fundamentally flawed. “They think their customer is the bookstore,” he says. “Publishers never built the infrastructure to respond to customers.” Without bookstores, it would take years for publishers to learn how to sell books directly to consumers. They do no market research, have little data on their customers, and have no experience in direct retailing. With the possible exception of Harlequin Romance and Penguin paperbacks, readers have no particular association with any given publisher; in books, the author is the brand name. To attract consumers, publishers would have to build a single, collaborative Web site to sell e-books, an idea that Jason Epstein, the former editorial director of Random House, pushed for years without success. But, even setting aside the difficulties of learning how to run a retail business, such a site would face problems of protocol worthy of the U.N. Security Council—if Amazon didn’t accuse publishers of price-fixing first.
he iBooks store seemed to provide a solution, which helps explain why five of the big-six publishers signed up without much apparent hesitation. The only holdout was Random House, the largest of the big six. Markus Dohle, the chairman and C.E.O., said that he shared the concern about the price of e-books but believed that publishers are being hasty in making agency-model deals with Apple or Amazon. “The digital transition will take five to seven years,” he said. “For me it’s not a question of a week, or a hundred days.”
Dohle, who is forty-one years old, rose as an executive on the printing side of Bertelsmann A.G., the parent company of Random House, and moved to the U.S. in 2008. He believes that as an outsider he sees the challenges to the industry more clearly. “If you want to make the right decision for the future, fear is not a very good consultant,” he said. Before accepting “a significant change in the business model,” he wants to take time “to talk to all our stakeholders,” including authors, agents, and booksellers. “For us in the publishing industry,” he said, “Amazon has been the fastest-growing customer. I think it’s a great company.” He welcomes Apple’s entrance into e-publishing, but says, “If you do a deal with Apple on the agency model, then it means that you have to do agency deals with all other e-booksellers.”
Michael Shatzkin, the C.E.O. of Idea Logical, a media-consulting firm, believes that Random House is holding out for a better deal. So do many of Dohle’s peers. But Shatzkin, who writes a publishing blog, also noted on the blog that by maintaining the status quo—selling e-books to Amazon at hardcover prices and letting Amazon take a loss—Random House will be making the most of its short-term sales and profits. “Random House will collect more money for each e-book sold than their competitors do while the public will pay less for each Random House e-book,” he wrote.
Dohle has also resisted “windowing,” the practice of delaying the release of e-books, which has become common among other publishers. Windowing isn’t a new idea; publishers have long withheld paperbacks to encourage hardcover sales, and in the movie business DVDs often appear a year after theatrical releases. But with e-books windowing can act against the best interests of publishers and authors. On January 11th, HarperCollins released the hardcover edition of “Game Change,” by John Heilemann and Mark Halperin; the e-book didn’t go on sale until February 23rd. The hardcover’s first print run, seventy thousand copies, sold out soon after it was released, and for nearly three weeks bookstores around the country had no copies in stock. The authors and the publisher were deprived of income, as potential readers found other books to buy.
Amazon’s Russ Grandinetti thinks that windowing is a mistake. “It won’t work,” he says. “Over time, people will read what they want. When a book comes out, authors need all the publicity they can get. To put up an arbitrary barrier and keep it out of the hands of someone who might evangelize that work is a bad business decision for the author. Not to mention frustrating for the customer.”
According to Grandinetti, publishers are asking the wrong questions. “The real competition here is not, in our view, between the hardcover book and the e-book,” he says. “TV, movies, Web browsing, video games are all competing for people’s valuable time. And if the book doesn’t compete we think that over time the industry will suffer. Look at the price points of digital goods in other media. I read a newspaper this morning online, and it didn’t cost me anything. Look at the price of rental movies. Look at the price of music. In a lot of respects, teaching a customer to pay ten dollars for a digital book is a great accomplishment.”
In Grandinetti’s view, book publishers—like executives in other media—are making the same mistake the railroad companies made more than a century ago: thinking they were in the train business rather than the transportation business. To thrive, he believes, publishers have to reimagine the book as multimedia entertainment. David Rosenthal, the publisher of Simon & Schuster, says that his company is racing “to embed audio and video and other value-added features in e-books. It could be an author discussing his book, or a clip from a movie that touches on the book’s topic.” The other major publishers are working on similar projects, experimenting with music, video from news clips, and animation. Publishers hope that consumers will be willing to pay more for the added features. The iPad, Rosenthal says, “has opened up the possibility that we are no longer dealing with a static book. You have tremendous possibilities.”
It remains an open question whether consumers accustomed to paying $9.99 for an e-book will be willing to pay $13.99, or more, regardless of extras. Tim O’Reilly, the e-books publisher, has found that the lower the price the more books he sells. O’Reilly’s company sells e-books as apps for the iPhone for $4.95, and he says that they generate “a lot more volume” and profit than his company loses in hardcover sales.
