The law of attraction to the law

For a short, wonderful time at the end of the last century, during the dot-com boom, before kids and homeownership, it looked like Andrea and I would be able to retire. What, I asked myself, would I do with my ample remaining time, once I’d had enough of sipping rum drinks on white-sand beaches? Surprisingly I had a single clear answer in mind: law school. I wanted not to practice law per se but to become a legal scholar so that when I wrote essays and gave lectures about the U.S. Constitution, which is what I saw myself spending my retirement doing — never mind why, I’m not entirely sure myself — I would know what the hell I was talking about. Plus, academic credentials would give people a reason to pay attention to my work.

It didn’t work out that way, which is probably just as well, because I know myself too well to believe I could devote the necessary focus to a single subject for the necessary length of time.

Only after I decided to study the law, then abandoned that idea, did I discover how strangely unoriginal that idea was among my cohort.

My closest friends in elementary school were David, Jon, and Sarah. At the time of Jon’s early death he was studying for the bar. When I reconnected with Sarah after a quarter century I discovered she was practicing law. David recently left his long-time job and is about to start law school himself (congratulations and good luck, David).

My closest friend in high school was Chuck. Upon graduating and moving to Israel, he too became a lawyer.

One of my two best friends in college, Bruce, after a somewhat dissipated lifestyle and careers as a computer programmer, saloon owner, and wrought-iron craftsman, is now also pursuing a law degree.

What gives? Apart from Chuck, I didn’t know about any of these career choices until after I’d decided (and then undecided) to go to law school myself; nor did any of them know that I had briefly considered it; and none of us was the type of person you might have expected to grow up to become a lawyer. So how did the same idea end up in all our brains? What is it about the law, or about my group of friends?

The next awesome

When you’re a kid, toys are awesome. Candy is awesome. Spinning around until you get dizzy and fall down is awesome. Mad Libs are awesome. For some unknown reason, stickers are awesome. A lot of things are awesome.

But you ain’t seen nothin’ yet, because a few years later you discover that girls [substitute your favorite gender as appropriate] are even more awesome, and kissing one? Forget about it. But hold on, because with a little luck, not too much later you discover something a lot more awesome even than kissing.

More new awesome things await you, even if they can’t quite match the awesomeness of sex (which is what I was alluding to elliptically above, for those who couldn’t quite catch that [but who can understand “alluding to elliptically”]). Earning your own money, that’s awesome. Moving into a place of your own — awesome. Married life — awesome.

But wait, the best is still to come, because you haven’t had kids yet, and when you do, oh my God the awesomeness. And then all their awesome things become awesome for you all over again.

So each stage of life has some new awesome thing to look forward to that wasn’t in the stage before — but what’s next for me? I’ve had candy, I’ve made myself dizzy, I’ve kissed (etc.) girls, earned money, had kids. Now what?

The obvious answer is grandchildren, but that’s a long way off. Up until now I’ve never had more than a few years to tire of one new awesome thing before discovering the next; but grandkids are probably a couple of decades away at least. Well, that’s the way life is: first it teaches you how to be patient and then it requires you to be. No wonder my folks kept pestering me about having children in the years before we finally did. I made them wait a long time, but if their reaction to becoming grandparents is any guide, I may still have some really substantial new awesomeness coming.

Play ball

It’s only natural that I hope my sons turn out like me in a lot of ways, and I’m pleased to say so far, so good on that front. They’re (ahem) bright, witty, thoughtful, and devastatingly handsome. And they love the original Star Trek.

It’s just as natural, I suppose, that I hope my sons will not be like me in certain respects.

For instance, as a boy I disliked team sports, though in summer camp I was often compelled to play softball. I feared the ball; I feared underperforming; and I feared the bees that were my constant companions among the clover in right field. These feelings, and popular stereotypes about (e.g.) obsessive Little League parents, eventually morphed into the conviction that sports were somehow beneath me, and I dedicated myself to the life of the mind. In retrospect I regretted it, of course, belatedly waking up to the benefits of being well-rounded in all ways, physically and mentally.

Over the past few months, Jonah (age 7) has shown the same hesitation about participating in team sports, even ones that his friends enjoy. But yesterday we discovered that our neighbor is the local Little League coach and that it wasn’t too late in the season for Jonah to join in baseball practice that very evening. Andrea pulled Jonah out of his afterschool program early, urging him to try baseball practice at least once. He dragged his feet but agreed. I met them at the field.

