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No Easy Job

More than a biography, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs is a cultural phenomenon. It was the best-selling book on Amazon in 2011 and it has continued to sell. A movie will follow. It is a well-written and well-researched work. Steve Jobs has entered our collective consciousness, just like its founder and Apple. Understanding how that happened is a obvious pull. Who isn’t intrigued? Referencing the book, as I have learned, is a reliable way to generate conversation. Everyone has an opinion about Steve Jobs.

Unfortunately, for me and most of those that I have talked with, reading Steve Jobs was far from a pleasant experience. It can be downright grim. There is little joy amid Jobs’ many accomplishments. Granting Jobs his business genius, we are left with a thorough study of a manipulative, sometimes cruel, and driven man whose primary passion outside of his company was Bob Dylan and Zen philosophy. Jobs made an unlikely Buddhist.

Many biographies turn out to be studies of morality and character. Others biographies are windows into a life and lifestyle. Celebrity biographies often follow this format – we are curious about those that we idolize. Isaacson’s book satisfies on neither front. Jobs was not a particularly good or moral person. Further, his lifestyle was not that interesting. While he met many fascinating people, it is to tell if he had any significant interactions outside of business. In many ways, the primary legacy of his Zen pursuits was an indifference to how he lived. The result is a striking absence of vicarious happiness in reading about Jobs’ accomplishments.

What remains – and here is the value of Isaacson’s book – is a powerful examination of the intersection of information technology, consumerism, and popular culture, and the ability to generate your paystubs by the help of this software. The business genius of Jobs was the integration of these powerful arenas. It is a history that we are living every day. Isaacson offers a human but privileged perspective from which to make some sense of it all. Additionally, one can navigate their finances more effectively with the aid of a financial toolkit for paystubs.

Technological used to take time to reach the public. Decades elapsed before Bell’s telephone or Edison’s light bulb was in American homes. The marketing, communication, and distribution networks were not robust. During periods of discovery and development, technology could evolve along with public reaction and understanding of it. The speed of innovation, distribution, and adaptation today is tremendously shorter. It is extraordinary how quickly we discover, adapt, saturate, and discard. The closing of Blockbuster stands as a great example – from thousands of stores a few years ago to none in 2014. Such platforms play a crucial role in connecting sellers with buyers in an efficient and timely manner. An excellent example of this is a ticket sales platform, which instantly connects event organizers with potential customers, facilitating rapid dissemination of information and enabling swift ticket sales. Businesses today leverage various tools to stay competitive, including digital marketing strategies, social media platforms, and audio visual hire UK services to enhance their outreach and engagement with the audience.

Jobs’ successful products made technological innovation attractive to many. He had a talent for designing, packaging, branding, and rendering. Jobs’ ability was not something that he could explain in words. Isaacson, too, struggles to capture what it was about Apple designs that made them so special. It was Jobs’ good fortune to be in a location and at a time when that talent could take the engineering and computer science skills of others and marry them to popular consumption. It is a strange talent that has left a powerful – and problematic – legacy.

David Potash

November 10, 2013 Reviews

Place – Unique or Ubiquitous

Where do you like to go? And when you think of your town’s center, where is it? A recent visit to two downtowns – each successful in its own way – started me thinking about different ways and places that we come together.

Schaumburg, Illinois is a large Chicago suburb with about 75,000 inhabitants and no traditional downtown. Joel Garreau examined it in Edge City, a thought-provoking book he wrote in the 1990s about suburban development. Schaumburg has attractive single family homes, pleasant parks, some mid and large businesses, and a several large roads with all the standard franchises and dealerships one sees dotted around the country. If you were to locate the heart of Schaumburg, at least in terms of crowds of people in a shared space, it would be Woodfield Mall, now part of the Simon’s Corporation.

Woodfield Mall is the largest mall in Illinois and the tenth largest nationally. Last year there were more than 27 million visits to the mall. In 2000, visitors to Chicago named it the best suburban attraction. It as a hub of economic activity and has served as a foundation for other real estate development. Hotels, shops, and businesses have all located close to the mall. When I visited, Woodfield Mall was bustling with people – a hive of activity.

