Sharpen your pitchfork

According to the Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun Mission Statement, the confluence of cheap populist rage, current events, and humanities boosterism is right in this blog's wheelhouse. Consequently, witness the backlash against the modern business school education. Matthew Lynn of Bloomberg launches this salvo, titled "M.B.A. Schools Have Nothing to Offer in New World." Bold language! Here's a money quote:

the intellectual tools that led us into the financial meltdown were largely invented within academia. Complex models for pricing risk created the market for the options and derivatives contracts that have caused so much trouble in the past year.

The business schools took something that was mysterious and unknowable -- risk -- and tried to make it as easy to count as peas in a pod. By doing so, they encouraged a whole generation of young men and women to go into investment banking armed with the belief that they had mastered risk, that it had been tamed and brought under control.

The truth, of course, turned out to be different. Bankers can no more tame risk than sailors can tame the oceans. All they can hope to do is steer a safe course through it.

Then, over at The Big Money, Matthew Stewart offers his dirge, "RIP, MBA," and reminds us of the Randian objectivist underpinnings of the modern Wall Street philosophy. He writes:

The reality is that business school is now chiefly a community of intention. It brings together people who share certain career aspirations—for the most part, to make big bucks—and occupies their time teaching them a few technical things that they don't need to know, along with a code of conduct that says, in essence, whatever is legal is ethical; and if it makes money, it's a positive duty. It's now clear that we would have all been much better off if, instead of cloistering these people on fancy campuses with world-class golf courses, we'd have sent them off to do two years of national service.

Now, I don't have a lot of experience with business schools, so I won't profess to know whether Mr. Lynn or Mr. Stewart are on the ball or not (although my instincts point to an entire system built on moral bankruptcy). But speaking purely academically, it's not so crazy to rethink the way we teach business; if it's not working, it's not working. I mean, Newtonian physics gave way to relativity, which will give way to whatever wacky idea they come up with next. Formalism gave way poststructuralism which gave way to, I don't know, performatism? Back to formalism? Whatever. The point is, when theories are discredited (and it appears to me that a lot of what business schools are putting out there has been discredited), new ones need to rise up and take their place. In the new world order, there's still a place for business education. Just as long as it doesn't look like what it looks like today.

Incidentally, I read the Stewart piece and had this really nagging feeling that I had read something very similar before. In fact, I had! It was this piece in the Atlantic from June 2006, called "The Management Myth," by the same writer. The gist: just study philosophy.

Great idea in action

The Washington Post checks in with a story about two young entrepreneurs (and BC grads) who have a "green" wireless Internet startup called Anaptyx. The gist: instead of having 20 separate wireless routers in 20 different units in an apartment building, sign up the whole building for one network with one or two high-powered routers. It's one of those ideas that makes so much sense that it's almost impossible to believe that no one has come up with it before. Hopefully it works out for these guys.

And since I'm nothing if not a shameless self-promoter, here's a story about the Boston College Venture Competition that I wrote. It features Anaptyx, as well as a bunch of other pretty cool startups. And it's very well-written.

Ding ding ding!

The Herald is alright, but nobody does punny slammers like the New York Post.

If you know Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, you know that "Boar War" is my favorite.

Uh duh

So the Globe checks in with this story about an industrious young go-getter who's leveraging Facebook to petition the MBTA to put their transportation system on Google Maps. (Apparently, teh Google has a Transit site for a number of cities where you can get directions that include public transportation options. Pretty sweet, eh?)

As you can tell from the title of this post, this is a no-brainer. I've complained about Boston being a rinky-dink town before, and it would be one thing if the Hub were lagging behind New York and Chicago. But Lexington, Cape Cod, and Framingham have their transit systems on Google, and Boston doesn't. Huh? Cmon, guys!

In the meantime, if you're looking for something slightly helpful, here's a map of town with the T superimposed on it. Not quite the same, but it works!

teh awesome

Photoshopped?