I’m thrilled to report that Jonah took to it like a fish to water. He got a warm reception from the coach and the other kids on the team. If the others had been much better than him, that might have queered things right away; but Jonah’s throwing arm is strong, he’s a fast runner, he even shows some hitting ability — and though he can’t catch (I blame myself), neither can any of the other kids!

He was issued his cap and his jersey — number 14. His first game is this Saturday. Go Rockies!

Now I’ve got to get myself a glove and join in practice from time to time. I feel the old anxieties bubbling up. Maybe it took having a son to finally overcome them.

Everything happens for a reason (including things that happen for no reason)

The new Battlestar Galactica, recently concluded, was a terrific show — a consistently gripping drama first, a science-fiction adventure (distantly) second. For four years it delivered countless memorable moments and performances; it caused us to mull deep questions; and it left us unable to wait for each new episode.

Last week the final episode of the series aired amid promises that the story’s mysteries and loose ends would be resolved; but that isn’t precisely what happened. For the finale, the show took a sharp turn from gripping to baffling.

As ever, the character aspect of the show was front and center for the final episode, but unlike the four years that preceded it, this time it came at the expense of the plot. Here’s what I wrote about it in an e-mail exchange with my friend Maggie:

Long ago on Usenet, the awesome Internet film critic Mark Leeper wrote, about Bonfire of the Vanities,

…a comedy that ends with some dignified character summing up the film and making a sermon for more “decency” at the end has a hard time being all good either. In the 1950s and 1960s a Spencer Tracy or perhaps a Henry Fonda could sermonize and it would work. Here it is like getting to the bottom of an ice cream sundae and finding a chunk of prime rib.

I had the reverse sensation on seeing the end of BSG. It was like enjoying a really juicy steak for four years and discovering, only after popping it in your mouth, that the last bite — the one you wanted most to savor — is made of cotton candy.

Her reaction was stronger, she replied; she felt betrayed. So I composed the reply that follows — which will make sense only if you’ve seen the series, and of course it includes spoilers.

Continue reading “Everything happens for a reason (including things that happen for no reason)”

Put on a happy face

Archer’s fifth birthday is coming up and it’s time again for a clever birthday party invitation.

Archer has a sunny personality and a very distinctive smile, and so the theme for this year’s party is smiles! For his invitation we printed out life-sized pictures of his smiling face, cut out eye holes, pasted a stick at the bottom to make it into a mask, and affixed a message to the reverse with the invitation details and saying, “Put on a happy face!”

Kernel of truth

Yesterday I received a link — buried at the end of a long chain of e-mail forwards all saying variants of, “Wow, this is scary!” — to a video that depicted groups of people using stray microwaves from their cell phones to cause popcorn kernels to pop.

In the video, three or four phones are placed on a table in a ring around a few popcorn kernels, and then someone dials each of the phones to cause them to ring. Within a couple of seconds the kernels start to pop.

The sender who forwarded it to me asked if I knew whether this was for real.

My reply asked the sender to consider the power available to a cell phone versus the power available to a microwave oven. A microwave oven draws 15 amps of current from the household mains, producing hundreds of watts of focused microwave energy with the specific purpose of heating up food placed in the target area — and even so, it takes at least 30 seconds of exposure for the first kernel to pop. A cell phone, by contrast, houses a battery rated in milliamp-hours, with a typical one holding 1500 milliamp-hours of energy. This means it can draw 1 milliamp for 1500 hours, or 1500 milliamps (1.5 amps) for one hour, and so on. If a cell phone tried to draw 15 amps from such a battery, then (apart from the phone melting) the battery would be depleted in 1/10 of an hour — six minutes. Clearly cell phones do not draw 15 amps, but even if they did, they wouldn’t convert nearly as much of that energy into microwaves as microwave ovens do; and even if they did that, the microwave energy wouldn’t be focused the way it is in a microwave oven. Yet the video depicts the first kernel popping within about three seconds.

If that much microwave energy really were reaching the popcorn kernels, we’d also be seeing the other effects of powerful microwaves on objects in the immediate vicinity. For example, we’d see sparks and electrical arcing from metal objects, including the cell phones themselves. But we don’t.

Finally, why would a ringing cell phone cause popcorn to pop? To ring, a cell phone merely has to receive an “incoming-call” signal from a cell tower. The phone doesn’t begin transmitting any appreciable amount of power until after you answer it and begin speaking!

