Farewell, Edward M. Kennedy

There probably will never be another American family like the Kennedys, if for no other reason, almost no one has nine children anymore. But it's also increasingly rare that wealthy families decide to devote their entire brood to public service, or care about the less fortunate in a profound, lasting way; to think Eunice Kennedy Shriver, who died two weeks ago, was relatively little known in the public mind, yet founded the Special Olympics. (Obviously, it helps to make millions upon millions before sending one's children off to public service.)

Kennedy's death is profound because he embodies an unimaginably complex mix of enormous legislative achievement, glamorous wealth, personal tragedy and personal idiocy in a way that few can ever hope to replicate. Watching people lined up for half a mile outside the JFK Library makes me cry. What is more Boston than a moment of silence for a Kennedy before a Sawx game? Kennedy is further proof that: Boston Is A Brotherhood.

Believe The Hype

There's something thrilling just about walking up three flights to the High Line, New York's newest park. Usually, climbing stairs happens inside or is at least done to an enclosed destination, such as an elevated subway line. But not here. Everything is open; and when I entered, a breeze picked up, and I found my heart beating a little faster with anticipation, like when an amusement park ride reaches a scary moment.

Strangely enough, the High Line is a slightly intimidating park. It's a bit out of the way-- it now starts at the intersection of Gansevoort and Washington streets and heads north to 20th Street and 10th Avenue; eventually, it will reach 34rd Street. It takes some background knowledge to know where the entrances are -- unlike, say Central Park, with its large and open arms -- suggesting a nightclub rather than park. It's downtown, meaning there are many more well-dressed hipsters walking the trail than you find at other parks (though there are families and tourists too). It's publicly owned, but was a chic philanthropic cause among New York's finance and media circles. (Barry Diller and his wife, Diane von Furstenberg, and Philip Falcone and his wife are the two biggest donors. The largest amount of staff is in the fundraising department.) It has its own sleek logo.

So what. Everything else about the trail more than overcomes this. The benches, which rise out of the ground as cantilevered stone and wood, and grass stalks, some of which poke out of slits in the walkway as though they're weeds, are playful without being annoyingly cheeky. There are a surprising number of nooks for something not terribly wide or long, so you don't believe you've experienced the whole thing after one walk. The faux-beach, wooden lounge chairs are a great play on city sitting options, a small part of what makes the High Line so much fun: Its ability to mix settings and the noisily urban and the quietly private over and over again.

Obviously, the High Line is a park, so it's removed from the general froth of every Manhattan block. But it's also only three stories above the street -- not in its own separate area -- so New York, the country's most vertical city, keeps happening around you every step of the away. Fashion billboards are at eye level. Cabs, restaurants, living rooms and cubicles are within view. But then there are the grasses and other vegetation not found anywhere else in the city. Then there are the benches and chairs, where you can sit, quietly converse and relax. And it's a trail, meaning people are leisurely walking, rather than rushing past. (I was there on a cloudy Saturday morning, so perhaps in attractive weather, the High Line is thronged and annoying.) But then there's all the people-watching, a defining feature of city life. There are even depressed bleachers with a wall consisting of a glass pane at the bottom, which don't seem to have any function except to allow you to watch others.

The High Line is never static; your experience constantly shifts under your feet. It provides that most alluring of perspectives -- "What does this street look like 30 feet higher?" It never allows you to be fully at ease, which is perhaps what an urban park should be.

(Photos are my own; taken via cell phone.)

Update: Serge Kovalevski, in yesterday's Times, throws a little, deserved jab at the High Line, questioning the salary and consulting fees it pays its foundation's president while the organization seeks to fund the park partially via a neighborhood improvement district. Why is the story deserved even when it's premise is thinner than similar ones usually are? Because everyone's cage should be rattled once in awhile.