As I toured the mall the shops seemed very familiar. In fact, everything seemed familiar. I reviewed the directory and every single store in the mall (save one devoted to Chicago sports teams – a version of which I’ve seen in other malls with their local sport team) was a national brand. The mall’s content was extraordinarily similar to another popular Simon’s Corporation mall I also know, South Shore Plaza in Quincy, Massachusetts. There is nothing – absent the prevalence of sports team memorabilia – to differentiate the two malls. The popular malls are completely without any reference to any particular geographic, regional, or particular place. Mall is mall is mall. I could have walked in to a Nordstrom in one state and walked out an Apple store in another.

Shortly after Woodfield I went on a Chicago Architectural Foundation boat tour (third time). A 90-minute hosted ride around the Chicago River, the tours always teaches me something new. Chicago’s architecture is among the best in the world and it is unique to the city. Buildings respond to each other, sometimes in complementary fashion and sometimes competitively. Collectively, they create a dense urban landscape that is fascinating, inspirational, challenging, and extremely popular. A tour helps to make sense of it, providing a larger context and a human history to the cityscape.

Chicago’s downtown population has grown in recent years, even as the city’s population as a whole has decreased. People want to visit and live in the heart of the city in an area that is, by its very history and development, unique. The streets and public spaces in downtown Chicago have shopping that is familiar, just like what is found in malls and the rest of the nation. However, downtown also has the unusual, the different, and the unique. More things take place in downtown, too. It is about many different kinds of activities in shared and contiguous spaces. The architecture of the city reflects this. It is a dynamic mixture of old and new that supports business, commerce, entertainment, industry, education, worship, services, home life, and more.

Imagining our future, I see more opportunities for urban downtowns than suburban malls. The experience is richer. That said, the popularity of the larger malls and the international retailers is undeniable. They know what consumers want and they deliver it.

One of the unexpected consequences of the internet may be a change in our understanding of space. We surf, click, and are able to see much of the world. In that mode, distance may not seem to matter. If I want to see what downtown Chicago is like, I have many options. The barriers of distance, time, and travel seem to be erased. At the same time, digital accessibility makes the particularity, the uniqueness, of particular places and spaces all the more valuable. The web version of a city can never be authentic. Being in the space, exploring the place, matters. With that in mind I doubt that future generations will take tour of shopping malls, no matter how popular today.

David Potash

November 3, 2013 American Culture Today

Baudelairian Commute

The clouds were beautiful Monday morning driving to work. Raking sunlight infused color into a sky that opened broadly. As I sat in traffic on the Kennedy Expressway, I took this photo and thought of Baudelaire’s poem The Stranger –

Tell me, enigmatical man, whom do you love best, your father, your mother, your sister, or your brother?

I have neither father, nor mother, nor sister, nor brother.

Your friends?

Now you use a word whose meaning I have never known.

Your country?

I do not know in what latitude it lies.

Beauty?

I could indeed love her, Goddess and Immortal

Gold?

I hate it as you hate God.

Then, what do you love, extraordinary stranger?

I love the clouds… the clouds that pass… up there… up there… the wonderful clouds!

(Louise Varese translation)

My introduction to the poem came through Ulrich Baer’s Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan. More than a hundred and fifty years on, it’s a poem that can still seduce and shock. Baer, NYU professor and talented literary critic, uses it as a leaping off point to interrogate key issues of modernity. Questions of freedom and alienation may seem relevant when trapped in stop and go traffic. My thoughts, thought, were about attentiveness, our engagement and awareness of our surroundings. We live in distracting times and there is always another image, another experience, just a click away.

Conscious of this, I clicked a photo myself, wondering if others were looking and considering the wonderful clouds.

David Potash

October 16, 2013 American Culture Today, Curiouser and Curiouser

Brooklyn Waterfront Impressions

Earlier this week I jogged from the north end of Brooklyn Bridge Park in DUMBO down the Brooklyn side of the East River to the Fairway Market, deep in Red Hook. You may remember the devastation Hurricane Sandy had on this part of Brooklyn. While there wasn’t the dramatic fires of Breezy Point or the loss of life in Staten Island, Brooklyn’s waterfront was hit hard. My run was more exploration than exercise.