At this writing, the video in question has a supposed 11,031,929 views. When I think of all the people across the Internet who are now arranging their cell phones in rings around a handful of popcorn kernels, I despair.

Dark Knighty-night

Many nights at lights-out, my kids will ask me to tell them a story. Sometimes I relate a bit of science or history; sometimes it’s something autobiographical; and sometimes I just make up a story they’ll like.

Last night I was too sleepy to do any of those, but they asked, so I started giving my usual cop-out spiel:

“Once upon a time, there were two boys, Jonah and Archer, who were so sleepy that they snuggled under their blankets…”

but Archer said, “No! Not about us!”

so I said, “Once upon a time, there was a dad who was so sleepy…”

but Archer said, “No!”

so I said, “Once upon a time, there was a grandpa who lived far away…”

but Archer said, “No! No Glicksteins! Tell a superhero story!”

So I thought a moment and said, “Once upon a time, Batman wanted some ice cream.”

Archer, knowing my pacifist tendencies in storytelling, said, “No, with fighting!”

So I said, “Hold your horses. How do you know there’s not going to be fighting in this story?” I continued, “Batman went to the ice cream store and said” — and here I put on my best iron-willed, tortured, costumed-vigilante voice — “‘One scoop of chocolate, please.’ The man behind the counter said, ‘I’m sorry, Batman, but we’re out of chocolate.’ So… Batman fought with the man behind the counter!”

Archer said, “No! Batman wouldn’t fight with the ice cream man!”

I said, “You’re right. OK: once upon a time, Batman wanted some ice cream. So he went to the ice cream store and said, ‘One scoop of chocolate, please.’ But the man behind the counter said, ‘I’m sorry, Batman, but I just sold the last scoop of chocolate to Spider-Man over there.’ So… Batman fought with Spider-Man!”

At this point, Jonah, who’d been listening in quiet amusement, chimed in, “But Batman is DC and Spider-Man is Marvel!” Which impressed the hell out of me.

So I said, “You’re right! So there could never be a Batman/Spider-Man crossover, could there? OK… Once upon a time, Spider-Man wanted some ice cream. So he went to the ice cream store and said, ‘One scoop of chocolate, please. No, wait: vanilla. Oh hold on: strawberry. No, rocky road!’ The man behind the counter started to get impatient. ‘Please make your selection, sir,’ he said. So Spider-Man said, ‘I really want cookies and cream. Wait, I mean pralines and cream! Ooh, maybe I should get some sherbet instead. Lemon — no, orange! Wait, rainbow! Eh… maybe I should stick with chocolate…’ Now the man behind the counter wasn’t just impatient, he was angry. His skin turned green, and he got really big and burst out of his shirt — he was the Incredible Hulk! And he fought with Spider-Man.”

Archer: “They wouldn’t fight. They’re both good guys! They’re on the same team!”

Me: “Maybe it wasn’t really Spider-Man. Maybe it was one of those bad guys who can make himself look like someone else.”

Jonah: “Like Clayface!”

Me: “But he’s DC!”

Jonah: “Oh yeah…”

Honestly, it’s a wonder those kids ever get to sleep.

Darnedest candor

Over dinner the other night, Andrea and I were gushing to our kids about how wonderful they are. “We’re so proud of you guys,” we told them. “You’re smart, you’re funny, you’re polite, you’re thoughtful. We’re very lucky to have two such wonderful boys.” They seemed indifferent to our praise, so, curious to know how and whether they valued their own attributes, I turned first to Archer and asked, “What’s your favorite thing about yourself?”

It took him just a beat to answer definitively, “My wiener.”

Hey, he’s only saying what the rest of us are thinking.

Rental mentality

American capitalism is broken, and in the race to fix it there is a lot of prognosticating about what will work, what won’t, and what things will look like after this crisis passes. One of the best things I’ve read in the latter category is Richard Florida’s article, “How the Crash Will Reshape America,” in the March 2009 issue of The Atlantic Monthly.

It’s a very long, in-depth analysis and rewards a full, careful reading; but since I suspect you’re not going to do that, let me sum up. Most of the article argues that industrial centers like Detroit are doomed in the long run, and that population-dense areas with diverse economies, like New York, will thrive, based on a notion of the “velocity of ideas” that such places generate, which may sound a little vague but rings true for me.