Thank You, 98.5 FM

Upon CBS Radio's announcement last month that it was turning 98.5 FM into a sports-talk radio station in Boston, Bill Simmons gleefully wrote on his Twitter page about the possible impending demise of WEEI, the market's dominant and generally putrid sports station. He compared WEEI to the Soviet Union circa 1986, seemingly very strong but actually capable of imploding. WEEI certainly is a much smaller institution than the USSR, but, as much as I like the idea, I'm not ready to write the station's obituary.

Nonetheless, from the small portions I've heard so far on 98.5, it's wonderful to have the competition. The mid-afternoon show hosted by Michael Felger and Tony Massarotti is wonderful: They have a great repartee, developed from their years together writing for the Herald, are knowledgable about all of Boston's sports teams, make interesting comments and, most importantly, let each other and callers finish their points without interrupting at the first word they disagree with. The nighttime host, Damon Amendolara, who I've never heard of before, is a reasoned, patient person. (The midday hosts, however, are acerbic and hyperbolic.) Overall, it's a pleasure to listen.

Who would've thought? There might be an opening in the market for well-informed, temperate radio where people talk to each other, rather than scream over each other? No way. If the station fails, as previous sports-talk competitors have in Boston, it might be proof that the broader populace doesn't like to think. Though this is the populace within sports-talk radio, so it's certainly possible they don't like to think. Few of WEEI's hosts do.

Update: Driving to New York this afternoon, I had the pleasure of listening to WFAN's star host, Mike Francesa. He understands multiple perspectives, refrains from vilifying athletes and makes good, overlooked points, such as today, when he highlighted Joe Mauer, the Minnesota Twins catcher in the midst of one of baseball's best years ever. Few on the East Coast realize this, including myself before today, but Francesa does. He even lets callers make their comments, but doesn't give them too much time, which is when they wander into neverland.

Cornell Essay, March 2009

Today's broadcast of the NPR show "On The Media" compiled its recent pieces about the Internet's broad effects on information consumption and society. Inspired by how I thought it affirmed several of my thoughts about how we use the Internet (which is ironic considering how I address below that topic of affirmation), I decided to post an essay I wrote in March for a scholarship application at Cornell. The application's directions were open-ended, so I launched into one of my favorite topics.

For several reasons, I didn't publicize it until now. Consider it my equivalent of the rehashes that all media outlets use through the summer doldrums (not that I'm out of ideas for posts). Oh, and I wasn't awarded the scholarship. Here's the essay:

"The infinite space of the Internet is intimidating. Type a search term into Google and millions of results return in one-tenth of a second. When I write a comment at the bottom of a news story or post a new entry on my blog, I might be planting my rhetorical flag in cyberspace, but I also might be shooting an arrow into the darkness, never to hit a target, never to make an impact.

"The Internet is championed as the great democratization of information. It makes previously unimaginable amounts of content available to everyone. It educates everyone and levels the playing field by making policy, politics, scientific research, financial data and opinion available for all to see. But is there a point where it all becomes too much information?

"As happens with all consumer products, the Internet has intended and unintended effects. In the fields of academics, arts, politics and policy, the Internet exposes people's work to audiences whose size and reach was once thought impossible. For example, it gives unheralded art and its practitioners' careers oxygen they probably deserve. Nonetheless, the effect that troubles me the most is how the Internet fragments thought and community by creating an ever-expanding database of niche publications and discussions that are delicately crafted to find the most specific of demographics. There's something for everyone out there in cyberspace and yet, we only seem to be finding the content that confirms what we already know.

"After a few years working in the journalism business, I can point most readily to the news phenomena the Internet has created. At best, there is Politico, which features excellent reporting and analysis, but rarely pokes its head outside of the "Swamp," aka Washington, D.C., to engage in something broader that resonates with the rest of America. At worst, there are the Huffington Post and the Drudge Report, whose undercurrent of bias is never far from the surface and whose writers never seem terribly interesting in heading to the other side of the partisan field to see if they have anything in common with the other team.