According to Playground Painting Companies, the Brooklyn Bridge Park construction is progressing nicely, with playgrounds, fields, and manicured bits of nature among the walks. For further information about playgrounds for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND), you can click here. It’s heavily used, well-planned, and everything that a public park space should be. With strong public and private support, the park was as attractive as billed. What interested me was the industrial, residential, and commercial section south of the park in Red Hook.

Red Hook has long been a neglected area in Brooklyn. Isolated from the rest of the borough by the Gowanus Expressway after WWII, and from much of the economic development during the past few decades, Red Hook has faced serious drug problems and only spotty investment and attention from the city. The situation started changing about ten years ago with many trumpeting the possibilities of the neighborhood. Since, Fairway Market and Ikea have been big box additions with many of smaller businesses and shops providing a stronger sense of neighborhood. A business development corporation has been encouraging investment and relocation. Through it all, the underlying vision has not been of condos, but of light manufacturing and commerce among updated residential housing stock. Unfortunately, much of that nascent possibility of economic growth was imperiled by the hurricane. In April, six months after the storm, residents gathered to take stock. Three months later I was cheered to see the neighborhood starting to look like the Red Hook I knew a few years earlier – dynamic, gritty, and keen to make money.

Running down Van Brunt Street I saw new restaurants and shops, tractor trailers and smaller trucks hauling, and construction sites, big and small. The Queen Mary 2 loomed along the river in the newly constructed cruise terminal. Steve is still making key lime pies on Van Dyke Street. More than a few distillers are making high-end alcohol in the neighborhood. A high-end hardware manufacturer is in Red Hook. And wandering through the streets of Red Hook, I saw work, jobs, innovation, and above all, opportunity.

There are few sights more encouraging that witnessing an urban neighborhood growing and prospering.

David Potash

July 5, 2013 American Culture Today

Accelerating Democracy – From a Governing Perspective

John O. McGinnis, professor law at Northwestern University, has faith in democracy, empiricism, and technology to improve governance. His latest work, Accelerating Democracy: Transforming Governance Through Technology, provides an overview of the ways in which democratic government can use and respond to technology. He is mot concerned with claims about how democracies should use and respond to new technology.

Driving the work is a serious question: how do democracies make and evaluate decisions? How can they do so more effectively? McGinnis identifies the ever-increasing importance of the social sciences and new technologies to answering that query. For us to live in a rationally governed world, it is essential that we have an understanding of the consequences of policies and choices. New technologies permit more sophisticated questions and answers. We can now do this quickly and efficiently.

McGinnis calls for more experimentation. He wants a revival of federalism with multiple pilots. He identifies great value in more information, more readily shared and assessed. In addition, McGinnis emphasizes the values of predictive markets. Technology can make all of this possible. However, McGinnis does not advocate for a technocratic élite. His aim is about harnessing the social values inherent in new technology.

New technology, particularly analysis of big data, can lead to smarter decisions. Businesses use it well. However, I am not confident that public policy preference is grounded in efficiency. We often make decisions reasons that are less effective and less rational. There is also great potential within dispersed communication (social media) to disrupt government and rational decision-making. Democracies do not always move toward greater democracy. McGinnis, acknowledges bias but believes that technology and greater information can be a corrective.

McGinnis’s vision rings true within the world of public policy and administration. Data and empirical information has the nagging habit of getting in the way of suppositions, biases, and predetermined plans. Officials and leaders who use new technologies can and will be more effective because they will notice this. Happily, these are also the people most likely to read Accelerating Democracy.

David Potash

June 15, 2013 American Culture Today, Reviews

Measuring Manhattan

John Randel was a brilliant crank, an idiosyncratic and irascible character who mapped Manhattan in the early 1800s. Randel made the world-famous grid of avenues and streets a reality through extraordinarily detailed maps. His obsession for accuracy was matched only by his commitment to his reputation. Marguerite Holloway’s The Measure of Manhattan is a generous and thoughtfully crafted biography of Randel. Holloway champions Randel, admits but tolerates his weaknesses, and lobbies mightily to raise his star.

