Why Donald Trump is going to lose, in one image

Posted on August 27, 2016

Now that Election Day is only a few weeks away, everybody’s wondering what Donald Trump’s performance so far as a general election candidate — a performance which could be most charitably be described as “erratic” — means for his prospects of victory.

People are studying all sorts of different tea leaves in attempts to find an answer to that question. But I would submit there is only one thing you need to look at.

It’s this image:

Slate has been doing a weekly feature called the Conservative Pundit Tracker, where they check in on a group of 25 prominent right-wing talking heads to see what they’re saying that week about how they will cast their own personal ballot in November. (This week’s edition is here.) They then distill their findings into an interactive graphic, screenshotted above, putting each talking head into the column that best fits what they’re saying. It’s a neat little visualization, go check it out.

Anyway, as of this writing, of the 25 pundits they follow, exactly two are saying unambiguously that they will vote for Donald Trump. All the rest are saying that they’ll vote for Hillary Clinton (4), stay home and not vote at all (1), vote for a an alternative candidate like Libertarian Gary Johnson or independent Evan McMullin (8), or are just keeping their mouth shut on the subject completely (10).

Two out of twenty-five conservative pundits saying they’ll vote for the conservative party’s candidate.

Two.

That’s not just remarkable, it’s kind of astonishing. (As Trump would say, it’s YUUUUGE.)

These are all people, remember, who earn their living promoting the Republican Party. And yet only 8% of them can say with a straight face that they will vote for that party’s nominee!

Now, I’m not claiming that this figure is directly predictive, that only 8% of registered Republicans will vote for Trump in the fall.  Trump has always been less popular with the conservative elite than he has been with the rank and file. So a lack of enthusiasm for him will always be more pronounced among the chattering class than among average Republican voters.

But I do claim that this picture means that Trump will lose, because it’s indicative of a deeply divided party — and in modern American presidential politics, where elections are decided by swings of just one or two percent in a few battleground states, when one party is divided and the other is not, the divided party is going to lose.

In an age when the demographics of the nation are already not going their way, it’s beyond critical for any GOP candidate to be able to at least hold on to the party’s existing core constituencies. Holding the Reagan coalition together is crucial. But all you have to do is look at that image to see how fractured that coalition has become. Which makes the trajectory of the candidate who’s depending on it pretty predictable.

There’s still a little more than two months left in the campaign, of course, and a lot of things could happen that could change that trajectory. But absent some kind of massive shift that miraculously puts Humpty Dumpty back together again, it’s difficult to see a party as divided as the GOP is today pulling off a victory.

Book review: “The Peripheral”

Posted on August 26, 2016

William Gibson’s latest novel, last year’s The Peripheral, is a difficult thing to approach.

I mean that literally, not metaphorically. The Peripheral is classic Gibson, visionary and daring; but it’s also a book whose first 50 pages or so are so densely packed with ideas and future-jargon that I fear many readers will find them impossible to wade through. Gibson drops you right into the deep end of The Peripheral‘s pool right from the jump, trusting that the reader is smart enough and committed enough to keep their head above water until they figure out what’s going on. It’s a brave decision, but I fear it will lead many people to give up on what’s otherwise a very good novel.

The Peripheral is told in alternating chapters from the perspectives of two protagonists. Flynne Fisher lives in a near-future American small town where the jobs have all dried up; she makes a living of sorts assembling cheap plastic crap at a 3D print shop, trying to avoid getting sucked into the undertow of the illegal drug-making economy that’s the only thing the town has resembling a growth sector. Wilf Netherton is a sort of P.R. flack living in London 70-plus years later; his living is made helping hyper-celebrities fine-tune their image and trying to keep his knack for making bad decisions from ruining his already-shaky career once and for all. Flynne’s brother Burton, an ex-Marine living on veterans’ benefits while scrabbling to make money on the side, picks up a gig doing security in a new kind of online game; one night Flynne agrees to cover a shift for him, and while doing so sees something that will bring her life and Wilf’s together in strange and unexpected ways.

Gibson’s aesthetic has always been cool and slick, black leather and burnished chrome, and The Peripheral is no different. Wilf’s farther-future London is steeped in it more than Flynne’s backwoods Recession-Americana community is, but you can see the seeds of the former being planted in the latter as you read. Gibson knows how to build dystopias that feel weirdly, unsettlingly familiar — dystopias that feel implausibly fantastic and yet somehow inevitable — and he’s at the top of his game here in that respect.

He’s also developed a pair of strong characters in Flynne and Wilf. Flynne is a spiky, angular young woman, but not in the standard cyberpunk-heroine style; she’s more country than computerized, and it shows in her preference for plain speech and direct action. Wilf is more considered and conditioned, a man whose main skills are a facility with bullshit and a willingness to contort himself into the awkward shapes necessary to fit alongside difficult people. He’s passive, but not in an uninteresting way; he comes across as a man who’s a passenger in his own life, trapped by his routines and weaknesses, but wanting desperately to break free. They’re opposites not just in time but in temperament, which makes their interactions pop and crackle.

All of which sounds pretty great, right? And it is — once you get past that beginning. Gibson has never been the type of writer who feels the need to explain his worlds; he just drops you into the middle of them, leaving it to you to find your bearings. When it’s done right this can be invigorating, but in the first chapters of The Peripheral it’s not done right. The scenes it drops you into are so unfamiliar, and the language the characters are using so cryptic, that it feels almost willfully obscure. I’m more game for this sort of thing than most readers, I think, and even I found myself tossing The Peripheral aside in frustration after the first few chapters, convinced that it wasn’t worth the effort. Reading positive reviews elsewhere convinced me to go back and try it again, and I’m glad they did; the deeper you get into it the more things fall into place, and there are several satisfying moments where things that seemed incomprehensible in the early going suddenly come into sharp focus.

So if you tried it and gave up, or were scared off by someone else’s experience of doing so, I encourage you to give it another try. It really is worth the price of admission, even if that price is steeper than it should be.

Books I love: Stephen Mitchell’s “Tao Te Ching: A New English Version”

Posted on August 25, 2016

If I was going to be stranded on a desert island for the rest of my life and could only take one book with me, I’m not 100% certain which one I’d pick. But I am 100% certain that Stephen Mitchell’s Tao Te Ching: A New English Version would be on the short list. It is one of the very few books I’ve read that legitimately changed my life.

I discovered it more or less by accident. I’ve written before about my experience living with depression, and how the pain it causes ebbs and flows. Once, many years ago, when it was well and truly flowing, I found myself in a bookstore hoping to find consolation in philosophy. I grabbed a few books at random, one of which was Mitchell’s Tao.

The others didn’t help much, but this one did. In fact, it kind of blew my mind.

It’s not a long book; just 81 short chapters, most less than one page long. There are editions of it small enough to carry around in your pocket. But don’t be fooled by that — there are ideas here deep enough to spend the rest of your life thinking about.

The Master
acts without doing anything
and teaches without saying anything.
Things arise and she lets them come;
things disappear and she lets them go.
She has but doesn’t possess,
acts but doesn’t expect.
When her work is done, she forgets it.
That is why it lasts forever.

Part of that comes from the timeless nature of the Tao itself, of course. Written hundreds of years before the birth of Christ, the Tao Te Ching is one of the foundational texts of Chinese religion and philosophy, and over time hundreds of translations spread its influence around the world. Its short, gnomic verses invite contemplation, like a puzzle waiting for the reader to solve it.

The heavy is the root of the light.
The unmoved is the source of all movement.

Thus the Master travels all day
without leaving home.
However splendid the views,
she stays serenely in herself.

But Mitchell’s contribution to this work shouldn’t be underestimated, either. Eager for insight, I’ve read several translations of the Tao beyond Mitchell’s, but I’ve never found one that affected me as deeply as his. He takes this ancient work and renders it in English prose that, diamond-sharp and flashing, approaches poetry.

Express yourself completely,
then keep quiet.
Be like the forces of nature:
when it blows, there is only wind;
when it rains, there is only rain;
when the clouds pass, the sun shines through.

That prose has brought A New English Version criticism ever since it was first published. Mitchell’s work is more interpretation than translation, his detractors charge, departing from the letter of the text in its efforts to communicate to a modern reader its spirit.

When a country is in harmony with the Tao,
the factories make trucks and tractors.
When a country goes counter to the Tao,
warheads are stockpiled outside the cities.

And maybe that’s the case; I don’t read classical Chinese, so I’m in no position to judge. But I’m approaching this work as a lay reader, not as a Taoist or an historical scholar, so I’m less interested in the strict accuracy of its translation than I am in its use as an aid to thinking. And I know no translation of the Tao that has given me as much to think about over the years as Mitchell’s.

Act without doing;
work without effort.
Think of the small as large
and the few as many.
Confront the difficult
while it is still easy;
accomplish the great task
by a series of small acts.

I won’t attempt to summarize the book’s message here. Who would be so bold as to try to summarize in a few words a book that people have ruminated on for thousands of years? But I can tell you what I have taken away from it, which is that so many of the problems we humans struggle with in our lives are just smoke from fires that we ourselves have lit.

The Master concerns himself
with the depths and not the surface,
with the fruit and not the flower.
He has no will of his own.
He dwells in reality,
and lets all illusions go.

That the secret of living in the world is found in learning how best to embody what the world is, rather than taking up hard iron tools to try and force it to become something else.

Men are born soft and supple;
dead, they are stiff and hard.
Plants are born tender and pliant;
dead, they are brittle and dry.

Thus whoever is stiff and inflexible
is a disciple of death.
Whoever is soft and yielding
is a disciple of life.

That the way to embody what the world is can be found in shedding pretensions and embracing humility.

The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain.

That ambition is a snare set for human hubris, regardless of whether it leads to success or failure.

Whether you go up the ladder or down it,
you position is shaky.
When you stand with your two feet on the ground,
you will always keep your balance.

That true leaders understand they are actually servants.

The Master doesn’t talk, he acts.
When his work is done,
the people say, “Amazing:
we did it, all by ourselves!”

I don’t expect you to agree with all of these positions. I don’t; or at least, I agree with some more than I agree with others. But I have found that the act of engaging with them, of hashing out how closely I should hew to them in my own life, to have a remarkable ability to blow away the smoke that clouds my mind and help me see things more clearly. It’s grounding, centering.

When I first discovered A New English Version, it was summertime, and I was volunteering with a group that taught theater skills to high school kids. We were doing Shakespeare in the Park that summer — A Midsummer Night’s Dream, because of course — in a bandshell in a beautiful park; so I spent a lot of time between scenes sitting on a green hilltop reading this little book. And as I sat there reading, the sun shining on my face and the wind blowing through my hair, this book taught me how to still the cacophony in my brain, how to find a place inside myself that I had never even realized existed. Someplace quiet, peaceful, where I could focus on the work that was immediately before me and tune out the rest of the world’s distractions.

Fill your bowl to the brim
and it will spill.
Keep sharpening your knife
and it will blunt.
Chase after money and security
and your heart will never unclench.
Care about people’s approval
and you will be their prisoner.

Do your work, then step back.
The only path to serenity.

Words to live by.

A word about #Brexit

Posted on June 24, 2016

Like many others, I was surprised when I woke up this morning to discover that a majority of British voters had cast their ballots for an exit of the UK from the European Union —  the event that pundits had not-really-charmingly dubbed “Brexit.” The conventional wisdom had been that “Remain,” the option to stay within the EU, would win a narrow victory, and this reading had been supported by most polling. So to see “Leave” win the vote came as a shock.

I don’t know how closely most of you have been following this issue, but as an official degree-bearing political science nerd I feel a responsibility to say a little bit about why this is a Big Deal and what it may mean for both the British and for us. So here’s a short post on that subject.

Why Brexit is a Big Deal

The best way to understand the EU as it relates (related?) to Britain is as a giant free-trade zone. Similar to the way an American business can set up in California and then do business in any other U.S. state without having to deal with the kinds of hassles (customs duties, tariffs, different sets of laws and trade regulations, etc.) that international commerce can involve, the EU provides a legal and regulatory framework that makes it easy for trade, commerce and capital to flow from one member state to the others within the EU’s “internal market.”

Now, the creation of this internal market is not the only thing the EU does. But it’s the main thing the EU means to Great Britain, because the British have always had one foot firmly planted outside the EU. For example, while most EU member states abandoned their national currencies in favor of the EU’s single currency, the Euro, the British chose to hold on to the pound sterling instead; and while most EU nations allow EU residents to move back and forth across their borders without having to show a passport, Britain does not extend such courtesy. So Britain leaving the EU is less of a seismic change than, say, France or Germany leaving would be.

But it’s still a Big Deal, for a number of reasons. First is that the UK is (was?) the third biggest nation in the EU; even if their participation was half-hearted, it was still participation, and having such a big participant drop out of any project is going to be a big blow to the credibility and prospects of that project. It also poses a potentially major threat to the British economy, since leaving the internal market will mean that businesses in the UK could now lose access to all those trade privileges described above; and if it really does become harder for British businesses to sell and buy on the Continent, the result could be severe economic dislocation as profits fall and jobs disappear.

The biggest reason, though, is that the Brexit vote has highlighted stark divisions within the United Kingdom itself. Overall the vote tilted towards Leave, but this was not the uniform result across the entire country; in Scotland and Northern Ireland, majorities actually voted to Remain in the EU instead. This is important, because the overall result has people in those parts of the UK asking themselves whether they’d be better off leaving the United Kingdom and staying within the EU instead of the other way around.

This isn’t an idle line of thought, either. Less than two years ago, the Scots actually had a referendum of their own on whether to stay part of the UK or seek Scottish independence; at the time a majority voted to stay, but the prospect of England dragging them out of the EU has them revisiting the question today. And Ireland, of course, has always been famously restive under British rule; Northern Ireland has deeper ties to England than the rest of the island does, but it’s not impossible to imagine them pulling away either, choosing to become part of a united Ireland within the EU.

What Brexit means

In the immediate term, it doesn’t actually mean anything. The vote yesterday was only a referendum; technically speaking it doesn’t legally bind the British government to take any action, it’s just a way for the people to inform the government of what they think.

That being said, there will be consequences. The value of the British pound started dropping precipitously since it became clear that Leave would win, for example; the possible economic consequences described above have traders thinking a pound is going to be worth less — maybe a lot less — in the future than it was worth yesterday. A weak pound is great news if you want to take a British vacation, but it’s less great if you’re a British business that has to buy materials overseas or pay employees in other countries.

While the referendum is technically non-binding, it would be political suicide for the British government to just ignore it. The Prime Minister, David Cameron, has already resigned, which will set off a scramble within his Conservative party to replace him. How aggressively the UK chooses to go about pursuing an exit will depend a lot on who wins that scramble.

The long-term economic consequences are less clear. It’s unlikely to be the kind of economic apocalypse that some have suggested, but if exit becomes a reality there will definitely be a period of adjustment, possibly severe. Businesses that do a lot of their business in the internal market may choose to leave Britain and relocate within the EU; talented young people who feel that the economic future is in Europe may follow them. Those that stay will have to deal with a period of uncertainty as Britain and the EU negotiate the new terms of their relationship. The longer that period of uncertainty drags on, the more damaging it could be to the British economy.

But for me, the biggest risk isn’t economic, but political. It’s the risk that Brexit may set in motion forces that could pull the United Kingdom itself apart. If Scotland and Ireland decide to pursue independence, that would be the end of the UK as a unified state. England and Wales are unlikely to want to fight a civil war to keep them under English rule — imagine the destruction and damage such a war would wreak on everyone involved! — but the alternative would be to just quietly let the United Kingdom dissolve, leaving behind a rump English state stubbornly sticking out of the EU while the Scots and Irish rush to return. Such a dissolution would be a world-historical moment, the final end of an empire that took hundreds of years to build.

What would such a dissolution mean for everyone else? It’s difficult to say. We are well and truly entering uncharted territory here.

For Europe, it could mean an EU with Germany even more strongly entrenched as its leading member, or it could mean an unraveling of the European project itself as other states that feel disadvantaged within the EU decide to follow the English example.

For America, it could mean watching our most important ally in the region come apart at the seams, with the obvious but unpleasant follow-up question being whether we stick with them or try to find some other country with which to have a Special Relationship. (And who would that be, exactly?)

All in all, Brexit raises more questions than it answers. The only thing that’s absolutely clear is that history, as it is wont to do, is suddenly happening in a rush. And nobody really knows who will keep up and who will fall by the wayside.

The curious case of “American Sniper” Chris Kyle’s DD-214

Posted on June 1, 2016

There’s been a lot of coverage over the last week to findings by The Intercept that Chris Kyle, legendary Navy SEAL and famed author of the bestselling book American Sniper, substantially overstated the number of decorations he was awarded. In the book and elsewhere, Kyle claimed to have earned two Silver Stars and five Bronze Stars for valor over four tours of duty in Iraq; but research by Intercept reporters Matthew Cole and Sheelagh McNeill found that official Navy records only showed him earning one Silver and three Bronze Stars.

Kyle’s own role in inflating his accomplishments has been well reported, both in The Intercept and elsewhere. But there’s another angle to this story that’s gotten less attention — which surprised me, because to me it’s the really important one.

It is this: if The Intercept’s reporting is accurate, Kyle’s case of “stolen valor” is unlike most. Because in this case, Kyle wasn’t acting alone. He had active, official assistance from the U.S. Navy itself.

To understand how we can see this, let’s talk a little about military bureaucracy. When a service member is discharged (released from military service), the military generates a form called a “DD-214” that summarizes the conditions of both their service and discharge. This document is what they can then use for the rest of their life to prove their eligibility for health care, education, burial in a national cemetery, and all the other benefits veterans are entitled to.

Because their DD-214 is the key a veteran uses to prove not just their veterancy but the details of their service, it is very important that it be accurate. And because it is very important that it be accurate, the world knows that the Defense Department puts great effort into making sure that it is accurate; which in turn means that facts on a DD-214 are accepted as being beyond dispute. The only way to get a more accurate report of a veteran’s career is to go to the Pentagon and query the DoD personnel database directly.

A brief consideration of various strategic problems in “Rule the Waves”

Posted on May 9, 2016

I’ve written in this space before about my love for Rule the Waves, a quirky but brilliant little game of naval strategy. It’s been a couple of months since then, and I’m still completely addicted to it; but the more I’ve played the more the game’s rough edges have come to stick out for me, and one big one is its complete unwillingness to even meet the new player half-way in terms of learning how to play it. You have to learn those lessons the hard way, by trial and error.

One of the most important of those lessons is learning how to play the various nations in the game, each of which has its own set of strategic challenges and unique resources to meet those challenges. So, for the benefit of newbies, I thought I’d take a moment to summarize the strategic mindset you have to take when playing each of the game’s nations to lead that power to success.

I’m going to address these in order of generally difficulty, taking the easiest nations to play as first and working my way to the hardest ones down the line.

The United States of America

The U.S. is by far the easiest power to play as in RtW. For this reason, I generally recommend it to new players as an ideal starting point from which to learn the game’s ins and outs. It is very hard for a player playing as the U.S. to do badly. You have to work at it.

There’s a few reasons why this is. The first is geography; the home coasts of the U.S. are separated from all other powers by broad oceans, making it extremely difficult for them to operate fleets there. Only Britain, with its bases in Canada, can plausibly mount a blockade of your home ports; and Britain’s need to meet responsibilities around the world (see below) can turn even this into an opportunity for the U.S. player, since you can concentrate your fleets in North American waters and thus open the door to landings that can seize those British bases.

The U.S. has overseas responsibilities of its own, but they are minimal. Bases in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean are large enough at the start to support fleets that include battleships, but in peacetime a couple of old cruisers is sufficient to cover them. In wartime things get more complicated, since Britain, France, Germany and Japan can all operate fleets of their own in Southeast Asia while Britain and France can do so in the Caribbean, but since these stations are relatively close to your home ports (the West Coast for Southeast Asia, the East Coast for the Caribbean) you can usually reinforce your fleets there quickly. And if you can build up forces in either station, the opportunity arises to gobble up those foreign colonies and expand your own presence there.