. . . without news

Funny.

h/t

Liveblogging my wisdom tooth surgery

9:35 Well, not literally, as I'll be under while the actual surgery is going on. And I'll probably be sort of loopy immediately after. But I'll be home from work for two days, recovering, so you, my precious readers, will get an inside look at what it's like to convalesce from getting four wisdom teeth out. Come back later for more updates!

1:40 "A little bleeding and seepage from the surgical sites is normal and expected." What a nice little euphemism for "you're going to look like one of the zombie people from 28 Days Later." I feel bad for the girl I talked to at CVS. Anyway, I'm home, cooking up some noodles so I can take my narcotic drugs.

4:42 Just woke up from a napski. I have to tell you, I was hoping the Vicodin would pack a little more punch than it actually is. That said, perhaps my pain is so transcendentally intense that even the most powerful narcotics are powerless against it? That could be true.

Anyway, I've been thinking of a few things. I don't remember going under, and I definitely remember being awake for quite some time, but I don't remember the surgeon going into my mouth. Is this how anesthesia works nowadays? I always vividly remember asking them to keep the teeth, which I have to assume is not standard protocol, as I didn't get the teeth back.

Talking to all my friends who have had their wisdom teeth out is making me QUITE paranoid. Like, I didn't get that little water-shooting gizmo to clean out the holes in my mouth. I even asked if I needed it, and the oral surgery folks said no. I trust them, because they're professionals, but still . . .

Also, I'm second guessing every little thing I do with my mouth. What if I swallow something too vigorously? What if I move my tongue around too much? Should I be talking? Help!

5:30 The human mouth is really a foul and loathsome thing. I recommend not coming into contact with it unless absolutely necessary.

7:24 I suppose I'm obligated to post this.


8:15 Nobody told me this was going to be a Kafka-esque nightmare of confusion and self-doubt. When are these gaping holes in my mouth going to stop bleeding? Soon, I hope! Should I not have eaten that oatmeal? Am I drinking too much water? Not enough? Is this blog going to turn into nonsensical rantings of a lunatic mind?

9:42 Not much more to say except that my mouth is starting to hurt again. I think I'll pop some more narcotic drugs before I go to bed. Sweet dreams, Angelface.

Gossip Girl is trying to convince us that Lily is all Rufus ever wanted of a girl

The Gossip Girl running diary is back. I got a weird vibe from this ep. Don't know why.

8:01 Awful awful awful. It’s snowing in the opening scene tonight. Nooooooooo!

Chuck is wearing a plaid button down. Ironic? Post modern? Post post modern? And of course he makes a gross “lick her wounds” double entendre. Chuck, you cad!

8:04 Oh hey, it’s the art purchaser that Rufus went on a date with. I totally forgot about her. I wonder how they’re going to fit that other woman in. Remember, he got her confused with the art purchaser lady?

Lily: "Let’s make lists." Has this ever worked out? It sort of reminds me of that Lifetime movie, “7 Things to Do Before I’m 30.” Lists are like radioactive dynamite!

8:07 Nice one, V. Getting Nate ensconced back with his shady-ass family is almost as bad as making lists.

8:10 Commercial for Adventureland just came on. Remind me to write an entirely different post about this.

8:13 Of course Nate assumed his family hated him without actually like, asking. Then again, maybe they do. And of course the Archibalds play touch football. “Football and distinguished public service. That’s what Archibalds do!”

8:15 Is Serena old enough to know who Trent Reznor is? She’s my brother’s age, and I’m certain he has no effing clue.

8:19 Sorry if the times are messed up. I paused the show to try to read lily’s list. Nothing to write home about, I suppose. Do you think the John Henry on her list is the owner of the Red Socks, or the steel-driving man?

I don’t like it when storylines drift too far toward bad Serena’s past. I’ve got an ideal I’m trying to maintain here, GG writers!

8:26 Are we really to believe that the frontman for Lincoln Hawk only has one index card of gal pals? He’s dated at least two women in the course of this show already! And he was married for a good portion of that time!

8:28 Chuck: "I’m not gonna play where’s Waldorf all night." Delicious!

8:30 Wow. B is crying to the dean of Sarah Lawrence? Wow.