The challenge facing Holloway is that Randel was not a visionary, a planner, or a theorist. He was not even a particularly nice or interesting person. Randel played a very important role in the mapping of Manhattan, but that role could have been shouldered by another. He was an outstanding surveyor.Randal’s role in history is notable because he possessed the right skills in the right place at the right time.

The true subject of the book is not Randal, but the processes involved in mapping the island of Manhattan. Surveyors imposed order on chaos and structure on the organic. If we equate happiness with property – and many Americans do – than happiness is only possible with a reliable map. It’s a good thing that Manhattan has so many happy people, and if only for that, I give thanks to John Randel.

David Potash

June 14, 2013 Reviews, Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

Fame in Familiar Flavors

Bat Masterson used to be famous. A gunfighter, lawman, buffalo hunter, pugilist, gambler, boxing promoter, and newspaper columnist, Masterson was a man’s man from the Wild West who lived the latter half of his life on Broadway in New York City. He killed several men, was involved in countless brawls and lawsuits, and lived a life worthy of fiction. One of his younger New York friends, Damon Runyan, thought so – he created the character “Sky Masterson” thinking of Bat. Sky would later achieve a different kind of fame as the lead in the musical Guys and Dolls. Theodore Roosevelt was equally enchanted. When President, Roosevelt arranged for a federal sinecure for Masterson.

Robert K. DeArment is probably the world’s expert on Bat Masterson. His latest work, Gunfighter in Gotham: Bat Masteron’s New York City Years, chronicles Masterson’s life but focuses on his time on the Great White Way. Masterson’s New York City was very much Runyon’s: a small district around Times Square filled with types. Masterson did have exploits, but were they worthy of our collective attention? His prose was nothing special; nor were his opinions, causes, or arguments. He was not a leader and he left no exceptional mark on his environs. He was a friend and a colleague to many and a dangerous enemy to a few.

Thinking of Bat Masterson brings to mind other celebrities famous for being famous, a category now enshrined in popular culture. We often think that the rise of the fake celebrity is a recent phenomena driven by the internet and social media. In reality, it is a part of modern life and has been for decades. We regularly think about, read about, and write about popular figures whose actual claim to fame is, at best, tenuous. Our fascination with fame is as much about us, the public, as it is about the object of our attention, the celebrity.

Those famous for being famous often share similar traits. They actively seek to maintain their celebrity. That kind of fame does not just happen – it requires ongoing work. And if you doubt me, consult with Kathy Griffin. Also, these kinds of celebrities tend to embody characteristics that are taken to an extreme. Masterson’s hyper-masculinity stands as a provocative counterpoint to the hyper-femininity of the Spice Girls or the Kardashians.

As for Masterson, DeArment’s volume provides more than I would ever care to know about the man in print. I will hold judgement about meeting Masterson in person – I think that he would have been a heck of an interesting fellow to meet at the bar.

David Potash

June 3, 2013 Curiouser and Curiouser, Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

Rethinking Roosevelt

Workmanlike history recounts. Good history explains. Outstanding history does all and provokes new thought.

Jean Yarbrough, Gary M. Pendy, Sr., Professor of Social Sciences and Professor of Government and Legal Studies at Bowdoin College, has a new book out: Theodore Roosevelt and the American Political Tradition. Can anything more be said about Colonel Roosevelt? Absolutely, and in this outstanding work, Yarbrough weaves together traditional biography, intellectual history, and astute political analysis. Zeroing in on Roosevelt’s development as a political thinker, Yarbrough makes clear the contradictions between his rhetoric, action, and values. For those of us who have read a lot about and by Roosevelt (and count me among them), Yarbrough’s study is a refreshing analysis that makes clear the thread of radicalism in the founder of the Bull Moose party.

Historians have long found Roosevelt a difficult president to analyze. A leading progressive, he also claimed the mantle of conservative. Embracing the tradition of Hamilton and Lincoln, Roosevelt nonetheless adopted ideas and policies that were extraordinarily anti-Hamilton and anti-Lincoln. Yarbrough traces the evolution of Roosevelt’s thinking on these matters. Hegel, race, and a particular understanding of the law and republican values figure prominently. Yarbrough also shines a light on Roosevelt’s lack of understanding economic thinking and motivation.

