Pardon the dust

Posted on August 25, 2015

For the first time in something like seven years, I’ve done some remodeling around here. The new layout should be more aesthetically pleasing as well as mobile-friendly, but I’ll leave you to be the judge of that.

The new theme is built on top of Bootstrap. Web fonts are provided via TypeKit; headers are set in Darden Studio’s Jubilat, while body text is set in Merriweather by Sorkin Type Co. More information about these faces is available on the colophon.

I tried not to break anything important, but you know how these things usually work out. If you find any bugs, please try not to hyperventilate while you figure out where to go on this Web site to find out how to tell me about them.

Your daily Zorroscope

Posted on August 10, 2015

ARIES (March 21-April 20): Only bold deeds will win the heart of the beautiful Señorita Lolita

TAURUS (April 21-May 21): Remind those who view your bold deeds that the phrase “who was that masked man?” is a legally registered trademark of the Lone Ranger

GEMINI (May 22-June 21): When meeting new people, remember that sticking a sword in the ceiling never fails to impress

CANCER (June 22-July 22): Pause today to appreciate the steadfast loyalty of your trusty steed, Tornado

LEO (July 23-Aug. 22): Pause today to appreciate the steadfast loyalty of your mute manservant, Bernardo

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sep. 23): Pause today to consider what it says about you that the same description can be applied to both your manservant and your horse

LIBRA (Sep. 24-Oct. 23): Use your rapier to slash the letter “Z” into something, because COME ON

SCORPIO (Oct. 24-Nov. 22): Do not give in to the temptation to name the group of noblemen who rally behind your rebellion “The Gay Caballeros”

SAGITTARIUS (Nov. 23-Dec. 21): Remind yourself that the base crimes of the treacherous Alcalde against your noble father cry out for vengeance

CAPRICORN (Dec. 22-Jan. 20): Your foppish affectations will continue to keep Sergeant Gonzales from suspecting that you, his good friend, are also the bandit he seeks

AQUARIUS (Jan. 21-Feb. 19): You feel vulnerable, but find consolation in the knowledge that no amount of terrible movies can ever truly kill a character who has fallen into the public domain

PISCES (Feb. 20-March 20): Learn to accept that your son will never be as good a Zorro as you were

With Windows 10, Microsoft sells you out

Posted on July 31, 2015

I’ve written before in this space that “tech needs to decide which master it is going to serve.” This week brings another illustration of why, courtesy of Microsoft.

In case you haven’t heard, Windows 10 shipped this week. And unlike the last big release of Microsoft’s world-dominating operating system, Windows 8, which was kind of a gigantic mess, Windows 10 is actually supposed to be pretty good. And in an unusually customer-friendly move, Microsoft made the upgrade to Win10 completely free for a year for anyone with a computer running a previous version of Windows — which is to say, just about everybody in the world. So that’s all pretty positive stuff.

But when Win10 started hitting peoples’ computers, a few observant users started noticing something troubling: Windows 10 watches everything you do on your computer and reports it all back to Microsoft. And when I say everything, I mean everything: your location, what you type, what you say into your microphone or webcam, what apps you use and how you use them. It turns your computer into a giant, unblinking Eye of Sauron with a 24/7 connection to Microsoft HQ.

Why do they need all that information about how you use your computer, you ask? To “personalize your experience” — which, translated from marketingspeak into English, means to sell you out to advertisers. Yes, your operating system now wants to shove ads in your face.

You can see how much fun this is going to be by looking at the evolution of Microsoft Solitaire, the classic card game that’s been included with every version of Windows since version 3.0, which came out 25 years ago.[ref]Well, every version except Windows 8 and 8.1, when Microsoft inexplicably stopped bundling it with Windows and made it a free download from their online app store. It’s included again with Windows 10, though.[/ref] Like every other edition of Solitaire, the Windows 10 version is free. But! In a new and exciting twist, it now vomits up ads at you — unless you shell out $10/year for a subscription, in which case they graciously turn the ads off.

How big of them!

Now imagine this model creeping out of Solitaire and moving into every nook and cranny of your computer. Think of the many thrilling targeting opportunities! The Print dialog can now try to sell you new ink cartridges before it will actually let you print anything. When you run low on disk space, the Save dialog can start reminding you that USB thumb drives are 20% off this week at Best Buy. And on and on and on.

This would all be bad enough if it was just annoying, but it actually creates a more fundamental problem. It means that your interest in how your computer works and Microsoft’s interest are no longer aligned. While you will want your computer to do things quickly and efficiently and unobtrusively, Microsoft will want it to do those things slowly and clunkily and painfully; because every delay, every useless dialog box you have to click through, is another opportunity for them to show you an ad. And while you will want your computer to keep your secrets secret, you won’t be able to trust Microsoft to want the same thing anymore, because suddenly all those secrets are worth money to them. They can use them to match you up even more exquisitely with advertisers, who have become Microsoft’s real customers for Windows.

In other words, they suddenly have a strong financial interest in selling you out.

If you care about privacy, it’s hard to overstate how disturbing a development this is. The operating system is the most fundamental level of software most computers have. It’s the foundation that everything else you run on that machine rests upon. If your computer’s operating system is designed to spy on you, there’s no browser setting or anti-malware program or encryption protocol that can protect you from that spying. You’re compromised no matter how hard you try to protect yourself. It’s game over.

And it’s especially surprising to see this kind of move coming from Microsoft. They’ve had their ethical problems in the past (to put it mildly), but since their revenue depended on selling software directly to customers, they at least had no incentives to compromise those users’ privacy to make a buck. Now, like Google, they have plenty of those incentives. When a for-profit company’s money stops coming from you and starts coming from someone else, the interests of that someone else will always carry more weight with them than yours do.

So today, with Windows 10, we have a new case study in how technology can’t serve two masters. It’s either about empowering you, or it’s about empowering someone else to make a buck off of you. And while Microsoft’s rhetoric is still all about empowering users, their business decisions show pretty clearly that you’re not the master they are interested in serving anymore.

Jason recommends: “Mr. Robot”

Posted on July 30, 2015

This is just a note to let you know that you should be watching USA Network’s Mr. Robot, because it is quickly establishing itself as the best new show of the year.

In Mr. Robot, Rami Malek plays Elliot Alderson, a brilliant but troubled young cybersecurity engineer. He makes his living helping giant corporations secure their networks against intrusions by hackers. When he looks at the clients he works for, however, he wonders if he’s on the right side of that particular war. One in particular, an enormous conglomerate called E Corp seems to him to encapsulate everything that’s wrong with modern society, where huge, unaccountable business interests exploit peoples’ hopes, fears and desires from the day they are born until the day they die. (Whenever E Corp’s name is spoken, Elliot mentally corrects it to “Evil Corp.”)

Then one day Evil Corp’s network is hacked, and while racing to contain the damage, Elliot makes a discovery. Tucked away in a server on Evil Corp’s network is a file written specifically for him. It leads him to a gruff, scruffy older man (played by Christian Slater) in a worn computer repairman’s overalls with a name tag that reads “Mr. Robot.”

Mr. Robot, it emerges, is the leader of a loose confederation of hackers that call themselves “Fsociety.” And Fsociety wants Elliot to join them, to switch sides and help them pull off an audacious hack. Through its subsidiaries, Mr. Robot explains, Evil Corp holds the debt of millions of people: mortgages, student loans, credit cards, and so forth. This is the lever it uses to keep those people in line. And Fsociety wants to erase it. Erase it all. Burn all the records and set the debtors free.

For Elliot, this is the call to action he’s been waiting his whole life for; he joins Fsociety, and starts helping them work out how to turn their vision into reality. But things start to go wrong almost immediately, and the first season is emerging as as a story of unintended consequences, as Elliot’s actions start a chain of dominoes tumbling over that’s much longer than he’d imagined. And as he watches the dominos fall, he realizes to his mounting horror that some of them are his friends.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ug4fRXGyIak

As a premise, this probably doesn’t sound all that revolutionary. And to be honest, it isn’t: the first couple of episodes wear their influences on their sleeves. It’s The Matrix (brilliant programmer is recruited by shadowy resistance organization to Fight The Power™) meets Fight Club (withdrawn, hesitant loner is teased out of his shell to start a revolution that spirals out of control). Watching the pilot, I was dismayed a little by how derivative the show’s aspirations seemed to be.

But we’re five episodes into the first season now, and Mr. Robot has roared away from its pedestrian beginnings to become riveting television. There are a few factors that have driven this. The first is a set of great performances, led by Rami Malek. I’d never heard of Malek before watching Mr. Robot, but he’s now on my (short) list of must-watch actors; with his gaunt, haunted eyes and taut, intense body language, he’s like a younger version of the great Michael Shannon. Malek works hard to establish Elliot as a believable character rather than a caricature of J. Random Hacker, and the work pays off in spades. He’s backed up by a strong supporting cast as well, particularly Frankie Shaw as Elliot’s drug-dealer-slash-maybe-kinda-girlfriend Shayna and Martin Wallström as Tyrell Wellick, an up-and-coming tech exec at Evil Corp who sees Elliot as a tool he can use to speed his ascent up the corporate ladder.

Second, Mr. Robot has a visual style that approaches the cinematic. It has a distinct visual aesthetic that helps tell the story on its own. It’s cool, detached, all wide shots and muted colors. We frequently see characters react to something in a bottom corner of the screen, with the rest of the frame being empty, nothing but background; this very effectively establishes their emotional distance from each other, and from the viewer.

Like Elliot himself, Mr. Robot‘s camera doesn’t let itself get too close to people. Close-ups are powerful things, and Mr. Robot distrusts that power. It wants us to have to struggle a bit to relate to the people it’s showing us.

Finally, unlike nearly every other show about computers and hackers and etc., Mr. Robot cares enough to at least attempt to get the details right. There’s no Independence Day-style “UPLOADING VIRUS” dialog boxes here, no NCIS-style “two idiots, one keyboard” techno-gobbledygook. The technology in Mr. Robot is grounded in reality; it’s Raspberry Pis and SSH sessions in terminal windows.

Most notably, Mr. Robot understands something fundamental about the real world of hacking that few depictions of hackers do: that what successful hackers are hacking isn’t really the technology, but the people who use the technology. In other words, the way you get into a system isn’t by breaking the door down; it’s by convincing a person on the other side of the door to let you walk through it.

Put all these things together, and you get a show that’s started strong and keeps getting stronger with each new episode. You really should be watching, even if you couldn’t care a fig about computers. But don’t take my word for it:

• Vox: “Mr. Robot actually does everything that True Detective pretends to do”
• The New York Times: “Elliot is a little like a computer-age version of Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, a loner who is paranoid — even about his own sanity“
• The Hollywood Reporter: “The series is ridiculous in description and enthralling in execution because of Malek’s natural charisma and his way with creator and head writer Sam Esmail’s frequent jeremiads against the powerful and moneyed“
• Entertainment Weekly: “Mr. Robot is a worldview-challenging psychological thriller that’s steeped in new-century punk politics, nervy with digital-age anxiety, and made with slick, smart panache“
• Variety: “Mr. Robot feels like a daring risk — one that’s more calibrated to the confines of pay cable, and animated by a welcome spark of inspiration“

So what are you waiting for? Get to watching!

Book review: “Ready Player One”

Posted on July 29, 2015

JWM’s Summer of Fiction continues! Today we’re discussing Ernest Cline’s 2011 debut novel, Ready Player One.

Ready Player One tells the story of Wade Watts, a teenager living in a dystopian Oklahoma in the year 2044. The world’s energy supplies have peaked and then dwindled, leaving a stark divide between a few lucky people who were able to hold on to some form of prosperity and a vast majority who were not. Watts is one of the latter; he lives in “the stacks,” a grim arcology of mobile homes stacked one upon the other into looming, rickety, crime-ridden towers.

But he has an escape from the grimness that surrounds him: a virtual-reality online network called the OASIS. In the OASIS, Wade Watts isn’t a pudgy, socially awkward kid from the wrong side of the tracks. There he is Parzival, one of thousands of hackers around the world who obsessively search the network for the OASIS’s ultimate prize: a series of challenges hidden in the system by its original creator, whose will specified that the first person to find and solve them all would inherit both the OASIS itself and the vast pile of money it had earned its maker. The novel follows Watts and a few of his hacker friends as they race to be the one who takes the prize, pursued by operatives of a shadowy corporation that wants the OASIS for itself and is willing to do anything to get it.

So what kind of book is Ready Player One? On the surface, it reads a bit like cyberpunk — the image of a world of people jacked continuously into an immersive digital experience will be familiar to readers of William Gibson or Neal Stephenson, among others. But when you dig into it a bit, you find that the cyberpunk stuff is mostly just set dressing, façade. Its actual heart is somewhere else altogether. To understand where, let me tell you a story.