Your navy starts off with a small budget and a middling fleet, but rapid industrial development means that by mid-game you’re able to build fleets big and fast enough to directly challenge any other power. Even at the game’s start in 1900 you have ample dock space (14,000 tons) to build even large battleships without needing to rely on foreign shipyards, and if you invest modestly in dock expansion you can easily be building 40,000+-ton dreadnoughts by the 1920s.

This is not to say that everything is cream and strawberries for the U.S. player. One strategic challenge the U.S. faces is the need to divide your fleet between the East and West Coasts in order to be able to respond quickly to overseas developments; this can make concentrating your forces difficult, especially in the years before 1914 when the Panama Canal doesn’t exist. (In the absence of the canal, repositioning ships requires making the long voyage around Cape Horn, which can take four months to traverse.) Your lack of overseas possessions in places like Northern Europe, the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean can make it difficult for you to “take the fight to the enemy” in wars against powers like Britain and France. And if you do end up gobbling up those tempting foreign colonies, you can find yourself having to divide your fleet up further to meet the requirements those new possessions have for locally stationed ships to protect trade.

None of these problems are insurmountable, though, and most of them can be solved simply by relying on the nation’s increasing industrial might. In 1900, it is difficult for the U.S. to field a fleet that can truly operate globally; by 1915-1920, it’s child’s play. You have the money, you have the technology, you have the capacity to field a navy that is second to none. All that remains is for you to put those resources to work.

Great Britain

The British start the game as they started the 20th century in real life: in unquestioned control of the world’s oceans. The legacy fleet they begin with in 1900 generally outclasses all contemporaries, frequently many times over. They have the largest naval budget, the most advanced technology, and a worldwide network of overseas bases they can use to bring their fleet to bear against any opponent they wish. It’s an enviable position.

The story of most games of RtW for the British player, however, is one of managing the decline of most of those advantages. The other powers in the game are simply building too many good-quality ships too fast for Britain to be able to continue to outclass them all. And as the relative margin of strength between the Royal Navy and the rest of the world’s navies erodes, that network of overseas bases starts to look less like an advantage and more like a liability; for protecting them all means dividing your fleet up into lots of smaller units, one to cover each sea zone, and it’s impossible to make each of those fleets strong enough to be able to counter every possible local opponent. Powers like Germany, Japan and the U.S. can, by concentrating forces in their home waters, force you to reduce your fleets elsewhere to dangerous levels just to keep up with them there. It all begins to feel a bit like a game of Whack-a-Mole.

Again as in real life, the main tool available for Britain to arrest this decline is technological. You start the game with shipyards large enough to build even the largest contemporary battleships, and if you invest in research you can have the tools you need to start building dreadnoughts as early as 1903-1904. Britain is one of the few powers with such a large naval budget that it can afford to periodically completely reinvent itself, scrapping old ships before they even technically become obsolete and replacing them with new ones using the latest bleeding-edge tech. This gives you opportunities to push other powers into naval arms races they simply cannot afford to win, with aggressive construction of dreadnoughts and battlecruisers driving even well-designed foreign fleets into early obsolescence.

And if things ever do come to a shooting war, all that technology can give you serious edge. You may never have as many ships as you’d like, but the ships you do have will generally be so good that you can even send them up against superior numbers without having to worry too much. When everyone else is fielding 25,000-ton dreadnoughts with 12 or 13 inch guns, it can be a real gut check for them to have to go up against a 36,000-ton British one with 15 inch guns and several extra inches of armor. If you keep such a ship out of the range of enemy torpedoes (read: avoid night battles if at all possible), it can be very, very hard for anyone to take it down.

There is one thing to be wary of, however. To reflect the real-world British experience at the Battle of Jutland — at which Admiral David Beatty, after watching three British battlecruisers explode spectacularly upon being hit due to insufficient protection against fires reaching their internal stockpiles of shells, exclaimed “there seems to be something wrong with our bloody ships today” — the game occasionally throws unseen weaknesses into the British player’s ship designs, which can lead in battle to catastrophic failure. (Once as the U.S. player I was forced to take one American dreadnought into what seemed a hopeless battle with four British, only to watch in astonishment as three of the British capital ships blew into smithereens one after the other.) There’s not really anything you as the player can do to defend against this, and how pervasive these flaws are aren’t documented anywhere; all you can do is be aware they exist, and that even the most impressive, modern class of battleships in your fleet could turn out to have an Achilles’ heel.

Germany

The German player starts off the game in a moderately awkward position.

In 1900, she has what appears to be an impressive network of overseas possessions, ranging from the west coast of Africa through the Indian Ocean to Southeast and Northeast Asia. However, when you look more closely at these, you quickly realize that these bases are all too small to support operations by battleships, or really anything larger than a single armored cruiser. But if you want to keep them, you have to protect them — so you have to find a way to get them into shape before another power with better basing in that sea zone comes along and takes them off your hands.

What’s worse, the legacy fleet you usually start the game with isn’t set up to defend those overseas possessions even if you want them to. You usually start with a few battleships, but they’re frequently battleships with short range and cramped accommodations; such ships can’t operate effectively too far from a large base, and in wartime short-range ships can’t transit through sea zones occupied by enemy ships at all. So if all you’ve got is short-range battleships, and you haven’t pre-positioned any of them in, say, Southeast Asia before war is declared, they’re simply never going to get there until the shooting stops again; too many enemy fleets lie between Germany’s home bases in the North and Baltic seas and the German bases in the Bismarck Archipelago and Caroline Islands for such a transit to be practical.

So if you want to hold on to all those colonies, at game’s start you have a lot of building to do, and in two directions at once. First, you have to be building ships with the range to make the kind of oceanic voyages you’ll need them to make in wartime — and that can mean spending the game’s first decade deferring getting into new-fangled ship types like dreadnoughts and battlecruisers in order to build up longer-ranged conventional ships. And while you’re doing that, you also need to be building up the naval bases at your possessions overseas so they are big enough to receive and support those ships once they arrive; and even if you limit that building program to one single base in each sea zone, that’s four bases you’ll need to put through a program of expansion that will take years and consume many millions of marks.

But despite the network of useless colonies it has built up, Germany remains in 1900 a continental empire, which means that maintaining those colonies could be argued to be secondary to the protection of German home waters. And in the game’s Northern Europe sea zone, which is where those home waters lie, you face powerful opponents: Britain, France and Russia, all of which are strong enough to pose a credible threat at the game’s opening. So now, alongside all that building you have to do to make those colonies defensible, you also have to be building up a fleet in the North Sea that can at least prevent those powers from putting you under blockade. And you have to do all this with a limited budget, less advanced technology, and a mercurial Kaiser.

(In the real world, the architect of the German Navy, Alfred von Tirpitz, didn’t even try to square this impossible circle. Instead, he promoted a mission for the fleet based on what he called “risk theory.” Risk theory argued that the Germans didn’t need to have a battle fleet large enough to overwhelm the main naval power in Northern European waters, the British; they just needed a fleet that was large enough to damage the British fleet so severely that it would be unable after a clash to meet its requirements around the world. Tirpitz argued that the simple possibility of such an outcome would deter the British from ever confronting Germany at sea. As it happened, this theory turned out to be completely wrong; having plowed so much money into its own battle fleet, it was the Germans who when war came shied away from a confrontation which could see that investment humiliatingly sent to the bottom of the sea.)

Despite all that, though, Germany comes into the game with some distinct advantages as well. If you’re willing to abandon your colonies, for instance, you can narrow the list of sea zones that Germany has to care about down to just one — Northern Europe — which means you really can build up a fleet that can challenge the British there, especially if they have to cover their overseas possessions too. While your guns will generally lag behind those of British and American ships in terms of caliber, they will often be of higher quality, letting those smaller guns hit more reliably and fail less often. And while your budget starts off limited, as the game goes on it’s one of the few that can grow large enough to keep up with those of the British and Americans. (Who, if you’re lucky, will at some point go to war with each other, letting you watch from the sidelines as your two biggest threats whittle each other down.)

Unlike many powers, Germany is also ideally positioned to make use of submarines. Submarines are useless as oceanic combatants, as their range is too limited to range beyond your home waters and they don’t count towards the tonnage requirements you have to keep on station at your overseas possessions. But they can be absolutely deadly off your home coasts, especially later in the game when the rickety, unreliable submersibles of 1900 have become the swift, deadly raiders of 1915; and since your home waters are also the home waters of your most dangerous enemies, a fleet of submarines can wreak havoc both on their shipping and on their battle fleets.

And, if you decide you really do want to fight for a colonial empire, opportunities can present themselves there as well. If you build up your foreign bases and build out ships with the range to reach them, it can be possible to mass enough force in one sea zone to permit your army to land at your opponent’s bases there, seizing them. France, Britain and the United States have lots of colonies in Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean and West Africa; if you’re nimble, you can mass in one of those zones and overwhelm some of those colonies before your opponent can gather enough force to drive you out. (This can have a virtuous-circle effect, too; when you capture an enemy colony you capture its naval base too, so capturing colonies can be just as effective a way to increase the size and number of ships you can operate in a sea zone as building up your existing bases there is.)

So: Germany’s position is awkward, but it’s not impossible, and at least you have options.

Japan

Japan doesn’t have a lot of options.

In 1900, Japan is a second-tier naval power at best.  In your own home waters of Northeast Asia you can face direct opposition by both Russia and Germany; your only overseas possessions are in Southeast Asia, where you can potentially run into conflict with Britain, France and the U.S. Your fleet is small, your budget is smaller, and your domestic shipyards can only build vessels up to 10,000 tons, which means that if you want to build a battleship you have to pay a foreign shipyard to do it for you. You can build up your own yards to a size where you can do your building locally, but doing so takes time — as with expanding naval bases, each round of improvements to your shipyards takes a year to complete — and unless you’re building out your yards very aggressively, you’re always going to be running behind the capacity of the first-tier powers.

All of which sounds pretty limiting, I know. But we know that, in the real world, Japan managed to build up sufficiently just a few years after 1900 to crush the Russians at sea in a war that dramatically established them as a naval power to be reckoned with. Can a Japanese player do the same in RtW?

The answer is yes. Japan has limitations, but it also has important advantages.

The first is positional. Unlike the Great Powers, you as the Japanese player have no globe-spanning network of colonies; but that can actually be a source of strength, because it means you can completely abandon the need to build a large enough fleet to meet any possible enemy anywhere in the world. All you need to care about is being strong enough in two sea zones — Northeast and Southeast Asia — to handle whatever forces the other powers station there. Additionally, since these sea zones are far from the home waters of most of the colonial powers, what you’re generally going to be facing there is second-line stuff, old cruisers and pre-dreadnought battleships and the like; Britain and Germany and France will all want to keep their cutting-edge ships closer to home for the purpose of fighting each other. Finally, that great distance means that, if you can overcome whatever forces they have on station when the shooting starts, it can take many months for them to sail reinforcements out to meet you; months that you can use to seize their bases, disrupt their merchant fleets, and generally make hay while the sun shines.

Since your home waters are just one sea zone away from Southeast Asia, of course, all of those positional problems are flipped on their heads for you. You can focus your limited resources on building enough ships to be competitive in just the two sea zones you care about, rather than having to disperse forces across the world’s oceans. You can concentrate powerful, modern forces in your two zones without having to worry about potential foes elsewhere. You can move forces between these two zones in just one month’s time, making you agile and hard to pin down.

In other words, so long as you can limit your ambitions to Asian waters, you can punch far above your weight.

You have some other advantages as well, including a special ability that only the Japanese possess; when war breaks out, if you and the opponent have fleets in the same sea zone, you can launch a night-time surprise attack that will catch the enemy fleet at anchor. While their ships are frantically trying to raise steam and get to battle stations, they are stationary and unable to fight back effectively; your ships, meanwhile, are sailing at full speed with decks cleared for battle. There are no guarantees that you will win this battle — fighting at night is difficult in this pre-radar era, wandering too close to the anchored enemy can result in your ships getting hit by torpedoes, and once the enemy is alerted and moving the advantages surprise gives you are gone. But it certainly lets you enter battle with your opponent severely handicapped; and if you’ve built wisely and can handle your ships effectively, you can take advantage of those handicaps to deal a devastating blow.

France

France starts the game in what seems like a good, strong position. It has bases around the world, a respectable legacy fleet, and a decent naval budget. But its strategic position is undermined by a fatal problem — the same fatal problem that made France a negligible naval power during this period in the real world as well.

That problem is France’s geography. Having both Atlantic and Mediterranean coasts, simply protecting her home waters requires maintaining two separate fleets; and these fleets each share waters with regional enemies strong enough to take on a fractional French fleet with reasonable hope of success (Germany in the Atlantic/North Sea, Italy in the Med). Concentrating to face one, however, leaves the other wide open. And France’s far-flung colonies need protection too, of course. If France had the resources of, say, the United States, she might be able to deal with this strategic incoherence simply by throwing money at it; but she doesn’t, so her strategy becomes a series of unenviable choices, of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

And then of course there is France’s traditional enemy, lurking right across the English Channel: Great Britain. Unlike France, Britain has the resources to maintain strong fleets in both the Northern Europe and Mediterranean sea zones, as well as to guard her overseas empire. And while in the real world Britain and France, both struggling to keep up with the pace of German naval construction, eventually came together in alliance to meet the threat together, there’s no guarantees of such a rapprochemont emerging in RtW. For all you as the French player know, it may be Britain and Germany teaming up, which from the French perspective is pretty much an apocalyptic scenario.

All of which locks France inside a puzzle box that it’s not clear how to open. If you try to abandon either the Mediterranean or Northern Europe sea zone to concentrate your strength in the other, you’ll quickly receive a tongue-lashing (and an accompanying prestige loss) from the civilian government, which has yet to come to terms with just how far France’s ambitions have outstripped her means. Pulling back from the colonies means losing them when war breaks out, or watching your prestige erode further as complaints from colonists and merchant mariners that you’re not protecting their supply routes pile up. You can try to build up a large enough fleet to meet the German threat, but you simply do not have the resources to meet every threat in every theater.

France is the first power on this list whose handicaps are sufficiently great to make it difficult to identify any really good strategy to overcome them. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t play as France, of course; struggling to overcome challenges is what makes a strategy game fun, after all. It does mean, however, that the powers on this list from this point on are best left to advanced, experienced players looking for something to really test their strategic mettle.

Russia

On paper, Russia looks like it should be a pretty formidable power in RtW. It starts you off docks nearly as large as those of England and France, a naval budget that’s in line with up-and-coming powers like the U.S., and a strong legacy fleet that includes a respectable number of battleships. If you play with an historical distribution of natural resources, Russia is even one of the few powers that has access to oil right from the start of the game, letting you switch from coal-fired ships to faster, lighter oil-fired ships as soon as you can get your hands on the technology to do so.

You may have noticed, however, that Russia is pretty far down this list. And that’s because, in RtW as in the real world, Russian naval power in 1900 is more or less a Potemkin village.

The handicaps Russia labors under are many and serious. You start with a healthy naval budget, but Russia’s failure to industrialize during this period means that it stays stagnant as other powers’ coffers swell. Russia’s backwards educational system and lack of naval expertise means that research pays off less and more slowly for you than it does for your rivals, which in turn makes your advantages in natural resources harder to tap; who cares if you have oil wells if you have no idea how to build an oil-fired ship?

Beyond cultural challenges, there are geographic ones to grapple with as well. Like the U.S., you have to split your fleet to defend two distant coasts, Northern Europe and Northeast Asia, simultaneously; but unlike the U.S., you have strong rivals right on your doorstep in each of those zones, and there’s no canal coming to cut down the length of the voyage required for ships to transfer from one to the other.

What’s worst of all, though, is the way these handicaps interlock to reinforce each other. You need to get your prestige up to get your budget increased, but to keep it up you need to win battles, and you can’t win battles with obsolescent ships that have to sail for half a year just to reach the battle zone. You need to increase your research spending to field ships that are competitive, but the game caps research spending at 10% of your overall budget, which means going beyond that requires increasing your budget; but that requires increasing your prestige, which, see above. When you turn from one problem you just encounter another.

If you’re playing as Russia, then, the key to getting to some kind of successful-looking conclusion is to be modest in your ambitions. Husband your fleet; don’t send it off to bravely confront enemy fleets if you can avoid doing so, keep it in port so it can at least stop your opponent from being able to put you under blockade. Your lack of overseas possessions can be a positive here — it means fewer flashpoints that can bring you into collision with better-equipped powers. You’ll never be able to take on Britain directly, so focus on Germany in Northern Europe and Japan in Northeast Asia.

Submarines can be useful, even though your subs will never be cutting-edge technically; the same is true of long-range commerce raiders, which can disrupt your enemy’s trade networks (building up political pressure on them back home to end the war). Your surface raiders are going to lag technologically too, though, so concentrate on making them fast and cheap — they’re going to get run down by more capable ships from time to time, so the extra speed can help them get out of danger, and making them cheap means you can afford to lose some without breaking the bank.

It’s not a great strategy, but then Russia doesn’t really have access to a lot of great strategies. You have to work with the materials you have.

Italy/Austria-Hungary

I’m grouping Italy and Austria-Hungary together on this list, because they both have more or less the same strategic position.

These nations are Mediterranean powers only. They can muster fleets that are strong and capable enough to guard their interests inside that inland sea, but that’s about it. Italy has just one overseas possession outside the Med, a naval base in the Indian Ocean at Eritrea that’s too small to support battleship operations; Austria has no overseas possessions whatsoever.

What this means in practice is that these two powers are each others’ natural enemies. There are plenty of possessions inside the Mediterranean sea zone that they can both dream of seizing; Italy has respectable bases in Sicily and Sardinia, Albania, Rhodes and Libya all start the game independent, and even France’s four bases can become targets if France gets tied down fighting strong opponents elsewhere.

Expansion outside the Mediterranean, though, is difficult at best. Italy’s tiny base in Eritrea provides what seems like a starting point; but its small size and Italy’s inability to field powerful fleets in the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean simultaneously mean that it’s frequently snapped up by other powers.

Austria lacks any such springboard altogether. It’s possible for them to obtain one via random events or some other freakishly lucky chance, but then she has the problem of defending these new holdings, which is difficult at best for a nation with an undersized fleet. Of all the powers in the game, Austria starts the farthest behind in shipbuilding — while her dockyards are able in 1900 to build ships up to 13,000 tons, the ships of her legacy fleet are almost comically small, with “battleships” so small that in any other nation they would be designated as armored cruisers. You can build up new, larger ships, but that takes money you probably don’t have and time your opponents may not be inclined to allow you.

In this respect, if Austria can be said to have any advantage, it’s a simple one: her naval presence is so small that it’s unlikely to attract much hostile attention. There are no Austrian colonies for other powers to eye greedily, no Austrian dreadnoughts standing in the way of some important supply line. Italy, while weak, can in at least some circumstances contemplate challenging larger powers like France; if Austria is to grow, it will have to be at the expense of the only power she can challenge on anything like similar terms: Italy.

Jason recommends: “The Guest”

Posted on April 23, 2016

Just a quick note to tell you about a good little movie you should check out: 2014’s The Guest, directed by Adam Wingard and written by Simon Barrett.

The setup of The Guest is pretty simple. We meet the Peterson family, whose grief over the loss of their soldier son Caleb in Afghanistan is grinding them all down in different ways. Then one day a stranger with piercing blue eyes appears at their front door. His name is David, he explains, and he served with Caleb overseas. He was there when Caleb died, in fact, and promised his dying buddy that he would let his family know that his last thoughts on this earth were of them. Now he’s out of the Army, and he’s come to fulfill that promise.

