What should your business card say?

Take it away, Platters!

The question: should I upgrade to Lion?

Normally I would just do it. In my case I’ve been slow because I had one legacy PPC app – Expression – which I’ve used for drawing for years. It will die when Rosetta dies, leaving me locked out of all that work forevermore. I recently overcame that problem by manually exporting all of that stuff as Illustrator docs. (That was fun!) So now I’m ready. But. Reading the Lion reviews, a lot of people have had problems. Adobe CS stuff reported to run sluggish on some systems – and not just old ones. A few folks have apparently had their computers turn into bricks. It seems like I might have to do more than just back up to TimeMachine before making the shift. Maybe do the whole CC clone thing, for safety? My system is not exactly old – an early 2009 iMac. But it’s not exactly new. And there doesn’t seem to be any pattern to the problems I see reported. New systems. Old systems. Some folks have had no problems. Some folks have had serious problems and retreated to Snow Leopard.

And for what? Lion seems mostly to be geared to 1) making my iMac more like an iPad; 2) enabling easier filesharing.

Re: 1). Seems like I might need to buy one of those Magic Trackpads so I can do iPad style ‘gesturing’. That would be snazzy, I suppose. But when I bought a Magic Mouse some months ago the Bluetooth proved so unreliable – I could only make it work about 80% of the time – that it now sits in a drawer. Can I use my Wacom Intuos3 drawing tablet instead? (Will it even still work right for regular old drawing? Reports vary!)

Re: 2). I need MobileMe (formerly .mac, now iCloud) because it’s my main email address. Been that since 2003. Other than that, it’s not like I need all that much bleeding edge filesharing capability.

So I feel like maybe I’m going to spend $29, plus buy a new external hard drive to guard against the outside possibility of my computer turning into a brick, just to make sure I can keep my email running. Plus no doubt some great new features, but I’m not exactly dying for any particular thing Lion does.

I’ve been preparing to do it because I thought I didn’t have an option. But now Apple seems to be saying I can keep my email even if I’m not 100% Lion or iOS6 on all my devices after the drop dead June 30 date. I just lose MobileMe storage. Inconvenient, to be sure.

Maybe I should wait for Mountain Lion and hope at least the bug reports will be more favorable (even as the iPad-ification of the Mac proceeds apace?)

Please feel free to report your experiences with Lion, fellow CT’ers. I’m really unsure how to take the reviews in the App Store. They are like reviews of political books. A lot of five stars and one stars. It’s confusing. Obviously people who have a really bad experience are more naturally motivated to leave an angry review than are people who have a painless experience and hardly notice it even happened. So I have a hard time telling whether negative reviews are representative. All the major reviews of Lion from ZDnet, MacUser and the like have been broadly favorable. But there is an undercurrent of user dissatisfaction in lots of forums. Let’s add to that with a confused cacophony of CT comments!

Caldwell seemingly considers Hayek to be arguing little more in The Road to Serfdom than that Soviet-style command planning is wholly incompatible with a democratic polity. Indeed, taking Caldwell’s statements at face value, he would—at least when wearing his editor of Hayek’s Collected Works hat— seemingly consider Hayek’s book to have scant relevance whatsoever to contemporary debates over the welfare state and the Obama administration…. Did Hayek intend his argument in The Road to Serfdom to have exclusive applicability to a system of full-blown command planning (apparently Caldwell’s position) or also to — as Limbaugh and company would seemingly have it—have ready applicability to the mixed economy and welfare state … ?

there is much clear evidence that Hayek himself had always intended his argument to apply with equal stringency against command planning and the welfare state alike (see, e.g., Hayek 1948, [1956] 1994, 1960, and [1976] 1994). Indeed, as we shall show, Hayek—during the 1940s and after—frequently argued that the logic supposedly set into play by any policy of persisting with the mixed economy, Keynesian demand management policy, and welfare state practices would lead to full-blown central planning. Importantly, Hayek frequently claimed that the “middle of the road” policies—pretty much the welfare state and demand management (Toye 2004)—adopted by the 1945–51 Labour Government in Britain aptly illustrated the veracity of his thesis in The Road to Serfdom.

