“…a few biologically stupid comments…”

In yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, there was a story about the the Republican National Committee meeting in Hollywood to discuss how they can turn things around in national elections. In general, many of these GOP bureaucrats say they aren’t going to shift any policy positions, but instead work on their rhetoric. Chairman Reince Priebus said his job was to communicate the party’s positions, “draped in grace and respect.” (As an aside, I’m not it’s possible to sound respectful to gays while calling for constitutional amendments preventing gays from marrying, no matter how many niceties you use.)

But the hilarious bit was this quote right after that, again from Priebus, who said, “However, I know we’ve also had a few biologically stupid comments that were made in 2012 that helped, unfortunately, build a narrative and caricature that wasn’t true.”

“Biologically stupid comments.” What does that mean? Is it s reference to Todd Akin who said while running for senate from Missouri, “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down.” That seems a biological gaff. Or the multiple GOP presidential candidates who insisted being gay was a choice—not to mention Michelle Bachman’s co-ownership of a clinic offering “reparative therapy”? That seems biologically ill-informed. 

Or, maybe the chairman actually grasps that GOP candidates’ are often caught talking out of their ass.

Crossing at Shibuya Station, Tokyo

Cherry Blossoms (Sakura) at Aoyama Cemetery, Tokyo

Hokan-ji temple in Kyoto, Japan

Fushimi Inari Shrine, outside Kyoto Japan

Photo from Sky Tree Tower, Tokyo

Mindful Management →

My new article on how and why companies are embracing meditation to train better leaders, one breath at a time from the Feb. 24 edition of the Los Angeles Times.

Double features in nonfiction writing

I’ve been thinking recently about two pairs of magazine articles that weren’t deliberately paired, but that complement each other. One answers questions the other raises. Or they open a space between them.

The first two are on child pornography, not a topic one generally finds appealing. But Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker article, “The Science of Sex Abuse” traces how a man convicted of possessing child porn is held beyond his prison term in a Kafka-esque scenario called—I’m not making this up—”therapeutic confinement.” The whole thing could be terrifically distasteful, but Aviv positions her story so neutrally that you’re left equally horrified by the perversion of the crime and the perversion of the punishment. 

The other article is Emily Bazelon’s “The Price of a Stolen Childhood,” From the Jan. 24 New York Times Magazine. It’s about a legal tactic that has victims of child porn seeking restitution—monetary payments—from the men convicted of possessing their photos. It adds the victims and lawyers to the story, extends their part of this horrible narrative years out from the initial crime, much like the New Yorker piece does for the perpetrator. 

Likewise, when I read this recent NYT op-ed, “The Great Gerrymander of 2012” by Sam Wang (founder of the Princeton Election Consortium), it landed on my consciousness like the long-awaited resolution to the election cliffhanger questions raised by “The League of Dangerous Mapmakers” in the October issue of The Atlantic.  The latter article focused on congressional redistricting efforts and one consultant in particular, Tom Hofeller, at work in North Carolina. Hofeller’s motto for redistricting is to follow the law and not overreach. 

And here’s the result — a close election that gave 9 of 13 North Carolina Congressional seats to republicans:

“In North Carolina, where the two-party House vote was 51 percent Democratic, 49 percent Republican, the average simulated delegation was seven Democrats and six Republicans. The actual outcome? Four Democrats, nine Republicans — a split that occurred in less than 1 percent of simulations. If districts were drawn fairly, this lopsided discrepancy would hardly ever occur.”

Newspapers and magazines often create “series” or package stories together, but they rarely have the cumulative effect of these two double-features. There are several very smart web sties that point reader to smart journalism—Longform.org is a favorite. I wonder if they’d like to take up curating nonfiction double-features, too.

Look back upstream. If you have come to your planned ending and it doesn’t seem to be working, run you eye up the page and the page before that. You may see that your best ending is somewhere in there, that you were finished before you thought you were.