The Petersons welcome him with open arms, and offer to let him stay with them for a few days while he looks for a job and gets on his feet. And David quickly proves to be an ideal guest; respectful, courteous and modest, he cheerfully helps out around the house, and even starts teaching Caleb’s bully-plagued younger brother Luke how to stand up for himself.

While he’s doing all that, though, we (along with the Petersons’ daughter, Anna) start to notice some weird things about David — things that indicate that maybe he’s not exactly the person he says he is. But if he’s not Caleb’s army buddy, who is he? And, maybe more troublingly, if he’s not there to keep a promise to a dying friend, what actually brought him to the Petersons’ front door? What does he want?

The Guest, in other words, is a mysterious-stranger suspense thriller, which led me to it with low expectations since movies with that premise tend to be low-budget schlock. While The Guest is not exactly big-budget, however, it is definitely not schlock; it’s elevated past its pedestrian premise by smart writing and strong performances into a fun, compelling thriller.

The performances are particularly worthy of note. The titular guest is played by Dan Stevens, who is probably familiar to most of you from his role as weedy aristocrat Matthew Crawley in Downton Abbey. Here, however, he is something else entirely; his body chiseled and cut, his eyes flashing like lasers, he manages to both be completely plausible as someone a family of strangers would take in without a second thought and as someone who practically vibrates with barely restrained menace. The facility with which he passes between these two modes of performance is startling. It makes the movie.

Another very good performance is turned in by Stevens’ co-star, Maika Monroe, who plays skeptical daughter Anna. Her character is in an awkward place in her life — 20 years old but still living at home, waitressing while trying to save up enough money to escape to college, secretly dating a local pot dealer but, we sense, less out of passion than out of a desire to defy her parents, who hate him. And Monroe takes exactly the right approach to this character, making her grounded and realistic in a way that provides a fascinating contrast to Stevens’ larger-than-life David. She’s a romantic, but not so much of one that she refuses to see what’s right in front of her; and that quality is what leads her to suspect David when all the other members of her family are busy being thrilled at how well he fulfills their individual needs. This is the first performance of Monroe’s that I’ve seen, but based on it I’m looking forward to seeing more.

And a special word must be said about the third act of this film, which is absolutely fantastic. The standard problem with mysterious-stranger plots is that, once the identity of the stranger is revealed, the movie has nowhere else to go. The Guest isn’t immune to that problem, but you get the feeling that the filmmakers recognized that and decided to address it in the only way they could imagine: by throwing all restraint to the wind and turning it into a completely different kind of movie. So, while most of The Guest is taut and suspenseful, the last thirty minutes or so are like someone strapped rocket engines to it and launched it towards the moon. It is so gleefully over-the-top that you can’t help but be swept along, giggling all the way. Every end-of-the-horror-movie trope is hauled out, dumped onto the stage, and then wired together to form a lurching, steam-belching monstrosity so ugly you can’t help but love it. It is glorious.

So yeah, The Guest is not Shakespeare. But it’s a lot of fun, even if you’re not usually a fan of these types of films. It’s free to stream on Netflix at the moment, available for rental from most other streaming services, and out on DVD and Blu-Ray as well. You should check it out.

What we talk about when we talk about a brokered convention

Posted on March 24, 2016

Now that Donald Trump has pulled out into a strong lead in the GOP presidential primaries, it might seem like he has a lock on that party’s nomination. But party leaders and other dissatisfied Republicans, desperate for a way to keep that from happening, have started talking about doing something that hasn’t happened in American politics in a long, long time: putting up a fight against him at the party’s nominating convention, regardless of how many votes he’s won. This would produce what’s known as a “brokered” or “contested” convention.

It’s a sign of just how desperate they really are that they’re talking about this as a viable way forward. There hasn’t been a brokered convention in so long that the idea is practically unknown in modern American politics. And there’s a reason why — a party that’s still fighting at the convention over who is going to be its nominee is a party so deeply divided that victory in the general election is usually a forlorn hope.

Still, here we are. So, since this is a subject that few people really understand and that the media has done a pretty poor job of explaining, I thought I’d take a moment and write a Guide for the Perplexed on the subject so that at least you, my devoted readers, will be prepared should it come to pass.

To understand how a “brokered” or “contested” convention would work, you have to first understand how a political convention itself really works. So let’s begin at the beginning.

How political conventions work

A political convention is a meeting of party leaders to decide the party’s stance on some question or other. It could be about anything, but in the modern context, there’s only one type of convention that really matters: a nominating convention, where the leaders gather to decide who the party should put up as its candidate for some public office. And at the national level, there’s only one nominating convention that really matters: the quadrennial conventions where the parties decide who to run for President and Vice President of the United States.

Today parties make that decision more or less by popular vote. They hold state-by-state election contests (called primaries or caucuses, depending on how they are organized), each of which decides how the party leaders who will be going to the convention from that state (called delegates) will vote on the nomination. The number of delegates each state is allowed to send depends on its population, so big states like Texas send a lot while small states like Vermont send fewer. The candidates then compete in these contests, and the one who wins enough contests to get a majority of the available delegates to vote for them gets the nomination.

(Note: I’m simplifying a bit here, because there are wrinkles like the Democrats’ “superdelegates” which complicate the picture somewhat. But at the macro level, the picture is accurate.)

How political conventions used to work

Things have worked this way for long enough now that most people just take it for granted that they will be able to vote for who their party nominates, and that their vote will matter. Neither of those things are written in law, however.

It’s important to understand that the entire process of primary elections is a patch that was put on top of an existing system to make it more democratic. Before that patch was applied by the reformers of the Progressive Era, the average person had little to no influence in who the parties nominated for the presidency.

There were still conventions, of course, and delegates still gathered at them every four years to nominate a candidate. But unlike today, those delegates weren’t “bound” by any formal agreement as to who they would cast their vote for when the roll was called. In other words, they could vote for whomever they wanted.

Astute readers will immediately understand the problem this kind of arrangement poses: if a delegate is free to vote however they like, they are also free to sell their vote to the highest bidder. So the party conventions quickly became orgies of political horse-trading, with backers of every declared candidate (and sometimes backers of people who weren’t declared candidates yet) making wild deals of money and favors with delegates to win their support.

And this in turn put people who could control the votes of a whole group of delegates — people like the bosses of the urban political machines, who were strong enough to make sure that the delegates from their region were men who were safely under their thumb — in a position to demand extortionate bribes in order to “deliver” their delegates as a unit. These deals went down in what became known as “smoke-filled rooms,” closed off from public view, so it was always difficult after the votes were cast to determine how many were cast out of conviction and how many had simply been sold off, either retail or wholesale. Even in cases where a nomination wasn’t the result of a behind-the-scenes bargain, the fact that all the important decisions were made in secret meant that the stink of corruption would still attach to it.

If this doesn’t sound particularly democratic or even participatory, that’s because it wasn’t. It had nothing to do with the wishes of the average voter whatsoever. The one and only job of the average voter in this process was to vote for whomever his party told him to vote for, and who the party told him to vote for mostly came down to the wishes of unelected party bosses who were accountable to no one.

This all changed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, though. Progressives believed in the value of democracy, and saw the closed, elitist party nominating conventions — and the power they gave those unelected, unaccountable bosses — as an affront to it. So one of the reforms they pushed for was to take the power of nominating candidates out of the smoke-filled rooms, and place it instead in the results of a popular vote. The idea caught on, and snowballed into the system we take for granted today.

But — and this is the really important bit — the reformers did not eliminate the old system. Delegates still go to conventions, and the vote of those delegates is still technically what decides who the party’s candidate will be. The only difference is that now most of those delegates are “bound delegates,” required by party rules to cast their vote depending on the results of their state primary or caucus. When you combine this with the winnowing effect the primary process has on the field — losses in early primaries tend to drive weak or fringe candidates out of the race — the result has been that in all modern elections one candidate has been able to sew up enough bound delegates to have a majority when the convention votes, making the actual vote itself a mere formality.

But what if that didn’t happen? What if a party reached its convention with no candidate having a majority of delegates bound to vote for them?

Things would get wild fast, that’s what. And the democratic patch that the Progressives put on top of the nominating process would quickly get peeled back, revealing the seedier system underneath.

How a contested convention would work

People talking about this subject frequently use the terms “contested convention” and “brokered convention” interchangeably. But I would argue that they’re referring to subtly different things, so I’ll be discussing them here separately.

A contested convention is a convention where no one candidate has a majority of the delegates bound to them by the time the convention starts voting. The Republican Party has credentialed 2,472 delegates to vote at its 2016 nominating convention, and party rules specify that a candidate needs to get the votes of a simple majority of those delegates — 1,236 votes — to win the nomination.

As of this writing, Donald Trump, who has 741 delegates bound to him, is the only candidate with a realistic possibility of sewing up that many votes by then; his last serious opponent still standing, Ted Cruz, has only 465.  944 delegates remain uncommitted, which makes it sound like it should be possible for Cruz to reach the magic 1,236 if he can pull off wins in the remaining primaries, but there’s a wrinkle here: unlike in general elections, where winning a state means winning all of that state’s electoral votes, many states have “proportional” or “winner-take-most” primaries where even losing candidates can come away with some delegates based on what share of the overall vote they garner. (As opposed to a “winner-take-all” primary, where whoever wins a simple majority of the votes gets 100% of the delegates from that state.)

So it could be possible for Cruz to run the tables, winning primary after primary, and still end up spitting the remaining delegates with Trump. Cruz needs to win 771 of the remaining 944 delegates — 82%! — to get to 1,236, so unless he starts blowing Trump out of the water by historic margins in those remaining primaries the numbers get pretty grim for him fast.

But while it’s difficult to imagine Cruz winning enough delegates to take the nomination outright, it’s not difficult to imagine him taking enough to keep Trump from doing so. After all, Trump is still 495 votes away from having a majority himself; that’s more than half of the delegates still remaining. If Cruz can keep Trump from getting enough of those delegates to reach the magic number, we’d have a contested convention.

So imagine that happens. The delegates arrive, the roll is called, and it turns out that no candidate has a majority of the delegates on their site. What happens then?

The GOP’s rules make it sound very simple. Rule 40 says:

(d) When at the close of a roll call any candidate for nomination for President of the United States or Vice President of the United States has received a majority of the votes entitled to be cast in the convention, the chairman of the convention shall announce the votes for each candidate whose name was presented in accordance with the provisions of paragraph (b) of this rule. Before the convention adjourns sine die, the chairman of the convention shall declare the candidate nominated by the Republican Party for President of the United States and Vice President of the United States.

(e) If no candidate shall have received such majority, the chairman of the convention shall direct the roll of the states be called again and shall repeat the calling of the roll until a candidate shall have received a majority of the votes entitled to be cast in the convention.

In other words: if they take a vote and nobody has a majority, they just take more votes, on and on, until somebody finally does have a majority. (Each of these votes is called a “ballot,” so a candidate who has a majority in the bag from the start is said to have “won on the first ballot.” At the legendarily divided Democratic convention of 1924, it took a whopping 103 ballots to choose the eventual nominee, John W. Davis.)

Which is where things get loosey-goosey, because the thing about those “bound delegates” we mentioned above — the ones who are required to vote the way their state primary shook out — is that they are not bound forever. The exact details are set by the state parties, so they vary from state to state; but many of them are only bound for one ballot, and if things are still deadlocked by a third ballot nearly all of them will have been released to vote however they wish. So delegates Trump “won” in the primary could, after casting a vote for Trump in the first ballot, switch over to Cruz, and vice versa.

Enter a dark horse

Or, just as plausibly, they could end up switching to a candidate who wasn’t even on the first ballot. In the past, if a contested convention proved after multiple ballots unable to agree on any of the currently running candidates, it was common for new names to be submitted by delegates in an attempt to break the deadlock by finding a compromise candidate that a majority could rally around. Such “dark horse candidates” can, of course, be candidates who dropped out of the race earlier after failing to attract votes in the primaries. (Which is why you’ll notice that, when those candidates drop out, they are always careful to say they are only “suspending their campaign” instead of terminating it; by just putting it in suspension, they keep the door open to bring it to life again later if an opportunity arises.)

But it can also be someone who had not been running could be, too. Delegates are free to put forward any name they like for nomination; and all the party rules have to say on the subject is

In making the nominations for President of the United States and Vice President of the United States and voting thereon, the roll of the states shall be called separately in each case

… which means that, if a delegate puts a name forward and a majority of the delegates agree that person should be in contention, then guess what, now they’re in contention! So it’s possible to imagine desperate delegates at a deadlocked convention throwing out all sorts of names.

Here, too, there is a catch. The national Republican leadership have inserted a provision into the rules that, as written, pretty dramatically limits the number of names the convention can consider for nomination. It’s in paragraph B of that Rule 40 I mentioned above:

Each candidate for nomination for President of the United States and Vice President of the United States shall demonstrate the support of a majority of the delegates from each of eight (8) or more states, severally, prior to the presentation of the name of that candidate for nomination.

This means that, at least in theory, candidates who want to be placed into nomination have to be able to demonstrate first that they have the support of delegates from at least eight states. Which, on the first ballot anyway, means they’ve won at least 50% of the delegates from at least eight primaries or caucuses. (If the 2016 GOP convention really does turn out to be contested, you’ll be hearing about this rule a lot, usually referred to as “Rule 40b” or “the eight-state rule.”)

Today there’s only one candidate who meets that standard: Donald Trump, who has won majorities of the delegates in 11 of the 21 primaries he’s won so far. (Remember, the rule calls for a majority of the delegates, not a majority of the popular vote — so in a winner-take-all or winner-take-most primary, the winner could be the only candidate to qualify under this rule even if he or she only won by a tiny plurality.) The only other candidates still running, Ted Cruz and John Kasich, both fail to meet this standard, Cruz having a majority of the delegates from just five or six states (depending on how Wyoming eventually shakes out) and Kasich in just one. So, by these rules, it’s possible that Trump will be the only candidate to reach the nomination whose name can actually be placed in nomination.

But! There are a couple of caveats to that as well. The first is pretty simple — the rules for the convention are set by the Republican Party, which means that they can be changed by the Republican Party too. If the GOP’s high mucky-mucks get to the convention and discover that Rule 40b is preventing anyone from being able to challenge Trump, they could very well engineer a change of the rules to remove that one, or to modify its meaning in such a way as to let other candidates they prefer get in as well. (Changing the convention rules would cause a huge outcry among those GOP voters who went for Trump because they think the process is rigged against them already, but party leaders may consider that a bridge to be crossed when they come to it.)

The second is more speculative, and, I will admit, based solely on my reading of the party’s rules rather than the judgment of some authoritative third party. (So I will cheerfully admit I could be wrong here.) But as I read Rule 40b, it only requires a candidate to display the support of a majority of delegates from eight states before their name is placed into nomination. It doesn’t say anything about that display having to take place before the first ballot.

Which could be significant, because, as we talked about above, lots of delegates will be free to change their votes after one or two ballots. So a candidate that didn’t have the support of a majority of State X’s delegates on the first ballot could theoretically get them later, once the bound delegates are unbound and allegiances are free to shift. And that would open a door for candidates who were knocked out by the primaries, or who hadn’t even run in them at all, because once the delegates from a state are un-bound the results of its primary would effectively have ceased to matter. So if the convention goes past one or two ballots, the imposing-seeming limits Rule 40b places on who can be nominated would more or less go by the wayside.

Into the last ditch: the brokered convention

So, you ask, what happens if all of these open questions collide with each other, and the convention goes ballot after ballot without any candidate finding enough strength to win? At that point we would go beyond a merely “contested” convention to something even more exotic: a “brokered convention.”

A brokered convention is exactly what its name sounds like — a convention where no candidate can win enough delegates outright, and so people start gathering in those “smoke-filled rooms” cutting deals to break the gridlock. (It’s called “brokered” because these behind-the-scenes power players are acting as brokers, buying and selling bits of political power until one of them has enough to put their favored candidate over the top.)

What shape could such deals take? Any shape, pretty much. Here’s some types of deals that were common at conventions back when brokering was more of a thing:

• Trading offices! Say John Kasich manages to hold on to the 66 delegates he won from his home state of Ohio. To another candidate who can’t quite win a majority outright, being able to swing those 66 delegates into his column could be what he needs to get over the top. So he meets with Kasich and offers a deal: you tell your 66 delegates to vote for me, and I promise to make you my Vice President, or Secretary of State, or whatever plum the candidate thinks Kasich would go for. (Before you get too far up on your high horse, consider that this is how Abraham Lincoln won the Republican nomination in 1860.)
• Trading favors! A President has a lot of levers they can pull to help or hurt a particular state or city, if they want to. So Candidate Y offers to pull some of them the way some on-the-fence group of delegates want them pulled, in exchange for their support.
• Trading money! A rich backer of Candidate Z meets privately with some delegate, that delegate changes their vote to Candidate Z, and a few weeks later that delegate receives a gift of a shiny new boat! What an amazing coincidence. (A delegate is technically acting in a private capacity as part of a private organization, not as a public official, so it’s not clear to me that such a deal would technically be prosecutable as bribery.)

In short, it would be an absolutely frenetic spree of deal-making, all taking place behind closed doors where the public and the press can’t see it — the perfect environment for publicly pious pols to belly up like pigs at the trough.

Conclusion

So will any of this stuff, you know, actually happen?

At this point, it’s hard to say. There’s still a fair number of primaries to be held, with enough delegates still in play to give at least one candidate the chance to put the nomination in the bag according to the rules as they are written today.

But that candidate is Donald Trump, and a whole lot of Republicans — particularly elite Republicans, the ones who could actually pull some of these tricks if they wanted to — hate him like poison. So a contested or brokered convention feels to me more like a real possibility today than it has ever before in my lifetime. It would cause a fight without precedent in modern history, but there are an awful lot of establishment Republicans who sound today like they’d rather make that fight than swallow Trump as the nominee.

In other words: I wouldn’t count it out, even if Trump manages to win an outright majority of the bound delegates. We’re much too deep into the fever swamps at this point to be confident about anything until the delegates actually vote.
(And, perhaps, vote. And vote. And vote…)

This blog is voting for Bernie Sanders

Posted on February 29, 2016

The Virginia Democratic primary is tomorrow, March 1, so I just thought I’d take a moment to let you know that I’ll be voting for Bernie Sanders.

Why? Well, I should probably start off by saying that I’m not really 100% behind either Sanders or his opponent, Hillary Clinton. The choices in this election hasn’t really lit my fire the way some in the past have. I feel like lots of good possibilities were either scared away or chased out of running by Hillary’s formidable early position, which is bad for all of us. (Sanders’ performance has shown pretty clearly what a bad choice those potential candidates made; as in 2008, the “Hillary is inevitable” argument stopped looking compelling when actual ballots started being cast.) So this is not a vote I’m casting out of passion.

But I generally believe voting is more responsible than not voting, so I’ve gotta vote for somebody. And given that, Bernie’s the one who will be getting my vote tomorrow.

The reason isn’t because of any particular element of Sanders’ policy proposals that I think elevates him above Clinton. (There are in fact some serious questions about the feasibility of those programs, questions I’d feel better if Sanders would answer.) And it’s not because of any particular bad feeling I have about Hillary, either. (I’ve poked fun at her in the past, of course, but that was mostly out of hope that she could be prodded into addressing her biggest weaknesses early and thus becoming a stronger candidate.)

No, the main reason why I’ll be voting the way I’ll be voting is pretty simple. I think that the main thing we learned from the experience of living through the 2000s — specifically the 2003 invasion of Iraq and the 2008 economic collapse — is that the system we live in is fundamentally broken, and only real root-and-branch reform will save us from even worse failures in the future. This is, I think, the Big Issue of our time; maybe of our generation. And Sanders appears to understand that, while Clinton does not.

I have no idea if the “political revolution” of a Sanders victory would be enough, all by itself, to make those deep reforms a reality. And there’s been plenty of evidence through the Obama years that the system will fight any attempt to reform it with fire and sword.