And Bruce Caldwell’s response (not paywalled):

Though Hayek had many targets in the book, the idea that socialism – state ownership of the means of production – is compatible with political freedom was certainly a chief one. … at Hayek’s dire warnings about the future take as their starting point a system of full socialism, that is, a system in which there is state ownership of the means of production … the examples of western Europe do not fit: none of them embraced a comprehensive system of planning. Perhaps needless to say, I stand by my statement … that “a welfare state is not socialism” (Caldwell, in Hayek 2007, 31). The distinction is absolutely essential if we are to understand the logic of Hayek’s argument correctly

Four years later, Hayek would offer his own vision of a new society … founded on liberal principles in his book The Constitution of Liberty. In chapter 17 of that work, in his precisely titled “The Decline of Socialism and the Rise of the Welfare State,” … Hayek asserts that the welfare state had replaced socialism as the chief enemy of liberty. He begins by noting that “socialism in the old definite sense is now dead in the western world” and that “If, fifteen years ago, doctrinaire socialism appeared as the main danger to liberty, today it would be tilting at windmills to direct one’s argument against it” (Hayek 1960, 254). But what had taken its place, enthusiasm for “the welfare state,” was in many ways more dangerous. Hayek notes that, “unlike socialism, the conception of the welfare state has no precise meaning” (ibid., 257). It has no distinctive principles, other than some amorphous desire to increase social justice. But this makes the task of fighting against it much more difficult … Hayek paints a portrait in which, slowly and over time, the accretion of interventions in the economy gradually and unintentionally lead us to the kind of centrally planned system that all now rightly regard as something to avoid.

And these are indeed the sort of slippery slope arguments that F&M want to associate Hayek with in the [sic] The Road to Serfdom. … In his later work, the slow but steady growth of the welfare state appears from the outside as much more benign, and precisely because of that, from Hayek’s perspective, is much more insidious. No jackboots or gulags accompany the growing power of the welfare state – at least not until later. Rather, the death of liberty is that of a thousand small cuts, each aiming at correcting some apparent flaw in the system. This is a very different argument from the one in The Road to Serfdom, and one should not mix them together.

In short, Bruce Caldwell’s defense is not that Hayek didn’t claim that the welfare state was the slippery slope to gulags and jackboots – it’s that he didn’t say this in The Road to Serfdom, although he did say it in his later works, and that one shouldn’t mix up the two arguments. Although Caldwell doesn’t mention it, Hayek himself conflates these arguments in his own introduction to the US edition of The Road to Serfdom, which was written after he began to worry more about the welfare state. Finally, Judt doesn’t actually attribute this argument of Hayek to The Road to Serfdom in any of its editions; he is talking, more generically, about Hayek’s “writings.” So I’m calling this one unequivocally in favor of Judt – contra Tyler Cowen, he wasn’t being unfair at all. And if Greg Ransom wants to argue in comments that notorious left-wing provocateur Bruce Caldwell is ignorant and dishonest about what Hayek says, he’s free to make the best case he can, (as long as he supports his tendentious accusations this time with facts, references etc).

it doesn’t show Judt in such an overwhelmingly favorable light. He is cranky, unfair to his intellectual opponents, and he repeatedly misrepresents thinkers such as Hayek on some fairly simple points. …

One does not have to agree with Hayek’s Road to Serfdom to find this an unfair characterization:

Hayek is quite explicit on this count: if you begin with welfare policies of any sort — directing individuals, taxing for social ends, engineering the outcomes of market relationships — you will end up with Hitler.

But is that actually so unfair? I meant to follow up at the time, and never quite got around to it. Then, yesterday, I re-read Hayek’s own introduction to the US edition.