— John McPhee
“Structure”
The New Yorker, Jan. 14, 2013

The page of swords, a.k.a. my intern

I made a quip on Facebook some months back that my editing shop needed an intern. Lo and behold the gods of small business were listening, because earlier this summer my friend Bob Vos recommended to me a college student he knew, Madeline, the daughter of a musician he carpools with.

I was wary. Not of Madeline specifically, but about whether I’d have enough work for an intern to do, or—let’s be honest here on the “unedited” blog—whether I was too much of a control freak to take advantage of the extra help. Still, I worked out a deal with Madeline to come to my home office 12 hours a week for most of the summer.

It was terrific. Plenty of the work I had her do was tedious: it is no fun to format, alphabetize, and double-check the spelling of 90 people’s names. But it needed to be done, and she did it is without complaint or error. I had her cross-check fixes that we sent to designers to make sure that each was completed as requested. She researched e-mail marketing systems. She transformed a nonprofit’s disorganized materials into a sharp two-page fact sheet that the group can send to potential donors. 

I hope Madeline left with some reasonably valuable knowledge. I introduced her to proofreading marks. I also made her complete weekly invoices for her hours. After all, the most important part about being a writer, or editor, or business owner is knowing how to get paid.

Laying down the law on lying down in yoga class

I returned to my Wednesday yoga class today for the first time in some months. I’ve been embarrassed to show my face there for a while. Well, ever since I told the teacher he was misusing the word “lay.”

Lie and lay is a pet peeve of mine, and so it is unfortunate for me that I take so many yoga classes. Because I think I can scientifically establish that 75 percent of yoga instructors don’t know lie from lay. Just as I get all sweaty and limber, I get yanked right out of my yoga zone when a teacher says, “OK, everyone, lay down.” My uptight editor brain overtakes my chill yoga brain and screams, “Lie down, you fool! Lie! Lie!”

In my defense, I have never screamed that aloud. But I really like this $5 lunchtime class at my local yoga studio. I can walk there. It’s cheap. This teacher has a very pleasant voice — truly, the most important aspect of a yoga teacher — and describes the internal mechanics of poses as well as anyone I’ve studied with during the past eight years. So after a year or so, I can no longer allow him to continue telling class after class to “lay down.”

There are a lot of reasons that lay and lie confound us, the primary one being that lay is the past tense of lie. I know. It is confusing. And many of you are thinking: wait, isn’t “laid” the past tense…

No. Bear with me. And I’ll explain this one key thing to you, just like I did to Billy the yoga teacher. Lie—when it means “to recline” not “to tell an untruth” — is like sit. Lay is like sat. Handy, that. So if you are confused, ask yourself, would I say sit or sat? I sat around all day. I lay around all day. Please sit still. Please lie still. Get it?

But…but… but… don’t you “lay things down?” Yes, but in that case look at your dictionary and it will say “[with obj.],” and that means lay needs an object. For instance, “Lay down the law.” Or, “Lay that book on the table.” Even “Now I lay me down to sleep.” And when Bob Dylan sings, “Lay, lady, lay… lay across my big brass bed,” he is wrong, wrong, and wrong.

I can’t do anything about Bob Dylan. But I did break down and tell Billy the yoga teacher that the phrase he should use was “lie down” or “lie back.” That was months ago. But when I saw him today, the first thing he said was, ”I’ve been thinking of you every time I say that.” And I blushed.

But I’ll tell you this: He got it right. And I got an hour of yoga uninterrupted by my editor brain.

‘The Earth cooled…’ and other bad places to begin your story

So my friend Kathleen, who is a professional jazz singer and vocal teacher, discovered country music and the results are striking. She and her songwriting partner formed a band called Fleeting Heart. Album to come soon.

Amy and I went to see Fleeting Heart do a short set at a little “hickster” joint in Echo Park this week, and they were fantastic live. The whole room fell silent, totally absorbed by their first three songs, including this one.