But I would rather vote for somebody who will at least make the attempt than for somebody who will surrender right off the bat, which is what Clinton’s “pragmatic progressive” talk sounds like to me. It sounds like surrender to the idea that entrenched economic interests cannot be challenged, cannot be rolled back, and that therefore we must just all learn to be satisfied with letting them do more or less as they please.

I understand the logic of that position; such a fight would be an incredibly difficult one to win. But I believe that the times demand the attempt be made — and that it will only ever get harder to succeed as time goes on.

Bernie Sanders is the candidate in this race who is ready to make that fight. So tomorrow, he’ll be getting my vote.

“Rule the Waves”: a unique, compelling game of naval strategy

Posted on February 12, 2016

Dear strategy gamers, I want to tell you about a little diamond in the rough I came across the other day. Its name is Rule the Waves, and you should be playing it.

Naval Warfare Simulations, the creators of Rule the Waves, describe it as “a game of naval ship design and combat at the birth of the 20th century.” But that really doesn’t do it justice. If you really want to get the flavor of what Rule the Waves does, think of it instead as Armageddon Simulator.

Let’s start with a little historical background

Though people didn’t really think of it this way at the time, at the end of the 1800s, the European system started breaking down. Germany had finally been unified from a collection of minor states into one huge nation, and the emergence of this new giant in the heart of Europe threw long-standing power arrangements into disarray.

Having defeated its main continental adversaries, France and Austria, on land, in the 1890s the Germans began to flex their muscle in a new arena: the sea. The mostly-landlocked German states had never been naval powers, but led by the navy-mad Kaiser Wilhelm II and his top naval advisor Alfred von Tirpitz, the new Germany embarked on a massive program to build a navy that could challenge the traditional ruler of the seas, Great Britain.

As an island nation that required overseas trade for nearly all its raw materials, including such necessities as food and oil, Britain was naturally alarmed by this development. A Germany that dominated continental Europe was a Germany the British could live with; a Germany that could choke off Britain’s trade routes was not. So they stepped up their own shipbuilding to meet the German challenge, kicking off a ruinously expensive arms race that didn’t end until the two countries finally went to war in 1914.

In the end, all that battleship-building had no real effect on the outcome of the war; the two fleets clashed a few times, but the “decisive battle” — the titanic struggle of battleships that the hugely influential contemporary naval theorist Alfred Thayer Mahan had predicted would decide any future war — never really came. Both nations had spent so much money on their battle-fleets that they could never bring themselves to put them fully at risk. It was a classic example of military spending becoming uncoupled from strategic reality.

Unleashing your inner Tirpitz

What Rule the Waves does is put you into the shoes of Tirpitz, or any of his contemporaries in other great powers — Jacky Fisher in Britain, Louis-Émile Bertin in France, William Sims in the United States, and so on — right at the moment that great naval race is about to begin. It then becomes your responsibility to steer the development of your nation’s navy until the year 1925, or until you’re driven from office in ignominy, whichever comes first.

Rule the Waves’ main interface screen, showing a typical auto-generated U.S. Navy “legacy fleet” in 1900

In practice, what this involves is building and managing a fleet. You start off in the year 1900 with a fleet of “legacy ships,” built to the standards of 1899. These will suffice for a few years, but each month-long turn brings news of new technical advancements in shipbuilding — advancements that allow the construction of new ships which can easily blow your legacy fleet out of the water. You have to keep up with these developments, choosing when to build new ships, how many to build, and which of the new technologies to incorporate into them.

Which brings us to one of your primary tasks in Rule the Waves: designing new ships.

Rule the Waves’ ship designer, showing a design for an early dreadnought battleship

As your boffins unlock new technologies, or as you buy them from other powers looking for some quick cash, frontiers in shipbuilding that were previously closed to you begin to open up. Early battleships may come with 10″ guns, but research can let you build up to 18″. Machinery becomes lighter and more powerful, letting you add more armor or artillery without paying a penalty in speed. New aiming mechanisms let your gunners land their shells with increased precision. And so forth.

But what makes all this a game and not just navy porn is that you have to figure out to put all this hardware to use while operating within some very powerful constraints. You have a budget, for example, given to you by your government, which specifies how much you can spend in a given year. You can choose to ignore it and operate at a deficit if you want; but if you do so for too long the head of government will tire of your free-spending ways and fire you, which means Game Over. So you find yourself constantly having to choose between competing priorities, since there’s never enough money available to pursue them all. Do you build a small number of huge mega-battleships, or a larger number of smaller ones? Should this cruiser be optimized for speed, for armored protection, or for firepower? Should you be building submarines, or destroyers you’ll need to defend your coasts from an enemy’s submarines?

Another constraint in Rule the Waves is time. You can design any type of ship you want (within the limits of your available technology at that moment, of course), but once you approve the design for production it can take months or even years for ships built to that design to start coming off the ways and into your fleet. And all that time you’re waiting for construction to complete, technology is still marching on — meaning that it’s very possible for a new class of ship to be made obsolete by technical developments before it ever sees its first day at sea. So at all times you have to ask yourself, is now the moment to pull the trigger on this new design and send it off for production? Or should I wait a few more months and hope to get one or two more big new advances in first?

Beyond new building, though, there’s your existing fleet to manage as well. The rapid pace of technical innovation means that the ships you actually have at any given moment are sliding closer to outright obsolescence every month; and keeping a ship on the roster costs money for upkeep and maintenance. So another question you’re always asking is, at what point does the cost of maintaining a ship outweigh its usefulness? Even completely obsolete ships can still have value, after all; old destroyers can still perform anti-submarine patrols, old cruisers can still sink unarmed enemy merchantmen, old battleships can be sent to remote colonial stations to “show the flag” and maintain your authority there. They can all serve in such capacities perfectly well, and spare you the trouble and expense of building up new ships to replace them — so long as they never cross the path of a modern, well-armed battlecruiser in wartime…

Interestingly, Rule the Waves gives you some options to extend the lives of your older ships alongside all the tools you have for building new ones. Any design that’s gone into production can be re-opened in the editor for modification at any time, though the changes you can make to it are limited somewhat by the ship’s existing size. Even with that, though, taking an existing ship and refurbishing it can be a quick way to upgrade your fleet, since rebuilds take less time and cost less money to turn around than building a new ship from scratch does. But you can only push a rebuild so far, so you’re constantly having to evaluate whether rebuilding or scrapping-and-replacing is the right move for that particular moment.

The inevitable clash of steel

All of this is what occupies the Rule the Waves player during peacetime. Eventually, though, war breaks out — and suddenly all your theories and plans are put to the test of fire.

War in Rule the Waves is not tied to war in actual history; there’s no fixed rule that it will break out in August 1914 and end up roping in the whole world. What happens instead is that your nation has a “tension” level with all the other nations in the game, and that level fluctuates based both on how aggressively you are building your fleet and how you choose to respond to events that pop up from time to time.

The fleet-building part of this equation is pretty straightforward; if you start building a fleet big enough to overwhelm someone else’s fleet, they get nervous, and if you push in that direction hard enough for long enough they’ll start wondering if they should just hit you today while that fleet is still a-building. The events, though, provide a fun wildcard. As you’re moving from turn to turn, the game will periodically throw up news of some development — the President said something stupid about France, for instance, or the dovish party in your legislature is pushing to cut naval expenditures to fund social programs, or your spy in Germany has gotten himself caught. Each of these comes with a set of options for how to respond, from which you have to choose one.

So far, so simple. But what’s interesting about those options, though, is that they generally force you to choose between tension — that nervousness other nations feel about your ambitions — and prestige, the value that keeps you from getting fired. So you can choose to be diplomatic and conciliatory, which will reduce tension but also chip away at your prestige; or you can choose to be bellicose and blustery, which raises your prestige at the cost of alarming the rest of the world. (Your budget is partly driven by your prestige as well, so caution and reserve can also be a good way to hamstring your building program.) This mechanism feels very true-to-life, and helps illustrate the dynamics that could drag the nations of the era into disastrous wars that nobody really wanted to fight.

When war comes — and it always comes, eventually — you have to take your lovingly designed fleet and send it out into the world to challenge your opponent.

Rule the Waves’ world map, showing the sea zones and possessions you can fight over

Rule the Waves divides up the world into a number of sea zones, each of which serves as a potential theater of conflict. Around each sea zone are scattered possessions, land territories that can serve as bases for ships.

Possessions are the axis around which warfighting in Rule the Waves revolves. If you send enough ships into a sea zone where your opponent holds possessions to overmatch their local force, your nation’s army can use that local superiority to land troops and seize those possessions from them, bringing them under your flag instead. But the enemy, of course, can do the same thing to your possessions. So in each war you have to decide at a high level whether to strike an offensive posture, trying to grab possessions from the enemy, or a defensive one, keeping them from taking any from you.

High-level decisionmaking isn’t enough, though, because no matter how feverishly you build, there’s never enough ships on hand when war breaks out to cover the whole world at once. So now you have more decisions to make: do you concentrate your fleet in one or two sea zones to maximize its striking power, or spread it out to try and protect all your possessions? Do you keep your heavy hitters, the battleships and battlecruisers, together in one flotilla, or break them up into battle groups of one or two capital ships with an escort of smaller ships for scouting? Do you want to try and win by crushing your enemy’s fleet in a Mahanian “decisive battle,” or by starving them into submission by sinking their merchant fleet — and, if it’s the latter, will you do it by sending ships off to hunt on their own as commerce raiders, or by massing your fleet in their home waters to blockade them?

However you end up deciding these things, however, at some point your ships are going to meet the enemy’s.

The cruiser USS Rochester and her supporting screen take on a French battleship

At which point Rule the Waves drops you into a top-down tactical interface, where you can lead your ships into battle yourself. Based on NWS’s earlier standalone game Steam & Iron, this mode lets you direct your ships by maneuvering one squadron — the “flag” — while the others maneuver based on how you instruct them to relate to it. So you can set up a long battle line, for example, by giving squadrons orders to follow the next in line, or send your light ships out to search for targets while the slower “core” with the big guns hangs back.

If you’re able to find the enemy — not always guaranteed in this age before radar, especially if you’re fighting at night — you have to maneuver your fleet to defeat them. This generally turns into a game of cat and mouse; heavier ships generally have the advantage in firepower and armor, but faster, lighter ships can more easily skitter out of range. If you’re the one with the big guns on your side, your goal therefore is to pin your opponent’s ships down and pummel them, while on the other side the goal is to escape and evade.

While you can have some effect on which of those sides you end up on through your choice of which ships to send into a particular sea zone, it’s not entirely within your control; the game usually only drops a portion of each side’s available forces into a given scrap, to simulate the difficulty of coordinating entire fleets of ships in an age before reliable ship-to-ship radio communication. This can lead to some lopsided fights, but in general it does a good job of balancing the sides. And since most battles only draw in a fraction of your forces, when you hit a  battle where each side actually brings its complete battle line to bear, it’s kind of awesome.

Wars can end a number of different ways. They can sputter out indecisively, with the combatants just deciding it’s not worth it anymore; they can climax in a great fleet battle, leading to the loser surrendering some of their possessions; or if the war drags on long enough and bites deep enough, they can even end with one nation collapsing completely through a popular revolution. (Which you can sometimes help along by smuggling an exiled revolutionary back into their homeland.)

Then the world goes back to peace, and you go back to building up your fleet for the next war.

Caveats and conclusions

As you have probably been able to surmise from the length and detail of this review, I like Rule the Waves a lot. It’s one of the most interesting and compelling strategy games I’ve ever come across. If you’re a fan of the genre, you really do owe it to yourself to give it a spin.

That being said, it’s not all peaches and cream. For reasons I won’t pretend to understand, NWS has made some decisions that really hobble the “curb appeal” of this otherwise excellent title. Which is a shame, because with just a little more care and attention, what is currently a very niche title could attract a much larger audience.

The first limitation is the quality of the graphics and the user interface, which, as you can see from the screenshots above, are pretty bare-bones. The UI is straight out of the Windows 3.1 era, all vanilla Windows radio buttons and lists and drop-downs. It works, more or less, but it makes it harder to learn the ropes than a more thoughtfully designed interface would. In the main interface, the only graphics are the occasional photograph that’s used to illustrate an event; the battle interface offers animated ships, but they’re presented in the most drab way possible, as blocky black elements on a flat blue sea. Like many titles in the wargaming niche, the production values are just sad when lined up against contemporary mass-audience games — or even mass-audience games from five or ten years ago. There is an amazing game to be found here, but you’d never know it from looking at the screenshots.

Second, the quality of the “onboarding” (ugh, how I hate that word) experience new players of Rule the Waves face is just dire. There are a lot of complicated systems under the hood of this game, which most developers would take as a sign that they need to provide new players with some hand-holding as they learn how they all work. NWS, however, drops you into Rule the Waves with no assistance whatsoever — no online help, no tutorial scenario, no nothing. The only guidance they offer is a disorganized, incomplete PDF manual you have to go to their forums to download. You could get away with throwing new players into the deep end of the pool twenty or thirty years ago, when there were fewer games for them to play; but today people are just awash in options, so the sink-or-swim approach just feels passive-aggressive and lazy.

Finally, the experience of actually buying the game is frustrating as well. You have to go to NWS’ web site, which looks like a Yahoo! store from fifteen years ago, put in your payment information, and then wait up to 24 hours for them to email you an activation code. In an age when you can instantly buy just about any game ever made with two clicks via Steam, NWS’ approach feels downright antediluvian. It’s like doing business with a company that has been frozen in amber for two decades. I have to think putting up all these barriers costs them sales — especially in conjunction with a relatively high list price of $35. Which is a shame when it’s driving people away from a game like Rule the Waves that does so many things right.

So, to summarize: Rule the Waves is hard to buy, hard to look at, and hard to play. But if you’re a strategy gamer you should play it anyway, because the actual game hidden underneath all those problems is so good it’s worth it. There’s tons of interesting gameplay to be had here, even if you’d never know it from looking at the outside. It’s a frog waiting for your kiss to turn into a prince.

Want to read more about Rule the Waves? I wrote a follow-up post on the strategic challenges you’d face playing as each playable nation.

Trump and Sanders: winning 2016 by a thousand OODA loops

Posted on February 10, 2016

I’ve written before in this space about my admiration for the thinking of John Boyd, the fighter pilot whose ideas on strategy revolutionized the American way of making war. So I wanted to take a moment to point out how brilliantly the 2016 Presidential campaign is illustrating one of his key insights: the central role in deciding victory or defeat of the decision-making model he called “the OODA loop.”

How we make decisions: the OODA loop

One of the subjects Boyd was intrigued by was the question of by what processes people turn the ambiguity they swim in every day into decisions that lead to concrete action. We live in a world of unimaginable complexity, with so many possible variables to consider that if we actually tried to consider them all before acting we’d be frozen in “analysis paralysis” forever. But we’re not frozen; we are constantly acting, in big ways and small. So how does that happen? How do we decide to act, and why do we make the decisions we do?

The name he gave to the model he eventually developed to explain this, the OODA loop, derives from the four stages he believed the human mind goes through in the process of moving from uncertainty to action. These are:

• Observe: Gather facts about the situation
• Orient: Fit the facts together with pre-existing mental models to develop a narrative of what is happening that makes sense
• Decide: Choose a course of action that seems appropriate based on that narrative
• Act: Translate that decision into some real-world activity that we believe will bring the situation more closely in line with our goals and desires

When the action is complete, Boyd argued, we cycle back to the beginning of the process, observing the effects of our actions in order to inform our next decision. (Which is what puts the “loop” in the OODA loop.)

Boyd’s insight went beyond just describing this model, though; he also articulated how central it is to any concept of strategy. In any contest, he said, the adversaries are constantly cycling through their own OODA loops, choosing ways to strike at their opponents and then evaluating how effective those strikes were. In such a process, therefore, the advantage will always go to the contestant who traverses their OODA loop more quickly than the other. As long as you can do so without sacrificing accuracy, cycling through your OODA loop more quickly means having more opportunities for action — more bites at the proverbial apple. Conversely, the slower your trip around the loop, the fewer actions you will be able to squeeze into a given period of time, leaving you vulnerable to a more nimble adversary.

In other words, if you can get yourself in a position where you are consistently lapping your opponent as you make your respective trips through the OODA loop, you are very likely going to defeat them. (In Boydian terms, reaching this position vis-á-vis an adversary  is called “getting inside their OODA loop.”)

Get to the point already

So what does all this have to do with Presidential politics in the year 2016?

I would submit that it’s a big part of the reason that Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders, two candidates who were widely dismissed as novelty acts when the campaign began, are currently doing so well. They have managed to get inside their opponents’ OODA loops.

This is not because either of them has figured out some particularly novel way of running a presidential campaign. They’re not making their trips around the OODA loop faster. What they are doing though — simply by existing! — is making their opponents’ trips around their OODA loops slower.

The weakest link in anyone’s OODA loop is that second “O” — “orient.” It’s the stage of the process where you take the raw data that is the evidence of your senses and turn it into a narrative about what is happening around you and why. But there’s no way to do that just with the data you’ve just now observed; you need to have a mental model of how the world works already in place to provide scaffolding to hang those data upon.

Luckily, every sentient person develops such a mental model as they live their lives, so that’s rarely a problem. But the thing about those mental models is that, once they’re formed, we tend not to update them very often — even as the facts of the world are changing all around us. Which means that, in times of social change, it’s fantastically easy for those models to slowly drift out of alignment with reality.

And when that happens — when your mental model of how the world works stops corresponding in any meaningful way to the way the world actually does work now — “orientation” in the OODA sense starts becoming more and more difficult the farther from reality your model drifts. You’re suddenly having to take facts that just don’t fit into your mental model, and find a way to jam them in there somehow regardless. That takes work, which takes time; and the longer you spend trying to orient yourself, the slower your trip around the OODA loop becomes.

2016: Death by a thousand loops

This is what Trump’s and Sanders’ opponents are struggling to deal with right now. In their mental models, Trump and Sanders are candidates who should not be viable in a national political contest. The rules of American politics as they understand them don’t admit any possibility for a reality TV clown or an unreconstructed socialist to find success. It simply should not happen. But every day sends them fresh evidence that it actually is happening — evidence that they, and their staff, have to find a way to integrate and react to. So they’re constantly playing catch-up; constantly getting caught on the back foot. And worse, the more the evidence that their model is wrong piles up, the slower the process of orientation becomes; facts that shouldn’t be true but are accumulate on their mental model like barnacles on the hull of a ship, slowing them further with each new one that fastens on.

I don’t think this is due to any individual peculiarity of their opponents. Rather, it’s due to a shared failure to update their mental models after what is probably the most consequential event in recent history: the massive financial meltdown of 2008. They failed to realize how deeply that event discredited the old politics, which opened opportunities for new types of candidates, untainted by the old politics, to find purchase. They thought it was just another bump in the road that could be massaged by tweaking their messaging, adjusting their “optics,” instead of a fundamental challenge to the order of things.

Not only did they think that in 2008, they still think that. Which is why they can’t seem to find a way to react to Trump and Sanders, who, for all their many differences, are the only two candidates in the race who understand that things have changed in deep and fundamental ways. As long as their competitors fail to integrate this reality into their mental models, Trump and Sanders will remain comfortably inside their OODA loops.

Gear VR: The future is (not quite) here

Posted on December 19, 2015

The line forms to the right, ladies

If you’re a nerd like me, you’ve been hearing buzz about a company called Oculus VR for a few years now. Oculus grew out of faith in what most of us thought was a dead god: virtual reality, the dream of technology that would allow people to immerse themselves in invented worlds.

Founded by Palmer Luckey and based on work he’d done at USC, Oculus claimed to have solved the problem that had killed the first VR boom back in the 1990s — how to create a head-mounted display (HMD) that was powerful enough to update its images as fast as the human eye requires, while being light enough to be worn comfortably. Luckey’s prototype attracted an enthusiastic core of influential fans, including legendary game programmer John Carmack (who would eventually become Oculus’ CTO); a hugely successful Kickstarter followed, with $75 million in venture capital and then acquisition by Facebook for a cool $2 billion not far behind.