When Germany reunified in the 1990s, Germans who had grown up in communist East Germany suddenly found themselves awash in a sea of glamorous consumer goods unlike anything they had ever imagined. But all that material richness came with a price tag attached, because the flip side of the new capitalism was that the economic security communism had provided was torn away. In the old system nearly everybody was poor, but they didn’t have to worry about what would happen if they lost their job tomorrow. The new system flipped those priorities on their head.

Most Easterners made this trade happily, but for some, the longer they lived with the new system the better the old system looked. They began to feel a nostalgia for the world they had left behind — a nostalgia that took in not just the old East German state, but even the low-quality goods that were all it had to offer its residents. The Germans eventually coined a term for this wistful feeling: “Eastern nostalgia,” or ostalgie. And it was a powerful enough sentiment that clever capitalists eventually started tapping into it, reviving old Eastern brands like Vita Cola specifically to attract the ostalgie-minded consumer.

I thought a lot about ostalgie while reading Ready Player One, because it itself is a work of nostalgia. While its trappings are cyberpunk, its core is really something very different: a fond love letter to American pop culture of the 1980s. The inventor of the OASIS, you see, had grown up in that era, and was so infatuated with it that he hid his challenges behind puzzles that would require a deep knowledge of the era’s ephemera to solve. So Parzifal and his hacker buddies, who have spent their teenage years trying to solve those puzzles, are all walking encyclopedias of Cyndi Lauper-era trivia, and key plot points hinge on things like the specific model year of a Tempest arcade game and the ability to recite all the lines from Monty Python and the Holy Grail from memory.

It’s clear that Cline loves the era; his fondness for it is all over every page of Ready Player One. The problem is that this love never really gets beyond the surface level. Ready Player One is loaded with references to ’80s pop culture icons, but it doesn’t really have anything to say about them; it just wants to evoke their memory to give the reader a warm, fuzzy feeling. So while at first the constant name-checking is fun, after a while it begins to wear.

I found myself wanting Cline to go deeper — to tell us why kids like Wade, who weren’t born until decades after the ’80s were over, became so enamored with the culture of the era. We can understand why the genius who planted the puzzles they struggle with loved it; he was a child then, and everyone has nostalgia for the era of their childhood, since no matter how bad it really was we remember it as the time before the demands of adulthood started pressing in on us. But Parzifal and company are 2030s kids, not ’80s kids. Why would that era resonate with them so deeply? Imagine if the story was about a reclusive genius in the year 2004 who hid the keys to a fortune in coded messages inside the liner notes of classic rock LPs from the ’50s and ’60s. Sure, you can imagine lots of 2000s kids chasing after those keys; but can you imagine them enjoying it?

Ready Player One doesn’t really operate at that level, alas. It’s not interested in engaging with these types of questions. It’s content to just be a simple adventure story with a heavy layer of VH1’s “I Love the ’80s” on top. Which led me to my other problem with the book.

As the Internet has taken off, “geek culture” has zoomed from the fringes of the pop world to its heart. The fantasy novels and comic book arcs that my nerd friends and I argued about over the lunchroom table in junior high school are now the basis for the world’s best-selling movies and TV shows. Back then, a person who knew too much about The Lord of the Rings was on a fast track to an atomic wedgie; today you can take that person and make him the lead character in a hugely popular network sitcom. It’s a different world we live in now.

Which is fine! I’m happy that kids who are interested in the things I was interested in as a kid aren’t getting swirlies over it anymore. But as with anything else that reaches mainstream popularity, as the masses have piled on to geek culture, sharp marketers have taken notice. So now those of us who were on the bandwagon before it started to roll have to see ideas and slogans that meant a lot to us in our formative years deployed to sell the world cheap T-shirts and disposable plastic crap.

And I got the same feeling reading Ready Player One that I did gazing upon all those sad tchotchkes: the feeling that my memories were being used to sell me something that couldn’t sell itself. Take the Star Wars logo off the pre-distressed $20 T-shirt, and does it still seem worth $20 anymore? Not really; suddenly it’s just a few dollars worth of fabric. Take all the ’80s nostalgia off of Ready Player One, then, and is what you’re left with a story that would grab the reader all by itself? Not really; suddenly it’s just a pretty basic adventure story. A basic adventure story that’s been dressed up to sell to people like me.

Ernest Cline just published his second novel, Armada. I was hoping when I looked it up that it would be a chance for him to stretch his legs a bit; but it looks like it’s a story about… video games and ’80s nostalgia. Sigh.

Next time out, I would urge him to get outside his wheelhouse a bit. Tell me a story about Regency England, or a fantasy kingdom, or Neo-Tokyo in the year 2178. Tell me a story with no Atari games or Oingo Boingo records. Stop leaning on the crutch of my nostalgia. Put all that stuff aside and just tell me a story.

You know?

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

The cops won’t change until we start expecting them to

Posted on July 24, 2015

So I’m sitting here this morning at my neighborhood bagel joint, reading my email and having a bagel and coffee and trying to control my blood pressure as the couple seated behind me argue about the death of Sandra Bland. Or, to be more specific, about the traffic stop that led to the death of Sandra Bland.

You see, the guy (of course it’s the guy) is arguing that the big takeaway from the dashcam video of that traffic stop is that Bland was at least in part responsible for the rough treatment she received, because she was disrespectfully refused the officer’s request that she put out her cigarette.

“There’s nothing to be gained by fighting something like that on the spot,” he tells his breakfast companion. “If a police officer asks you to do something, unless that thing would put you in physical danger, you should just comply. Any competent attorney will tell you that. Comply and fight it in court later. Getting all bent out of shape because you ‘know your rights'” — you can hear the air quotes around the words as he says them — “won’t accomplish anything except causing problems. Because things happen, you know? Things happen.”

That’s true! Attorneys will tell you that! As Sandra Bland could testify if she were still alive, when you act disrespectful to a cop, things do happen.

Which is kind of the entire fucking problem, you know?

Citizens shouldn’t have to walk around on eggshells any time a cop approaches them out of fear of getting a beating if they say the wrong thing. Cops are (supposed to be) public servants. They work for us.  They should be the ones bending over to respect our sensitivities, not the other way around.

Dealing with grouchy, unpleasant people is no fun, I’ll grant you that. But anyone who works in a job where they interact with the public knows that’s no excuse for flipping out. Being a professional means learning to put aside your irritation at the occasional rude person and get on with doing your job. That’s the standard we expect 19-year-old cashiers at Walmart to be able to meet, anyway. Why should we expect less from an armed police officer?

Because that’s what we do when we make passive-voice statements like “things happen.” We’re making excuses. We’re justifying expecting less.

See, people who work in and around law enforcement don’t tell you to “comply and fight it later” because that’s the right thing to do. They tell you that to protect you. They know there are cops out there who refuse to follow even the minimal standard of professionalism of a zit-faced Walmart cashier. They tell you this to protect you from those cops, in the same way they would tell you not to climb the fence around the lion’s den at the zoo.

But lions at least have a good reason for their behavior: they’re fucking lions. Eating people is what lions do. They don’t have free will; they don’t decide to eat people. It’s nothing personal, in other words. Like the scorpion in the fable of the scorpion and the frog, it’s just their nature.

Cops are human beings, though. They do have free will. They can decide to do better. They just don’t have to, because we, their employers, don’t require them to.

So yes: telling people to be extremely cautious when dealing with cops is good advice. Which is about as damning a condemnation of the state of police professionalism in America as anyone could possibly make.

Amazon: the screw begins to turn

Posted on July 23, 2015

A year ago, I wrote:

That is the Amazon endgame — a market where they hold all the cards. The low prices and famous customer service are just means to that end. Amazon doesn’t offer you all these bennies out of the goodness of their hearts. They offer them to you because, right now, they need you; because the only way they can take on the other participants in any market is to start by owning such a large portion of that market’s sales that they have significant leverage to apply against them. Nobody cares if they start getting threats from a company that accounts for 1% of their sales; but make that 25%, or 50%, or 75%, and the beads of sweat start to form. So they need your purchasing power at the moment, and they’re willing to treat you as well as it takes to get it, and to keep it.

But what happens when Amazon doesn’t need you anymore? I’ll tell you what happens: the nice treatment stops. You become just another revenue stream to be optimized.  This is how every story of vertical integration ends.

Last weekend, I put in an order with Amazon for some stuff I needed around the house. It wasn’t anything urgent, so I chose their “free Super Saver shipping” option. (I nearly always do this, because I live close enough to an Amazon distribution center that even with free shipping my orders generally arrive within two days.)

After the page had updated, I was surprised to see that the projected delivery date for the order was a week and a half away. All the items were in stock, so that seemed excessive, even when using free shipping. Still, I’ve seen weird delivery projections like that a couple of times in the past, and they’ve always proven to be exaggerated — the items showed up within a couple of days regardless, like everything else I’ve ever ordered from Amazon. So I went ahead and put in the order.

Fast forward three days. I realize that I haven’t heard anything back from Amazon regarding the status of my order. Not just that it hadn’t arrived yet — I hadn’t even gotten notice that it had been shipped.

I send an email to their customer support desk asking what’s up with that. Here’s their response:

We process and ship your order in the most cost-efficient way possible so we can pass the savings on to you in the form of free shipping. This means that we’ll optimize our fulfillment operations by taking a little longer to ship out if necessary. However, we won’t hold on to your order for any particular reason, and we also won’t delay shipping if that means we’ll miss the delivery promise we’ve given you.

When you select free shipping during checkout, the final page of our order form displays the estimated date of shipment for your order. This is only an estimate–your items may ship sooner. If the date doesn’t meet your needs, you can change the shipping speed before submitting your order.

In other words, if you choose “Super Saver shipping,” they “optimize [their] fulfillment operations” by putting your order in a bin labeled “deal with this whenever you get around to it.” And since they’ve given themselves a lot of wiggle room by only promising a delivery date in the distant future, nobody’s in any particular hurry to get around to it. Maybe it’ll be this week, maybe next, ya cheapskate.

This is never how “Super Saver shipping” orders were dealt with in the past, at least in my experience. They were delivered using the lowest-cost shipping options available, but they still left Amazon’s warehouses in a timely fashion, just like every other order. That was part of what made Amazon attractive — the sense that, while delays could still happen in transit, you could at least count on Amazon to get their part of the transaction right.

So why the change? I’m sure it has nothing to do with this:

Need a last minute gift? Can’t get out of the house? Realize you forgot to pick up something? With FREE Two-Day Shipping from Amazon Prime, your shopping problems are solved. You get unlimited deliveries with no minimum order size, and with 20 million eligible items, the options are practically limitless. From big to small, A to Z, home to office, and everywhere in between, satisfying that shopping itch —or need— is just two days away.

Yes, one of the many attractive benefits of an Amazon Prime subscription is that you no longer have to worry about orders languishing in Amazon’s warehouse! And all that peace of mind costs just $99 per year. By Grabthar’s hammer, what a savings.

But why would you need to pay for Prime if the free shipping they offer to everyone already works fine for you? It’s a good question. To which Amazon’s easiest answer would be to simply change the free shipping so that it doesn’t work fine for you so much anymore. Suddenly you have a reason to shell out those ninety-nine smackers.

This is the start of the endgame. Amazon has spent twenty years now attracting shoppers with goodies like fast, free shipping. But businesses don’t give out goodies without expecting to make money off them at some point; so fast, free shipping quietly becomes a choice: fast shipping or free shipping. “Customer delight” becomes “fulfillment operations” to be “optimized.”

And the screw, so motionless for so long, begins to turn.

Book review: “Swamplandia!”

Posted on July 11, 2015

The book review juggernaut that is Just Well Mixed rolls on, this time over literary wunderkind Karen Russell’s 2011 debut novel Swamplandia!

Swamplandia! is the story of the unraveling of the Bigtree Tribe, a family of deeply white ersatz Native Americans who operate a down-on-its-heels alligator-wrestling theme park on a patch of Florida swampland. The heart of the operation is its star attraction, Hilola Bigtree, who dives into a pool full of alligators while recorded music plays and her husband, the Chief, follows her with a spotlight. Crowding around their feet are the Bigtrees’ three children: Kiwi, a studious 17-year-old boy; Osceola, a distant, romantic 16-year-old girl; and their younger sister, 13-year-old Ava, who dreams of growing up to be a champion alligator wrestler like her mother.

When the story begins, this family is intact and life in Swamplandia! goes on as it had since the ’30s, when the family patriarch, an Ohio coal miner named Ernest Schedrach, bought the land sight unseen and re-christened himself “Sawtooth Bigtree.”  But their happy stability is quickly struck by two hammer blows: Hilola gets cancer and dies at the too-young age of 36, and a newer, more modern theme park (“The World of Darkness”) opens and steals the tourists Swamplandia! used to attract. As the park’s business dwindles and its debts mount, each of the three Bigtree children strikes out to try and secure the future, with consequences that will change the family forever.