8:31 And there we go. Blair admits to defacing herself. Now I feel bad for all the girls at Aarah Lawrence who are watching. Then again, who am I kidding. If B slandered Boston College on Gossip Girl, I’d be out of my seat cheering.

8:32 17 Again? Didn’t they make this movie already and call it 13 Going On 30?

8:35 B: "Garcon with the bubble butt"! Please don’t stop this meltdown, Serena.

Also, what is it with people rifling through people’s bags on this show? I’ve never rifled through one bag in my whole life!

8:38 Can’t V cut Nate a little slack? His dad is in prison! He helped put him there!

8:46 Thanks, writers, for not forgetting that Nate and B dated for like, ever. This show was starting to have less continuity than the Simpsons.

8:49 I like Serena with this flat hair. On a related note, I just got my new rolling stone in the mail (we get it for free, for some reason.) All I can say is, ooh la la crème!

8:52 Cmon, V. You knew what you were getting into. Don’t act like Nate being a feckless drip is any kind of surprise.

8:56 What makes Jenny think that Nate and V belong together? They probably belong apart.

Ok, I legitimately laughed out loud when Lily read the wrong side of the napkin. That was cheap, writers.

8:59 Nate and B getting back together should be the exact type of thing that would infuriate me. And yet I feel oddly serene. What gives?

Crazy pills

Another week, another writer trying to make sense of the financial crisis. At bat is one of my favorites: Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone, with an offering titled "The Big Takeover," and subtitled "The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution ." There's a lot of high-quality vitriol as only Mr. Taibbi can deliver it, much of which I'm sure my more banking-sympathetic readers will find over the top. But he's got a great point toward the end, channeling a bit of the Shock Doctrine:

As complex as all the finances are, the politics aren't hard to follow. By creating an urgent crisis that can only be solved by those fluent in a language too complex for ordinary people to understand, the Wall Street crowd has turned the vast majority of Americans into non-participants in their own political future. There is a reason it used to be a crime in the Confederate states to teach a slave to read: Literacy is power. In the age of the CDS and CDO, most of us are financial illiterates. By making an already too-complex economy even more complex, Wall Street has used the crisis to effect a historic, revolutionary change in our political system — transforming a democracy into a two-tiered state, one with plugged-in financial bureaucrats above and clueless customers below.

Do with that what you will. I'm getting crazy-pilled out.

Six years

Today marks the sixth anniversary of the day President Bush launched the war in Iraq. Regardless of your politics, please take a minute, or more than a minute, to remember that there are thousands of Americans, as well as soldiers fighting for our allies, who are over there ready to die in our name. And each one of them has friends and family back home. And then there are innocent Iraqi civilians whose property and lives are at risk every day. If you're someone who prays, these people deserve to be in your prayers.

More music is my imaginary friend

So did you ever let some music fall through the cracks of your normal iPod rotation? You get in a little bit of a rut, and then after a few months, you realize "Hey, I haven't listened to Butch Walker in a while." And then you listen to a few songs and you wonder how you could have gone so long without listening to this music that you love so much? And then you see that Butch is coming through Boston and you jump on a pair of tickets? And then the show is effing awesome and it pumps you up for the rest of the week?

"Here Comes the . . ." is burning a hole in my noise-canceling headphones. I can't get enough of it! It's got soul, it's got hooks. Bee-Dub is the greatest. And I was thrilled to find a video of a performance on Ellen, of all places. Listen to some Butch Walker.

DD&U in the news

So your favorite blogger was interviewed by Meg Tirrell, a reporter from Bloomberg, the other day (not in my blogger capacity, unfortunately. Someday, though). Here's the story. It's an interesting little piece about Kodak's strategy for remaining relevant in a post-film world, and it captured my imagination for three reasons:

1) I'm in it! Thousands of people are going to read this story and think "Wow, this guy has some insightful things to say about business and marketing. He make say 'like' a little too much, but that's only an indicator of his authenticity and credibility." I hope to somehow leverage this article into a permanent role as spokesman for Young People Everywhere.