It was one of the most meteoric ascents in modern tech history, and it was all driven by one thing: testimony by those who had experienced Oculus’ technology that it was game-changingly, world-changingly good. “Once you experience it, you’ll understand,” they said. But for most people, such experience was elusive, because despite three years having passed since the Kickstarter Oculus has yet to ship a consumer-ready version of its VR technology. All that they’ve shipped are a couple of developer kits and a lot of buzz. So people have been starting to wonder when the revolution Oculus promised is ever actually going to arrive.

If we’re talking about the main consumer-oriented Oculus product, Oculus Rift, the answer is “not anytime soon.” The latest ETA from the company has Rift shipping sometime in the first quarter of 2016 — which, critically for a consumer-tech product, means that they’re going to miss the Christmas 2015 retail season.

But surprisingly, while Oculus won’t have an Oculus-based product for sale for some time, Samsung has one you can buy right now. Called Gear VR, it combines Oculus’ VR tech with the latest generation of Samsung smartphones (the Galaxy S6, S6 Edge, S6 Edge+, and Note 5) to create what they say is a ready-to-go VR environment that turns the Oculus buzz into something ordinary people can experience today. And it does so for a very reasonable price: $99. (Not including the cost of the phone, of course.)

I’ve been wanting to see if the Oculus tech was equal to the Oculus hype for some time now, so I picked up a Gear VR and put it through its paces. Here’s what I found.

The hardware

Gear VR is a head-mounted display that weighs about seven-tenths of a pound. It requires a little assembly on first use, mostly threading the various straps that hold it onto your head into place. Popping off the plastic front plate reveals a slot into which you snap your Galaxy phone with a couple of easy-to-use clips (one of which has a micro-USB connector, which plugs into the phone’s data port) and you’re more or less off to the races.

The first challenge a head-mounted display has to overcome is the simple fact that strapping a bunch of tech to your face is a process that’s difficult to make comfortable. To Samsung and Oculus’ credit, Gear VR mostly overcomes this; it’s light enough that it doesn’t weigh down your head or bite into the bridge of your nose, and all the places where it comes into contact with your skin are sufficiently padded to prevent you getting pinched by plastic. It can fit comfortably over glasses if you wear them, though I found I didn’t need mine — my eye problems are all about distance viewing, and the virtual image Gear VR presents is right up in your proverbial grill.

The device is capable of head-tracking, meaning that moving your head while you wear it changes the point of view you see on the virtual image; swivel your head left and the camera pans left, look up and it pans up. There’s also a directional pad and set of buttons (back, volume up, volume down) on the right side of the headset; they provide an additional means of input for applications that support them. (Not all do; in some apps you select things by looking at them and tapping your finger on the d-pad, while in others just looking suffices.)

Because all the actual processing happens in your mobile device, there’s no power cord, external battery or data cable to some other device required; Gear VR is completely cordless. This is convenient, both because it streamlines the process of getting up and running and because it makes the whole setup portable — just grab the goggles and your phone and you’ve got everything you need to share it with friends at a party.

Gear VR splits your phone’s display into two areas, one for each eye, so the S6’s 1440 x 2560 pixel display gives it an effective resolution of 1440 x 1280 per eye.

The experiences

But you’re not here to wade through mind-numbing spec sheets; you’re here because you want to understand what using this thing is like. So let’s talk about that a bit.

When you plug your device into Gear VR, it undergoes a kind of personality transplant. The old Android interface falls away, replaced by a panoramic Home screen that floats in midair inside what looks like a pretty swank apartment. The Home screen displays buttons to launch your most recently used VR apps, as well as to access your Library (the collection of all VR apps installed on your device) and an online app store operated by Samsung and Oculus from which you can obtain more.

VR is still in early days, which a quick browse through the app store will make painfully obvious. There’s a reasonable number of apps on offer, but most of them are pretty small-scale; bite-sized experiences designed more to demo the hardware than anything else. Thankfully, these are mostly free. There are a few paid apps to be found as well, of varying degrees of polish and content density; Oculus appears to be encouraging developers to follow the pricing model of mobile apps, so these range from $.99 to around $15.

Broadly speaking, the available apps offer a few general categories of experience:

• Panoramic imagery. These apps take a still image, generated either by a special 360° camera or by stitching multiple images from a regular camera together, and let you effectively step into the picture as if it were painted on a dome surrounding you. Moving your head changes the perspective from which you view the image, but since it’s at root a still image you don’t get the sense of things moving around you. The images available include both photographs of real-world locations and completely invented digital landscapes that exist only in some creative person’s head.
• Video. In these apps, you… well, you watch videos. The videos themselves are the same as they would be on YouTube, flat 2D moving images, but by presenting them in a virtual environment Gear VR can make use of some interesting tricks it has up its sleeves. Instead of just seeing the video in a little window, for instance, it can present them as if they were being projected on a giant movie screen, so big it completely fills your field of view. It can also place that virtual screen inside a virtual environment — an empty movie theater, for instance, complete with lights that dim when the video starts and come back up when it’s done. When it’s done right, this effect can be quite striking.
• Panoramic video. These apps present video that’s more tailored for the VR environment, filmed (like the panoramic images above) using 360° cameras so that action all around the camera can be captured at once. Here you’re not looking at a movie screen, you’re placed right in the middle of the shot itself; and as you move your head, your viewpoint moves with you. The best of these combine this immersive perspective with clever use of positional audio, so that (if you’re wearing headphones) you can hear something happening outside your field of view and then turn around and see it. It’s still video, however, so your ability to interact with the experience is generally limited to just turning about within it.
• Games. There are also a small-but-significant number of VR games available. Unlike the apps described above, these generally present you with rendered 3D environments rather than still images or video; because of this, you can interact with these environments in richer, more complicated ways, though the exact type and complexity of these interactions will vary from game to game. Developers are still working out exactly what types of interactions work best in the VR environment, but there are a few types that have already begun to emerge as standards. One is what I’d call the “psychokinetic puzzler,” in which the interaction involves solving puzzles by moving objects around in the VR environment; since Gear VR has no way to capture what you’re doing with your hands, these games typically let you “move the objects with your mind” by focusing on them and then performing some interaction with the d-pad or buttons. (Examples: Land’s End; Esper/Esper 2.) Another is what I’d call the “turret defense” game, in which you are placed inside some kind of gun turret and then tasked with shooting down waves of enemies, typically directing the turret’s fire by moving your head. (Examples: Gunjack, Bandit Six.) But there’s also games which defy categorization, such as Drift, which is played from the perspective of a bullet fired out of a gun; you guide the bullet’s trajectory through space with your head movements, helping it avoid barriers and find its intended target.

The compromises

All of which probably sounds pretty neat. And it can be! But the more you use Gear VR, the more you discover the compromises that have to be made in order to make it possible. And some of those compromises detract significantly from the quality of the experience.

When I first heard about Gear VR, it piqued my interest for a simple reason: it didn’t seem like something that should actually be able to exist. As I said above, Oculus has been working on their own consumer-oriented VR device (the Rift, due sometime in 2016) for several years now. And while the exact shape and capabilities of the Rift have varied with each new developer kit they’ve released, one thing remained constant: the warning that it would only work if you plugged it into a powerful desktop-class computer with a top-of-the-line graphics processing unit (GPU). VR was computationally demanding, they said, so being able to tap into all that raw computing power was absolutely necessary for Oculus to work its magic.

This was a message that made sense, at least to me. But it was also a message that was completely undermined by Samsung’s Gear VR, because here was a device using Oculus tech that was driven entirely by the comparatively meager processing power of a mobile phone. (A top-of-the-line mobile phone, but still.) Both Samsung and Oculus claimed that Gear VR was a real, honest-to-gosh Oculus device, not some dollar-store knockoff. But that seemed impossible, because if you could get a true Oculus experience with just a mobile phone, did the Rift really need that beefy desktop PC? And if the Rift really did need it, how could Oculus and Samsung say with a straight face that Gear VR was a comparable product?

I’ve never had a chance to use a Rift, so I can’t answer those questions with 100% certainty. What I can tell you, though, is that while I no longer doubt that Gear VR can provide a “real Oculus experience,” it does so by cutting corners and pushing your smartphone harder than it’s ever been pushed before.

“Cutting corners” comes across more harshly than what I intend to say here; I don’t think either Samsung or Oculus skimped on this product. What I mean is that, while the initial impression Gear VR makes is amazing, once you’ve used it for a few hours the seams begin to show.

Take those panoramic video experiences I described above, for example. They are definitely novel and (in some cases) immersive. But there is one thing they definitely are not, though: high definition. As noted above, Gear VR’s per-eye resolution is 1440 by 1280 pixels, which sounds impressive considering that over-the-air broadcast HDTV programming is often displayed in the comparatively pixel-meager 720p (1280 × 720) format. But when you actually put Gear VR on you discover that spec sheets aren’t everything, because that 720p image on your HDTV will look crisp and clear while video on your Gear VR is muddy and indistinct.

And that matters, because it distracts from the immersion that Gear VR is straining so hard to provide. It’s fun to be standing in the middle of a virtual crowd crossing a street in Tokyo; it’s less fun to realize that you can’t really make out the expressions on their faces. It’s not enough to ruin the experience, but it definitely detracts from it.

Why the muddiness? That brings us to the other major compromise. It’s kind of amazing that Samsung and Oculus were able to derive a more-or-less convincing VR experience from just the resources in a smartphone. But it quickly becomes clear that Gear VR is using all of those resources, pushing the device as hard as it possibly can, because after you’ve been using it for half an hour to an hour the device becomes physically warm to the touch and your VR experiences start getting interrupted with “Gear VR needs to cool down” warning messages. You can dismiss them and keep using the unit, but once they start popping up they’ll just keep coming at increasingly shorter intervals until you power down and give your phone a breather. (One review I read suggested that this wasn’t really a problem, because it can be mitigated simply by pointing a desk fan at your head. That may be true, I haven’t tried it, but it strikes me as a bit of a reach to expect people to make that a regular part of their VR experience.)

So my suspicion is that the answers to the questions I asked above are simple: you can use a modern smartphone to drive a VR system, but it takes just about every CPU cycle that poor little device has, and even at that there’s only so much fidelity you can expect to squeeze out of it. It just doesn’t have the computational oomph to give any more, the poor thing.

Once you realize this, you start to notice how the smarter developers of Gear VR apps found ways to work around it. The best of the currently available games, for example, is the above-mentioned Land’s End, in which you travel across a set of striking landscapes while solving puzzles along the way.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwJ9fiH2Ksw

Land’s End is an impressive accomplishment, not least because it creates a sense of immersion more complete than any other game I tried; at one point you’re taken up to the edge of a cliff, and looking down gave me the same alarming sense of vertigo that I’ve experienced when looking down from high places in real life. But you’ll notice from the trailer that while Land’s End‘s production design is artful, it steers hard away from photo-realism; the terrain is chunky and stylized, looking more like a sort of digital painting than any landscape you’d actually encounter on planet Earth.

On one level, their decision to go that route is an artistic choice, in the same way that the stylized look of a movie like 300 is. But I suspect there’s another level in operation as well, namely that Gear VR simply can’t push enough pixels to make a truly photo-realistic landscape possible, at least not while also providing the level of dynamic interaction a game like Land’s End requires. So instead of mounting a futile battle against this limitation, the designers cleverly made the most of it instead by taking their aesthetic in a different, more abstract direction that also happened to be within the bounds of what the hardware could actually handle.

Other titles by less savvy developers call attention to Gear VR’s limitations, instead of obscuring them. One example of this is Action Bowling VR, which is exactly what it says on the tin: a bowling game that plunks you down inside one of several virtual-reality alleys. The alleys themselves are rendered convincingly, and it’s impressive to turn around and take in the environment the game has created around you.

But when the time comes to actually bowl, you immediately run into a fundamental problem: Gear VR has no way of tracking the movements of your hands, so you can’t throw the virtual ball with the same movements you would use to throw a real one. In fact, you can’t really throw it at all. What you have to do instead is swipe a finger across Gear VR’s touch-sensitive d-pad, swiping towards the top to pull the ball left and towards the bottom to pull it right. It works, sort of; but it feels absolutely nothing like actual bowling, and that in turn destroys the immersion. It’s painfully obvious that you’re playing a video game about bowling instead of experiencing bowling itself.

(Oculus is aware of this problem, of course, and are working on a peripheral to let you use your hands to interact with things in the VR environment. But that’s another bit of tech that’s still stuck in their labs instead of available as a real product, and even if/when it ships it will add another layer of gear on top of what you need to hook up to dive into VR, making it even less appealing for casual use than it is already.)

The conclusion

As a technology demonstrator, Gear VR is terrific. It provides an excellent illustration of how thoroughly Oculus has conquered some of the long-standing problems, like head tracking and natural-feeling motion, that kept VR from taking off in the past.

As a product for the general public, though, I’m not sure it’s really there yet. Even putting aside the way its requiring a current-generation Samsung flagship device limits its audience, the limited number of available experiences and variable quality of the ones do exist make it something less than a no-brainer purchase, even if you already have a compatible device and even at its attractive $99 price point.

Spending some time with it also raises, at least in my mind, some more fundamental questions about the appeal of VR technology in general. Namely:

• Will near-future devices (Oculus’ Rift, as well as its also-expected-in-2016 competitors like Valve/HTC’s Vive and Sony’s PlayStation VR) have enough horsepower to provide high-enough quality video and interactive experiences to avoid the immersion-limiting resolution limitations Gear VR suffers from?
• Will the extra oomph made available by tethering the device to an external processing unit like a desktop PC or game console be worth the resulting loss of flexibility and additional complication of setup that will entail compared to just popping your phone in?
• Will someone come up with a “killer app”: a VR experience so compelling that people are willing to buy the hardware specifically to make use of it?

And then there’s the challenge that to me seems like the big one:

• Will anyone have a VR experience so compelling that a world full of people who weren’t willing to put on special glasses just to watch 3D HDTV will be willing to strap hardware to their face (along with hand-tracking hardware and lord knows what else) to get into it?

I’ve enjoyed my time with Gear VR, but so far it hasn’t given me a high degree of confidence that the answer to any of the questions above is yes. It shows a lot of potential, but potential by itself does not a mass-market smash hit make. It has to be fulfilled to get people to open their wallets. And Gear VR, at least as of this writing, is long on potential and short on fulfillment.

Jason recommends: “Our World War”

Posted on November 24, 2015

I want to tip you off to something really good I came across while digging through Netflix’s catalog the other day. It’s a 3-episode miniseries called Our World War, produced last year by BBC Three as part of the Beeb’s ongoing commemoration of the 100-year anniversary of the First World War.

Our World War isn’t an attempt to tell the whole story of that war. Instead, taking memoirs and letters home written by men who actually fought in it as its source material, it tells three intimate, tightly-focused stories of the war as several British soldiers experienced it. Episode one, “The First Day,” follows young Lieutenant Maurice Dease as he and his small unit of Royal Fusiliers struggle desperately to prevent the German army from crossing a strategic bridge at Mons in August 1914. The second episode, “Pals,” follows Paddy Kennedy, a Manchester clerk who joins the army with his fellow office clerks in a flush of patriotic enthusiasm only to all be thrown together in 1916 into the charnel house that was the first day on the Somme. And in the final episode, “War Machine,” Private Charles Rowland joins the fledgling Tank Corps in 1918 just in time to participate in the Battle of Amiens, in which tanks and airplanes realized for the first time their potential to break the trench stalemate of the Western Front.

The first thing to like about Our World War is that tight focus. By keeping its gaze firmly upon just one leading character and a handful of supporting characters, it gives you some sense of what it must have felt like to be a tiny cog in any of the modern world’s huge military machines. The men it depicts don’t have any meaningful control over the colossal events thundering around them; they just try to follow their orders as best they can and not get themselves killed in the process.

The show is also interesting in how it will broaden your understanding of how World War I was actually fought. Now that it’s almost entirely beyond living memory, the image of that war that lingers in our perception is the hopeless, static struggle in the trenches. Our World War steps beyond that by taking you to moments on the Western Front that belie the stereotype. Mons, fought before the trenches were dug, comes across as a desperate stand in the 19th-century tradition of Little Bighorn and Rorke’s Drift, as a small band of riflemen with barely any cover to hide behind try to hang on against overwhelming numbers. At the Somme, the show takes us not with the many units that were mowed down by machine-gun fire, but with one of the very few that actually managed to break through the German lines — only to find themselves locked in a swirling, seemingly endless fight for survival in a grim, fog-shrouded wood. And when we climb aboard the Niveleur, the primitive tank that carries Chas Rowland into battle at Amiens, we find a close-packed, claustrophobic world in which eight men have to work together without being overcome by sweltering heat or poorly ventilated engine fumes to make their steel beast come to life.

Surprisingly, the reviews I could find online from the original airing of Our World War in Britain were mixed at best, with lots of complaints about one particular element: the filmmakers’ stylistic decision to make their presentation deliberately modern, eschewing a sepia-toned, wax-cylinder aesthetic in favor of contemporary music on the soundtrack and abrupt, quick-cut editing. It’s a decision that rubbed some reviewers distinctly the wrong way. Personally, however, I think it was brilliant; it takes these stories out of the black-and-white realm of memory and makes them involving to a modern viewer in a way that old newsreel footage could not. Some reviewers did understand this, but most appear to have not, with the result that Our World War has been buried deep in the bowels of Netflix instead of getting the attention on this side of the pond it really deserves.

My hope is that writing this can help change that, at least a little bit. Our World War is thrilling, engaging and profoundly moving. It brings World War I to life in a way that no other production I’ve seen ever has. So if you’re a Netflix subscriber, do yourself a favor and check it out.

Marvel Unlimited: Everything good and bad about comics, for $9.99

Posted on November 20, 2015

I’ve never really been a comics nerd. (I’m certainly a lot of other kinds of nerd, just not that kind.) I read ’em as a kid, of course, so I know enough to know who the Avengers are and that Aquaman sucks. But I lost interest in them in adolescence and never really came back, so I missed out on their remarkable creative efflorescence over the last twenty years or so.

All of which was kind of embarrassing when I was reading an article the other day that was going on and on about the brilliance of this one particular writer working in comics today, Matt Fraction. Feeling ignorant, I wanted to get up to speed on Fraction’s work and see if it lived up to the hype.

I started poking around the Web to see if I could find good recommendations for where to start, and the general consensus seemed to be that Fraction’s run on the Marvel title Hawkeye was a good choice. Since I was just looking to stick a toe in the water, the convenience and ease of getting digital copies instead of trying to hunt down physical copies was appealing. But I was disappointed to discover that digital copies of the issues of that book ran between $2 and $5 each, which would add up quick given the brevity of individual issues. Compilation volumes are available, but they’re not cheap either, running $12-16 for 5 or 6 issues bound together. And of course Marvel won’t sell you digital issues without larding them down with DRM, so even after spending that money you don’t really own anything; you’ll only be able to access the material you paid for as long as they choose to allow you to.

I did however find another option: Marvel Unlimited. Unlimited is basically the Netflix model, applied to Marvel’s comic library — you pay a subscription fee of $9.99/month, and they’ll let you read as many of the 17,000 comics in the Unlimited archive during that month as you want. You don’t own anything, of course — stop paying the subscription and you lose access to the whole library. But that was fine with me, since I was just looking to casually browse these books, not to build a personal collection; and in this case I was actually getting something valuable in exchange for giving up ownership rights, namely the ability to read the whole series for one low price. A quick check of the Unlimited database showed that Fraction’s Hawkeye was included, so I ponied up my $10 and got down to reading.

And the article was right! Fraction really is a good writer; his Hawkeye is grounded in the real world in a way that the comics I read as a kid never were, and he’s good at establishing characters with realistic problems and motivations. But there’s only 22 Fraction-penned issues of Hawkeye, so it only took me a couple of days to blow through the whole thing; and I had an entire month’s subscription paid for. So what then?