"Content such as these publications only strengthens the echo chamber the Internet was supposed to demolish. It's become quite a cacophonous room at that, considering how there's space for everyone and everything online. Rather than use search engines to find what is new and curious, we settle for what we already know. We nod our heads in affirmation -- 'How could we be so right again and they so wrong?' -- when maybe we should search for something that furrows our eyebrows in puzzlement and provokes thought for the rest of the day.

"Postmodernism, among all its definitions, teachers that there is no omniscient voice and no way to wrap our arms around all of a topic's discourse. The Internet confirms this idea. To yearn for some sort of central repository of thought we can all access via the Internet is outmoded and unproductive. However, the hyper-proliferation of niche sites is also unproductive. In a time where our country's leader and much of the public say they want to embark on an era of post-partisanship, why does so much on the Internet seem to separate us in our preferred corners and cliques? Terry Teachout, the arts critic for the Wall Street Journal and Commentary magazine, often writes about how the explosion of cable television and the Internet has eroded culture's middelbrow. Where one was once able to find great art broadcast to the masses, now everyone turns on his own channel, crafted just so, according to his tastes. The same cannot happen when it comes to public discussion. We must push ourselves to remain engaged with everyone on the Internet and avoid using it as a misguided tool that confirms the correctness of our opinions and hardens the divides among communities."

Cars Are The New Social Security?

There's plenty to dislike about "Cash For Clunkers," the federal program that gives new car buyers up to a $4,500 rebate as long as the new car is marginally more fuel-efficient than the old one. Aesthetically, the phrase is irritating, cooked up by Democratic strategists and tested to death in focus groups. Philosophically, the program misses the mark on several levels.

Sure, the first week of the program, in late July, is responsible for the best sales month the car industry has seen in 11 months, but the impact is artificially inflated. The rebate compresses sales that were at least likely to happen at some point into a small time frame. That aids the Obama administration, which will be able to point to an improved third-quarter GDP as another sign of the national economy's recovery, but won't help sales afterward. After the program expires, sales will probably drop significantly. The only purchases that weren't going to happen eventually are probably by people wealthy enough to quickly buy a new car when the government offers a rebate; they were probably driving newer, more expensive cars than the ones this program is supposed to target. The trade-in program rearranges the pie; it doesn't expand it.

Because of the potential marginal differences in fuel-economy and the program's brief time frame, the environmental effectiveness isn't as deep as it could be. If federal legislators want to coax U.S. car owners to rid themselves of their inefficient cars as one way to tackle environmental pollution and climate change, the best, longest-lasting way to do is raising the federal gasoline tax.

Doing so automatically creates the stable market parameters car makers need to dive into efficient-car production. The tax doesn't have to jump immediately to a certain, intimidating, politically untenable point either. It can increase two cents per gallon per month over a two-year period. People won't notice. Considering oil is a volatile commodity that itself can help produce a recession, the tax can even be partially relaxed when per-barrel prices are astronomically high. In the 21st century, taxes have strictly become a means of raising money to pay for government, instead of also being a mechanism to promote good behavior and dissuade bad behavior. Why can't it include the latter too?

Congress' decision last week, at the Obama administration's urging, to triple the trade-in program's funding from $1 billion to $3 billion creates an alarmingly dangerous precedent. Legislators added the money because extraordinary demand exhausted the $1 billion much quicker than expected. Well, of course it was used quickly. Who doesn't want the government to subsidize the purchase of a new car?

By adding so much more money, Congress creates a precedent for the next time the money is used and car dealers and buyers clamor for even more. Car dealers are a more powerful constituency than one would expect because there are many in every congressional district and they represent some form of down-home, nostalgic Americana. If their industry associations believe business will tank once the program ends, they will lobby forcefully to extend it again. The program's end-date and allocation of money were already arbitrary, making them easy to funge again.