2) Kidding, of course. It was something of a revelatory experience, though, to be interviewed and then see my words in print. As the guy that's usually doing the interview, I usually think nothing of distilling long conversations with subjects into a few quotes and paraphrases that fit the narrative that I'm crafting. That's just the way it goes. Thinking back on the conversation I had with Ms. Tirrell, it's interesting to see which quotes she picked, which she left behind, and what she decided to take generally out of the interview. Which is not to say she picked bad quotes or took me out context. They're good quotes, completely in line with the rest of the interview. I found it fascinating to have a more inside view of the choices that another writer made. What fun!

3) In terms of the article's content, I think it lines up with a lot of what I've been writing recently about newspapers, which is a philosophy that can be applied to pretty much any business in a time of transition. As you've heard me say (or seen me write) before, newspapers are in the news business, not the paper business, but that's a realization that many newspapers may have come to too late. Here's an illuminating quote from Tim Calkins, a marketing professor at Northwestern:

“What Kodak stood for was really memories,” he said. “That is still an incredibly important thing even though the technology has changed.”

A company like Kodak had choice (and maybe it still does) of being in the memory business, or the photograph business, just like way back when railroads had the choice to be in the transportation business or the steel-rail-and-wooden-tie business, or any of a number of other examples. One choice gives you the agility to change with the times and the tastes of the consumer. The other ties you to what eventually will become a dead, or at most a niche, technology. This is why I'm amazed to read things like this. Exxon will spend $29 billion this year on "finding, drilling and refining fossil fuels and chemicals," but then complain that research into alternative energy sources is too dependent on government underwriting. Exxon, one of the richest companies in the world, has decided that it's in the oil business, not the energy business. Remember that.

Music is my imaginary friend

Hmm. Those last two posts put me in a pretty bleak mood. So here's an appropriately bleak song from the aforementioned greatest album ever created, Bon Jovi's Keep the Faith. I think that after the past few years of watching unbridled executive authority exercised by craven and evil lunatics, and unchecked greed on the part of our Wall Street overlords, this is a good tune. After all, aren't we all just swimming in the sand, praying for some holy water to wash these sins from off our hands?

Listen to Dry County.

Bon Jovi - Dry County

. . . without news

Here's a story that ran in the Times yesterday, putting in print the macabre parlor game of conjecturing which major city will be the first to have its newspaper fail. It sends a shiver down one's spine.

Of course, given the financial straits that many newspapers are in, it's not inconceivable that a big city (Seattle? Boston? San Francisco? Really?) could be without a daily newspaper. It's very hard to imagine what the news landscape would be like in that city, thought. I'm going to go ahead and say it would be a combination of Mad Max, the wedding dress sale at Filene's Basement, and the upcoming season of Real World/Road Rules Challenge.

I liked this article, though, because (even though it doesn't realize it), it wanders around the outskirts of one of the main problems with the newspaper world perspective:

Nearly every large paper in the country prints fewer pages and fewer articles, and many have eliminated entire sections. Bureaus in foreign capitals and even Washington have closed, and papers have jettisoned film criticism, book reviews and coverage of local news outside their home markets.

In the heady days of 20 percent profit margins, it made sense to start new sections about books, style, travel, food, et cetera. It made sense when the newspaper was the most convenient, most thorough source of current information. That's obviously no longer the case. The internet puts restaurant and book reviews, classified ads, ruminations on style, and pretty much everything a newspaper does, at a person's fingertips. Even the type of commentary that's the bread and butter of newspaper op-ed pages is on the way to being rendered obsolete. Why read Tom Friedman when there's an entire blogosphere filled with writers who are smarter than him?

Newspapers are paring down the functions that the internet renders redundant. News-gathering, of course, is not, and can not, be one of those functions. This is not to say that internet-based news outfits can't do a good job of reporting; they clearly can. Whether it's economically sustainable is yet to be seen. What I mean is that, going forward, established newspapers, if they want to survive, need to start looking at news as their niche, in the same way that classifieds are the niche of Craigslist and reviews are the niche of Yelp. As I've said before, and will surely say again, newspapers aren't in the paper business or the website business. They're in the news business. If the rest has to be made extraneous, oh well.