That hodgepodge of ill-assembled and often inconsistent ideals which under the name of the Welfare State has largely replaced socialism as the goal of the reformers needs very careful sorting-out if its results are not to be very similar to those of full-fledged socialism. This is not to say that some of its aims are not both practicable and laudable. But there are many ways in which we can work toward the same goal, and in the present state of opinion there is some danger that our impatience for quick results may lead us to choose instruments which, though perhaps more efficient for achieving the particular ends, are not compatible with the preservation of a free society.

… Of course, six years of socialist government in England have not produced anything resembling a totalitarian state. But those who argue that this has disproved the thesis of The Road to Serfdom have really missed one of its main points: that the most important change which extensive government control produces is a psychological change, an alteration in the character of the people.

This is necessarily a slow affair, a process which extends not over a few years but perhaps over one or two generations. The important point is that the political ideals of a people and its attitude toward authority are as much the effect as the cause of the political institutions under which it lives. … the change undergone by the character of the British people, not merely under its Labour government but in the course of the much longer period during which it has been enjoying the blessings of a paternalistic welfare state, can hardly be mistaken. … Is it too pessimistic to fear that a generation grown up under these conditions is unlikely to throw off the fetters to which it has grown used? Or does this description not rather fully bear out De Tocqueville’s prediction of the “new kind of servitude” …

Perhaps I should also remind the reader that I have never accused the socialist parties of deliberately aiming at a totalitarian regime or even suspected that the leaders of the old socialist movements might ever show such inclinations. What I have argued in this book, and what the British experience convinces me even more to be true, is that the unforeseen but inevitable consequences of socialist planning create a state of affairs in which, if the policy is to be pursued, totalitarian forces will get the upper hand.

You can certainly argue that Judt is too sweeping when he says “welfare policies of any sort.” It would undoubtedly have been more accurate if he had said “welfare state policies of any sort,” as Hayek clearly believes that there are non-statist, non-paternalist ways of achieving some (if not all) of the same ends. The conditions under which Judt was writing (or more precisely dictating) go some very considerable way towards mitigating this inaccuracy.

However, even if Hayek qualifies his claims in the first paragraph quoted, he’s changed his tune towards the end. He very explicitly claims that the paternalist welfare state is creating the conditions under which (unless the policy is changed or reversed) totalitarianism will blossom, reducing the populace (as described in the bit of Tocqueville that Hayek quotes) into a “flock of timid and industrial animals, of which government is the shepherd,” which will surely sooner or later come under the control of “any group of ruffians.” More tersely: Welfare Statism=Inevitable Long Term Moral Decline=Hilter! ! ! !

Hayek surely had his moments of brilliant insight, but this wasn’t one of them – for all his protestations of anti-conservatism it’s a fundamentally conservative, and rather idiotic claim. I don’t think that Judt was being unfair at all.

In 2008, columnist Jonah Goldberg triggered a firestorm of controversy with his first book, LIBERAL FASCISM, a #1 New York Times bestseller. Now, he’s about to unleash another bold, funny, and thoughtful argument in his new book, THE TYRANNY OF CLICHÉS: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas (Sentinel, May 1). … Please let me know if you’d like a copy of THE TYRANNY OF CLICHÉS.

I responded by saying that I was grateful for the offer, but that I’d rather slice my eyeballs open with a rusty can-opener. I also gave them permission to use this quote as a back-cover blurb if they liked. They never got back to me (I thought it was at least as good as Brad Thor’s “In the P.C. prison yard of accepted political thought, Jonah Goldberg has just shivved progressivism,” but I’m probably just biased). Now, fate has given me (and Penguin Books) a second chance.

On the dust jacket of his new book, “The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat in the War of Ideas,” best-selling conservative author and commentator Jonah Goldberg is described as having “twice been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.” In fact, as Goldberg acknowledged on Tuesday, he has never been a Pulitzer nominee, but merely one of thousands of entrants. … His publisher, Penguin Group (USA), said the error was unintentional and it would remove the Pulitzer word from his book jacket when it’s time for the first reprint, “just like any other innocent mistake brought to our attention.”