I went into Swamplandia! with some reservations, mostly because the customer reviews on Amazon were so lukewarm. (As of this writing, the average review is just 3.2 stars out of 5; quite low for a critically buzzed-about book.) Now that I’ve finished it, I find those lukewarm reviews baffling, because Swamplandia! is brilliant — a gorgeous fantasia that flirts with magical realism without ever letting its feet drift too far from the ground.

The first thing to say about Swamplandia! is that Karen Russell is a hell of a writer. She has a facility with language that is downright startling, finding ways to describe things that are breathtakingly fresh and creative. Most of the book is written from the perspective of Ava, the youngest Bigtree child, and Russell manages to capture in her both the matter-of-fact magic that a child sees at work everywhere in the world and the tougher, more prosaic worldview that we take on when childhood is over.

Russell has also found the perfect tone for her story. It’s elegaic, but never grim. It would be easy for a story about a family going through what the Bigtrees go through to feel oppressively hopeless — or to overcorrect and ladle on maudlin, never-say-die sentimentality. Swamplandia! avoids these hazards with an almost jaunty confidence. The story goes to some pretty dark places, but in doing so it never feels cheap or exploitative; Russell earns our trust with her command of the narrative, and pays it back with interest.

And it’s funny! While the overall arc of the story is a sad one, Russell finds ways to lighten the mood with smart, silly details: the cornball sincerity of the Bigtrees’ family museum; the internal workings of the World of Darkness, which combine Dante’s Inferno with Office Space-style corporate banality; the strange interactions the various Bigtrees have with the mainlanders their journeys force them to interact with. The occasional absurdity provides a perfect balance for the story’s more gothic elements.

This is the part of the review where I would normally talk about the things I didn’t like. In the case of Swamplandia!, though, I can’t really think of any. It’s a wise, witty, funny novel, you should definitely read it, end of review.

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

Book review: “Telex from Cuba”

Posted on July 5, 2015

What is that dread, fearful shadow slouching over the horizon? It’s another book review! This one’s for Telex from Cuba, the 2008 debut novel of Rachel Kushner.

Telex from Cuba is an exploration of the years leading up to Castro’s seizure of power in Cuba, told from the perspectives of several foreign expatriates whose lives have brought them to the island. Among them are K.C. Stites and Everly Lederer, the young children of American executives who run a United Fruit Company sugar plantation and a U.S.-owned nickel mine, and Christian de la Mazière, an exiled French Nazi collaborator who now makes his living traveling the Caribbean selling weapons to both dictators and the rebels who want to overthrow them. As the Batista regime begins to unravel, all these characters are sucked into the vortex of its collapse, with consequences that will change their lives forever.

I’m a sucker for fin de siècle stories (gosh, I wonder why), so I found Telex from Cuba terribly compelling. Even beyond my own biases, though, there’s a lot of good stuff to be found here. Telex from Cuba is that rare novel with a true sense of place; it drips with atmosphere and period detail. The action shifts back and forth between Havana and the vast American-owned agricultural enclaves of Oriente province, and provides a convincing feeling of life in both. Making several of her point-of-view characters children allows Kushner to show us the decadence and corruption of United Fruit’s imperialist reign, without ever having to beat us over the head with it. To a child, the way things are is the way things are supposed to be, and so to K.C. and Everly it is perfectly natural that their families, strangers in a foreign land, should live in grand houses with servants and staff while natives break their backs in the cane fields at gunpoint. (Though Everly’s crush on a local boy begins to awaken her to the injustice that her whole way of life is steeped in.)  And Kushner knows how to draw strong, interesting characters, too; de la Mazière, in particular, is fascinating, a complicated bundle of conflicting motivations that could carry a whole book all by himself.

Which is not to say that Telex from Cuba is perfect. Its profusion of characters means that we don’t ever get to know any of them as deeply as we’d like, for instance. The story threads set in Havana and those set in Oriente never really come together the way you would hope they would; in places they feel as though they’re coming from two separate books. (I haven’t read Kushner’s collection of short stories, The Strange Case of Rachel K, but it looks like two of its stories are earlier tellings of the Havana and Oriente tales, so it’s possible that Telex from Cuba is an imperfectly realized attempt to join them together.) And Kushner has a habit of dropping fictional characters with the names of real people into the story, which can be confusing. Christian de la Mazière, for instance, was a real Frenchman who actually did collaborate with the Nazis, but in real life he never visited Cuba. And there’s another character, an exotic dancer de la Mazière becomes infatuated with named Rachel K, whose name, even more confusingly, coincides with the author’s own. (Kushner says Rachel K was based on another actual person, but that doesn’t cut down the confusion any.) It would have made for an easier read if she’d just changed these characters’ names while still making them inspired by their real-life counterparts.

Still, in the grand scheme of things, none of those are book-ruining flaws. And there’s so much to like in Telex from Cuba that they’re easy to forgive. So if you like period pieces or historical fiction, and are willing to work with Kushner a little bit to get past the occasional bump in the narrative, you should definitely check it out.

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

Book review: “Old Man’s War”

Posted on July 2, 2015

Another day, another book review. This one’s for my latest read, sci-fi author John Scalzi’s 2005 debut novel, Old Man’s War.

Old Man’s War is the kind of story Hollywood would refer to as “high-concept.” In this case, the concept is pretty succinctly summed up in the novel’s opening lines:

I did two things on my seventy-fifth birthday. I visited my wife’s grave. Then I joined the army.

The “I” in those lines is John Perry, an aging widower in the distant future who lives outside of Dayton, Ohio. (Scalzi is a Daytonian himself, and since I was born and raised there, I happily give him bonus points for that.) But the army Perry joins isn’t the U.S. Army; it’s the Colonial Defense Forces (CDF), a vast, shadowy organization that manages and protects the colonies humans have established out among the stars.

Its contacts with alien civilizations have given the CDF access to incredible technology — technology far beyond anything people living on Earth have access to. So it’s in a position to offer graying Terrans a hard-to-argue-with deal: sign up for a ten-year stint in the Colonial army, and the CDF will use all that technology to restore your youth. It’s a chance to live life all over again, only this time knowing all the hard lessons you learned the first time around. You’ll have to fight, of course; there’s a reason the CDF needs a constant stream of new recruits. And exactly how the CDF gives you your youth back is a closely guarded secret. But it’s a chance to roll the clock back. And who knows, you might even survive the entire ten years!

Perry, like lots of others, thinks that sounds like a pretty good bargain. So he joins up, and we follow him through his training and his CDF service, discovering along the way the secrets behind the CDF’s Fountain of Youth and the questionable morality that underlies the CDF’s policies.

Old Man’s War is, at heart, a modern example of an old slice of the genre: military sci-fi. Reviewers compare it frequently to the works of Robert A. Heinlein, which makes sense, since it rolls smoothly down a groove that was dug out long ago by Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, exploring many of the same themes and topics: the relationship between the citizen and the military, the morality of war, and so forth.

But even putting aside the thematic similarities, I can see why people make the comparison to Heinlein, because like Heinlein, Scalzi is a damn fine writer. His prose is vigorous and compulsively readable; I didn’t read Old Man’s War so much as I inhaled it, gulping down the entire book in just a couple of sittings. The action is compelling and kinetic, which is important in an adventure story. And while John Perry isn’t a particularly complicated character, Scalzi gives him enough color and nuance to avoid him seeming like a cardboard cut-out or authorial Mary Sue. So there’s a lot to like about Old Man’s War.

In fact, the only thing that really disappointed me about it was that Scalzi’s reach occasionally exceeds his grasp. For the most part, these failures are small ones. Scalzi is the kind of sci-fi writer who takes the “sci” part seriously, for example, which is fine as far as it goes; there’s plenty of room in the genre for both “hard” and “soft” science fiction. But in Old Man’s War this tendency manifests itself in a character whose job is to periodically stop the story to explain the science of what we’re seeing to us, and to me that’s a no-no. Any time the science in a science fiction story gets so enamored of itself that it starts elbowing the fiction aside, it gets on my nerves; the story should always come first. But these interludes are few and short, so they never send the book completely off the rails.

There is one place, however, where this reach-exceeds-grasp problem is significant, and it boils down to this: you can’t make a 21st-century version of Starship Troopers without grappling with the things that make Starship Troopers uncomfortable to read in the 21st century. Heinlein was a great writer, but his politics could be (to put it mildly) problematic, and in Starship Troopers he frankly sees violence was a sort of purifying, ennobling force that makes those who deal in it superior to those who do not. That’s not necessarily fascism, but it sure isn’t democracy either.

If you’re going to tell a story that hearkens back to Troopers, then, you have to make a choice: either embrace all that paleoconservative baggage, or challenge it. But in Old Man’s War, Scalzi never really commits to either approach. Sometimes he makes gestures toward a critique of the default military sci-fi ideology. We sometimes see how endless war grinds Perry down, for instance, and the battle scenes never tip over the edge into glorification. But there’s plenty of the old-time religion in there as well, alas; Perry turns out to be really good at war, he gets over his occasional bouts of conscience with depressing ease, and the only character who explicitly challenges the rightness of expansion at gunpoint is written as a buffoon whose naïvete puts the lives of his squadmates at risk.

None of which is to say that I didn’t enjoy Old Man’s War; I did, quite a bit. But all that enjoyment made me wish the book had just pushed itself a little further, a little harder, to become something a little greater than just a fun read.

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

Book review: “The Circle”

Posted on June 26, 2015

I’m continuing to plow through my summer fiction binge; the latest morsel to go down is The Circle, the 2013 novel by Dave Eggers.

The Circle is the story of a young woman named Mae Holland, who through the intervention of a friend in high places gets a coveted job at Google the Circle, a tech company famous for its lavish perks, intellectually challenging projects, and disdain for antiquarian notions like “privacy.” Starting as a lowly customer-service representative, Mae works her way up the Circle’s corporate ladder, but finds that grasping each new rung requires her to face painful decisions about which she values more: the people she loves, or the Circle’s ideology. And as the Circle’s prying eyes extend their gaze further and further across society and government, she must choose whether she loves a smart co-worker who holds to the Circle’s transparency-über-alles agenda, or an enigmatic rebel who is trying desperately to stop it.

Let me say this up front: ideologically speaking, I am 100% in agreement with the sentiment I would assume after reading this book that Dave Eggers holds about tech companies like Google the Circle that offer people cool stuff in exchange for their privacy. That stuff drives me nuts. I much preferred the old world where software cost money and didn’t spy on you to the new world where it’s free but does. This opinion will not come as a surprise to Longtime Readers™ of this blog; I believe software should empower people, not betray them. And software that silently rats you out to corporate interests is anything but empowering.

So on the book’s Big Argument, Eggers and I are 100% sympatico. OK, then: why didn’t I like this book more? Because like it I most definitely did not. I think it’s because The Circle has a few different problems.

The first is why I feel confident saying above what Dave Eggers’ opinion is: because he’s not shy about slapping the reader across the face with it. Characters routinely stop what they’re doing to give each other speeches about the relative merits of transparency and privacy. Even worse, it’s obvious which of those speeches Eggers agrees with and which he doesn’t, because the characters who value privacy get to make the longest and most clearly argued speeches, while the characters on the other side spout childish rhetoric. It starts to feel after a while that Eggers is just beating up a straw man.

Here’s an example. Midway through the book, the Circle’s brain trust — the “Three Wise Men” who together run the company — roll out with great fanfare (and protagonist Mae’s help) a set of slogans designed to help them sell their agenda to the public at large.

Presumably these men, who are among the richest in the world, have access to the best public-relations minds the world has to offer. So what are the slogans they come up with? They are, I kid you not:

• “Secrets are Lies”
• “Sharing is Caring”
• “Privacy is Theft”

I ask you: do these phrases sound like anything a real-world Google Circle would use in their corporate communications? Of course not. They sound instead like someone stuck a George Orwell novel in a blender with a Care Bears picture-book and set it on purée. And by leaning on heavy-handed Orwellspeak like “privacy is theft,” Eggers tips his hand: these people are Bad, which means those who oppose them must be Good. He doesn’t go all the way and have a scene where they sit around twirling their mustaches, at least, but anything short of that is fair game.

Then there’s the character of Mae herself, our protagonist, who is maddeningly passive; she spends the whole book being pushed around by the other characters like a pawn on a chessboard. And she whip-saws between drinking deeply of the Circle’s Kool-Aid and worrying about the ethical implications of the work she does, driven primarily by the opinions of the last character we saw her talk to.