The good news is that there’s a ton of other good stuff readable via Unlimited as well, both modern (the new Ms. Marvel, with its teenaged Muslim Jerseyite protagonist Kamala Khan, is every bit as good as you’ve heard) and classic (the excellent X-Men comics I remember from my childhood, which I discovered via Marvel were the work of writer Chris Claremont). If you want to nerd out on comic books, it’s a very good value.

Not a great value though, for a few reasons. The first is that, if you don’t know enough about comics to go in looking for a specific issue or writer/artist/whatever, Unlimited doesn’t do a whole lot to help you find something worth reading. They make some limited stabs in that direction, but for the most part they just throw you into their gigantic database and tell you you’re on your own. That’s no problem for the veteran comics reader who knows she wants 1974’s Incredible Hulk #180 because that was the first appearance of Wolverine, but for newbies it’s all a bit overwhelming. I ended up turning to threads on Reddit and in comic nerd forums to identify gems for picking out of Unlimited’s database, but it’d really improve Unlimited’s value if Marvel did that work for me.

There’s also the problem of the way comics are written, which is to say the problem of crossovers and team-ups and one-shots. Organizing everything by title means there’s no easy way to just follow the plot thread of one particular character, because characters — especially popular characters — were and are constantly being pulled from their main title and dropped into others to help boost their sales. And sometimes there’s a big “special event” series like 2006’s Civil War that takes pretty much every character and scrambles up their story in ways that make no sense until you go back and read all the issues from the special event. I understand why they do things this way, it’s been a reliable way to move comics off shelves for decades apparently, but when you’re viewing everything as a big flat pile of comics rather than a slow month-to-month drip of new issues it makes picking up a story and following it difficult.

And then there’s the obvious problem: Marvel Unlimited is just, well, Marvel. You won’t find comics from DC, or any other publisher. There’s still plenty to read, and Marvel characters are a big share of the world’s best-known and best-loved comics characters, but if you’re expecting to use it to catch up on the history of, say, Batman, you are out of luck.

Even with those problems, though, I found it to be enough fun to more than justify the $10 I spent on it. The biggest challenge for Marvel now, though, will be finding a way to convince me to keep spending $10 on it every month. Now that I’ve read the Hawkeye comics I originally came for, and had a good browse through a range of other titles as well, the difficulty of finding new stuff to read makes me feel like it’s probably not worth keeping the subscription going. So if Marvel wants to turn Unlimited from a novelty into a habit, they’ve got some work to do. However, if the idea of binge-reading comics appeals to you, and you don’t mind basically renting the comics instead of owning them, Marvel Unlimited is where you want to be.

Nine questions for Jack Dorsey

Posted on November 13, 2015

Dear Jack,

1. Why do characters in URLs count towards my 140 characters?
2. Why do characters in @-usernames count towards my 140 characters?
3. Why do any characters that are part of obvious metadata count towards my 140 characters?
4. Why can’t I edit Tweets for a limited period of time after posting them, so I can fix typos without having to delete and re-post?
5. Why can’t I specify what part of an uploaded image you should use as its preview thumbnail, rather than you just taking a slice out of the middle?
6. Why can’t I subscribe to a hashtag and have posts with it automatically show up in my main feed?
7. Why does the counter in the title bar count all unread Tweets, rather than just unread Tweets that are directly relevant to me (replies, DMs, RTs)?
8. Why is it easier to get to the Advanced Search feature by going to Google and searching for “Twitter advanced search” than it is from within Twitter itself?
9. Why is the only way to display a complete Twitter discussion to leave Twitter and go use Storify instead?

Book review: “Kraken”

Posted on October 26, 2015

Let’s do another book review! This one’s for China Miéville’s 2010 urban fantasy, Kraken.

Kraken is the story of Billy Harrow, a specialist at London’s Natural History Museum who has worked, among other things, on the museum’s prize specimen: an enormous, preserved giant squid. One day, while leading a tour of the museum, he comes to the place where the squid should be only to discover that it has completely, mysteriously vanished. Which poses some obvious questions: how would somebody steal a giant squid without leaving behind any evidence of it having been moved? And why would anyone want to steal a giant squid in the first place? Billy’s investigation into these questions leads him into an arcane London he had never previously known existed — a London of fringe religions, paranormal police and criminals with supernatural powers, all battling each other just beyond the sight of the city’s more normal population. And as these weird elements digest the fact of the theft of the squid, it begins to appear that it it may be the catalyst that kicks off the end of the world.

I’m a huge fan of China Miéville, so I picked up Kraken with great anticipation. It pains me to report, therefore, that Kraken just isn’t very good. It feels less like a China Miéville novel than a failed experiment to see if you could breed a clone of Neil Gaiman using only China Miéville’s DNA.

Part of the problem is the setting. One of the things I generally love about Miéville is the wild imagination he brings to the worlds he builds; they’re full of strange and in some cases uncomfortable little details that make them seem to throb with life. (The most fully realized example of this being Bas-Lag, the bizarre alt-Earth that has been the setting of several of his other novels.) By setting Kraken in real-world London instead of a world completely of his own creation, Miéville lashes the novel to the mast of reality with more firmness than we generally expect from him, and you can feel the story straining against these restraints. The London of Kraken is so overstuffed with weird factions and unlikely characters that at some point you start wondering how all these people manage to keep their secret wars completely off the mundane world’s radar screens, which you’d think would start blinking when gods fight in the streets.

This overstuffed quality also points to another of Kraken’s shortcomings, namely its length. This is a 500+ page novel, and so much of that space is given over to explaining all these mystic factions and personalities that the constant explanations start to become something to slog through instead of something to savor. Miéville’s promethean imagination is normally such a pleasure, but in Kraken it actually gets in the way of the story, and in storytelling that’s a mortal sin. Perhaps if this world were presented to us in a trilogy of novels (much as Bas-Lag sprawls across three separate books) instead of just one, all that stuff would be spread across enough story for it to not gum up the works. But it’s all jammed into one book in Kraken, and that ends up spreading lore so thick that you begin to regret not bringing waders and hip boots.

There’s another problem with Kraken as well, and that’s with the protagonist, the abovementioned Billy Harrow. A book like Kraken in which the bizarre is running riot needs a strong character at its heart to ground it; but Billy is, sadly, a cipher. Nowhere in Kraken does it really feel like he’s actually driving the plot the way a good protagonist should. Instead he’s just constantly reacting to the weird stuff around him, and as a result he feels maddeningly passive, more a vehicle for Miéville to wedge explanations of the weirdness into the story (since Billy’s constantly having to have things explained to him) than a galvanic force of his own. That’s not necessarily a fatal thing — dropping an uninitiated character into a deeply weird setting can be a useful way for a writer to ease his readers into that setting — but we expect to see the character, as they learn the ropes of their new world, grow and evolve to cope with and eventually master it, and Billy never really gets around to doing any of that. (There’s some half-hearted stabs in that direction near the very end, but they never really get off the ground, which is a shame.)

Don’t get me wrong, there are things to like in Kraken. The main attraction, of course, is that trademark Miéville inventiveness, which creates a lot of moments that by themselves are fascinating and fun. But they never really come together into something more than the sum of their parts, and there’s so damn much of that inventiveness on display that it wore even a Miéville fan like me into numbness. If you knew nothing of Miéville, and Kraken was your first exposure to his work, I imagine you’d get about halfway through before chucking it aside as hopelessly overindulgent. And that’s a real shame, given the joys that are waiting to be found elsewhere in his work. (If you’re such a reader looking for a better introduction to Miéville, I recommend his Bas-Lag-set 2000 masterpiece, Perdido Street Station.)

So I put Kraken, sadly, into the “should have been better” folder. Miéville completists may want to give it a go, but for anyone else, it’s a muddle at best and a misfire at worst.

What it is like to live with clinical depression

Posted on October 21, 2015

It’s been a little more than fifteen years now since I was first diagnosed as clinically depressive. I haven’t really talked about it much in that time, here or anywhere else. Partly this is for the same reason that I don’t talk about myself more generally — my assumption is most people would find the day-to-day details of my life to be as dull as dishwater. I mean, I’m a computer programmer, not James Bond, you know?

But it’s also in part because I’m a coward. Depression (and mental illness overall) still carries a stigma. It changes how people look at you, even if they don’t want it to. You can see it in their eyes. And I was afraid of what it would mean if that look was the look I got from everybody. So I kept quiet.

But that stigma will never go away if as those of us who live with this never talk about it, right? Right. So fuck it, let’s talk.

Sorrow vs. despair

Those people I’ve spoken to about it who don’t have it themselves generally assume that depression is analogous to the worst bumming-out they’ve ever had, only worse. They think about some event that made them really sad — the death of a loved one, the end of an important relationship, some major decision they made the wrong way, something like that — and then figure it’s more or less the same thing, only, like, times two.

Maybe for some people it’s like that; I can only speak to my own experience. And in my experience, it’s not like that at all. There’s a distinction, I would argue, between that kind of feeling — let’s call it sorrow — and what the clinical depressive feels, which is closer to something like despair.

The main thing about sorrow is that it’s a temporary condition. No matter how deep it is, eventually it wanes. Like a physical wound, given time, it will heal. It may leave some ugly scars behind, but the skin closes, the bones knit. And while we may not feel that at a conscious level, somewhere, deep down, we know it. We know that the dark tunnel has an end, even if we can’t see any light at the moment. So we have hope, a reason to keep plodding through.

Despair is more existential, because part of it is the fear that it has no end. That this is just the way the world is, now and forever. That nothing will change, because nothing can change. And despair is the depressive’s lot, because we carry our tragedy around with us in our head. You can’t run from it by changing jobs or moving to a new city — though God knows, we try! — because you’re just going to take your head along with you. Try to escape and you just find it stalking you, its teeth bared, its eyes hungry.

Depression is a battle you know you can’t win, an enemy you know you can’t defeat. It’s a war that never ends. All you can do is arm yourself and train so you’re ready whenever it strikes.

The physicality of depression

The other distinction I would make between regular sadness and clinical depression is the sheer physicality of the latter. It’s not just something you feel in your heart, it’s something you feel in the rest of your body too. It engages your senses in a way that regular sadness does not.

The best way I can describe the experience is like this: it’s like a tornado sweeping across the prairie of your mind.

Sometimes it comes out of nowhere, but usually not. Usually it approaches the way a real storm does — slowly, tentatively. Clear skies cloud over, a breeze becomes a gust. It can be triggered by some event in your life, some failure or rejection or snub, but just as frequently it comes for no discernible reason whatsoever.

And then it comes, and when it comes, it comes hard. Your brain fills with noise, with static, like an old broadcast TV would do when lightning crashed around it. The signal of your thoughts distorts, breaks up, until all there is is the noise, roaring like a freight train through your consciousness.

But the experience isn’t just in your mind. It’s tactile, and it’s everywhere. Everything you’ve ever failed at, every mistake you’ve ever made, all of them are suddenly converted into dead weight, and that weight lands on you like a ton of bricks. I mean that literally — it presses down on you, like the hand of an angry god. You feel every ounce. If you’re standing, you want to sit; if you’re sitting, you want to lie down. If you’re lucky, you just sag under the weight of it. You want to lay down and pull a blanket over your head.

Things go along like that for however long they’re going to go this time, and pretty much the only thing you can do in the meantime is ride out the storm. You can still be somewhat productive if you’ve got some simple manual labor to do — take out the trash, walk down the street for lunch, go get the mail — but cognitive labor is difficult or impossible; your brain, for the moment, has problems of its own to deal with.

Eventually, though, it passes. The weight lessens, the noise quiets, the static clears. The storm starts to move off into the distance. You can open your eyes and think a complete thought again. Hooray! It’s over! Until the next time.

Learning to ride a tiger

As the Chinese say, one who rides on the back of a tiger will find it difficult to dismount. So what can we, those of us who are stuck on the back of this tiger, do? We can’t get off, but can we learn to live something like a normal life?

There are ways. The big one is, of course, medication. People like to rage about Big Pharma, and they certainly do plenty of things to justify that rage, but antidepressants work and can be a literal life-saver. With the right meds, the attacks can become both less frequent and less severe. They can dull the pain, limit the weight, turn down the volume on the roaring noise to a point where it becomes an annoyance instead of a debilitating handicap. To a point where you can live and work and do all the things that make a life. To a point where you can live again.

Nothing’s perfect, of course, and antidepressants aren’t exempt. The big problem is that doctors don’t really understand why they work, only that they do. (They have theories, but nobody’s been able to prove one conclusively yet.) So finding the right meds for a particular patient is as much an art as a science; it can take a few tries to find a medication or combination of medications that are actually effective at reducing that person’s suffering. And like most medications, antidepressants can have side effects of varying degrees of severity. It’s therefore possible that the patient will have to wade through whole new types of physical problems as their doctors try different meds on them, which for an already-depressed person is sort of piling insult upon injury. (And even effective meds can have blowback effects: some useful antidepressants cause people to put on weight, for instance, and nobody ever solved their self-image problems by getting fatter.)

All of which probably sounds like it sucks, because it does. But it usually sucks less than the alternative, which is going through all those attacks over and over again for your entire life without anything to blunt their force. So if you’re depressive, and you’ve been avoiding pharmacological treatment out of fear of the meds, I urge you to reconsider. Meds are tough, but living with depression without treatment is much, much tougher. (Not to mention that many people who avoid medication just end up self-medicating themselves with alcohol or drugs, which can bring whole new catgories of suffering on their own.)

Beyond medication, there’s also more traditional psychotherapy — “talk therapy,” where you work through your problems on a doctor’s couch. There’s plenty of debate about how effective this can be, so your mileage may vary. I was fortunate enough to find a very good therapist not long after my diagnosis, though, and over the course of a couple of years she helped me immensely.

Because the root of my depression was biological rather than psychological, there wasn’t much she could do to help me address that. But what she could do was learn to recognize the self-defeating ways I reacted to the depression, and break out of those negative, recurring patterns. She was a cognitive-behavioral therapist, and the central insight of cognitive-behavioral therapy is that over our lives we develop standard reactions to various kinds of internal and external stimuli — reactions seated so deep in our consciousness that we never really even think about them; we just react, the way a child reacts when it touches a hot stove. But because they’re pure impulse, these reactions can be unhelpful, or even actively harmful. So improving your life becomes a matter of recognizing these patterns, and then training yourself to break out of the ones that hurt more than they help.

I found this approach incredibly powerful for dealing with depression, because part of the problem with depression is that depressives frequently do really, really stupid things to try and cope with living with it. We spend money we don’t have buying things we don’t need, because we think the shiny new thing will cheer us up. We drink too much and ingest substances we shouldn’t and have sex with people we really should not be having sex with in a search for something powerful enough to dull the pain. But we don’t do these things consciously; we do them instinctively, following patterns that we learned a long time ago, often as children too young to even understand we were learning something that would echo in our mind for the rest of our lives. So learning to spot these tics, and eventually to free yourself from them, can liberate you from a hamster wheel of self-destruction.

There’s plenty of other consolations in the world besides these — philosophy and art, creation and accomplishment, and friendship and love, to name a few — but while those are all good and can all be helpful in varying degrees, nothing beats meds and talk. Meds and talk are the reason I live a productive life today. Meds and talk are how you learn to ride the tiger.

I don’t really have a snappy ending for this essay. I wish I did; as a writer, few things feel better to me than wrapping up an argument with some really powerful statement, some punch that takes the point I’m trying to make and drives it right between the reader’s eyes. So I’ll just end by saying that hopefully reading about my experiences will help at least one other person out there realize that they’re not alone, and that there is hope. Because the only way we will ever heal the world is by tending to each other, one by one.

Book review: “The Martian”

Posted on October 19, 2015

Let’s do another book review! This one’s for Andy Weir’s 2014 debut novel The Martian, which is terrible.

(Oh, I kind of gave away the end of the review there. Shoot. Sorry about that.)

The Martian is the story of astronaut Mark Watney and how clever he is. Through a regrettable misunderstanding, the rest of the crew of Watney’s Mars mission thinks an injury he’s suffered has actually killed him, so they leave him behind when NASA aborts their mission and calls them back home. Watney, stuck on the Red Planet with the gear the rest of his team left behind, has to find a way to (1) let NASA know he’s not actually dead and (2) stay alive for as long as possible, to give them time to come rescue him — which would take a while, since traveling from Earth to Mars by conventional rocket takes more than a year. The novel tells the story of Watney’s struggle to make it home, cross-cutting between his log entries on Mars and NASA’s efforts back on Earth to reach him before his supplies run out.

The Martian has received glowing reviews, both critically and from readers on sites like Amazon and Goodreads — which I find completely baffling, because it’s not a very good novel.

Let’s start with the character of Mark Watney. Or rather, let’s wish we could start with the character of Mark Watney, because Mark Watney, as written, is not a character. He displays no personality throughout the entire course of the book; no interesting personal traits, no flaws or shortcomings, no nothing, save MacGyver-grade resourcefulness and a relentlessly positive disposition that nothing, not even being stranded on freaking Mars, can so much as put a dent in. One would expect a person going through such a trial to have at least some moments of doubt, but not Mark Watney! He’s too busy making quips about the poor quality of music recordings his absent crewmates left behind to let a little thing like being stranded on freaking Mars get him down. Watney’s not so much a character as a little plastic action figure for Weir to push around however the plot requires.

Which brings us to the plot. The plot of The Martian is thinner than the latest iPhone. It boils down to this:

1. Watney realizes something about being stranded on freaking Mars that is going to kill him;
2. Watney thinks for a little while;
3. Watney comes up with a way to solve the problem with materials he just happens to have on hand;
4. Whatever dramatic tension the book has managed to muster gets sucked out of it with the force of an explosive decompression;
5. Go back to step 1 and repeat.

Seriously, that’s all there is to it. The entire plot of The Martian is just an extended cycle through these five steps. And once you’ve been through them a few times, whatever “crises” Weir throws Watney’s way lose their impact; you know Weir’s not going to put Watney into a situation he can’t get out of, so there’s nothing at stake and therefore no drama. For a novel whose “high concept” is so much about putting a character in peril, you never really feel concerned for Watney, because he never really seems concerned for himself. It’s less like a desperate battle for survival and more like he’s taking a harder-than-average final exam.

There’s other missed opportunities in The Martian, too. One big one is that Weir never really gives us a sense for how it would actually feel to be standing, all alone, on the surface of Mars. That would probably be pretty amazing, don’t you think? It’s the sort of overwhelming experience that might lead you to profound insights about what it means to be human, the nature of our place in the universe, etc. But Mark Watney has no time for such thoughts; he’s too busy making radios out of Martian coconuts to be concerned with anything like that. So Weir uses the pages he could have used to put us in Watney’s shoes to instead give him long monologues explaining the exact chemical property of nitrogen that is he is about to take advantage of.

Even worse, Watney never changes or evolves in any way over the course of the story. When a good author throws a fictional character into peril, they do so not just to advance the plot, but also to advance the character: responding to the peril can force the character to change in ways we might not have predicted, which makes for interesting reading. But the Mark Watney in the book’s final pages is the same cheerful, chipper cipher that we met back when we first opened it. Having to cobble together a way to survive in the most hostile environment any human has ever lived in turns out to be no big deal, which is kind of jaw-dropping.

I could go on and on, but I’ll spare you. Suffice it to say that The Martian is a failure on nearly every level. If you’re in the market for a practical how-to guide for surviving on Mars, you might find it of interest; but anyone looking for a compelling plot, memorable characters, interesting turns of phrase, or really any of the pleasures usually associated with fiction should leave this one in a galaxy far, far away.

Nobody ever won by surrendering the initiative

Posted on October 14, 2015

This will just be a brief note on strategy. Nobody ever reads these and they never change anything, so I have no idea why I still bother, but here we go anyway.