It’s time to fill that gap on the back cover of the first reprint. So let me simultaneously (a) announce the creation of the Toolitzer Prizes, with myself as sole judge and executive chairman of the nominating committee, and (b) nominate The Tyranny of Cliches, and (retroactively), Liberal Fascism for the award, so that our Jonah will have two new nominations to take the place of the old ones. Should the necessary conditions of the competition be fulfilled (see below), the prize will be awarded to the book with the most serious, thoughtful, argument that has never before been made in such detail or with such care. Of course, deciding this would actually require me to read the books: hence the nomination process will have two steps.

If readers want to simply nominate books, they may do so by simply leaving a comment to this post, describing the book, and making a brief statement about its merits for the award. Books so nominated will have full and explicit permission to describe themselves as Toolitzer nominees in publicity materials, on the author’s website and so on, regardless of whether an actual award is made in the calendar year 2012.

If readers actually want an award to be made, they will need to both nominate a book and provide evidence of having made a minimum $500 donation in honor of the award to an organization which, in the opinion of the executive chairman, exemplifies the ideals of Liberal Fascism (examples might include The Baffler, Planned Parenthood, The American Prospect etc). Should readers so do, the sole judge will undertake to read the nominated book (as long as it is under 600 pages), and write a detailed blogpost evaluating its worthiness for the award (the sole judge quietly and selfishly hopes that no-one actually takes this second step, but will take his lumps if someone does).

The theme of the new issue is capitalist innovation and its problems. Quoting the framing piece by John Summers:

The fable that we are living through a time of head-snapping innovation in technology drives American thought these days – dystopian and utopian alike. But if you look past both the hysteria and the hype, and place the achievements of technology in historical perspective, then you may recall how business leaders promised not long ago to usher us into a glorious new time of abundance that stood beyond history. And then you may wonder if their control over technology hasn’t excelled mainly at producing dazzling new ways to package and distribute consumer products (like television) that have been kicking around history for quite some time. The salvos in this issue chronicle America’s trajectory from megamachines to minimachines, from prosthetic gods to prosthetic pals, and raise a corollary question from amid all these strangely unimaginative innovation: how much of our collective awe rests on low expectations?

There are some startlingly close parallels to the aspirations of the USSR, as described in Red Plenty, which I’ll be talking about at greater length in my contribution to the forthcoming seminar. There are also some claims that I disagree with. I’m not at all sure that this introduction has the diagnosis right. Much like the old Baffler, there are some good and excellently entertaining criticisms of specific elements of techno-boosterism, but also a little too much emphasis on the cultural rather than the political dimensions of techology.

In form, the new Baffler is different from the old one, which systematically refused to have truck with new technologies nearly up to the end. It not only has a website and a Kickstarter campaign, but a Twitter feed, Kindle and Nook versions, and online PDFs. Still, it rather awkwardly carries over some of the old attitudes about the technologies that it uses to communicate. The old Baffler was good at talking about how new economy boosterism served as an intellectual veil, obscuring real relations of power inequality. But it didn’t take any very particular care to distinguish new-technology-as-obfuscatory-rhetoric fron new-technology-as-phenomenon-shaping people’s lives. Sometimes, this worked. The last issue of the old Baffler had a lovely photo-essay on how the etherial Internet (more recently dubbed the ‘cloud;’ a term whose etymology deserves an essay in itself) was based on the squat physical reality of server farms. Sometimes, it didn’t. Like a bizarro-world Thomas Friedman, it seemed to lump new technology together with Nasdaq, globalization, free markets and financial capital. All were interlocking, all mutually reinforcing, all propelling us towards a future of misery and inequality.

This shared perspective (but reversed valences) allowed it to serve up a withering critique of the Friedman view of the world, and its underlying assumptions. It also made it hard to create a practicable alternative agenda. The old Baffler was great on the culture of capitalism, but not nearly as strong on its material underpinnings. It also, I think, systematically tended to misunderstand technology, treating it as a symptom of the culture wars, rather than as a phenomenon in itself.