A protagonist needs to be an active character, needs to drive the story forward, or else we start wondering why the camera is focused on them all the time. Alas, Eggers never really justifies Mae’s star status. Her only virtue as a character is that, being new to Google the Circle, she gives Eggers a way to explain the company’s internal workings to us; every time someone has to explain something to Mae, we of course get the explanation too. But even that has its problems, namely the aforementioned one of people making speeches all the damn time. A speech presented as a new-hire orientation session is just as dull to read as one presented as a political manifesto.

Finally, there’s a fundamental problem with Eggers’ understanding of the issues he wants to debate, namely that he doesn’t really understand what makes companies like Google successful. The Circle’s customers are presented more or less as lemmings; they use the Circle’s products because they’re novel and fashionable. But what makes Google successful is that it makes compelling products. And what makes that scary is that what makes those products compelling is inseparable from their ideology. There is no way for the one to exist unless you accept the other.

The best example of this is a Google service called Google Now. Its pitch is that, unlike traditional search services, with Now you don’t have to actively seek out the information you need at any given moment; it just comes to you, automatically and conveniently, via your Android phone. If you’re flying this evening and your flight gets delayed, Now will tell you before you ever think to look at an airport notice board. If you’re walking down the street and pass a restaurant you would like, Now will let you know without you ever having to search for restaurant reviews. When it works, it’s kind of amazing.

But the thing about Now is, the only way to get access to that amazing-ness is to open your life up to Google completely. The more access you give them to your personal, private information, the better Now works. It has to track your every step to tell you you’re passing a restaurant you’d like. It has to read all your email to know you’ve got a flight booked for tonight. Software like Now simply could not work without having all that data about you to trawl through.

Which is scary — but also tempting, because it’s not like you’re giving that stuff up for nothing. You’re getting a huge amount of convenience in return. For a lot of people, that trade-off is worth it, which is why Google is the behemoth it is today. You can argue that the trade-off isn’t worth it (and I’d agree with you!), but Eggers doesn’t bother to try. He just paints the people who think it is as unthinking followers, which is unfair both to the intelligence of the average person and the seriousness of the challenge to privacy that companies like Google the Circle represent.

The Circle isn’t completely without merit. There’s one scene in particular, near the end, where Eggers frees himself from the shackles of practical realism and lets the Circle’s ideology run riot, with (probably predictably, but still) shocking and tragic consequences. It’s hard to read, but in a good way, as Eggers conjures up a scenario that is recognizably fantastic but still contains within it a hard enough kernel of truth to chip your tooth when you bite down on it. Maybe if he’d taken that tack with the whole book — set it in the far future rather than the day after tomorrow, for instance, or gone with a magical-realism approach where the mundane and the mythic rub up against each other — it would have worked better. But no, once that scene is complete, Eggers settles back down into the banality of the real world, and our hearts sink.

The question of where the boundary between the public and the private should be drawn is going to be one of the defining questions of the 21st century. It deserves a great novel to help us work through it. The Circle is not that novel.

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

Stalin’s minions: an experiment in virality

Posted on June 23, 2015

There’s an interesting story up at The Awl today, titled “How Minions Destroyed the Internet: The Horrible Story of the Perfect Meme,” about the exploding popularity of images juxtaposing banal sentiments with pictures of the animated “minion” characters from the Despicable Me movies:

Their whole gestalt is faux-brutal honesty; the sort of call-it-like-I-see-it posturing that thrives on social media. This makes Minions uniquely exploitable on the memescape. Their central core of mischief applies to many of the feelings that people like to vent through memes: anger, joke-y threats, the idea that whoever’s posting is smarter than everyone else around them. Minions can be paired with many of the same phrases that appear on graphic tees at Target.

In fact, I’ve spent the last two weeks trying to find the right analogy, and I think that’s it. Minions are the Target graphic tees of the internet.

Wait, no, wait I just got it. I figured out their appeal. Minions are basically emoji. They’re yellow, they run the emotional spectrum, they function as a malleable shorthand for almost indescribable feelings. Like, do you know what the nail art emoji means? It means a million different things. So does the prayer hands emoji. (This is an emerging area of academic study.) Okay, so… Minions are emoji with arms, legs, and goggles.

I’ve noticed these images popping up more and more myself, especially on Facebook, where they’ve become a sort of plague. So I read this piece with great interest.

I don’t, however, think either of author Brian Feldman’s analogies (Target t-shirts, emoji) really captures what these Minion memes are like. I would submit that the closest thing to them are the “Calvin peeing” decals, featuring the human half of the much-missed comic strip duo peeing on something or other, that have become ubiquitous on the nation’s truck cabs and motor homes. Like the Calvin-peeing decals, Minion memes have become a sort of visual shorthand that a certain type of opinion is about to be expressed — an opinion that is rooted more in knee-jerk reaction than deep thought. Family is good. Getting old is difficult. The Yankees suck. Nobody who holds these opinions reached them after struggling through a long night of the soul. They are completely unchallenging, and as such, they are perfectly tuned to spread virally.

In fact, I think that to a certain degree, the words that are put next to the Minion image no longer really matter much. What matters is the use of the Minion image itself. It serves as a kind of icon, a logo that says “I am not intellectually curious.” The words reinforce that, but it’s the image that sends the message. Putting it in your Facebook timeline or Pinterest pinboard or whatever is a way to announce to the world that you belong to this tribe of the clueless.

Which got me thinking about a way to test this hypothesis. What if there were Minion images paired with words that seemed at surface level to be innocuous, but, when Googled, turned out to be linked to one of history’s greatest monsters? Would they spread just as well as the banal, unchallenging ones? Would anyone who saw them actually bother to Google the words, or would they just see the Minion and start hammering the “Share” button so hard their computer table breaks in two?

Let’s find out!

Below are eight images, posted in high-res and ready for you to share far and wide. I call them “Stalin’s Minions,” because each one features a picture of an adorable Minion glancing mischievously at a phrase that is actually a quote from genocidal Soviet tyrant Joseph Stalin. Will your friends put in the five seconds of work it would take to discover that, or is that too much of a lift for them? Now you can finally know for sure.

Herewith, Stalin’s minions! Click any image for a full-size version, suitable for downloading/reposting.

Book review: “The Paying Guests”

Posted on June 22, 2015

My summer fiction binge continues, this time with The Paying Guests, last year’s offering from novelist Sarah Waters.

Set in 1922, The Paying Guests centers on the character of Frances Wray, a woman in her twenties who lives in a stately manor house outside of London with her mother, Mrs. Wray. The Wrays are in a bad way; Frances’ two brothers died on the Western Front, and when her father followed them he left behind a mountain of debt. Reluctantly, Frances decides the only way what’s left of her family can hold on to the house is to take on boarders; and so the Wrays are introduced to Leonard and Lilian Barber, a middle-class couple who lack the Wrays’ pedigree but do not lack cash. As Frances adjusts to living with her paying guests, a forbidden attraction is sparked; and following that attraction leads her down a dark, frightening, and terribly uncertain path.

I’m going to tell you my opinion of The Paying Guests, but if you want a TL;DR version the opinion of the book Stephen King posted on Twitter more or less sums it up:

Finishing THE PAYING GUESTS, by Sarah Waters. Awesome full-bodied novel. It's like she's saying, "Hey, dudes, this is how you do it."

— Stephen King (@StephenKing) January 6, 2015

The Paying Guests is a very, very good book. In fact, it’s the best novel I’ve read in quite some time. It manages to be so many things at once: a keenly observed character study; a taut, tense thriller; a work of historical fiction that vividly captures the moment in which it is set. Books that hit one of those marks are rare enough, but to write one that hits all three — and does so seemingly effortlessly, as if for Ms. Waters scoring that kind of hat trick is no big thing — is a startling achievement.

Let’s talk in more detail about The Paying Guests as character study. Waters has a keen eye for the telling detail, and simply by deploying a few of those in just the right places, she quickly establishes in our minds who Frances Wray is, what she wants, and what she fears. Her portrait is painted not with broad strokes, but with fine, fine lines that weave together until to our surprise we realize we can’t see the lines anymore.

If Frances’ experiences have a through-line, it is suffering. Her family, as noted above, was blown apart by the Great War. Class anxiety presses in on her as her slide down the social scale accelerates. She’s an unmarried woman approaching the end of her twenties in a time when to be that was seen as a deep personal failure.

But, we quickly start to realize — Waters is too smart to just tell us this up front, choosing instead to let us figure it out as we listen to Frances’ thoughts — there’s also something else, some deeper wound that somehow connects all the other tragedies of her life together. Frances is, we realize, a lesbian. (To reveal this is the most minor of spoilers; The Paying Guests has much bigger surprises in store.) And this element of her personality, which in our time would be utterly unremarkable, was of course seen very differently in 1920s England. So it has forced her, in her past, to make painful decisions — decisions whose consequences still haunt her.

It’s easy to imagine a dozen ways a character like this could go wrong; could spin off the road into cliché or stereotype. Waters is deft enough to avoid them all. Frances has suffered, but she is also resilient, and while she struggles with self-pity it never defines her. She tries to hide her sexual orientation from polite society, but when in the company of those she trusts is capable of addressing it frankly and without shame. She seems resigned to the idea that she can never be truly happy, but then…

But then she meets Lilian Barber, and the book bursts into flame.

I won’t go into the details here — those would be real spoilers! — but suffice it to say that Waters demonstrates both how to write sex scenes that boil and how to take a plot you thought was going in one direction and wrench it shockingly into another. If you read my review of Gone Girl, you may remember how frustrated I was with how clumsily that novel handled its big twists. The Paying Guests is everything that Gone Girl is not. It is adroit and clever, it respects the reader’s intelligence, and it knows how to build tension and how to pay it off. It’s a remarkable accomplishment, and it has me simultaneously itching to read Ms. Waters’ other novels and eager to see what story she chooses to tell next.

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

Book review: “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot”

Posted on June 16, 2015

Another day, another book review! This one’s for Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, last year’s debut novel by David Shafer.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is a comic adventure centered around three characters: Leila, an NGO worker who wonders if she’s wasting her life fighting through developing-world red tape to accomplish something positive; Leo, the spaced-out heir to a board game fortune whose dedication to the slacker ethos is matched only by the volume of the voices in his head; and Mark, a celebrity self-help guru who finds it more difficult than he’d expected to sell his ersatz philosophy without actually believing in it. One day Leila sees something on the border of China and Myanmar that she was not supposed to see, and catches the attention of the kind of people whose attention is hazardous to your health. Her discovery leads her into a clash between a corporate titan’s secret plan to control the world’s information and a loose network of activists bent on stopping him — a clash that she needs Leo and Mark’s help to get out of intact.

The prompt that got me to add Whiskey Tango Foxtrot to my reading list was an absolutely glowing review by Dwight Garner in the New York Times last year, which starts off by asking “[i]s it too late to nominate a candidate for novel of the summer?” and only gets more gushing from there. The book earned other raves as well, such as a slot on NPR’s “Best Books of 2014” list, so I cracked it open with high hopes.

It falls to me, then, to tell you an unpleasant truth: I have no idea how Whiskey Tango Foxtrot earned all those raves. Literally no idea. It baffles me, in the same way that I am baffled by the appeal of Aziz Ansari and Chipotle. I just cannot comprehend it.

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot isn’t a bad novel, per se. I never felt the urge to put it down and walk away from it. And Shafer is clearly a talented writer; he has a gift for memorable turns of phrase, and his characters (the main characters, at least) are really well drawn. Leila especially has a three-dimensional realness to her that’s rare in comic fiction; she’s not “Action Girl” or “Magical Girlfriend” or “Hypercompetent Sidekick” or one of the other clichéd stock types you typically run across in this type of book. She’s an honest character, grounded in reality. I liked her a lot.

The problem with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, though, is nearly everything else.

The book starts off with Leila in Myanmar, trying to get a shipping container full of relief supplies released from the local bureaucracy. This material is really strong; like Leila herself, it’s grounded in reality, and it’s interesting to watch her work. (This may just be a quirk of mine; I like stories that show me the ropes of a profession, especially one that’s different from my own.) Then we meet Leo and Mark, and they’re both doing recognizably real stuff as well, and those scenes work well too.

But then, after giving us all this strong, naturalistic stuff, Shafer takes the plot and stands it on its ear. Suddenly these realistic characters are entangled in a Giant Conspiracy with Secret Armies Battling in the Shadows, Etc., Etc., and — here is the killer — none of that stuff makes a damn bit of sense. Not one bit. Despite words being piled endlessly upon words to tell us about the two sides, what they want, and why they want it, it’s all more or less as vague at the end of the book as it was at the beginning.