I was listening to the Diane Rehm show on public radio this morning, which featured a panel discussing how last night’s Democratic presidential debate turned out. Asking a group of deeply conventional people to produce insta-takes on a subject doesn’t usually result in much insight, and this show was no exception. Near the end, though, the discussion took a turn that I thought illustrated just how badly informed on the subject of strategy DC conventional wisdom tends to be.

The point was made most strongly by panelist Stu Rothenberg, who’s been one of the leading professional political cud-chewers in America for a couple of decades now. The panel was discussing whether Bernie Sanders is too far to the left politically to be an effective President, and Rothenberg opined that he is:

As to this question of how he would perform as President, it came up quickly in the debate last night. I think he would have trouble working with Republicans. And I think Secretary Clinton made it clear, she’s progressive, but she’s a pragmatic progressive that wants to get things done. And I don’t know, I think Bernie Sanders give off, at least, an impression that it’s my way or the highway. He always seems angry to me. He hollers. He seems very doctrinaire. And so, I think it’s a problem for Americans who are trying to get past the gridlock.

This opinion, that to be effective in office any Democrat who would replace Obama will have to be “pragmatic” instead of “doctrinaire,” is pretty common among our betters in the chattering class here in DC. Which is kind of amazing, given how completely it flies in the face of recent history.

Just look at the last seven years, the Barack Obama administration. The reason we have gridlock in Washington isn’t because Obama hasn’t been willing to offer Republicans half a loaf; the reason we have gridlock in Washington is because the Republicans made a strategic decision to refuse to work with him at all unless he gave them the whole thing. As long as they held at least one house of Congress, their thinking went, they didn’t have to compromise on anything — they could just refuse to pass any of his programs until he gave them everything they wanted. The result would be inaction, “gridlock,” but they calculated that people would blame the President for that more than they blamed Congress, so public pressure and his own frustration would eventually force his hand.

The results of that strategy have been mixed, but for the most part it has worked as they anticipated. It wasn’t enough to stop Obamacare from passing, but lots of other programs — including critical economic stimulus packages that would determine how fast the economy would recover from the 2008 financial crisis — had to either be shelved completely or retooled to satisfy Republican ideology. By turning governance into a game of “chicken” and throwing their own steering wheel out the window right at the start, the GOP has been much more effective politically than they had any right to imagine themselves being back on election night 2008.

It’s all very cynical, but I’m not here to discuss that. I’m here to discuss something else, namely that there is only one reason the GOP had a strategy like this in their arsenal. It was there because Barack Obama put it there.

Think back to the 2008 Presidential campaign. Back then, candidate Barack Obama made a very explicit strategic decision of his own: he decided to position himself, not as a Democrat or a progressive, but as a “post-partisan” candidate who could build a coalition across party lines:

“I think the American people are hungry for something different and can be mobilized around big changes, not incremental changes, not small changes,” Obama said Saturday night. “I think that there are a whole host of Republicans, and certainly independents, who have lost trust in their government, who don’t believe anybody is listening to them, who are staggering under rising costs of health care, college education, don’t believe what politicians say. And we can draw those independents and some Republicans into a working coalition, a working majority for change.”

The consequences of this decision have been reverberating through our system ever since. It’s perhaps the single most critical decision in modern American politics, because it’s the decision that put that weapon of sheer stubborn rejectionism into the Republicans’ hands.

Any strategy, you see, contains within it a set of criteria by which its success or failure will be evaluated. (If you can’t tease such criteria out of it, it’s an abstraction, not a strategy.) For post-partisanship, the evaluation was simple: you would know whether it was succeeding by looking at how many Republicans Obama was bringing along with him. A “post-partisan” President would have to have at least some. If he didn’t — if he was only able to bring along with him those of his own party — his strategy would obviously be failing.

And this was the gift Barack Obama gave the GOP, because it made them the arbiters of whether his strategy was successful or not. To be successful, Obama needed Republican support — which meant that they could force him into failure, simply by withholding it. The only decision that mattered was the one he left to them to make. They seized upon this profound strategic error and have been exploiting it ever since.

Military strategists have a term for the gift that Obama gave the Republicans. They call it “initiative.”

In a battle, one side is usually actively driving things forward, guiding the shape and pace of the fight, while the other is responding, trying its best to keep up. The side that is driving things forward is said to “have the initiative.” Having the initiative is a critical factor in achieving victory, because once you have the initiative you can make sure that the battle plays out in ways that maximize your advantages and minimize your weaknesses. And if you don’t have the initiative, you’re going to be on the opposite side of that equation, fighting on terrain that favors the enemy at a time of their choosing.

You’re going to be losing, in other words. Which is why generals who have lost the initiative find themselves looking for ways to turn the tables — to wrest it from the hands of the enemy, and hold on to it. Losing the initiative doesn’t always mean losing the battle, but it certainly doesn’t help.

That’s why it was so frustrating, back in 2008, to see Barack Obama framing his candidacy in terms of “post-partisanship.” It meant watching him surrender the initiative. And he didn’t even make them fight for it! He just handed it over to them, right on a silver platter.

And that’s why it’s frustrating to see this same conventional wisdom being rolled out seven years later, and to see Hillary Clinton playing to it in the same way that Obama did way back then. “Pragmatic progressive” isn’t exactly the same as “post-partisan,” but it still takes the initiative and leaves it right on the GOP’s front doorstep, because if you’re defining success in terms of your ability to cut a deal with the other side, all the other side has to do is refuse to deal and you’ve officially failed. The battle is over before it’s even begun.

Maybe Hillary’s not smart enough to have learned this lesson, but you can be. When fighting your own battles, don’t look for ways to hand the initiative over to the other side. Look for ways to seize it, and hold it, and force anyone who wants to take it from you to dance to whatever tune you choose to play.

Book review: “The Water Knife”

Posted on September 25, 2015

Time for another book review! This one’s for The Water Knife, the new environmental horror story by Paolo Bacigalupi.

The Water Knife is set in a near-future American Southwest devastated by global warming, where seemingly endless drought has made access to water the thing that determines whether cities live or die. The state of Texas has more or less collapsed, caught between the water crisis and mega-hurricanes fueled by warmed-up oceans; its population has become a flow of refugees desperately streaming north and west, Okies of the 21st century.  The flow of migrants has been dammed up in Arizona after neighboring states militarized their borders to keep the refugees out; its own institutions and water resources already strained, Arizona teeters dangerously on the edge of collapse itself. Its survival will be determined by who controls what’s left of the region’s main water source, the Colorado River watershed; Arizona needs its water to hang on, but so do California and Nevada, who aren’t willing to give it up without a fight.

Into the vortex of the slowly imploding city of Phoenix come the book’s three main characters. Angel Velasquez is the “water knife” of the title, a fixer and enforcer for the water authorities of Las Vegas, who aren’t above blowing up the occasional aqueduct to choke a rival city to death. Lucy Monroe is a reporter with a national reputation who came to Phoenix to write some click-friendly disaster porn but went native, identifying more and more with the “Zoners” as they scrabbled to keep their communities from following Texas down the drain. Maria Villarosa is a young migrant from Texas whose dreams of making it to somewhere safe jar uncomfortably against the realities of what she has to do just to stay alive. Machinations to tilt the balance of power in the region’s struggle for water bring them together, racing to find some kind of future for themselves amidst the chaos.

The Water Knife is an excellent novel. Much of the praise that’s come its way has been for Bacigalupi’s skill at world-building, and it’s entirely deserved; the future Southwest of The Water Knife is both thoroughly realized and chillingly plausible. It’s speculative fiction, but none of the speculations are far-fetched; they just take things we see around us every day and push them just a little further in the direction they’re already going. It’s not hard to imagine states that are already paranoid about immigrants turning that paranoia on other Americans; it’s not hard to imagine National Guards evolving from reserves for the Federal military into border patrols for their states; it’s not hard to imagine the gated communities the rich are already fleeing into becoming completely self-contained arcologies. The result is a world that feels weirdly alien and yet completely familiar at the same time, which is an accomplishment.

But Bacigalupi also deserves praise for The Water Knife’s characters as well; they’re nuanced and layered, people rather than stereotypes, and they develop in satisfying ways as the story proceeds. Angel, for instance, is a hard man, all the sentiment beaten out of him by a childhood spent fleeing from Mexican narco gangs, and as a result he brings no morality or sentiment to his work. His boss, the woman who runs Las Vegas’ water authority, plucked him out of the sea of refugees and gave him admission to a world of security and safety, and in gratitude for that he’s willing to do more or less anything she asks him to do. But as he sinks into the morass of corruption and decay that is Phoenix — and as he’s exposed to the kernel of idealism that still somehow survives within Lucy Monroe — his mental toughness changes from a simple means of defending his sanity in a crazy world into something more like a philosophy, a code. He doesn’t soften, but what at a distance appeared to be solid plates of armor start to reveal unexpected facets. It’s an interesting process to observe.

It’s tempting to say that the theme of The Water Knife is that ecological catastrophe looms over us, but that would be to confuse the book’s message with its setting. Its message is just as applicable to us today as it is to his near-future characters: that things go bad when people start putting the world they want to live in before the world they actually do live in. His characters experience this quite brutally at times; this new world of scarcity and want doesn’t hesitate to deal out punishment to those who persist in believing in old, dead gods like “Law” and “Fairness” and “America.” But the book also makes an argument that we today are just as guilty of deluding ourselves as his characters are; fattened by decades of easy wealth and steady growth, we blithely assume such things will go on forever even as the factors that drove them fly further off the rails. Faced with hard problems, we choose to pretend they don’t exist instead of accepting the pain that would be necessary to confront them. And the result, of course, is that the problems only get worse, the pain only greater, until such time as it’s so bad and so painful that they’re no longer possible to ignore.

There are a few small problems with The Water Knife. One is that, as you can probably tell from the paragraph above, its purpose is essentially didactic, and as a result there are a few places where Bacigalupi’s usually light touch turns into more of a hammering. At multiple points, for instance, characters stop what they’re doing to marvel that the people of the past knew all this bad stuff was coming, and chose to do nothing to prevent it; which is true, of course, but it demonstrates a lack of faith that the reader will be able to derive this lesson without having it stated to them flatly inside quote marks. Additionally, at times the book betrays a fear that its argument won’t be accepted on its own authority, so it starts showing us its sources in the hopes that they will lend its arguments weight. Not just content to show us that not one but two characters own (first edition, no less) copies of Marc Reisner’s sweeping history of Western water policy Cadillac Desert, it goes a step further and makes one of those copies integral to the plot itself. It feels safe to say that, if you enjoy The Water Knife and want to read more, Bacigalupi would really, really like you to pick up Cadillac Desert next. I hold no brief against that suggestion — I’ve never read Cadillac Desert, but now I definitely want to — but it’s awkward for a work of fiction to essentially stop the story to present you with a reading list. It’s a recommendation that belongs in an afterword, not in the plot.

Don’t take these complaints as a sign that The Water Knife is dull reading, though. It’s not! It’s an exciting thriller and a stark warning about the future, not a textbook. It’s not perfect, but it’s very strong, and it’s definitely worth your time.

Book review: “Ghost Fleet”

Posted on September 23, 2015

Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War, the new-ish techno-thriller by P.W. Singer and August Cole, arrived on a flood tide of warm reviews describing it as Tom Clancy for the 21st Century. After reading the book, I find myself agreeing with that assessment; Tom Clancy’s books weren’t very good either.

Ghost Fleet is the story of a big near-future war between China and the United States. The Chinese, who are bad, catch the Americans by surprise thanks to a combination of advanced technology and benighted Asiatic cunning. (This latter taking advantage of some serious real-world U.S. strategic missteps, a couple of which I’ve written about previously.) A series of reverses drives America out of the Pacific, with even Hawaii falling before the red tide. With their backs to the wall, the Americans devise a desperate, long-odds plan to neutralize China’s advantages. Does it succeed? Are you serious? This is a book written by Americans for an American audience, so of course it does.

The story of Ghost Fleet centers around the characters of… oh, why bother? Why bother putting more work into describing the series of cardboard cut-outs that pass for characters than Singer and Cole put into actually creating them? There’s the Intrepid Young Naval Captain; the Gruff Old Senior Non-com who is also the Intrepid Young Naval Captain’s father (ooh!); the Brilliant Female Scientist who is both Asian (because of course she is) and the Gruff Old Senior Non-com’s love interest (despite the two of them having literally nothing in common); the World-Weary, Cynical Russian, because in these kinds of books Russians are always cynical and world-weary; and on and on and on. None of them are written with even the slightest shred of originality or wit. They always, without fail, do exactly what you expect they will do.

This is the kind of book where the Chinese characters, who are uniformly devious and cunning, spend all their time quoting Sun Tzu at one another. Yes! They actually settle arguments that way, by seeing who can deploy the best bon mot from The Art of War, “Dueling Banjos” style.

But nobody ever read a Tom Clancy book for the characters, so maybe it’s not fair to judge Ghost Fleet negatively just because its characters are less characters than mannequins dressed up in sailor suits. The draw of the techno-thriller has always been two-fold: first, an almost pornographic wallowing in the minute details of weapons technology; and second, a plot that’s long on big, dramatic set-piece battle scenes where the author can show all that porno-tech doing its thing.

Unfortunately, Ghost Fleet falls short by these yardsticks as well. The book rolls out its fair share of bleeding-edge death gadgets — carrier-killing missiles! Electromagnetic cannons! Satellites that can track untrackable submarines! — but with the exception of the latter, it never really lingers on how they operate or what changes to the strategic calculus of war they represent, preferring instead to just wave them about like plot devices in a Harry Potter book. The result is a story so crowded with dei ex machina that they start stacking up like planes at O’Hare on the day before Thanksgiving.

Plot-wise, the book disappoints as well. It starts promisingly, with scenes of our American protagonists going about their business on what Roger Ebert would have called a Seemingly Ordinary Day — a day that’s so boring that we just know something terrible is about to happen. (In case we’re too dense to pick up on that well-worn trope, however, Singer and Cole thoughtfully start the book with a prologue in which we see an American astronaut on the International Space Station get jettisoned into space by his devious Russian colleague.) Sure enough, something terrible does happen: a panoramic attack on American forces across the Pacific by the Chinese and Russians, who have joined forces because the plot requires them to. A disaster on the scale of the World War II attack on Pearl Harbor unfolds, more or less plausibly.

Mystifyingly, however, once that new Day of Infamy is over, the book leaps ahead in time several months into the future. You would think that the days and weeks immediately following the biggest geopolitical development of the century would be pretty interesting, but not to this book, which is so focused on matters nautical that it skips all that so we can jump straight to the reactivation of the ships of the National Defense Reserve Fleet (the “ghost fleet” of the title) to fill out the gaps left by all the ships the Chinese sent to the bottom. These rusting hulks, led by the destroyer USS Zumwalt (DDG-1000) (which the book plausibly projects was mothballed pretty much right after delivery, due to its massive cost overruns and unreliability of its many whiz-bang technological features), form a new fleet. We then spend the rest of the book watching the Intrepid Young Naval Captain, who has been placed in command of the Zumwalt, argue with the Gruff Old Senior Non-com — who is also his father, remember! — over the best way to run a ship, while the G.O.S.N. bangs on malfunctioning computers with a wrench and growls “I dinna think she can take much muuuuuuuir, cap’n” in classic Mr. Scott fashion. Meanwhile the ship has also been outfitted with a super-high-tech new weapon that could change the course of the war — but only if they can get it to work, which is why Brilliant Female Scientist has come along for the ride.

Will the super-high-tech weapon work when it has to? Only a person of reasonably average intelligence could predict the answer.

There’s also a couple of subplots jammed in too, because you can only watch people bang on computers with a wrench and work out their daddy issues for so long. They both take place in occupied Hawaii: one follows a female Marine who organizes an underground resistance movement, while the other follows a civilian woman who turns into a serial killer of occupying troops and the Russian counter-insurgency expert the Chinese bring in to run her down. The resistance subplot is competently done, but completely unsurprising. The serial killer subplot feels like it belongs in a completely different book. It baffles me why Singer and Cole chose to include it; the only reason I can think of is that they thought they needed something to rope in the Thomas Harris/Stieg Larsson creepy-crime audience. Anyway, it all works out more or less as you expect it to.

There’s another post to be written about the geo-strategic assumptions of this book, and what they say about the anxieties and fears of the managers of America’s defense-industrial complex at this particular moment in history. But for now I’ll confine myself to evaluating Ghost Fleet as a literary artifact, and as a literary artifact, it ain’t very good, even with the severely limited expectations one usually brings to the techno-thriller genre.

In case the above was unclear, I didn’t like it.

More book reviews are over here, if you’re into that sort of thing.

Ask Mr. Science: How to securely manage your passwords

Posted on September 16, 2015

Panel from “Dilbert” by Scott Adams for April 6, 1998. Full strip here.

Hi there, Mr. Science!

Hello, Bobby! It’s nice to see you again.

I have a question, Mr. Science. With all the different sites that are getting hacked these days, what can I do to protect my personal information online?

Why, I’m glad you asked, Bobby! The first thing you need to do is start practicing good password hygiene.

Password hygiene? What’s that, Mr. Science?

Have a seat, Bobby, and I’ll explain.

The first thing you need to understand about passwords is that you can only stay secure if you use a different one for every Web site and app and online service you need to log into, because each of those systems is a target for hackers. And if you use the same password everywhere, when those hackers actually get into one of those systems and pull your password out of it, they now can log in as you everywhere. So the only way to compartmentalize the risk is to use a different password for each service.

That makes sense, Mr. Science.

But this is complicated, of course, by the fact there are so many services in our lives that require passwords these days. Your bank needs one. Your credit card needs one. Your email needs one. Your Facebook and Twitter and Tumblr accounts all need one. The first step to doing anything online is always setting up yet another username and password. And if you diligently try to do the right thing and give each one its own unique password, you quickly discover that there are so many that it’s impossible to remember them all, or which one goes where.

Gosh, Mr. Science, you’re not just whistling Dixie! I’ve got so many online accounts I can hardly keep them all straight.

Nobody can, Bobby. So what you need is a tool which can remember all that stuff for you. And that kind of tool is called a “password manager.”

A password manager is a computer program that remembers all your passwords, so you don’t have to. They’re basically little databases that keep track of which usernames and passwords go with which sites. Then, when it’s time to log in, you just copy the password from your password manager and paste it into the appropriate password field. And many of them will even integrate with your browser, so that you don’t even have to copy and paste; the right password just gets inserted automatically.

That sounds convenient, Mr. Science! Computers are way better at remembering things than I am. But my browser can already remember my passwords for me. Isn’t that enough?

Not really, no; the security level of browsers’ built-in password managers are all over the map. So you really want a purpose-built tool for this sort of thing.

So which one should I use?

Well, that depends, Bobby.

Depends on what?

Well, basically there’s two types of password managers: online password managers, and offline ones. Online password managers connect to an online service, and store all your password information there. (Example: LastPass.) Offline password managers, on the other hand, store your passwords in an encrypted “vault” on your PC itself. (Examples: KeePass, Password Safe.) Some password managers, meanwhile, try to straddle this distinction by letting you choose whether to store your data locally or remotely. (Examples: Dashlane, 1Password.)

Gee whillikers, Mr. Science. I don’t care about all this stuff. Why do I need to pay attention to it?

Because, Bobby, there’s an important tradeoff you make when you decide where to store your password database.

Online managers are super convenient, because your data is always available, regardless of which machine you happen to be using at the moment. (As long as you have an Internet connection, at least.) But if your data lives on some remote server out in the cloud somewhere, it’s only as secure as that server is — if the server gets hacked, all your passwords are potentially at risk.

Offline managers are (theoretically) more secure, because your data isn’t sitting on a remote machine that’s a juicy target for hackers because it’s mixed up with a bunch of other peoples’ data too. But now, if you use more than one PC, you need to figure out a way to synchronize the password database between them so that they all have an up-to-date version of it available. And you have to be careful how you do this, because you certainly don’t want someone being able to grab a copy of the database as it zips between one machine and the others!