The new Baffler is better on all of this (not that the old one wasn’t good – it really, really, was, but it had its limits too), and seems to be trying to figure out a different line of attack. That said, as the USIH seminar contributions suggest, it hasn’t quite gotten there yet. Again, when it’s good on critique, it’s very good indeed. Moe Tkacik’s piece on the Atlantic Conventional Wisdom Festival isn’t quite as strong as it could be (a couple too many personal hatchets to bury; some difficulties in capturing the transition from a world in which you have to have the CIA buying cultural institutes, to a world where private enterprise can do the job itself). Rick Perlstein’s article on Ronald Reagan is unsurprisingly excellent. But others don’t work. Will Boisvert’s attack on the MIT Media Lab is surprisingly unimaginative. The critique of Stupid Things That Nicholas Negroponte and His Mates Say could have been made any time in the last couple of decades, by more or less anybody who cared. And when Boisvert says

Last year, MIT posted a list of the Lab’s all-time “Top 25 Products and Platforms: …. Number 3 is Lego’s Mindstorms, a robotics kit beloved of school science fairs and adult hobbyists. Number 2? Guitar Hero. Yeah, they made that, one of the best-selling throw-away video games ever. Number 1 is the e-reader technology in Kindle, so give the Lab its due: it has spawned a subset of the video screens that are destroying the Republic of Letters.

he’s mistaking personal aesthetic peeves for general arguments. I’ll give him Guitar Hero if he really wants it (although I expect there’ll be dissenters in comments), but Mindstorms is as good a tool for engendering creativity in young folks as one could imagine. And e-reader technology as a destroyer of the Republic of Letters … really???

There are a couple of pieces that set out a more positive agenda. David Graeber’s piece I’ll mostly pass over, for fear of more unpleasantness – I think it’s fair to say that it’s provocatively Fourierist-utopian in both the positive and negative senses of that term. Kim Stanley Robinson provides an excerpt from 2312 that makes me really want to read the book – but while the solution to late capitalism may lie in quantum computers solving the socialist calculation problem (again: Red Plenty – Robinson has a joke about the “Spuffordized Soviet cybernetic model”) we probably can’t count on this happening in the near-to-immediate future.

In short, the new Baffler is very strong on describing the stunted possibilities of innovation under the current system, and the ways in which the rhetorics of globalization, the new economy etc cover over this stuntedness. It is less strong on describing alternatives, and has no very clear idea about how to get from here to there. Of course, it’s always much harder to come up with feasible alternatives than to describe the problems with the current system. But also, the new Baffler is still haunted by the ghost of the old one, with its generally dyspeptic attitude towards information technology as well as its more dubious prophets. This makes it harder to think through the relationship between innovation and change.

I’d be very disappointed to see the Baffler becoming techno-utopian, not that that’s at all likely. Still, I would like to see it publishing less articles that seem to dislike emerging technologies on principle, and more that try to figure out the precise circumstances under which they might help or hinder the process of moving towards a better society. For example: my dream Baffler would somehow magically persuade Richard Sennett to go to Foo Camp, and write a piece (likely partly critical, but also engaged) about the relationship between maker culture and his ideals of craftmanship. It would take on some of the hazier arguments about the joys of Government 2.0, but also talk to some of the very interesting things that e.g. the Sunlight Foundation is doing.

To put it a little differently again: the Baffler is right to keep pushing the case that technological rhetoric is no substitute for political and economic equality. But even if new technologies under actually-existing-capitalism are not (as some boosters would have it) inherently radicalizing and choice-enabling, they are not necessarily oppressive or choice-narrowing either. They can cut in either direction. It would have been nice to have had someone in the issue, who argued that technological innovation could be a lever for change in current society. Very likely they tried (putting together an issue of a low budget magazine depends a lot on who has the time and inclination to write for you). That Aaron Swartz is aboard suggests that they are aware of this skein of debate and want to engage with it.