Then again, when you've got the coordinator of Columbia Journalism School's reporting and writing program saying things like "F*ck new media," maybe all might actually be lost.

Bubbles can burst?!

Remember, that was Bart Simpson's incredulous query when the Repo Depot came to take away BetterThanTv.com's ping pong tables and pinball machines after the company went bankrupt, and Milhouse said "Well, I guess the bubble burst." Fans of The Simpsons will also remember that the repo man observing the action with Bart and Milhouse replies "Yeah, but it's a golden age for the repo business, one that shall never end," and then lights a cigar with what we can only presume is a $100 bill.

Mmm, that's good satire.

Of course, that episode (featuring a web TV startup that distributes stock certificates out of a paper towel dispenser) was a send-up of the dot-com bubble, but the repo man might as well have been a Wall Street banker. After all, wasn't the era of securitized mortgages and credit default swaps, built on the rock-solid foundation of ever-rising home prices, a golden age that would never end? Nobody could have predicted that home prices would eventually stop rising, that predatory lending would lead to foreclosures, and that there's only one logical conclusion to a Ponzi scheme!

All of this is by way of introducing this doozy of a story that ran in the Globe yesterday. Here's the lede:

WASHINGTON - The federal agency that insures bank deposits, which is asking for emergency powers to borrow up to $500 billion to take over failed banks, is facing a potential major shortfall in part because it collected no insurance premiums from most banks from 1996 to 2006.

Let's refresh: the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation was set up after the Great Depression to protect people's deposits in banks. If your bank failed for any reason, the FDIC insured your money up to a certain threshold ($250,000 today). The confidence that ordinary Americans had that their money was safe prevented the sort of runs on banks that occurred in the early part of the Depression and contributed to more than 4,000 bank failures in 1933. Bank failures are bad. Deposit insurance is good. Like other insurance plans, participating banks pay premiums to the FDIC, which goes into the fund that would, you know, pay for the deposits that are lost when a bank fails. It's easy.

It's a shame most banks didn't pay premiums for a decade. The FDIC could kinda use that money about now. I'll let James Chessen, the chief economist for the American Bankers Associant, explain the reasoning:

"[T]he fund became so large that interest income on the fund was covering the premiums for almost a decade." There were relatively few bank failures and no projection of the current economic collapse, he said. "Obviously hindsight is 20-20," Chessen said.

Isn't that so typical? Of course Congress wouldn't authorize fees on its enablers in the finance industry. Why do the legwork of actually paying your insurance premiums when you can kick up your feet and let the interest do it for you? After all, we were living in a golden age! One that would never end!

I love that dirty water

A couple relatively Boston-related links for you all.

## The Globe's Braniac blog offers up this post about conflicting schools of landscape architecture thought on Boston's City Hall Plaza. Apparently, the Cultural Landscape Foundation has designated City Hall a "Marvel of Modernism." Problem is, the local architectural community doesn't really want City Hall Plaza put on any pedestals. You know, because they hate the place. Regular readers of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun know my true feelings about the City Hall building. By logic, these same strong feelings should extend to City Hall Plaza. And they do! This was all true, even before I learned that the plaza was designed by I.M. Pei. How can you not preserve a space designed by the only non–Frank Gehry contemporary architect that anyone can recognize by name? Ridiculous!

## This isn't as much about Boston as it is about New York. But by comparison, it makes the Hub of the Universe look wicked good. Here's a report from Rolling Stone about my former favorite radio station, 92.3 K-Rock. You can click the link for all the detes, but quickly: 92.3 is switching formats from mostly-classic-rock-and-some-contemporary-stuff to Top-40. This is after switching to mostly-classic-rock-and-some-contemporary-stuff from mostly-talk-and-rock-on-the-weekends. And this was after switching to mostly-talk-and-rock-on-the-weekends from just straight up contemporary alternative rock. Sad times for the rock faithful in the tri-state area. Apparently, the only rock station left in New York (not counting classic rock station 104.3) is something called 101.9 WRXP. I listened to the radio every day for something like 13 years in Jersey, and I ain't never heard of 101.9.