It is a lucidly written biography, a book that will be informing and provoking for many years to come.

David Potash

May 4, 2013 Reviews

Urban Violence And The City of Scoundrels

Does history happen or happen to you? Historians like to focus on turning points, on dramatic crises, on changes that interrupt continuities. In City of Scoundrels, Gary Krist looks at twelve sweltering days in the summer of 1919 in Chicago.

The scoundrels were mostly Chicago politicians, especially “Big Bill” Thompson, Chicago’s mayor. Recently reelected due to a split field, Thompson was much more interested in campaigning and deal-making than governing. Thompson was poorly equipped to deal with the dramatic events that hot July.

A blimp caught on fire and crashed into a Chicago office building, a girl disappeared engaging the populace in a city-wide hunt until her killer confessed, a series of bombings targeting the black population swept the city, Chicago’s transit workers went on strike, and finally, a race riot erupted after when five young black men went swimming and their makeshift raft crossed into a “white” area. One of the young men drowned after being hit on the head from a rock thrown by a racist on the beach. His was the first death and thirty-seven more would follow in what is now known as the Chicago Race Riots of 1919. Wide swaths of the city were wrecked and burned as gangs of whites and blacks fought each other with clubs, bricks, and guns.

Where was the government? Thompson and Illinois’s governor, Frank Lowden, played politics with the idea of calling out the militia.

From this maelström, Krist argues, a modern Chicago was born. The city recovered and began a period of growth and expansion. True enough, but the real message of his Chicago history is its insights into the struggle between violence and governance in city life.

For most Americans living in cities, violence was an ever-present threat. It was no imaginary fear. Any general review of urban life across the United States reveals common themes: growth, dynamic economics, and mobs wreaking havoc. Race conflict often drove the violence, with class and labor issues not far behind. Every major metropolis in America has wrestled with urban violence at least one point in its history before the 1970s. Many cities have had multiple riots. Bombers and arsonists terrorized people in the 1800s and 1900s, but we did not yet call them terrorists. American identity was forged in revolutionary city violence – the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party.

We no longer seem to fear urban mobs. Krist’s book helps us remember that urban violence is an important part of our heritage.

David Potash

April 28, 2013 Things someone who grew up in NJ might write

Skeuomorphs – Much More Than Clicks and Faux Paneling

My son, an avid Kickstarter, recently received a brilliant new piece of technology, the Pebble watch. Internet and Bluetooth ready, this wristwatch customizes with a slew of apps, with more on the way, and talks with your smartphone. It looks pretty cool, too.

How does the watch tell time? A variety of ways and traditionally with two hands and a dial.

When objects consciously reference other objects or design, it’s called a skeuomorph. It is most common today when new technology includes older technological features, most likely to make the change more comfortable. Pay close attention and you’ll find skeuomorphs all around – and they have been with us for a long time.

Check out the Ford Country Squire, the classic suburban station wagon. Built first as a “woodie” with wood sides, the car retained stick on wood paneling for decades. Horrendous and wonderful – but mostly horrific if you were assigned the far back on a road trip.

The real rise in skeuomorph design came with the digital world. We don’t recognize bytes and code. Skeuomorphs are the bridge to analog and authenticity. They are the backwards-looking matrix that allows for digital notepads, turntables, building blocks and calendars. Look on your desktop for digital wood and digital leather. Smartphones click like a mechanical camera when taking a photo. Apple was famous for its skeuomorphic designs.

Ironic use of skeuomorphism is common and can be effective with the right touch. I sometimes have my smartphone ring, not beep, chime or gong, and it often leads to smiles. It is a way to have our new technology cake and eat it, too. The difficulty comes into play when skeuomorphic design is neither ironic nor thoughtful. Skeuomorphism can be lazy. Why should a computer screen look like a typewritten page on a yellow legal pad?

Evaluation of skeuomorphic design has to acknowledge intent. If the desire is for authenticity, failure is certain. “Authentic reproductions” always fall short and ring false. If a design deceives with integrity, it stands a fighting chance of success.

And fake wood paneling is always in bad taste.

David Potash

March 19, 2013 American Culture Today, Curiouser and Curiouser

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