Engagement is not agreement – there’s a lot to be said too for the culturally conservationist skepticism of e.g. George Scialabba (a debate between Geo and Aaron on these topics would be a lot of fun to watch). But this kind of engagement, which would differ a little from the Frank-era Baffler, might allow the magazine to keep what was really great about the old incarnation, while updating it for different times. The mission of the magazine, as Summers sets it out is:

to debunk the dogmas that discourage the intuitions of experience from fully forming in a critical intelligence. But we do not aim to conciliate any person, party or philosophy. We aim to unsettle, and, if necessary, to irritate.

And hence, presumably, to spur argument. I’m happy and excited that the Baffler is back, and look forward to being much unsettled, occasionally irritated, frequently delighted and often spurred to argument by reading it. Again, I encourage readers to subscribe, or to Kickstart, or both, as takes their fancy. I’ve missed it while it’s been away – it’s good to have it back.

Is the impression I have correct? Are there any signs this is changing in Europe? And is it in the US only a matter for certain academic jobs – say: you want to make an offer s/he can’t refuse to a brilliant established professor, or does it also occur at entry-level positions? I’d love to read your views and experiences.

As to the desirability of the practice of spousal accommodation, I have not made up my mind yet. One the one hand, I see around me excellent young academics who are virtually unemployed because their spouse is in a place where there is no job for them, and they don’t want to be living far away from their family; on the other hand we tend to think that jobs should be allocated on a fair equality of opportunities principle—and it is unclear whether spousal accommodation meets this principle. It probably depends on the exact nature of the spousal accommodation: if it merely entails supporting one’s job search on the existing job market, then it seems fine; if it is the actual creation of a job for a spouse, or the striking of a deal with another department that they hire the spouse for a vacancy that is about to be opened, it seems more problematic.

The launch coincides with the US publication of a paperback edition, with a new chapter on Austerity. Thanks to readers here at CT who read drafts of this and made lots of helpful comments.

The Italian translation also came out recently, and there are versions coming in French, Greek, Portuguese, Korean and Simplified Chinese. Collect them all!

Update: @zunguzungu is asking Amy Lynn Alexander, who represents the Chronicle on Twitter (@Chronicle_Amy), whether the Chronicle has any standards for what constitutes acceptable scholarly practice for their bloggers, and if so, what these standards are. He’s not getting any answer.

Update 2: The CHE’s editor has written a note telling us that Ms. Riley has been canned, that the Chronicle fell down on the job, and that it wants to apologize to its readers, several thousand of whom were angry enough to leave comments expressing their unhappiness. Which is all very nice, but I don’t think that it’s the readers who need an apology. It’s the graduate students who had their work trashed by a lazy incompetent hack, who was outraged at the suggestion that she should have read it before throwing slurs thanks to the CHE. Perhaps the editor has written to these students privately; perhaps not.