The bad guys are led by an evil billionaire, because of course they are, and he spends the book walking around wearing an “I’M WITH EVIL” t-shirt and fearlessly withholding even the smallest bit of information that would help us understand his motivations. His nefarious plot centers around making a giant backup of all the world’s information and storing it on hard drives at the bottom of the sea (!), which he will use to take over the world by… well, that’s never explained. Yes, dear reader, it’s a completely non-ironic use of South Park’s Underpants Gnome scheme:

1. Copy all the world’s information
2. …
3. Profit!

Meanwhile, the good guys (whose global alliance is weirdly called “Dear Diary,” for reasons Shafer never bothers to make clear) are put forward as obviously good, because they’re against the evil billionaire. But we never really get a handle on what exactly they stand for, or how the world would be better if they were in charge than it would be if the evil billionaire was. Indeed, they came across to me as creepy in their own way.

An example. They recruit new members by giving them something called “the eye test” — a sort of burst of visual stimulus that unlocks parts of their brain that used to be closed off. If you pass the eye test, you not only get to be a member of Dear Diary, but you also get heightened senses, a sense of “connectivity” (whatever that means), and the ability to perceive the unique numbers that describe your personality and the personalities of everyone you meet. Pretty cool, huh?

Sure, why not. But here’s the thing — it’s established in the course of the story that the changes the eye test makes to your brain are permanent. Once you take it, there’s no going back to the person you used to be, for good or ill. But despite this, Dear Diary runs around giving people the eye test without explaining its consequences to them. It’s just, “Hey, look at this! Oh, by the way, we just completely rewired your brain. Hope you’re OK with that.”

That’s pretty creepy, don’t you think? Shouldn’t the good guys be getting informed consent from people for that sort of thing? Isn’t it dangerously close to brainwashing to spring it on them without any warning? But never mind, Whiskey Tango Foxtrot has no time to grapple with these sorts of questions.

There’s other problems too, alas. Leila and Leo fall in love, with zero motivation; it felt like it happened because it was the sort of thing that was supposed to happen in this type of story. The plot is driven by information technology, but Shafer appears not to understand how information technology actually works. But those aren’t the biggest things that turned me off about Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. The biggest thing that turned me off was that it completely lacks an ending.

Yes. You read that right. You’re moving through the story, and it seems to be building to a big, climactic third act where the two sides of the secret war have their big knock-out throw-down clash, and then the book just… ends. Before we ever see any of that third act! The story just falls off a cliff.

If you read the Amazon customer reviews for Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, you’ll see lots of people complaining about this. Many of them speculate that the sudden ending was Shafer setting up a cliffhanger for a future sequel to resolve. But I don’t think that’s the case, because cliffhangers don’t work that way. A cliffhanger cuts off right at the climax of the story — after the final resolution, the third act, has begun, but before it’s clear what its result will be. Stopping the story before the resolution even begins isn’t a cliffhanger, it’s just… stopping the story. Perhaps it was an artistic choice, Shafer pushing against the expectations readers bring to these sorts of stories; I dunno. All I know is it is really unsatisfying.

The sad thing is, you can see the bones of a really good book underneath Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. If Shafer had taken those three characters, and built a naturalistic, character-driven story around them instead of throwing them into a semi-coherent conspiracy story, it could have really been something. Skip the evil billionaires and the Death Star yacht and the plants that are also computers (don’t ask), and just take us for a walk with these interesting characters, you know? Let us live inside their heads for a little while. Trust yourself to tell their stories without all the conspiracy hoo-hah. That’s a book I would love to read.

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

Book review: “The Bone Clocks”

Posted on June 9, 2015

Time for another book review! This one’s for The Bone Clocks, the most recent novel by David Mitchell, author of the absolutely stunning Cloud Atlas (which was later made into a substantially less stunning movie).

The Bone Clocks is the story of sixty years in the life of Holly Sykes, who we meet at the opening of the book as a rebellious English teenager in 1984 and leave at its close as the wistful matriarch of an ersatz, improvised family in 2043. Holly’s story begins with a series of strange events, including the mysterious disappearance of her younger brother Jacko, that propel Holly into the middle of a secret war between two factions of supernatural beings — a war that will impact not only her life, but the lives of everyone around her.

I’ll cut right to the chase and tell you that I really liked this book. I didn’t love it — for reasons I’ll get into in a moment — but I really, really liked it. It’s definitely worth your time.

Structurally, The Bone Clocks has a lot of things in common with Cloud Atlas. It’s organized as a series of vignettes, with long spans of time (usually around a decade) separating them. Some of the vignettes are told from Holly’s point of view, while others are from the perspective of a person passing through Holly’s life — a caddish student who briefly becomes her lover, a childhood friend who eventually becomes her husband, a famous writer whose star is declining as hers is rising. These characters are all drawn compellingly enough that they could easily fill novels of their own. And it’s moving to see a character we last encountered twenty or thirty years ago pop up again in the margins of someone else’s story and notice all the ways they’ve changed, which Mitchell is smart enough to trust we’ll pick up on without his needing to call them out.

Mitchell is also deft enough to avoid the common flaws in stories with fantastic/supernatural elements that I noted in my review of Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 — failing to establish the rules of their world, or to play by them consistently once they have been established. The Bone Clocks takes its time explaining how the “magic” of its universe works, but once it does, its internal logic is coherent and understandable; and all the elements of the story that are unexplainable when they first appear are eventually made explainable by that logic. Mitchell understands that part of the enjoyment of fantasy for the reader comes from the same place the enjoyment of a mystery novel does — taking the pieces of a puzzle and learning how to fit them together.

While The Bone Clocks is very good, though, I can’t go along with some reviewers who place it on the same level as Cloud Atlas. It’s not quite as good as Mitchell’s earlier magnum opus, for two reasons. First, because he spends so much time in its beginning and middle giving us deep, rich portrayals of characters besides Holly, Mitchell finds himself near the end having to unload a metric ton of exposition on us in order to snap all those puzzle pieces together. Much of the penultimate section is taken up with various supernatural characters giving speeches to Holly about who they are, what they’re fighting for, etc., and it all comes so thick that my eyes glazed over a bit trying to parse all the backstory. It wasn’t bad backstory, it just would have been better if it had been spread out more evenly across the whole novel rather than coming all at once in a rush.

Second, the supernatural part of the story feels a bit disconnected from the more grounded, naturalistic part; the great hidden war gets completely resolved in that chunky second-to-last section, but instead of having that be the climax of the book, it’s followed by a long, completely naturalistic coda in which an elderly Holly struggles to protect the people she loves as society begins to unravel after environmental and economic disasters. (This sense that the near future will be a grim, melancholy place is another thing The Bone Clocks has in common with Cloud Atlas.) In terms of sheer writing skill, this section is the best thing about The Bone Clocks — its gentle terror is so powerful that you will be thinking about it long after you put the book down. But coming as it does after the big supernatural struggle has ended, it makes that whole plot thread feel kind of superfluous. What was the point of winning the big supernatural war in 2025 if by 2043 society is collapsing anyway? What did it matter? (Perhaps that was the point Mitchell was trying to make — I’m not sure.)

But while those objections keep The Bone Clocks from reaching my desert island book list, the book is still a great read, one of the best things I’ve read in a long time. You should give it a look.

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

Book review: “Gone Girl”

Posted on June 8, 2015

As long as we’re talking about books, let’s talk about another one I’ve read recently: Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. (Can you tell I’ve been working through my “I-should-really-get-around-to-reading-that-someday” list lately?)

First, full disclosure: while I’ve read Gone Girl the novel, I have never seen Gone Girl the 2014 movie. This review is strictly about the book version; it’s possible that the movie version is different, better or worse in ways I can’t speak to.

Gone Girl is a critically hailed novel telling the story of Nick and Amy Dunne, a pair of aspiring young writers in New York who meet, fall in love, get married, and then discover that “aspiring young writer” is not the royal road to riches you might think. After losing their jobs in the 2008 economic crash they move back to Nick’s Missouri home town, which puts strain on their marriage as native New Yorker Amy discovers that there are people in America who drink soda pop omg and Nick gets in touch with his inner douchebag. One day Amy disappears, leading to an increasingly public investigation whose focus slides inevitably towards Nick the longer it goes on.

Then of course there is a SHOCKING TWIST that SHOCKS you with how TWISTY it is. This makes it hard to discuss Gone Girl without assuming that the people you’re discussing it with have already read it, since to do so you kind of have to give away the SHOCKING TWIST. Given that it’s been years since the book came out and a major motion picture based on it has come and gone, it’s highly unlikely that anyone who’s interested in it isn’t familiar with it yet; but nonetheless, if you are among the yet-unspoiled, consider this your official

♦♦♦ SPOILER ALERT ♦♦♦

Have both the people in the world who still need a spoiler alert for this book left the room yet? Good. Then we’ll continue.

OK, so it turns out that Amy actually faked her own disappearance to punish Nick, and that all the “Amy” diary entries we’ve read so far were actually written by her expressly to implicate Nick. Then she goes into hiding and gets robbed by hillbillies, and then she meets up with her old boyfriend Snidely Whiplash, who locks her away in a tower. Meanwhile, Nick realizes that she faked her disappearance, and hatches a cunning plan to get her to come back and face justice that consists of sobbing drunkenly in to a stranger’s Flip camera. It works, except for the “facing justice” part; she comes back, gets herself pregnant using semen Nick froze years ago, and uses the baby as a human shield. Reunited, Nick and Amy live happily (?) ever after, leaving a nation of angry readers screaming “THAT BITCH” and throwing their (hopefully softcover) copies of the book across the room.

I actually liked the first half of Gone Girl quite a bit: the writing was crisp, Flynn was able to switch effectively from writing in Nick’s voice to writing in Amy’s (both the saccharine, innocent Amy of the diary and the more hardened and cynical real Amy we meet later), and the plot never got so knotty it got in the way of telling the story. I even liked the reveal of the SHOCKING TWIST, which I thought was handled effectively and without taxing the reader’s credibility in the way the SHOCKING TWIST in an M. Night Shyamalan movie might do.

So I was surprised at how much I disliked everything in Gone Girl that came after the SHOCKING TWIST. When that TWIST happens, the book changes gears completely and goes from an incisive, introspective look at the lives of realistic characters into a pulp story where Amy is depicted as a cross between Hannibal Lecter and the Terminator, an unstoppable, unkillable machine for bringing woe to anyone who crosses her path. It’s understandable that Flynn would want to draw a bright line between “diary Amy” and “real Amy”, the Amy who could actually concoct a plot to drive her husband into the electric chair, but “real Amy” turns out to be so far beyond plain old everyday evil that only capital-E Evil can describe her. She stops being a character and starts being a cardboard cutout: “insert villain here.”

But the perplexing thing about that shift is that Flynn can’t seem to make up her mind about just what kind of a villain Actual Amy is. For much of the second half of the book she’s depicted as an evil genius, someone who’s capable of seeing potential threats and engineering plots to foil them literally years in advance. She’s the classic potboiler villain who’s always playing three moves ahead of everyone else. But then at other times we see Actual Amy behaving in ways that aren’t just stupid, but obviously stupid. She’s hiding out in the woods to prevent anyone from learning that she hasn’t actually disappeared… but then she goes out of her way to make friends with the people she meets there. She’s on the run and needs help from her ex-boyfriend, Snidely Whiplash… but she meets him in a casino, when casinos are notorious for having cameras recording every square inch of what happens on their premises. She hates Nick enough to construct an incredibly elaborate plot to ruin his life… but then she sees him one time on TV blubbering about how much he misses her, and decides that he’s learned his lesson and it’s safe for her to reveal herself. I could buy Actual Amy as an all-seeing supervillain, or as a clueless klutz, but whip-sawing us back and forth between both these characterizations only makes us wonder if Flynn ever understood Actual Amy as a character as well as she did Diary Amy.

Of course, Actual Amy isn’t the only character revealed in the second half of the book to be a colossal idiot. Nick takes a few turns on that merry-go-round as well. At one point, for example, he’s struggling to figure out how he can convince the police that he’s innocent and that Amy is trying to frame him. He goes back through her life and finds three different people who had the exact same experience with her in the past — they were her friend, but she decided they had betrayed her, so she concocted elaborate plans to ruin their lives. All three are even willing to tell their stories to the cops to help him out! But he (and, even more mysteriously, the local cop who’s been on the case since the beginning) decides that this isn’t enough evidence, so there’s no point in bothering to bring it to the police, or even the media. Yes! All three just get dropped from the story without making the slightest bit of difference — except perhaps to further hammer home to the reader that Actual Amy is Capital-E Evil.

Watching Nick drop all those witnesses without even trying to make use of their testimony made me feel like Marge Gunderson in Fargo: “I’m not sure I agree with you a hundred percent on your police work, there.”