What does this have to do with Boston? Not too much, except for the fact that the Cradle of Liberty is blessed with at least three alternative rock stations: 97.7/107.3 WAAF, 104.1 WBCN, and 92.1 WFNX. Now, I'm sure there are a lot of demographic factors involved with 92.3's change in format. However, comma, I kind of have a hard time processing the idea that Boston has more quality rock stations than the greatest metropolis in the galaxy.

First impressions

Here's a fun list: the 25 most epic opening rock tracks. It should sufficiently pump you up.

In today's age of individual iTunes downloads and, heavens forfend, music piracy, the order in which an album's tracks are organized doesn't matter as much as it did back in your mom and dad's era. But if you think of bands as collections of artists, and albums as tapestries, lovingly crafted out of well, smaller tapestries, then you can appreciate how important the order of tracks can be. And when it comes to rock, you want something that'll melt some faces from the starting gate. A quick jaunt through my music library turns up these all-time favorite opening tracks.

"Tell That Mick He Just Made My List of Things to Do Today," Fall Out Boy, Take This to Your Grave
This tune, in addition to featuring some fist-pumping guitar riffs and quintessentially emo lyrics, is followed by two other tremendous songs, "Dead on Arrival" and "Grand Theft Autumn," making the rare epic-opening-tracks trifecta.


"I Believe," Bon Jovi, Keep the Faith
All that needs to be said is that this is a sweeping anthem that happens to be the first track on the greatest album ever written by humans. About this, there can be no debate.

Bon Jovi |MTV Music

"Hands Down," Dashboard Confessional, A Mark, A Mission, A Brand, A Scar
When the song that a band consistently uses as a show-closer also happens to be the first song on an album, I think that adds up to a pretty good opening track. Also, "Hands Down" is followed by "Rapid Hope Loss" and "As Lovers Go," making another maybe-not-so-rare opening track trifecta.

Dashboard Confessional |MTV Music

Hmm . . . this is getting a little long. How about I stretch this bad boy out into a couple posts? That sounds like a capital idea.

One more Watchmen commentary amongst foundations makes little difference

I saw Watchmen on Friday. Like all good fanboys, I was tremendously excited, but also trying to temper my expectations, for fear of having my hopes and dreams crushed.

I thought it was great, but then again, I'm not a very critical viewer of movies. Spencer Ackerman has a nice and thoughtful post about what the movie did well and not so well that I'll pass along. I more or less agree with most of it (how equivocal).

If you've read the book, or are familiar with the seemingly interminable struggle to get the movie made, you can understand that the fact that Watchmen movie exists, and that it makes narrative sense, is in itself a triumph. Matt Yglesias pretty much made this point yesterday: the curse of Watchmen is that it's only 12 issues, so there's a temptation to look at it as capturable on film. It is, in a way; the current movie is proof. But you don't get the reputation of being the greatest comic ever without being incredibly dense and nuanced; so much of the original wound up getting left on the cutting room floor (or who knows, not even being filmed), that the book and the movie are essentially different stories. Both good. But different. Here's a money quote:

All-in-all, I’m torn between immense admiration for the film and regret that it was done as a movie at all. In retrospect, I kind of wish we’d instead gotten a 12 part HBO maxi-series that was really uncompromising and didn’t leave anything out.

I was very pleased to read this comment, to say the least. Not only because I agree with it, but because I've always felt that the actual best graphic novel ever written deserves the sort of high quality cable treatment that we've seen out of shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men.

I'm talking about Preacher.