E-book price fixing and the agency model

So the DoJ fired a warning shot over the bows of book publishers, suggesting that they were colluding to fix prices for e-books. (If you didn’t, the WSJ has a clear story on the situation here. Link good for one week.) Buyers of e-books probably cheered. Why should we be paying $15 or more for a digital book?

Well, as The Guardian explained last year:

Most people instinctively feel that ebooks should be substantially cheaper than paper books, because an ebook is not physically “made”: there are no printing costs. But if, says [author Robert] Levine, the real value of a book resides in the “text itself”, then the delivery method shouldn’t much matter. The fixed costs – acquiring, editing, marketing – remain unchanged.

In truth, paper is cheap. So is printing and binding. The largest advantage to publishers about e-books is not that they don’t have to print them, but that they don’t have to store and ship them, or take them back as remainders.

So what’s this about price-fixing? It’s complicated, but the tale is essentially one of publishers squirming between two tech behemoths: Amazon and Apple. Amazon, eager to sell Kindles, would “buy” e-books from publishers, and then sell them below their wholesale price. You can see how really cheap e-books would make a voracious reader want a Kindle.

That spooked publishers, who didn’t like seeing their fresh-to-markets (essentially “hardback”) titles sold for mass-market paperback prices. But there was little they could do. If Amazon wanted to take a loss on every e-book it sold, that was their business.

Along comes Apple with its shiny new iPad. Apple offers book publishers more or less the same deal it offered music companies: we’ll sell your product and take a 30 percent cut. The difference here was the book publishers got to set their own prices. They liked that. (This is the “agency model.” Think of the reseller — Amazon, or the iBooks store — as an “agent” who gets a cut of the sale, like a real estate agent.)

The DoJ says that by imposing the agency-style payment system on other resellers (read: Amazon, but also Barnes and Noble) that they were colluding to raise prices.

I just looked at Amazon’s Kindle best-sellers. Jonathan Kellerman’s new “Victims” (Ballantine) is $14.99. William Landay’s new thriller “Defending Jacob” (Random House) is $12.99. “The Hunger Games” (Scholastic) and its sequels are selling for $5-$7. Prices drop the longer something is out… but isn’t that the same way with other media? One week a movie is $10 at the theater ($14 here in L.A.), and in a month, it’s at the $5 cinema, then a $3 DVD rental. Surely there is more price variation, especially over time, than the $.99 or $1.29 iTunes single.

I think Amazon is doing really innovative things with digital publishing, truly. But which is closer to oligopoly-style power over e-book sales — Amazon and Apple, or the five big book publishers who have to compete with dozens of smaller houses and an increasing number of self-publishing writers?

Book buyers may howl, but over the long term, an agency model actually aligns the interests of publishers and resellers—and maybe readers too. Both make the most money if they find the optimal price to move the most books.

What giving away news did to newspapers in two easy charts

My friend Wynne says that for so long newspapers made so much money that any dumb asshole could get rich owning one — and that that’s why so many dumb assholes own them.

Those days are over. This short piece from The Atlantic’s business writer Derek Thompson shows how print advertising and circulation fell off a cliff in the 2000s — and just how steep that cliff was. Interesting that the bright spot was the Wall Street Journal, which has kept its circulation up even when instituting a pay wall for online content. The NY Times finally got around to that about a year ago, and the LA Times started it’s pay-only system this week.

I suspect we’ll be seeing lots more pay for content on all sorts of web sites. I just had a chance to do some editing for a start-up company here in L.A. called MediaPass. (Note: the new Get Rauzi-improved words not online yet.) Their business is to sell subscriptions to any online content with just a bit of javascript code. It’s like AdSense for paid or premium content: you put the code on your page, and they collect all the revenue, take a cut, and send you monthly checks. The hurdle to pay walls has been expense, and that expense is now effectively gone.

Question is, when you stop giving your articles away for free, will subscriptions climb again? Or at least level off?