And then there’s the ending, which a lot of people seem to have found upsetting but which mostly just left me cold. I don’t expect the good guys to win in every story; indeed, it can be interesting to read a story where the bad guy gets away with it by cleverly outmaneuvering her pursuers. But Gone Girl‘s ending isn’t that clever. It’s more just a collection of possible ways for Nick to bring Amy’s scheme crashing down, each of which Amy turns out to have foiled long in advance during one of her “all-seeing supervillain” episodes. Then Nick just sort of gives up and collapses into passivity, leaving Amy to win more or less by default. That’s not necessarily out of character for him — we’ve spent the whole book seeing how he fell into the life he was leading, rather than ever actively choosing it — but it’s weird to see a character the book has been building up sympathy for just sort of flop over like a puppet whose strings have been cut. It’s anticlimactic.

So should you read it? If you’d asked me halfway through, I’d have said unreservedly that you should. Flynn’s a skilled writer, and the slow reveal of what’s really going on as you read is more than enough to keep the pages turning. But then you hit the SHOCKING TWIST and the book becomes less like a unified narrative and more like an explosion at a paperback factory, with smart characters suddenly becoming dumb, realistic plots becoming ridiculous, and just generally everything roaring wildly out of Flynn’s control and flying every which way at once. So I’m a bit mystified at how positive all the reviews were, and how much some people seem to love this book. It’s a high-wire act where the aerialist can’t make it all the way to the other side.

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

Dear Democratic candidates: stop talking, start doing

Posted on June 7, 2015

Here’s something that drives me nuts about Democratic politicians. (I’m going to pick on Hillary Clinton here, but it’s important to note that this is not something unique to her — every major Democratic Presidential candidate in my lifetime has done the same thing, including Barack Obama, John Kerry, Al Gore and Bill Clinton. It’s a Democratic problem, not a Hillary problem.)

Take a look at this story in Politico today:

Hillary Clinton to fast food workers: ‘I want to be your champion’

DETROIT — Hillary Clinton told a conference of fast food workers Sunday that she supported their push for a $15 minimum wage, saying “I want to be your champion.”

Appearing by phone at a meeting of 1,300 workers, Clinton voiced her most emphatic support yet for the nationwide Fight for $15 movement, which is also seeking to unionize fast food giants like McDonald’s…

“I hope that every one of you will continue to raise your voice until we get all working Americans a better deal,” she said. “I want to be your champion. I want to fight with you every day.”

It then goes on to wax rhapsodic about what a great boost this is for the fast food workers who are struggling to get their fair share of the massive profits their industry rakes in.

All of which is nice. But it does raise a question: if Hillary wants to be fast food workers’ champion, what’s stopping her?

I mean, she doesn’t have to be President to be an outspoken advocate for underpaid workers. She doesn’t have to win an election to do that. She could just… start doing it. Walk with them on their picket lines. Help raise money for strike funds and local politicians who support fast food workers. Use the massive media attention that follows her when she goes to Chipotle to highlight whether the restaurants she visits treat their workers well or badly. And so on.

There’s nothing stopping her, right now, from doing any of those things. She doesn’t need an elected office; she doesn’t even need their permission. She could be out there, fighting with them, being their champion, right now.

And if you want to win these workers’ support, doing any of these things would be a surer way to accomplish that than just making promises could ever be. People aren’t stupid; they know the difference between someone making a promise and someone actually taking action, putting themselves on the line. The person taking action will get their respect — and their votes! — over the other one any day.

So why bother with promises? Just get out there and do it.

Like I said above, this isn’t just a Hillary problem. Barack Obama did the exact same thing when he was running for President in 2007-8. Here’s an example, from November 3, 2007:

If American workers are being denied their right to organize and collectively bargain when I’m in the White House, I’ll put on a comfortable pair of shoes myself, I’ll will walk on that picket line with you as President of the United States of America.

Remember all those times President Obama showed up on a picket line after getting elected President? Oh. Right. He never did. Not once.

Put aside the election and the office for a moment, though, and ask the same question of Candidate Obama in 2007 that we’re asking of Candidate Clinton in 2015. What was stopping him? He didn’t need to be President to make a difference by showing up on a picket line. He was already a United States Senator and one of the most famous, influential people in America. His appearance on a picket line would have instantly launched an intense, 24/7 media investigation into the labor practices of the company being picketed. It might have done a lot of good for some people who desperately needed it.

But that didn’t happen, obviously. All those people got was the promise. The words.

It’s almost enough to make you think that these politicians don’t really believe these words they are saying. That they care more about “optics” and “positioning” than they do about actually standing up for people like underpaid, struggling workers. That they’re just cynically making promises they have no intention of keeping, because the people they’re making them to aren’t the constituents they really care about, so who cares as long as they vote the right way every four years and then shut up and go away.

So, Democratic politicians: don’t feed our cynicism. Help us believe in you. Stop talking, start doing.

Book review: “1Q84”

Posted on June 4, 2015

I just finished reading Haruki Murakami’s 2011 novel 1Q84 and had some thoughts about it, so now, dear reader, you’re going to get those thoughts dumped on you.

First, some background. 1Q84 is a story about two people living in Japan in 1984. Tengo is an aspiring novelist who can’t seem to get off his duff and actually write anything. Aomame is a personal trainer who moonlights as an assassin (you know, like you do). Both their lives are knocked off course when a young woman named Fuka-Eri flees a religious cult and writes a novel called Air Chrysalis, which sets in motion a train of events that leads them all into a parallel world where there are two moons instead of one, a world Aomame dubs “1Q84.” It turns out there are deep connections between Tengo and Aomame, connections that turn out to be their only hope of ever again returning to the real world of 1984.

All of which sounds pretty silly! But 1Q84 isn’t as bad as all that, or as the New York Times made it out to be. It’s actually pretty engaging, if only in fits and starts. Tengo and Aomame are clearly drawn and more or less compelling characters, there’s a good range of supporting characters too, and despite the book’s length the narrative never really runs out of steam, even if it does seem to be threatening to in places.

Which isn’t to say it’s perfect, or even very good; 1Q84 has lots of problems. Murakami has a bad habit of insisting on listing the brand names of every object his characters touch, so Aomame can never just get dressed; we have to slog instead through repetitive descriptions of Junko Shimada suits and Charles Jourdan heels. (Are these even real brand names? I have no idea, and I’m too lazy to Google them to find out.) The sex scenes range from “awkward” to “unsettling.” And the romance that sits at the center of the plot guns its engines and leaps over credibility like Evel Knievel jumping the Snake River Canyon.

But 1Q84‘s biggest flaw is that Murakami breaks his contract with the reader. When a writer flies out of the everyday into a fantasy world with malicious pixies and multiple moons, there’s generally two things they need to do in order to bring the reader along with them: they need to establish the rules of the fantasy world — show you how it works, particularly how the way it works differs from the way our tedious workaday world works — and then they have to tell a story that plays by those rules. The rules can be implausible or even ludicrous, but generally speaking we as readers are willing to accept them as long as they don’t contradict each other, and as long as the story stays within the lines the author has drawn for us.

Murakami does neither of those things in 1Q84. First, he never really bothers to fully explain how this new world works — strange things happen, and we’re never sure exactly why. (Sometimes he deigns to imply a cause, but other times we don’t even get that.) And even in those places where the rules are explained, the story never feels like it takes them particularly seriously. Huge volumes of words are spilled explaining the mechanics of air chrysalises and dohtas and mazas, but even after reading them all they don’t ever give you the sense that you’ve got a handle on what’s going to happen next. As with mystery novels, where the joy comes from the process of figuring out whodunit, the joy in this kind of story comes from the process of figuring out how the world you’re immersed in works. You feel that joy at the moment when all the pieces fall into place and a light bulb goes on over your head. But in 1Q84, that moment never really comes.

Great, now I fear I’ve made this book sound worse than it actually is. It’s not that bad! Promise! I kept turning the pages, and enjoyed the act of reading it; I just didn’t feel satisfied when the last page had been turned. And it wasn’t even the good kind of unsatisfied, the kind where you’re unsatisfied because it leaves you wanting more. It was the kind instead where you scratch your head and say “Huh. OK. Huh.”

So should you read it? Cripes, I don’t know. Maybe? You might like it, if you’re into literary sci-fi and you can live with a story not revealing itself fully to you. I don’t regret having read it. I just wish it was as good as it felt like it could have been.

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

Make typing special characters stupid easy: meet the compose key

Posted on March 16, 2015

I use Linux on both my desktop workstation and my laptop. I mention this because, while it marks me out as kind of an oddball in most respects, it establishes my credentials pretty effectively on one point: I know how to edit text.

Unlike every other operating system in common use today, Linux (and Unix-like systems more broadly) is unashamed about its love affair with plain old text. Things that other OSes hide behind shiny, clicky “control panels” are squirreled away by *nixes into text configuration files. Much of how you automate procedures in such systems involves piping text output from one program into another. Where other systems race toward any opportunity to keep the user from having to put their hands on a keyboard, *nixes stubbornly look for ways to keep the user from having to take their hands off the keyboard.

All of which is probably why *nixes are unappealing to most users unless they are hidden behind a thick layer of graphical candy, as OS X does. But it makes those of us who do use them really, really good at editing text. So I’m writing this to share one trick I’ve learned by using such systems.

Longtime Readers™ will already know that I’m fond of putting that little trademark symbol at the end of the phrase “Longtime Readers.” But let’s look at a mechanical question for a second: how do you actually put a symbol like that in there?

For most people, the answer will involve opening up an application (Character Map in Windows, Character Viewer in OS X), finding the symbol you want in there, clicking some buttons to copy it to the clipboard, and then pasting it into your text where you want it. That works, but — let’s be real here — it’s incredibly clunky. You’re talking about multiple clicks just to get a single special character in place. That’s a pain.

Some more advanced users will have learned an alternate input method, Alt codes, that can be entered straight from the keyboard; no special app or multiple clicks required. But while they’re easier than using a character map, they force you to remember a special numeric code sequence for each character you want to use. And those code sequences have nothing to do with the particular character they represent — what correspondence does the number “164” have with the character “ñ”? — so learning new characters means memorizing new numbers for each one. And capitalized characters are coded separately from lowercase ones, so just because you know the code for ñ doesn’t mean you’ll be able to use that knowledge to use the character Ñ. So it’s better, but not by much.

All of which means that, when confronted with special characters, rather than deal with these frustrating input methods people tend to take lazy shortcuts like dropping accents off non-English characters. So suddenly Luis Buñuel turns into “Luis Bunuel,” and “LEGO®” becomes “LEGO (R)” — all because the computer of the person typing made being accurate too hard.

People of Earth! I come to tell you that there is a better way. Better than character maps or Alt codes. So much better, in fact, that once you get used to it, you’ll find typing on a computer that isn’t set up to support it positively painful.

That better way — which I had never heard of until I started using Linux — is called the “compose key.”

Here’s how it works. You tell your computer that a specific key on your keyboard (it can be any key you like) is a special, magic key called a compose key. And once the compose key is pressed, rather than taking each character you type after that on its own, the computer looks to see if the characters form a compose key sequence — a series of keys that correspond to a particular special character. If they do, the computer outputs the special character; if they don’t, the keys are ignored.

All of which probably sounds similar to the above-described Alt codes. But there’s a key difference — rather than just a number, compose key sequences for characters are specifically designed to be similar to the character they should produce. This makes them easier to remember than Alt codes, and additionally makes it easy to guess the sequences for characters you haven’t used before, without having to look them up.

Let’s take as an example the ñ character mentioned above. When your system is set up with a compose key — I use the right Ctrl key for mine, since it’s out of the way of regular typing — producing this character is simple. You just type:

Compose + n + ~

… and bam, out comes “ñ”. Notice how the compose key sequence follows from the character itself; to use ñ, you type a plain “n” and then a tilde (“~”), the character closest to the accent mark the character includes.

Knowing that, can you guess how to use a compose key to produce Ñ? I bet you can:

Compose + (Shift + n) + ~

That’s right — it’s just a matter of holding down the Shift key when you hit “n”. Now you know how to capitalize any accented character.

How about turning “Longtime Readers (TM)” into “Longtime Readers™”? You guessed it:

Compose + t + m

Boom™.

Or how about that little registration mark (®)?

Compose + o + r

It’s Just That Easy®.

What about fractions, you ask?

• ½: Compose + 1 + 2
• ¼: Compose + 1 + 4
• ⅛: Compose + 1 + 8

You can even use the compose key to do some of the weirder Unicode characters:

• ♥: Compose + < + 3
• ☺: Compose + : + )
• ☭: Compose + C + C + C + P (Yes, really. Try it!)

You’re probably starting to see now how much easier this is compared to character maps and Alt codes. It makes typing special characters so easy that it just becomes part of your regular typing flow. “Special” characters become just… well, characters. Which is they way they should be.

And unlike Alt codes, which are tied to Microsoft Windows proprietary character codes, a good compose key implementation will produce clean, interoperable Unicode characters, so there’s no worry about them glitching out when copied into an email or Web page.

