Free Advice

A few days ago I had lunch at a newly renovated hotel in downtown Washington with an old colleague, by which I mean both someone I have known for many years and someone beyond age 60--not that 60 signifies anything in particular for someone, like myself, who is a mere 58. The conversation touched on many things in no particular order, as a midweek Washington luncheon conversation should. We both have new books; that took some time, each of us complaining in turn about what readers don't read, editors don't review, and publishers don't help with. At one point, I don't know why, I expressed some sense of being more tired lately than I remember and would like to be. My friend, who will remain unnamed for an excellent reason that will become clear in a second, offered me empathetic counsel based on his own experience: "Slim down at the gym, shave off your beard, and get a mistress. Does wonders."

"What does wonders--which one, I mean?", I asked.

"All three," he replied.

This is not the sort of advice I get every day, or even every decade. It's true: This friend was not born and raised in the United States (or Britain), and so that may help explain the novelty. My reaction, immediate and unshakable, was that "this is impossible."

"Which one?", he asked.

"All three," I answered, and it's true. But I like to think that either going to the gym regularly or shaving the beard would be hardest.

The lunch was overpriced; the advice free. Do you really get what you pay for?

Sunday's New York Times carried a front page story on Genentech lobbyists perverting the health care debate, such as it's been. Seems that lobbyists provided copy to House staffs, which made its way into the record verbatim, thus leading to a bunch of Congressmen saying exactly the same things. Genentech had of course earlier poured dollars into these Congressmen's campaign coffers. This is mildly embarrassing, but what Genentech and related lobbyists said about the episode was not embarrassing--it was outrageous.

Note the quote from Even L. Morris, head of Genentech's Washington office: "There was no connection between the contributions and the statements." If you believe that, there's a bridge in Brooklyn I'd like to talk with you about. Worse, another lobbyist said: "This happens all the time. There is nothing nefarious about it." The fact that, indeed, it does happen all the time is precisely what is nefarious about it. That someone can say such a thing with a straight face, and maybe even believe it, is the truest measure of what a state of decay this democracy is in.

It's get more and more frustrating to see the New York Times on Sundays. The Magazine might as well be named The National Homosexual Advancement Journal. The Book Review has turned into a journalists' delight: almost no standards, no rules of evidence, few serious books reviewed, and only journalists who know less than the authors seem to be able to review them. What is Sam Tanenhaus doing?

Case in point from a month or so ago -- Tony Horwitz reviewing Rich Cohen's book Israel is Real. It was hard to tell from the review essay which made the largest number of factual mistakes, the book or the review. Certainly the book, now that I've seen it. I even saw the author at a Bookfest at the JCC in San Francisco, but I couldn't bring myself to go over and introduce myself. What would I say? "Gee, Rich, you sure write well; too bad you don't have a clue what you're talking about"? There was a intro to the Horwitz review, in the form of a brief interview, on the inside cover of the Book Review that week, in which Horwitz let his discomfort with synagogues and rabbis and Judaism hang out for all to see. Cohen, apparently, too. So one semi-alienated Jew who feels heroic about it reviews a book by another semi-alienated Jew who feels heroic about it, and what do you think is going to happen? Well, it happened.

And then there's this week--nothing (thank G-d) to do with Judaism, only with a few Jews. We have in the November 9, 2009 issue Hanna Rosin reviewing a book by Barbara Ehrenreich -- her book entitled Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. Ehrenreich lampoons positive thinking, which is right but she goes a little overboard. Rosin somehow managed to love the book even while dissenting from Ehrenrich's thesis--which is that corporate greed and connivance is behind the positive thinking plague. Of course Ehrenreich and Rosin appreciate the uses of sadness and angst--they're both reasonably well educated and well accultured Jews, after all; how could they not? But, that said, it is usually hard to like a book so well but at the same time disagree with its core argument. Do you think? But no, not in the NYTimes Book Review, where you get maximum points for striking the right mood and disliking the right things. Logic? Argument? Please don't bother me with that stuff.

And then there's Nicholas Thompson's review of Bruce Bueno de Mesquita's The Preditioneer's Game. Bueno de Mesquita is a political scientist (I've even published him myself once, or half of once -- he was a co-author...) who seems to have been bitten by the rational choice bug. He argues that people act in their own self-interest, and that most collective behavior can be predicted from this insight. The reviewer wonders at one point if Bueno de Mesquita is full of baloney, so the reviewer is clearly not a complete idiot. Of course, Bueno de Mesquita is at least half full of baloney. Sure, one has to start with self-interest, but one cannot possibly stop there. Self-interest can be interpreted in all sorts of ways by individuals, rationally and not so rationally. After all, all of us are emotional creatures, and some of us are stupid, too. Moreover, collective behavior -- of governments, corporations, large organizations of all kinds, not to mention societies -- is not a simple aggregation of individual behaviors. Anyone who hasn't appreciated that little fact yet needs remedial training in the act of having an adult consciousness. Rational choice modeling is a a step backwards, and it is only as popular as it is because it seems you can load a lot of data into a computer and watch it gurgle and purr. Oh what fun. Oh what alchemistic baloney. Oh what "stuff" to ignore in a New York Times Book Review essay.

Thank heaven, at least, for TLS.