Now that the government is subsidizing car sales, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., is correct to say, What's next? Socks? Refrigerators? Flat-panel TVs? The financial system had to be rescued to prevent the apocalypse and I'll grudgingly say the same about GM and Chrysler because the unemployment rolls would've swelled to a crushing level if both died. But that doesn't mean car purchases are the logical next step. Federal subsidies should exist for programs that benefit the neediest and broadest swaths of the population -- Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, heating oil, housing. Industrial policy doesn't qualify.

Minor Note on Nicholson Baker's Piece in The New Yorker

In his essay in last week's New Yorker, the author Nicholson Baker sure goes out of his way to criticize the Kindle. To think, the Kindle doesn't properly render the diagrams from the award-winning medical textbook "Imaging in Oncology." The horror! (Baker has legitimate criticisms as well, such as the screen's color, its occasionally fading clarity and the absence of some literary classics from its catalogue.)

But, as noted in these pages before, Baker's disgruntlement with the Kindle seems valid. I've yet to have the chance to use a Kindle, but the idea of making the act of reading, particularly serious reading, an all-electronic affair strikes me as something that compromises the act of reading. The concentration and devotion reading requires directly contradict the flightiness computer screens engender. It's not terribly surprising that public intellectuals such as Baker dislike (and are threatened by) the Kindle, but that doesn't mean they're wrong.

The often militant commentators of the new-media cognoscenti argue the research, reporting, writing and consuming developed in print can be sustained in a purely online format. There are several examples establishing themselves that proves this, but I'm still waiting for the convincing argument that the online life is inherently better than the paper one.

Update: Baker sure seems to have spent handsomely to prove his point, New York Magazine details here, though he refutes the dollar figures in the comment section.

Further Update: Michael Sokolove has a very well-written elegiac story in last Sunday's Times Magazine about the impending demise of Philadelphia's two daily papers, which are owned by the same bankrupt company. As odd of a business plan it is to have one company own a city's broadsheet and tabloid, Sokolove makes a compelling case for why newspapers need to be saved, somehow, by the market. It's worth reading in full.

Everyone Who Pretended To Like Me Is Gone

For the first time in my life, I've quit. Smart, likable, mildly athletic kid in high school; graduate with high honors at one of the country's most prestigious colleges; reporter at the MetroWest Daily News. Now, the Daily News is a wonderful place, as are nearly all of its people, but it's not sitting at the top of the class. In fact, while I think I was an above-average reporter, I certainly didn't do anything to distinguish myself from the other talented reporters and writers there.

So I looked around at every newspaper in the country, hemorrhaging revenue, staff and money; the $50,000 salary you earn through middle age unless you break through to the truly top echelon; the strange hours; and strange, ceaseless drumbeat of pressure that comes when your day isn't over until you've filed your stories, and decided I wanted out. Hopefully urban planning is as interesting I've convinced myself it is. I like to think it has a broader impact on the way we live and the social good -- whatever that means -- than 21st-century journalism does.

My friends say I've made the right decision. Semi-surprisingly, most of my co-workers did too. Newsrooms breed cynical, if not curmudgeonly, spirits (which the world needs in doses), so perhaps everyone there looks around too and can't help but apply the cynicism to themselves. Either way, I'm going to miss nearly every reporter and editor I've worked with, and the buzz that runs through my ears when I know I have a good story. That's something innate I don't think I'll ever cleanse from my daily life, and makes quitting hard. I have an odd feeling in my stomach as I compose this post.

At least I'm not going into public relations, as so many former reporters, too numerous and detestable to name, have. Besides, they've all typed their names into their search engines as "Google News Alerts," so if I actually listed my "favorites" they'd discover my measly blog and be offended that a reporter who they may have spoken to once was quietly holding a grudge and decided to defame them.

Thanks to the Walkmen for the post's title. I recently started saying the phrase to myself a lot, convincing myself it's some nice summary on an office's social environment.