Wasn't Preacher, the tale of the minister Jesse Custer, who was imbued with the power to command men by an angel/demon hybrid spirit, built for a five-season run on HBO or Showtime? Preacher is a comic that does exactly what comics are supposed to do, and it does it better than anyone: create a unique, American folklore. It's got God. It's got cowboys. It's got vampires. It's got a cross-country quest. Fast cars. Trucks. Women. Booze. Watchmen is a superbly crafted tale with a powerful political message, but it's very firmly rooted in the 1980s and the Cold War. Watchmen engages history to that point, but in the end, it ends. Preacher, in this writer's myopic opinion, is a little more ambitious in its tackling of wider themes of love, friendship, faith, and Americanness. It obviously can afford to be, being 66 issues in length. Short of doing an actual close reading (sorry, dearest readers, I'm not going to do that much homework for a dopey comic book blog post), I feel like I took more out of Preacher than I did Watchmen. Then again, I'm a romantic.

But this is all to say, the series has the right number of twists and turns, memorable characters, huge explosions, emotional moments, and cliffhangers to make an awesome, unrated television series . . .

And of course, in the process of writing that paragraph, I decided to Wikipedia Preacher to see if, in fact, there were any film projects in the works. And of course there was an HBO series in development, and of course it got canned in favor of a big screen film, the script of which was still being written as recently as January. Punch me in the face. They better not mess this thing up.

Music is my imaginary friend

Listen to a little Lostprophets.

. . . without news

One of the sub-genres of scare stories that has cropped up in this age of doom and gloom that's very near to my heart, as a pseudo-journalist, is that of "the death of journalism." Now, newspapers were in bad shape as a business before this recession. A waning tide lowers all boats, though, and newspapers have the problem of also being a leaky skiff, at best.

So it seems that not a week goes by without another alarming think piece fretting over the sad state of newspapers today, and our sad future should newspapers go the way of Lehman Brothers or the walkman. (Let me warm you up with one from Time magazine from early February, in which Walter Isaacson proposes an iTunes-esque micropayment system for individual bits of news content.)

As a service to you, my darling readers, I'm starting this recurring feature, where I'll present some of the better pieces that tackle the future of journalism. I've got a dog in this race, guys, so you can at least count on me having actually thought critically about this stuff.

(And in case you're wondering about the title of this particular recurring feature, since I don't often explain these things [you guys know that "Zelda Warriors" are links, right? You know, like the hero from the Zelda Nintendo games?] allow me. When I was the news editor at the Heights, the independent student newspaper of Boston College, I used to have a little catchphrase: you can't spell "newspaper" without "news." It was a way of making my section seem more appealing, compared to the glitzier sports and features section. As you'll come to see, that phrase more or less sums up my view of the newspaper industry.)

Anyway, this installment is about a piece that appeared on the New Republic's website, by Yochai Benkler. It's a response to an earlier story speculating that the decline of newspapers would result in a proliferation of corruption by our politicians. Benkler refutes this premise, and lays out a sensible vision for the future of journalism, one where we get our reporting from a melange of different forms, ranging from traditional newspaper operations, to TPM-like online outfits, to motivated individual citizens. Money quote:

But policy interventions, if any, need to be designed for this networked environment of diverse models of news production. More important than a national fund to assure the continued existence of certain journals in their present mode would be transparency regulation that would assure that data about public action and behavior will be made available, at all levels of government--federal, state, and local--to the public . . .

As money as that quote is, it's not actually the reason I liked Benkler's piece. What I really like was his calling out of the pastoral ideal of journalism that today's worry-mongers hold up as perilously close to being lost forever. Moneyer quote:

Two weeks ago and then last Friday, The Washington Post was still allowing George Will to make false claims about the analysis of a scientific study of global sea ice levels without batting an eyelid, reflecting the long-standing obfuscation of the scientific consensus on the causes of climate change by newspapers that, in the name of balanced reporting, reported the controversy rather than the actual scientific consensus.

You don't even have to look closely at any newspaper to see examples of this pernicious little habit of reporting the controversy as opposed to like, you know, the actual facts (any story on intelligent design can serve as a case study). Glenn Greenwald consistently does a good job of pointing out this behavior, like in this withering takedown of former NBC White House correspondent David Gregory, who said this about the media's performance in the lead-up to the Iraq war: "I think there are a lot of critics who think that . . . . if we did not stand up and say this is bogus, and you're a liar, and why are you doing this, that we didn't do our job. I respectfully disagree. It's not our role."