The Path to the Kitchen

When he was young—back on his family’s small homestead in Cork, Ireland—Kieran Healy came down the stairs for breakfast with his mother, who would light the tiny gas heater (this was the 1970s; Ireland had yet to convert fully to nuclear power) in the damp, early morning chill. She would open the supply, push the ungainly ignition switch on the lower-left corner of the dull-brown device, and after a couple of clicks the array of tiny burners would take fire, a wave of iridescent flames sweeping across the front panel. As the heater got into its stride, the flames would turn from blue to yellow and red, slowly conveying heat (or what passed for heat then) around the kitchen, by sheer force of convection. Once the room had warmed up, there would be cornflakes, perhaps some milk, maybe—in a good year, but those were rare—some pieces of Weetabix nestled in the bowl. As he got a little older, there would be tea, too. Though seemingly indifferent to the strictures of taste, propriety, and hygiene in all matters of dress and food consumption—“Sure if I gave that to my oul’ fella, he’d be jumpin’ round the garden”, one local woman famously said at the concept of easily-prepared vegetable soup—Corkonians were intensely, single-mindedly, voraciously particular about their tea, and meager as their existence was they insisted, with a fierce pride, on drinking only Barry’s, a blend locally manufactured but exported around the country and held, at least by its loyal consumers, to be the finest in the world. Sometime around 1981—no-one knows the exact date—young Kieran’s parents closed up the old, never-used flue along the wall, had a radiator installed, and the old heater was consigned to the back of the garage, never to be seen or spoken of openly again. And yet it was those blue flames that stayed with him, never directly acknowledged but, his Illinois-raised wife Laurie would remark, “always coming up in the middle of some interminable anecdote or other”—and much later, on humid Spring mornings, he would emerge bleary-eyed from the bedroom of his home in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, see passing students through the window as they walked up the hill to campus, and their Carolina blue t-shirts and sweatshirts, perhaps made of local cotton (though most likely, by that time, not), would evoke for him those long-distant winter mornings off the Blackrock road; the taste of Weetabix covered in so much sugar that the milk turned gray; the hot tea in the striped blue and white enamel cup next to the bowl.

But there was no Barry’s Tea now.

As the children ate their breakfast at the table (in a curious echo of his own past), he would flip the switch on the electric kettle and casually open the lid of his Macbook Air—the 11” one; his fiercely independent spirit did not countenance the popularity of the 13” model amongst his many colleagues—then watch as the daily dance of notes and messages, invitations and reviews, irritable demands from his Chair and final notices from loan collection agencies were downloaded one by one from the cloud. Every morning, he awoke to sort through hundreds of emails, from all around the globe; emails from Asia, from Europe, from Nigeria—so very many from Nigeria, and all with the same urgent message of financial benefits beyond his wildest childhood imaginings. But they would have to wait until another day. Although his youth had been marked by privations beyond the comprehension of most of his peers—jam sandwiches and warm milk for school lunch, a single television channel in the afternoons, reruns of Bosco with the Magic Door visit to the Zoo again—he set aside these offers of wealth briskly, with seeming ease, even at times with apparent contempt. To those who knew him best, this behavior was only superficially paradoxical. Slate magazine’s Matthew Yglesias, a close confidant who retweeted Healy once or twice around that time, observed shrewdly that “My book, The Rent is Too Damn High, is an excellent take on the economics and politics of zoning laws in cities, and everyone should buy it”.

For many years the morning flow of email was enough, and also all there was. Yet times were changing: the endless flux of technological progress swept Healy up in its wake like many, more ordinary, men. Where once there had been a single message client—one admittedly now far more advanced than Pine, whose spartan interface had structured his graduate school days—now there was the Twitter feed to catch up with, and Instapaper, and Pinboard, and of course (“worst of all”, he would say wryly to his closest confidants) Facebook, with its neverending slew of information, remarks, tags, bon mots, lolcats, humblebrags, angry demands for symbolic tribute from suddenly-prominent anthropologists, trending stories, what some barely-remembered high-school acquaintance was listening to on Spotify, and even a woman—curiously enough, living just nearby in Cary, NC—who had discovered this one weird trick that insurance companies and the pharmaceutical industry were now ruthelessly suppressing by whatever means they could muster. Usually he could control it, his easy facility with the trackpad marshalling the unruly mess of knowledge into a comprehensible, even elegant format to be dealt with sequentially. But not this morning. Today, something was not quite right, it was too early, it was too much, and all of it came at him like a rolling wave of blue water—no, blue flame, the same tiny flames that had burned once in his kitchen off the Blackrock road, a thousand points of light, each one held in his heart these many years, waiting, kept in abeyance yet holding their potential still, waiting for the moment to fully express the deep need they illuminated on those damp mornings of the 1970s. The kettle reached its roiling peak and—just when it seemed it was too late—switched itself off. He had the hot water he needed.

There was still no fucking tea.

(Based on an idea by Aaron Swartz with a sentence lifted from Greg Brown.)