So there’s no clear one that’s better than the other, Mr. Science?

That’s right, Bobby. There’s no absolute winner and loser here, just different sets of tradeoffs that are more or less appropriate for different kinds of people.

But I’m just a kid, Mr. Science. I don’t know which is better or worse for me. Maybe I should just pick a password manager that can work either way?

If you don’t feel qualified to decide between offline and online password managers, what makes you sure you’ll make the right decision if the tool just leaves it up to you?

Gee.

And we haven’t even gotten into the distinction between open-source password managers versus commercial ones, either. (Open source is generally preferred for security tools, because it means that third parties can audit them to make sure they’re not doing something nasty behind the scenes. But open-source tools are generally less polished and easy to use than commercial, closed alternatives. So now we’re looking at trading off security and convenience again.)

Or the question of whether the password manager you want to use is available on all the platforms you do your computing on. There’s nothing less fun than loading all your passwords into a manager on your Windows PC, only to discover that there’s no way to open the database on your Mac laptop.

All my computers run Windows, Mr. Science. So —

All of them, Bobby? Even your mobile phone?

Ohhhh.

A modern smartphone is basically just a computer that fits in your pocket, Bobby. You probably have a bunch of sites and services you connect to through it, so you’re going to want to have access to your password vault there too.

Except that the vast majority of smartphones on the market are running mobile-specific operating systems like Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, so you can’t just load the app you use on your desktop and laptop onto them.

Gosh, Mr. Science. I don’t even know where to begin with all these decisions. I give up! Just tell me what you use, OK?

I use an offline password manager, syncing the database between machines using the (Edward Snowden-approved) file syncing service SpiderOak.

Hooray! We’re done now, right?

Sorry, Bobby, but no. Now that we have a password manager, we have to figure out how to use it securely.

Oh no. What?

Think of it this way, Bobby. Regardless of whether you store your password vault locally or remotely, it’s basically the same thing — a little box you’re loading a bunch of really sensitive information into. A good password manager will encrypt that box, so people can’t just pop it open and start rooting around in it. But you need to be able to open it, or else it’s useless, right? So we need to set it up so that you, and only you, can do that.

That makes sense, Mr. Science.

Out of the box, most password managers handle this by having you create a “master password.” Which is exactly what it sounds like: one more password, this one to be used to unlock the box where all the other passwords are stored.

But Mr. Science, I thought the point of all this was that I wouldn’t have to remember passwords anymore!

You won’t! Except for this one, I mean. Which you are definitely going to have to remember.

Oh.

And did I mention how if you ever forget the master password, your password database will become completely inaccessible? That’s right, there’s no way to reset it if the password database is actually secure. (Some managers do offer a password reset option; this is a good indication that behind the scenes data stored with them is not actually 100% locked up.)

Argh!

I know, right? So you’ll probably want to write your master password down somewhere, just in case.

Wait, isn’t writing down passwords a terrible idea, security-wise?

Oh, most definitely!

And isn’t this password now like the one most important password in my entire life?

Yup.

So why would I ever write it down, Mr. Science?

In case you forget it.

But now all someone needs is to find the place I wrote it down, and they can see all my passwords!

Right. So we need to take this a step further. We need two-factor authentication.

What’s that, Mr. Science?

Security nerd-speak for setting up your database so that it can’t be opened with a single key. You need two keys, used together, instead. And ideally, those keys will be completely different kinds of things, so that it’s hard to lose them both at once.

What do you mean, different kinds of things?

Imagine a simple padlock that you open by twirling the dial to a particular combination, Bobby. This lock has a key, but the key isn’t anything you can touch — it’s that combination of numbers, which is a secret you carry around in your head. Security nerds call this type of key “something you know.”

Now, think of the front door on your house. You probably don’t open it with anything you carry around in your head; most likely you open it with an actual object, a physical key. Without that object, the lock can’t be opened. This is a different type of key — “something you have.”

In a good two-factor authentication setup, to get access to the data that’s behind the encryption, you need to provide both of those kinds of keys. (Hence the name — two kinds of keys means two “factors.”) You need something you know, like the master password. But you also need something you have — some physical object that the system is set up to recognize as a valid key. It’s the combination of both these things that unlocks the data.

So with this type of setup, it doesn’t matter if you have your master password written down somewhere, Bobby. Nobody can open your password vault unless they have the matching physical key as well.

So how do I get one of these physical keys? I can just go down to Best Buy and buy one, right?

Nope. Nobody’s really created a good physical authentication token for consumers yet. (There’s options for big business, but they’re crazy expensive.) So you’re probably going to need to roll your own.

Oh.

There’s some different ways you can do this. One is to install some software on your smartphone; this turns the phone into a type of physical key. (Example: Google Authenticator.) There’s some setups you can do that use an encryption key stored in a file that you carry around on a USB memory stick. Or you can try a device like a YubiKey, though in my experience those don’t really work very well.

I dunno, Mr. Science. This all sounds really complicated.

It’s not for me, Bobby! I actually enjoy it. In fact, I put aside a little time every week to review my password management strategy, lingering thoughtfully over the merits of various peer-reviewed encryption protocols.

You’re weird, Mr. Science.

Don’t judge me, Bobby.

But what are people who don’t enjoy all this stuff supposed to do to stay safe online, Mr. Science? I mean, I think I understood everything you just explained, but I could never explain it to the other kids in my school.

You are correct, Bobby; unlike you and I, most people are stupid.

And even if I could explain it to them, they’d never follow it all, you know? It’s just too much work.

Or lazy, I mean. Stupid or lazy. Or both! Many people are both.

Well, yeah, Mr. Science. But just because someone is stupid or lazy, that doesn’t mean they deserve to get hacked, right? Shouldn’t even stupid and lazy people have some protection online?

You’re starting to sound like a Communist, Bobby. You’re not a Communist, are you?

Gosh no!

That’s a relief.

Thanks, Mr. Science!!!

Our new comments policy: don’t let the door hit your comments on the ass on their way out

Posted on September 4, 2015

After I rolled out JWM’s new design, a few Longtime Readers™ wrote in to ask a simple question: what happened to the comments? So I figured I should say something for the record on that score.

The short version is that comments are closed on Just Well Mixed. Comments posted in the past have been retained and will continue to be displayed, but the option to post new ones on either new or old posts has turned off.

Why? Two reasons.

First, the quality of comments this site has received has been going downhill for a long time. That’s kind of depressing, because one of the great joys of the early blogosphere was the intelligence and variety of the comments I got here. And because of that, we early bloggers got kind of attached to comments as an integral part of a blog. We had arguments over it. We got ideological about it! People used to tell each other (with a straight face!) that a blog wasn’t a “real blog” if it didn’t allow comments, if you can believe that.

Those days are long past, of course. My comments section hasn’t exactly been the second coming of the Algonquin Round Table for quite some time. Today the comments are almost entirely spam, and those that aren’t rarely have anything interesting to add to the conversation. So my attachment to the idea of allowing them being an integral part of what makes JWM JWM isn’t what it used to be.

Second, there’s no shortage of other channels people can use to opine on my work. Here is a short list of some things that did not exist when this site first went live, all the way back in January of 2002:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Tumblr
• Reddit
• Hacker News
• WordPress.com

These, and many many many others, are all places where you can discuss things you read here with like-minded folk if you feel the desire to. And the conversations around my writing that have sprung up there have in recent years been much higher quality than the ones that have sprung up in the comments sections of the posts themselves.

When I started JWM, publishing online was a complicated process that required either a (small, but still) degree of technical knowledge or a fair bit of money. In that environment, comment sections were nice; they opened the conversation to people who otherwise would not have been able to participate in it. Today, though, those barriers have all come down. Anyone who wants to can publish anything they want to, almost always for free, without needing me to provide them with tools to do so. In that environment, comment sections feel increasingly beside the point.

Comment sections are the male nipples of online publishing. Maybe at some point in the distant past they served a purpose, but today they are vestigial legacy organs at best. Well, here at JWM we don’t truck with dragging obsolete flesh around; if it isn’t useful, we get out the rusty X-Acto knife and get to cuttin’. So the nipples are gone, my friends. The nipples are gone. And if you want to yell at me about that, you’ll need to rustle up your own megaphone from here on out.

Book review: “Wolf Hall”

Posted on September 3, 2015

The JWM Summer of Fiction hit a bit of a snag over the last couple of weeks, due to some unexpected personal difficulties. But those are now (more or less) resolved, so I can finally get around to posting the last review: Hilary Mantel’s 2009 Man Booker Prize winner, Wolf Hall.

Set in the years that led up to the English Reformation, Wolf Hall‘s protagonist is Thomas Cromwell, a man on the make if ever there was one. When we first meet him, Cromwell is part of the inner circle of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, whose position at the intersection of the Catholic Church and the court of King Henry VIII made him one of the most powerful men in England. Wolsey’s influence is on the wane, however, due to what his contemporaries delicately referred to as “the king’s great matter“: the inability of his queen, Catherine of Aragon, to produce a male heir to continue his dynasty.  Henry wants to jettison Catherine for a juicy young thing named Anne Boleyn, who he believes will give him the son Catherine cannot; the Church, whose official opposition to divorce gives it a convenient tool to squeeze the desperate Henry for political concessions, stands in the way of that desire; and if Wolsey can’t find a way to thread that needle at a price Henry can accept, the king is determined to find someone who can. The novel follows Cromwell as he becomes that someone, supplanting Wolsey and prompting one of the great crises of European history.

From what I can see, Wolf Hall appears to be one of those novels that polarizes its readers — either they love it, or they really, really do not. I loved it, for a few different reasons.

First, it gave me one of the things I appreciate most in a work of historical fiction: a new way to look at familiar people. The conventional take on the personalities of the English Reformation paints Henry as an amoral horn-dog and Cromwell as a Machiavellian schemer who helped the king put his libido and dynastic ambitions before the law, with another of the king’s advisors, Sir Thomas More, positioned as a principled man who died a martyr for standing up to him. Wolf Hall flips these characterizations neatly on their head. Its Cromwell, while still fairly Machiavellian, is human and relatable; he’s a smart man trying to make his way in a difficult world. Its More, meanwhile, is a Catholic zealot, less concerned with the niceties of the law than with keeping England under the thumb of a distant, corrupt church. I’m not enough of an expert on English history to tell you if these portrayals are more or less accurate than the old standards; but when reading a work of historical fiction, emphasis on fiction, that’s not my primary concern. It’s OK to reinterpret people in that context, as long as doing so results in a compelling narrative that says something interesting about the people and the period it’s depicting, which Wolf Hall does.

One of the other pleasures of good historical fiction is the way it can give you insight into why the people of the time did the things they did, and Wolf Hall delivers here as well. The main narrative thread running through it is the process by which Henry came to the decision to separate England from the Catholic world, which was one of the monumental decisions of the age. But Mantel shows how this monumental decision was actually no one decision at all, but rather the slow accretion of many decisions, all of which seem small in context. Henry doesn’t so much decide to break from orthodoxy as he does run out of alternatives, exhausting his options as each fails in turn. This is consistent both with his character as the novel portrays it, and with the way big, historic changes generally come about; we like to think history is a story of people making bold choices, but when you put those bold choices under a microscope you typically find they are actually just a bunch of unremarkable choices that circumstances have rolled together into a lump.

I also liked how Wolf Hall gives you a sense for how different the world of the 16th century is to the world we live in today. It’s striking, for instance, to watch Cromwell move through a world where death is so commonplace as to be almost casual. England in his time was in the grip of a pandemic, and as we follow him we watch it sweep great swathes of his family away with what to a modern mind is shocking frequency. To Cromwell, though, it’s just the way things are; he grieves, but it doesn’t shock him. He doesn’t ask why, because asking why would be useless. They died because dying was what people did then. Soon enough the places they left empty are filled by others, and so (for the living, at least) the dance of life goes on.

It’s not perfect, of course. Much of the negative reaction to this novel seems to be rooted in one particular stylistic decision Mantel made, using the pronoun “he” almost exclusively to refer to Cromwell. This can lead to some awkwardness as you read a sentence and try to work out whether the “he” it refers to is the not-Cromwell person named elsewhere in the sentence or Cromwell himself. I’m not really sure what prompted this choice, to be honest. If it’s an experiment, it fails, because it obscures more than it illuminates. But I’m not averse to a novel that makes me work a little if it offers sufficient reward for that work, and Wolf Hall does. So if you like historical fiction, you shouldn’t avoid it just because of this issue.

And I suppose that’s my final verdict on Wolf Hall: it’s good! Not perfect, but really good, and definitely worth your time.

Want more? Links to all Summer of Fiction book reviews can be found here.

“Show Me a Hero” and the limits of Life, the Movie

Posted on August 31, 2015

The HBO miniseries Show Me a Hero, which concluded last night, is a really interesting piece of work. On one level, it’s a sprawling portrait of a struggling urban community — Yonkers, New York in the 1980s and early ’90s, when a push to desegregate public housing nearly tore it apart. This wide scale probably isn’t surprising, since it was co-written by David Simon, creator of The Wire. But unlike The Wire, which was an ensemble piece from beginning to end, Show Me a Hero also has a central character: Nick Wasicsko, a young, up-and-coming local politician who is serving as Mayor during the crisis and whose work to advance the desegregation program derails his career.

As played by Oscar Isaac, Wasicsko is a compellingly complicated figure. His cheerful earnestness and obvious love for his community make him easy to root for. But as he wades deeper into the morass of the housing battle, those qualities that initially seem so positive also start to cut against him; he lacks the sophistication to understand all the angles of the game he’s trying to play, and the tough skin that can help a politician who is the target of public anger hold on to his self-image. Watching Wasicsko’s soul slowly leak out of him is what makes Show Me a Hero effective as tragedy.

But there is one paradox about Wasicsko that the film never really tries to grapple with. Over the course of its story, as he becomes increasingly desperate to turn his career around, we see him become someone willing to cross lines and burn bridges that had seemed precious to him at the story’s opening. But why? What changed inside him that brought such moves into the realm of the possible?

Now, of course, Nick Wasicsko was a real person, and we can never really know what was going on in another person’s head. And the motivations of Show Me a Hero’s Nick Wasicsko, the character Nick Wasicsko, can diverge wildly from those of the real person who inspired him, depending on the whims of writers and actors and producers. But it’s hard to watch Show Me a Hero and not find yourself trying to peer into this character’s head and see what’s going on there, because the movie never really lingers on that question — or, at least, it allows itself to be satisfied with leaving it as an exercise for the viewer, which means everyone is going to have their own theory.

So here’s mine: Wasicsko forgot that he was living in real life and not “life, the movie.”

Life, the Movie was the title of a 1999 book by Neal Gabler that offered a provocative premise: that entertainment has become so deeply woven into the fabric of modern life that we have internalized its values and structures. We expect real life to play out the way it does on the TV screen, with clearly recognizable heroes and villains, story arcs that have neat beginnings and endings, plot lines that set up and pay off. And when the facts of the world don’t fit this model, we simply rearrange them in our heads until they do. We force narratives into places they don’t exist and never have, just because we can no longer comprehend of a thing that isn’t also a narrative.

And that is where Show Me a Hero’s Wasicsko makes his central mistake: he comes to see the desegregation battle not as a big, messy clash of interests with lots of players with their own motivations, but as a hero’s journey in which the hero — himself, naturally — embarks on a quest to slay a dragon. Wasicsko’s version of the story has a bittersweet ending: he slays the dragon of segregation, but it inflicts a mortal wound on him in the process, wrecking a promising political career. In the movie playing in his mind, he’s the hero who made a noble sacrifice, who laid down his life to save the world.

Which leads him into a series of rude shocks as he discovers that nobody else sees things that way. Nobody. Even those closest to him, his wife and friends and most intimate political allies, see the fight over “the housing” as just another political battle; it cost him an election, but politicians lose elections all the time. They assume he’ll just take a little time off, rebuild his support, and come back another day. And to those who know him less well, the countless ordinary people of Yonkers, he’s even less integral to the story; to them he’s just a name on a ballot or a face from the endless TV news stories that ran during the desegregation crisis, just another supporting character.

This is something Nick has trouble accepting, because in the hero’s journey, the hero’s sacrifice is supposed to be followed by a commensurate reward; there is always some boon at the end of the road that makes all the suffering along the way worthwhile. But other than a little praise from some out-of-state worthies, Nick finds no reward waiting at the end of his journey. There’s no grand movement to recognize that he was right, no groundswell of support to bring him back to office; just the  abstract notion that he’s made life a little better for some people he doesn’t really know. Which doesn’t seem to him like much of a reward, considering all he gave up.

Real life, in other words, is not like Life, the Movie. In real life, the good guys sometimes lose. To live in the world, they have to learn how to accept that, to accept that sometimes the only reward for doing the right thing is your own awareness of having done it.

But Nick can’t accept that. It seems wrong; unfair. That’s not how life is supposed to work. And this sense of being wronged, of being entitled to something better, is the seed that we eventually see grow into some foul fruit.

We see that growth over time, sometimes in quiet, surprising ways. There’s one scene in the last two-episode block that expresses it particularly well, though. In this scene, Nick, who is struggling mightily to get back into politics, sees a notice of a public meeting where the winners of spaces in the new housing development he helped push through will be announced. Despite having no role to play in this meeting, he chooses to stop by anyway. But once he’s there, he only stays for a little while, sitting silently while watching residents of Yonkers’ decrepit, crime-ridden housing projects jump up in excited joy when their names are called. He observes this scene briefly, mutters congratulations to a few of them as they dash past him to accept their ticket to a clean new townhouse in the white part of town, and then slips back out the door.

Why is this scene in the movie? Viewed strictly from a plot perspective, it doesn’t accomplish much. Nick doesn’t really do anything at the meeting; he just shows up and then leaves. The event would have gone the same whether he had attended or not. So why devote precious minutes in a miniseries to showing it to us? Why bother?

The answer is that the film shows it to us because it illuminates just how deeply Nick has begun living in Life, the Movie. Because he would not have gone at all if he’d expected to happen what actually did. What he’d expected — or maybe just hoped for, deep in his heart of hearts — was that he would walk in and someone would shout “Look! It’s Nick Wasicsko! He’s the one who made all this possible!” And then he’d receive a classic Hollywood moment: the slow clap. One by one, the recipients of these beautiful new houses would stand up and applaud his noble sacrifice, until the entire hall was rocking. And then he could take the microphone, say a few humble words, and insist that they get back to the program.

Because that’s what happens to heroes who make noble sacrifices in Life, the Movie: they get, at minimum, a delicious moment of public validation. They get a moment where they can bask in a warm wave of applause, of recognition that they Did the Right Thing. This is why Wasicsko has bothered to take time to come to this meeting; this experience is what he is looking for. What he is hungry for.

But director Paul Haggis’ pitiless camera makes clear, as Wasicsko sits unnoticed on a folding chair, just how little the conventions of Life, the Movie actually pertain to life, the real thing. The movie doesn’t have to lay this out explicitly; you can see it in the sour look on Oscar Isaac’s face and the cold light that bathes the gymnasium where the meeting is being held. He’s come looking for something he thinks he’s earned, that he deserves, only to find that it isn’t on offer.

The film (and the book it’s based on) takes its title from a saying by F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Show me a hero and I will write you a tragedy.” Fitzgerald, who struggled with commercial failure and alcoholism his whole life and whose work was never properly appreciated until after he had died, would have known. He also observed, however, that “there are no second acts in American lives,” and that feels even more like an epitaph for Wasicsko; for his tragedy, a tragedy of thwarted expectations and virtue unrewarded, is in a sense the defining tragedy of our age, an age when fame and recognition and material success have come completely unmoored from any requirement of selflessness or even accomplishment.

In that sense, perhaps, today we are all Nick Wasicsko.