None of this is to say that there's no good journalism out there. There's plenty. But it doesn't help to pretend that the way we've been doing things is some Platonic ideal of journalism. There are some branches that can be pruned in this present crisis, and it'd be a shame to waste the opportunity.

Wall Street's cosmic cube

When I'm not busy peddling half-informed liberal vitriol, I like to think that I'm helping y'all learn a little something about the world around ya. In that spirit, please read Felix Salmon's cover story from this month's Wired. It's about David Li's Gaussian copula function, the formula that, simply put, allowed Wall Street to easily quantify the risk inherent in heretofore unquantifiably complex pools of securities. Money quote:

As a result, just about anything could be bundled and turned into a triple-A bond—corporate bonds, bank loans, mortgage-backed securities, whatever you liked. The consequent pools were often known as collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs. You could tranche that pool and create a triple-A security even if none of the components were themselves triple-A. You could even take lower-rated tranches of other CDOs, put them in a pool, and tranche them—an instrument known as a CDO-squared, which at that point was so far removed from any actual underlying bond or loan or mortgage that no one really had a clue what it included. But it didn't matter. All you needed was Li's copula function.

Salmon's lede references the Nobel prize that, had things played out differently, Li might have been eligible for. This allusion can't be accidental. Alfred Nobel, plagued by the guilt of inventing an instrument of both great utility and great destruction (dynamite, in this case), famously willed the majority of the fortune he earned to fund the Nobel prizes, which would reward great achievements in science, literature, and the furtherance of peace. It's actually refreshing that in this time of tremendous crisis, with heaps of blame to be divvied up on a great many guilty parties, Li's name hasn't really come up much. After all, it's not his fault that his creation was turned into an engine of devastation.

Zelda warriors: Crazy pills edition

Remember the presidential campaign? Those were some nutty days. The epically crazy stuff coming out of the McCain campaign, combined with the Bush administration taking advantage of its last opportunities to show its genuine and sincere contempt not only for the American people but all of creation, truly made right-thinking people feel as if they were, in fact, taking crazy pills.

You'd think that once an intelligent, thoughtful, compassionate, and capable individual took a seat in the Oval Office, our addled brains would get a rest from what can only be described as a clandestine spiking of our Pepsi Max with some sort of pernicious insanity-inducing potion. Alas, that's not the case, and you've got the economy to thank for that. If you're a regular reader of Dangerous, Dirty, and Unfun, you can probably tell where I stand on the whole "giving billions of dollars to the guys that burned the world economy to the ground" thing, so these posts won't beat you over the head with the sheer injustice being perpetrated on regular American people. However, comma, there's enough unadulterated lunacy out there that I don't have to put up a "wait, why wouldn't we want to help people pay off their mortgages instead of letting them foreclose" post every other day.

## Now, I'm not an economist, but I do know a little something about like, logic. Where I grew up, when you took someone's money in exchange for a service, you provided that service. And if you didn't, there were consequences. AIG, obviously, didn't grow up where I did. Imagine if I sold you a glass of lemonade on a hot day. But instead of giving you your lemonade, I just took your quarter and put a $1,000 bet on the Washington Generals. Is that not what AIG did?

## This ABC News story has had the S flogged out of it throughout the liberal blogosphere for the past couple days, so I won't add any more than my own few cents: we should all be so lucky, that we can choose to be latter-day John Galts and work less (and cost other people their jobs) in a recession, all to, I don't know, give Obama the finger? Prevent poor people from getting health insurance? What's the angle here?

## Here is, incidentally, a dose of sane pills, courtesy of Boston College's own Alicia Munnell: Social Security isn't in a crisis. And it would be utter maniacal insanity to even consider cutting benefits.

Music is my imaginary friend

Sorry for the lull in posting, gentle readers. I was off doing some actual like, professional writing. But I couldn't ignore you guys! In honor of it still being winter, listen to some AFI.