If you’re a *nix-using nerd like me, your system probably already supports compose key sequences, so all you have to do is check the docs to see how to start using them. But for those of you who use Windows or OS X, never fear — the power of the compose key is available to you too!

Getting a compose key on OS X: As befits its *nix heritage, a compose key is available to Mac users without having to install any additional software. However, since Apple’s entire interface philosophy is built around using the mouse rather than the keyboard, they don’t enable it by default. So to turn it on, you need to either fiddle with your settings a bit or install a new keyboard layout that has a compose key set up by default.

Getting a compose key on Windows: Windows, not being a *nix in any conceivable shape or form, has no compose key support out of the box. However, you can easily add one by installing a free, open-source utility, WinCompose. Once it’s installed, just run WinCompose and any key you specify will function as a compose key. (Or just tell Windows to run it at startup if you want compose key support all the time.)

So regardless of what platform you’re into, you can take advantage of the compose key to make your life suck less. Give it a try — and prepare to be amazed at how soon it becomes indispensable!

Kids, ranked

Posted on February 26, 2015

34. The Punk Kid

33. The Jew Kid

32. The Black Kid

31. The Mormon Kid

30. The Sleepy Kid

29. The Ripley Kid

28. The Painter Kid

27. The Clinic Kid

26. Kid Niles

25. Kid McGinley

24. The Boone Kid

23. The Honey Grove Kid

22. The Little Alabama Kid

21. The Big Alabama Kid

20. The Brass Kid

19. The Harmony Kid

18. The Postal Kid

17. The Gash Kid

16. The Leatherhead Kid

15. The Square Faced Kid

14. The Molasses Face Kid

13. The Squirrel Toothed Kid

12. The Yenshee Kid

11. The Narrow Minded Kid

10. The Sanctimonious Kid

9. The Yellow Kid Weil

8. The Seldom Seen Kid

7. The Harum Scarum Kid

6. The Collars and Cuffs Kid

5. The Money From Home Kid

4. The Narrow Gage Kid

3. The Hashhouse Kid

2. The High Ass Kid

1. The Christ Kid

(All Kids above being real people profiled in The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man by David W. Maurer, published 1940)

Jason recommends: “80 Days”

Posted on February 23, 2015

I don’t use this space to recommend mobile games too often, because, let’s face it, the vast majority of mobile games are just utter, utter crap. While the PC side of the gaming world has seen a remarkable efflorescence of creativity over the last five years, mobile gaming over that period has been marked by a race to the bottom, driven by customers whose willingness to spend money tops out around 99 cents and app stores that put no effort into helping original, unique ideas get the attention they deserve. The result is a grim wasteland of barely playable dreck, usually larded down with come-ons for “in-app purchases” so that the game you downloaded because it was “free” turns out to cost $200 if you actually want to play the damn thing. And in those rare cases where someone does come up with an original idea, it is promptly buried in an avalanche of cheap-o copycats.

It’s all pretty depressing.

But I have recently come across one title that I found was very creative, fun to play, and reasonably priced, so I wanted to do my bit to draw your attention to it. That title is 80 Days, from UK-based inkle studios.

80 Days is a clever riff on a classic piece of literature, Jules Verne’s 1873 novel Around the World in 80 Days. In the novel, English gentleman Phileas Fogg, inspired by the late 19th century’s spread of modern transportation systems like railroads and steamships, accepts a wager that he can circumnavigate the globe, starting and ending at London’s Reform Club, in the titular eighty days. The novel then follows Fogg and his newly hired valet, Frenchman Jean Passepartout, as they try to win that bet.

In inkle’s game, the novel provides the basic concept: you, the player, starting at London with £4,000 and a choice of beginning your journey by going to Paris or Cambridge, must find your way around the world in the time allotted. However, 80 Days uses the novel more as inspiration than as a fixed script. Starting from the novel, it builds its own wildly creative world.

First, each city you travel to offers multiple connections to others, so you can build any itinerary you wish; you are not fixed to the one Verne set for his protagonists.  You can follow the novel’s course across Suez to India, or take the Trans-Siberian Express or mountain trails through Turkey and Pakistan; you can cross the United States, or make the long sea voyage through the Panama Canal, or find your way across South America. Each new connection has factors in its favor and factors against: your money is precious — especially since drawing more funds from a bank can require waiting for days for approval to arrive from London — but fast routes are available to the traveler who can afford a ticket. So each connection opens up new choices you have to make to keep moving forward.

Tired of squeezing into coach? Upgrade to a mechanical elephant instead

Second, inkle’s 80 Days is set in a Victorian world, that, while mostly like the novel’s, also departs from history in fun, steampunkish ways. Airships and rockets ply the skies, while steam-powered cars trundle from city to city. One city in India  has itself been lifted in its entirety onto mechanical legs, offering a precious free connection across the subcontinent for the traveler lucky enough to find it.

Third, 80 Days is, at heart, a work of interactive fiction — which means that each new connection plays out with its own mini-stories, as you scramble around each city trying to find a means to get to the next one. None of the connections are shown to you at the game’s beginning; you have to uncover them, either by buying maps and route tables, or in conversation with people you meet. And these conversations yield up a wonderful array of colorful characters, all with their own problems and desires, which can pull you off course in unexpected directions. But if your only experience with IF games has been the daunting, text-only games of old, don’t let 80 Days’ heritage scare you off; it’s lavishly illustrated, with a gorgeous interactive world map and great art for each new city and mode of travel you encounter.

What’s most interesting about 80 Days’ design is the way it creates a sensation that you don’t often encounter with IF games of any kind: urgency. In this game the clock is always ticking, so you can’t always leisurely consider your next choice. Take too long weighing which train to take, and you may find they’ve all left the station, costing you another precious day. A ride on a rickety steam-shovel may seem less appealing than a berth in a luxury clipper ship — but if the shovel is leaving today and the ship isn’t leaving for four days, you may find yourself reconsidering. This tension makes the game a kinetic experience, where your own momentum carries you into adventures you might otherwise never discover.

80 Days is available now in the Apple, Android and Amazon app stores for $5.00. It’s telling how that seems like a lot for a mobile game, but this is one that’s well worth the price.

America needs an Elizabeth Warren movement, not an Elizabeth Warren presidency

Posted on February 11, 2015

Since the 2016 election season is starting to warm up (God help us all), I wanted to take a moment to discuss the first development in it that’s been interesting enough for me to watch: the emergence of the “Ready for Warren” movement to draft Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts for the Democratic Presidential nomination.

You’d have to look long and hard to find a bigger admirer of Senator Warren than me. For many years now, she’s been one of the few voices on the national stage speaking out for those whose voices our system usually drowns out: the working family struggling to keep their house, the young graduate buried under student loan debt, the community left adrift after all its jobs have disappeared. In the wake of the 2008 financial meltdown, when all our other leaders — Republican and Democrat — were lining up to give Wall Street’s executives “Get Out of Jail Free” cards, she was one of the few demanding both reform and accountability. And since her election to the Senate in 2012, she has quite brilliantly used the platform her office has given her to keep pressing those issues onto the national agenda.

She is one of the few people I’ve seen in nearly twenty years working in and around politics who gives me hope that we can have leaders who are something better than venal, corrupt sleazebags. So yeah, I’m a fan.

But despite all that, I have to tell you, there is this: I can’t get on the “Run, Liz, Run” train. I’m sorry, I just can’t.

The reason isn’t anything to do with Senator Warren’s fitness for the office, which as you could probably tell from the above I think is just fine. And it’s not because I think the presumptive frontrunner for the nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York, is particularly awesome; I was all Hillaried out in 2008, and the last six years haven’t changed that. (Though I will say that it’s awesome to see a contest shaping up where both of the most-buzzed-about candidates for the Democratic nomination are women.)

No, my hesitation comes from something else: a feeling that the “Ready for Warren” campaigners, as much as I agree with them in so many ways, are simply putting the cart before the horse.

For many decades now, Democrats have had a bad habit of thinking that all the way to solve the country’s problems is to find one ideal person, one perfect candidate, and run them for President. Once elected, the thinking goes, the perfect candidate will be a perfect President, sweeping away all opposition to a broad agenda of progressive change with their perfect-ness.

But politics in America doesn’t work that way — and I’m kind of amazed anyone could have lived through the presidency of Barack Obama without coming to understand that. Obama was the Perfect Candidate in 2008, after all, and the six years since then have been an object lesson in just how little leverage perfection buys you in Washington.

Obama has struggled because a Perfect Candidate is not enough. To get things done, a president needs, above all else, power. And the hallmark of presidents with power is generally that they have a movement backing them up.

The genesis of the Perfect Candidate myth goes all the way back to Franklin Roosevelt. But it’s worth remembering that when Roosevelt was elected in 1932, he didn’t arrive in Washington alone; he was backed up by gigantic majorities in both the House and the Senate. And those majorities, combined with his own enormous popularity, gave him the leverage he needed to push the First New Deal into law.

Barack Obama didn’t have that kind of support when he came to D.C. in 2008, and it showed. It showed immediately. He had to start horse-trading with conservatives from day one to get anything done. And that after his predecessor oversaw both a disastrous war and a near collapse of the entire economic system!

If ever there was a moment in our lifetimes that should have been amenable to the wonders of a Perfect Candidate, 2008 was it. But even then, even when we were all standing amidst the rubble shaking our heads, one perfect man was not enough.

None of which is to say that Obama couldn’t have accomplished more in those early years with the cards in his hand than he did. (I thought, and still think, he could have.) But it certainly would have helped if he’d had a bigger electoral margin and a wave of new, supportive members of Congress behind him.

We didn’t produce those things. In what should have been a great progressive moment, we failed — because all of our energies went into finding the Perfect Candidate.

Why would we believe things would be any different if the Perfect Candidate in question was Elizabeth Warren in 2016, rather than Barack Obama in 2008? Who would be there on Capitol Hill and in the state legislatures to help her move her agenda forward? Progressives like to say that they’re from “the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party.” But can you name any other elected officials who are saying that? Or even any promising candidates?

They are, sadly, few and far between. Which does not bode well for the success of a Warren Administration.

The lesson of all this is simple. The way to make change doesn’t start at the top. It starts at the bottom. It starts with Americans, grassroots progressives, building a movement around the principles that Senator Warren has so ably articulated. It means finding strong progressive candidates for local offices, and then getting them the money and boots on the ground they need to win those offices. It means developing enough strength in the states to challenge and overcome the networks of corporate interests that run riot in so many statehouses and Congressional districts. It means driving the money-changers, from humble local party committees all the way up to the DNC itself, out of the Democratic Party.

And then, when all that is done, it means finding, and running, a candidate for President. A Presidential candidate is the fruition of a movement, not the seeding of one.

This is not a work of the near term. It’s a work that would take decades to complete. I may not even live long enough to see it find whatever destiny fate has allotted it. But it’s the one way — the only way — to effect the change that so many of us want to see.

There is no Perfect Candidate who, all by themselves, can ensure a safe, prosperous future for America. That responsibility falls upon all of us.

Jason Recommends: “The Years of Lyndon Johnson”

Posted on January 29, 2015

This is just a brief note to tell you that I’ve been making my way through Robert Caro‘s epic multi-volume biography of our 36th President, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. If you’re at all interested in the history of the United States during the 19th and 20th centuries, you need to pick up these books.

(Or do what I did, which is to get the unabridged audiobook versions of them, read by the excellent Grover Gardner, from Audible.com.)

I make this recommendation regardless of whether or not you’re a fan of LBJ, or even particularly interested in him. The books use Johnson’s life as the scaffolding around which they hang their narrative, but they’re not really so much about Johnson as they are about the times he lived in, the America he moved through. As Johnson moves up the political ladder, Caro keeps introducing us to more fascinating characters, each time pulling away from Johnson’s story for a while to tell the story of this new person so that by the time their life collides with LBJ’s we understand what makes them tick — what they want, why they want it, and whether those desires will make them an ally of Johnson or an opponent. Some of these figures are well known to students of general American history, but many are not: “Pass the Biscuits Pappy” O’Daniel, for instance, a flamboyant Texas politician with a personality straight out of a Coen brothers movie, or Leland Olds, a passionate, powerful advocate for regulation of electrical power interests who Johnson’s oil-and-gas business paymasters ordered him to destroy.

None of which is to say that Caro gives short shrift to Johnson himself, though. The fundamental paradox of Lyndon Johnson has always been this: here was a man crassly devoted to accumulating personal power, frequently in the most blunt, corrupt way possible, who nonetheless did more to lift up the poor and disenfranchised — the very people who had no power for him to absorb — than any other American President, before or since. So which of these two strains, then, was the one that drove him? Was he a compassionate man forced to bend himself to the grubby realities of politics? Or was he a cynical political operator out for his own gain who happened, purely by accident, to help others? Which was the real Lyndon Johnson? I won’t spoil the books for you by telling you Caro’s answer to this question, but he has one, and it’s both unsparing and compelling.