Jason Epstein believes that publishers have been handed a golden opportunity. The agency model, he says, is really another form of the consortium he proposed a decade ago: “Publishers will be selling digital books directly to the iPad. They are using the iPad as a kind of universal warehouse.” By doing so, they create opportunities to cut payroll and overhead costs. Epstein said that e-books could also restore editorial autonomy. “When I went to work for Random House, ten editors ran it,” he said. “We had a sales manager and sales reps. We had a bookkeeper and a publicist and a president. It was hugely successful. We didn’t need eighteen layers of executives. Digitization makes that possible again, and inevitable.”
mazon seems to believe that in the digital world it might not need publishers at all. In December, the Simon & Schuster author Stephen Covey sold Amazon the exclusive digital rights to two of his best-sellers, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” and “Principle-Centered Leadership.” The books were sold on Amazon by RosettaBooks, and Covey got more than half the net proceeds. One publisher said, “What it did for us was confirm that Amazon sees itself as much as a competitor as a retailer. They have aspirations to be a publisher.”
A close associate of Bezos puts it more starkly: “What Amazon really wanted to do was make the price of e-books so low that people would no longer buy hardcover books. Then the next shoe to drop would be to cut publishers out and go right to authors.” Last year, according to several literary agents, a senior Amazon executive asked for suggestions about whom Amazon might hire as an acquisitions editor. Its Encore program has begun to publish books by self-published authors whose work attracts good reviews on Amazon.com. And in January it offered authors who sold electronic rights directly to Amazon a royalty of seventy per cent, provided they agreed to prices of between $2.99 and $9.99. The offer, one irate publisher said, was meant “to pit authors against publishers.”
Grandinetti concedes that Amazon has tried to make more direct deals with authors: “We’re constantly looking for ways we can do something more efficiently.” He suggested that this was nothing new. “There’s a long history of booksellers in the publishing business,” he said, mentioning Barnes & Noble. Major publishers, he points out, all sell books directly to consumers on their Web sites. “It seems like they’re in our business, so it’s a strange argument to worry about this in the other direction,” he said. But publishers’ sales through their own Web sites are negligible, and though Barnes & Noble’s publishing program antagonized publishers, it did not threaten a wholesale devaluation of their products. O’Reilly believes that publishers have good reason to be anxious. “Amazon is a particularly farsighted, powerful, and ruthless competitor,” he says. “I don’t think we’ve seen a business this competitive in the tech space since Microsoft.”
For the time being, Apple’s entrance into the book market has given publishers a reprieve. A close associate of Bezos said, “Amazon was thinking of direct publishing—until the Apple thing happened. For now, it was enough of a threat that Amazon was forced to negotiate with publishers.”
sked to describe her foremost concern, Carolyn Reidy, of Simon & Schuster, said, “In the digital world, it is possible for authors to publish without publishers. It is therefore incumbent on us to prove our worth to authors every day.” But publishers have been slow to take up new technologies that might help authors. Andrew Savikas, O’Reilly Media’s vice-president for digital initiatives, is shocked that publishers have done so little to create digital applications for their books. “Nothing is stopping publishers from putting apps for books on iPhones,” he said. “There are fifty million iPhones in the world. That’s a great customer base.” Budget-conscious publishers have also reduced the editing and marketing and other services they provide to authors, which has left a vacuum for others to fill. Author Solutions, a self-publishing company in Bloomington, Indiana, has ninety thousand client-authors. For books that attract commercial interest, the company has partnered with publishers like Harlequin to release them through traditional channels, but with more generous royalties.
Jane Friedman, who served as president and C.E.O. of HarperCollins, left in 2008 and established Open Road Integrated Media, an e-book venture. She plans to acquire electronic rights to backlists, sign up new authors (with fifty-per-cent profit-sharing), and form a self-publishing division. “The publishers are afraid of a retailer that can replace them,” Friedman said. “An author needs a publisher for nurturing, editing, distributing, and marketing. If the publishers are cutting back on marketing, which is the biggest complaint authors have, and Amazon stays at eighty per cent of the e-book market, why do you need the publisher?”
Publishers maintain that digital companies don’t understand the creative process of books. A major publisher said of Amazon, “They don’t know how authors think. It’s not in their DNA.” Neither Amazon, Apple, nor Google has experience in recruiting, nurturing, editing, and marketing writers. The acknowledgments pages of books are an efficiency expert’s nightmare; authors routinely thank editors and publishers for granting an extra year to complete a manuscript, for taking late-night phone calls, for the loan of a summer house. These kinds of gestures are unlikely to be welcomed in cultures built around engineering efficiencies.
Good publishers find and cultivate writers, some of whom do not initially have much commercial promise. They also give advances on royalties, without which most writers of nonfiction could not afford to research new books. The industry produces more than a hundred thousand books a year, seventy per cent of which will not earn back the money that their authors have been advanced; aside from returns, royalty advances are by far publishers’ biggest expense. Although critics argue that traditional book publishing takes too much money from authors, in reality the profits earned by the relatively small percentage of authors whose books make money essentially go to subsidizing less commercially successful writers. The system is inefficient, but it supports a class of professional writers, which might not otherwise exist.
Madeline McIntosh, who is Random House’s president for sales, operations, and digital, has worked for both Amazon and book publishers, and finds the two strikingly different. “I think we, as an industry, do a lot of talking,” she said of publishers. “We expect to have open dialogue. It’s a culture of lunches. Amazon doesn’t play in that culture.” It has “an incredible discipline of answering questions by looking at the math, looking at the numbers, looking at the data. . . . That’s a pretty big culture clash with the word-and-persuasion-driven lunch culture, the author-oriented culture.”
Most publishers mistrust Amazon and think it is unnecessarily secretive. It won’t tell them details about customer habits, or the number of Kindles sold, or what it costs to make a Kindle. It won’t even disclose the percentage of revenues its book sales represent, saying only that “media”—movies, music, and books—accounted for fifty-two per cent of sales in 2009.
Publishers say that the negotiations with Apple were less contentious. There were arguments over the price of e-books, with publishers wanting the top price set at seventeen dollars and Apple insisting on fifteen. “Once Apple had determined that they were going to accept the agency model,” a publisher said, “they were very tough: Take it or leave it.” But the Apple people “had a much more agreeable feel than Amazon did. They said they would share some consumer data about buying e-books. We have no such data from Amazon.”
ublishers have another recently converted ally: Google, which not long ago they saw as a mortal threat. In October, 2004, without the permission of publishers and authors, Google announced that, through its Google Books program, it would scan every book ever published, and make portions of the scans available through its search engine. The publishing community was outraged, claiming that Google was stealing authors’ work. A consortium of publishers, along with the Authors Guild, filed a lawsuit, which was resolved only in the fall of 2008, when Google agreed to pay a hundred and twenty-five million dollars to authors and publishers for the use of their copyrighted material. John Sargent, who was part of the publishers’ negotiating team, said the agreement is a huge accomplishment. “The largest player in the Internet game agreed that in order to have content you have to have a license for it and pay for it, and that the rights holder shall control the content,” he said. Whether or not the settlement is ultimately approved by the U.S. courts, Google will open an online e-books store, called Google Editions, by the middle of the year, Dan Clancy, the engineer who directs Google Books, and who will also be in charge of Google Editions, said.
Clancy said that the store’s e-books, unlike those from Amazon or Apple, will be accessible to users on any device. Google Editions will let publishers set the price of their books, he said, and will accept the agency model. Having already digitized twelve million books, including out-of-print titles, Google will have a far greater selection than Amazon or Apple. It will also make e-books available for bookstores to sell, giving “the vast majority” of revenues to the store, Clancy said. He suggested that in trying to dominate the market Amazon and Apple were taking the wrong approach to business online. “It’s much more of an open ecosystem, where you find a way for bricks-and-mortar stores to participate in the future digital world of books,” he said. “We’re quite comfortable having a diverse range of physical retailers, whereas most of the other players would like to have a less competitive space, because they’d like to dominate.”
or now, many publishers believe that they have won the chess match that Sargent started. “We have three behemoths now competing,” the C.E.O. of one house said. “So one of them can’t force us to do anything unless the others go along.” Early sales of the iPad are promising: Apple said that more than three hundred thousand sold the first day, and analysts have guessed that between five and seven million will be sold this year. And a dozen other digital reading devices were on display at the Consumer Electronics Show, in Las Vegas, in January, providing more competition for the Kindle.
Publishers have another reason to hope. The recession has changed the thinking of Silicon Valley companies, shaking their faith in advertising as their only source of revenue. YouTube has begun charging for some independent movies, in an effort to compete with Netflix, and its managers know that to succeed it must have professionally produced content that advertisers—and consumers—will pay for. As digital companies begin charging for content, they are met in the middle by old-media companies looking for ways to charge for what they produce. The incentives for old and new media to form partnerships seem to converge.
“Ultimately, Apple is in the device—not the content—business,” the Apple insider said. “Steve Jobs wants to make sure content people are his partner. Steve is in the I win/you win school. Jeff Bezos is in the I win/you lose school.” Jobs recently met separately with New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Time Inc. executives to demonstrate the iPad’s potential to make money for newspapers and magazines. Jobs, who had a liver transplant last year and has battled pancreatic cancer, has begun to think about his legacy, the insider said. “He’s in a hurry to create in the next two years what he may have been thinking about in the next ten years. What keeps him going is his vision. Nothing is going to stop him, except death.” The insider said that Jobs was pleased with his advocacy of publishers: “He feels like he’s their champion.”