There are currently four volumes in The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power, which follows Johnson’s youth in Texas’s rugged, arid hill country; Means of Ascent, which follows the start of his political career through the incredibly corrupt 1948 election that sent him to the U.S. Senate; Master of the Senate, which details how Johnson rose to become the one man in American history ever to truly run that institution; and The Passage of Power, which recounts his years as John F. Kennedy’s Vice-President and his sudden elevation to the Presidency after Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas’ Dealey Plaza in 1963. (Robert Caro, who was been working on these books for decades now, is currently working on a fifth and final volume, to cover Johnson’s tumultuous Presidency and the years after.)

These books aren’t 100% perfect — Caro has a habit of circling back to remind the reader of things he told us in previous volumes, for instance, which can lead to certain events and stories coming up so many times they suffer from repetition — but they are so close to perfect, and have so many interesting stories to tell you, that if you’re interested in American history at all you really owe it to yourself to read them. Sweeping and magisterial, tough and thrilling, they will help you see both the nation you live in and the man whose life they recount with new eyes.

The secret of Sierra

Posted on December 20, 2014

I know I’m going to sound like a grumpy old man by saying this, but I don’t really get the whole “gamecasting” phenomenon. The idea of watching other people play video games just has zero appeal for me. I mean, I love video games, but the attraction of things like Twitch and PewDiePie soars right over my head. I find watching someone else playing a video game just leaves me the feeling that I wish I was the one playing the game instead.

That being said, I recognize that I am way, way out of the mainstream on this one. PewDiePie has racked up more YouTube views than Rihanna, for Pete’s sake. So the audience for this stuff is clearly there. It’s just one of the many, many ways in which I am grievously out of touch with the culture in which I live.

For this reason, when I saw that Rich Evans and Jack Packard of Red Letter Media (of whose praises I have sung before) had launched a gamecasting series of their own titled “Previously Recorded Live,” I felt like despite my not really digging the general concept I had to at least give the new show a fair shake. I’m a fan of these guys and their work, after all; I want them to succeed, even if they’re working in a genre I don’t really get.

So I watched a few episodes of “Previously Recorded Live,” and for the most part they did not change my mind about gamecasting. It’s still not something that rings my bell, alas. But there was one group of episodes I did really like — and that actually taught me something new about a game I first played something like 20 years ago, if you can believe that.

That game was the classic Sierra On-Line comedy adventure Space Quest: The Sarien Encounter.  If you’re a computer gamer of A Certain Age, you probably have fond memories of this seminal title, which turned into a huge hit for its era and spawned five sequels. Evans and Packard devoted six episodes of “Pre-Rec Live” to a complete playthrough of the game, playing all the way from beginning to end.

I’ve pulled those episodes together into a YouTube playlist, if you’d like to watch them yourself. And here’s an embedded version:

(A note: if you do decide to watch, skip ahead about 10 minutes in on the first video; everything before that is just the two guys futzing around trying to get their streaming setup working properly. Which I’ll admit is part of what turns me off about “gamecasting” generally; there’s so much insistence on “let’s do it live!” that you end up watching huge chunks of dead air and uninteresting filler.)

I’m taking the time to write this up because, like I mentioned above, these episodes actually helped me understand something about the classic Sierra adventures generally, and Space Quest specifically, that I had never really understood before.

This realization came because only one of the two RLM guys in the video had ever played Space Quest before. Like me, Rich Evans grew up playing Sierra games; but Jack Packard, it turns out, had not. In fact he had never really played anything from the Golden Age of Adventure Games. So they set the video up with Packard being the primary player, Evans only really jumping in to provide color commentary and the occasional reminder to save the game (which in Sierra games, which took great glee in killing the player off, is always a good idea).

What I realized, watching the two of them make their way through this game that I knew so well, is that there’s something fundamental about Sierra games that I had never really understood before. It’s that Sierra games weren’t, fundamentally, adventure games. What they were was multiplayer games.

In other words, the fun provided by the game came only in part from the game itself, which was typically structured as a series of puzzles for the player to solve. The rest of the fun came from the way you went about solving those puzzles. And solving them with a friend or friends was so much more fun then solving them on your own.

It got me thinking back to all the fond memories I have of playing Sierra games. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that in all those memories I was never playing the game alone. It was always me and my little brother, or me and a friend, or me and a group of friends, all crowding around the computer monitor, taking turns at the keyboard; bouncing ideas for ways to solve the latest puzzle off each other, cracking jokes and riffing off each others’ creativity.

Which isn’t to say I never played a Sierra game alone, of course. Just that the memories of those games that have lasted, the ones that are the most fun to think back on, are all memories of playing those games collaboratively. Sierra games were party games before the concept of the “party game” had even been invented.

All of which makes me feel kind of sad, because while the rise of the Internet has made multiplayer gaming a much bigger thing than it ever was back then, this particular type of multiplayer game really doesn’t exist anymore. Today’s multiplayer games are almost all shooters and MMOs, where you work together with people you don’t really know to blow stuff up and gather loot. Playing a Sierra game collaboratively was something different; it was a positive collaboration, a constructive one, where the players put their minds together to come up with a solution to a problem that they might never have come up with individually. And since there was no global computer network to tap into back then, if you had people to play those games with you, they were by definition people you knew well. They were the same real-life friends you did everything else with.

I suppose that some of that style of play has come back again in the resurgence of tabletop games. Computer and video games have given card and board games a rough couple of decades, but the format has sprung back and is now even undergoing a kind of renaissance, full of creative designs made possible by the popularity of titles like The Settlers of Catan and Cards Against Humanity.  But on the electronic side of things, there’s no sign of anything like the experience we had playing those old Sierra games coming back anytime soon.

Maybe that’s just the way things are; maybe collaboration in computer games will always be limited to shooting people and stealing gold. But I hope not. Watching Evans and Packard play through Space Quest reminded me that it wasn’t always that way; so maybe it doesn’t always have to be.

Go ahead: joke about killing Kim Jong-un all you want

Posted on December 17, 2014

If you follow the news, you’re probably at least dimly aware about the brouhaha surrounding the new movie by Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg and Dan Sterling, The Interview, whose comedic plot revolves around two American reporters who are asked by the CIA to use a rare interview opportunity with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un to assassinate the reclusive tyrant. The North Korean government, unsurprisingly, is not pleased with this storyline, and hackers who may or may not have ties to North Korea have now managed to both capture and release an absolutely mind-blowing amount of Sony’s internal data and frighten Sony into cancelling The Interview‘s release in American theaters.

This is an ongoing story, so I’m sure there will be further developments to come. However, I’m writing this not to comment on the overall story itself, but on one type of reaction to it that I’ve been seeing pop up periodically in my various social feeds. That reaction is to blame Rogen and his collaborators for having written a story that was too provocative towards North Korea.

These arguments generally take one of two forms:

• Political: “You may not like Kim, but he’s the leader of a country, and it’s not right to joke about killing any country’s leaders.”
• Humanitarian: “You may not like Kim, but he’s a human being just like you, and it’s not right to joke about killing any human being.”

With all due respect to people making either of these arguments, in the immortal words of Jules Winnfield, “allow me to retort.”

My retort: fuck that noise. Seriously. As far as I’m concerned, if you want to joke about killing Kim Jong-un, you should feel free to knock yourself out.

First, a tangential point: it’s important to note that The Interview is not a movie about just anyone trying to assassinate Kim Jong-un; it’s a movie about the CIA trying to assassinate Kim Jong-un. And the CIA has a long and sordid history of trying to assassinate foreign leaders it didn’t approve of. Sometimes it even tried multiple times — Fidel Castro alone, for instance, was on the receiving end of between 8 and 600+ CIA assassination attempts. (None of which succeeded, obviously.) And many of the schemes the CIA tried in real life were at least as harebrained as the one in The Interview, centering around such tactics as poisoning his cigars or planting a depilatory agent in his shoes to make his hair fall out. So the premise of The Interview can be read to be as critical of America’s addiction to covert assassination as a tool of policy — and its persistent weakness for using that tool in as ridiculous a way as can be imagined — as of Kim’s regime.

But let’s put that aside for a moment and talk about the main point the critics are making, which is that it’s somehow illegitimate to make jokes about assassination. In most cases, I would agree with that argument. But in the case of Kim it falls short, because the North Korean regime is one of the most monstrous in modern history. The regime that Kim presides over has brought its people nothing but isolation and starvation for more than sixty years now.

To get your arms around the scope of the regime’s crimes, you have to start with Kim’s grandfather, the founder of the modern North Korean state:  Kim Il-sung. His appetite for power led him, to the horror of his Soviet and Chinese sponsors, to launch an invasion of South Korea that eventually widened into the Korean War — a conflict that would take the lives of more than two million Koreans on both sides, along with hundreds of thousands of Chinese and tens of thousands of Americans. And his war, whose declared aim was to unify the two Koreas under Northern rule, accomplished nothing; three years of bloody fighting left the boundaries of the two Koreas only slightly changed.

Beyond the war, Kim Il-sung also built the garrison state that his son and grandson would eventually inherit. His philosophy of Juche (“self-reliance”) wrecked North Korea’s economy and turned it into the impoverished state it is today. He also established the hard-line approach taken to dealing with internal dissent that would eventually flower into one of history’s most brutal networks of political prisons. Prisoners in these gulags are worked as slaves, with only minuscule food rations and in harsh conditions. Thanks to the government’s policy of “guilt by association,” criticizing the government or attempting to flee the country will not only land you in one of these prisons, but your entire family as well. It is estimated that as many as 200,000 people are detained in these prisons today.

Kim Il-sung’s son and successor, Kim Jong-il, took this horror show of a government and managed to make it even worse. In the first years of his rule, he presided over a disastrous famine. Hunger and malnutrition became so widespread that rumors of cannibalism swept the country. Nobody knows exactly how many North Koreans died during that period, but estimates range from the high hundred thousands up to as many as three million, in a country whose total population at the time was just 22 million.

The United Nations estimates that Kim Jong-il could have fed his people by importing between $100 and $200 million worth of food. The regime was unable to find the money to accomplish that. But at the same time, while its people starved, it managed to find as much as $900 million to build a massive mausoleum for its departed “Great Leader,” Kim Il-sung.

The impact of the great famine led to Kim Jong-il’s personal twist on the state’s Juche ideology: the policy of songun, or “military first.” Under this policy, the North Korean military has unquestioned first call on any of the country’s scarce resources, including food. In a country that faces no real external military threat — neither South Korea nor the United States has any policy aiming at military conquest of the North, Japan’s days of conquest are long behind it, and North Korea receives protection from the powerful and nuclear-armed Chinese — the idea of starving the country to feed the army is beyond obscene. But in North Korea, that idea is official state policy. (In a state where the army is the only power center beyond the Kim family that is allowed to exist, that was also probably inevitable.)

The current ruler of North Korea, Kim Jong-un, has done nothing to improve the conditions his poor subjects have suffered under for all these decades. Juche and songun are still in force, the economy is still a shambles, the gulags are still full. His primary accomplishments since taking power upon the death of his father in 2012 have been murdering most of his father’s closest advisors, rattling his rusty saber at the United States, and bumping the amount of money the government spends buying him cognac and cars to nearly $650 million per year.

To sum up: Kim Jong-un is a ruler who lives in unimaginable luxury while his people, even in good years, struggle to eke out a basic living. He has taken the crimes of his father and grandfather and adopted them as his own, with no indication of a desire to break with those policies or even of him viewing those crimes with regret. He is the fruit of a poisonous tree.

(And if your concern is that it’s somehow out of bounds to joke about killing a foreign leader, all I can say is: have you ever seen North Korean propaganda? It’s full of imagery about how Americans are evil imperialists who need to be fought and killed. They even make cartoons with that message to make sure it’s not lost on the young ‘uns. And the North hasn’t stopped at just words, either — on at least three occasions, they have actively attempted to assassinate the leader of South Korea.)

I’m sitting here trying to come up with a single good thing any of the Kims have done for North Korea, and I’m coming up completely empty. Which is kind of amazing, when you think about it. I mean, I think we can all agree that Adolf Hitler was a pretty evil dude, but he at least managed to build his people some decent highways. Josef Stalin was another monster, but he at least managed to turn the backward, agrarian Soviet economy into a modern industrial one. Nearly every horrifying tyrant in history has managed to do something that can be put on the plus side of his historical ledger. But all the Kims have brought their people in the decades of their rule is death. Death in a pointless war, death in a needless famine, death in front of a firing squad, death working in a remote, frozen gulag while dressed in rags. Just death. Only death.

So yeah, fuck Kim Jong-un. Joke about his death all you want. He’s earned it.