The article holds up Pittsburgh as a model for successfully managing the transition from a large industrial economy to a smaller idea-based one, and it wraps up with some prescriptions for managing this crisis to a comparatively soft landing. The most compelling suggestion the author makes is for “the removal of homeownership from its long-privileged place at the center of the U.S. economy.” Its benefits aside, homeownership creates economic ills of various kinds: for example, it anchors people to a region that may be in economic decline, producing a “creeping rigidity in the labor market,” when those people ought to be mobile and able to go where the work is. Further, government incentives encouraging homeownership distort demand, producing, for example, speculative bubbles of the kind we’ve just seen pop.

Richard Florida would rather see government policies favoring property rental, and calls the current tidal wave of foreclosures an opportunity: banks could be required to rent a foreclosed home to the erstwhile owners at the prevailing market rate (typically much less than a mortgage payment). This would achieve the goal of keeping families from ending up on the street, in a less artificial way than prohibiting foreclosures would. Just as importantly, it provides a basis for valuing some of those “toxic assets” you’ve heard so much about.

Digression: a big part of the problem in the financial world right now is that years of bad lending decisions have led banks to accumulate a lot of worthless assets on their books — worthless in the literal market sense that no one, no one wants to buy them at any price. In the absence of at least a potential buyer, it is literally impossible to compute a value for an asset, and in the absence of some way to place a value on those assets, banks will sooner or later be forced to “write them down” — to admit they’re worthless and that the bank as a whole is worth a lot less than before. If the bank’s assets shrink enough, its liabilities may overwhelm it, at which point it becomes insolvent.

This is one reason why compelling banks to turn foreclosed homes into rental properties is so attractive: in many cases it guarantees a stream of rental income from the property, meaning that the property now has a non-zero value even in a glutted real-estate market where the house itself can’t be sold.

I am a somewhat reluctant homeowner. Having grown up in New York City, renting was always the norm, and I never felt the urge to own my own home. But after a few sour landlord-tenant episodes, and after we made some money in the dot-com boom, and after our first son was born, Andrea got the homeowning bug and I went along — mainly because, even though renting had always been the norm, there was always lip service paid to the unalloyed good of property ownership.

I cottoned at once to Florida’s repudiation of this idea, but if we’re going to transform ourselves from a nation of hopeful homeowners to one of eager renters, there are some things about rental that we’ll have to make less painful. Here’s a short list of rental pain points that I’d want addressed if I were going to take that step myself:

  • Rent control (though unfortunately, when economists agree, the thing they agree about the most is that rent control is bad)
  • Ample notice of lease non-renewal or significant changes in lease terms
  • Authority to hire approved vendors for basic maintenance

Since I would expect to move more often as a renter, I’d also want a more robust and economical network of storage and moving services than exists today; but in a successful transition to the rental-oriented new-urban utopia of tomorrow that should follow naturally. I can’t wait.

Citizen George

Recently on the “parents” e-mail list at work, someone asked whether Hearst Castle would make a good trip for a 12-year-old, or whether they’d find it boring. Here’s what I wrote in response about how I’d make Hearst Castle interesting to a pre-teen.

Once upon a time there was a young filmmaker named George Lucas. Everyone thought he was a little weird, but one day he had a great idea. No one believed it could work, and he nearly killed himself making it a reality, but in the end he had Star Wars and he changed the world, and made himself rich.

What could he do with all his money? He could build a mecca for rebel filmmakers, that’s what, away from the suits and the beancounters of L.A. And so George began building Skywalker Ranch. But it was expensive, and he needed more money, so he hired some folks to make a new Star Wars movie. He hired some other folks to license Star Wars merchandise. And he hired still more folks to sell his splendid movie-production services to other filmmakers. He grew richer and richer, and built Skywalker Ranch bigger and bigger.

By now many years had passed. George Lucas was no longer young. His wife had left him. His friends, the other rebel filmmakers he’d hoped to bring into his fold, were scattered to the four winds, starting their own companies, making their own success. What could he do?

George could think of only one answer: get richer still. Build his empire bigger yet. He made more Star Wars movies! He took over the Presidio! He marketed cartoonish violence with no coherent story logic to young children! And he grew even more wealthy, but no less alone and unfulfilled. And he had become the very type of corporate executive whose influence he once sought to escape.

Some dark night in his cavernous mansion he will whisper the nickname of his beloved childhood hot rod, which no one will be around to hear, and expire.

William Randolph Hearst? He was the George Lucas of his day.

Update [15 June 2009]: George Lucas’ design for new building is twin of Hearst Castle centerpiece. Whoa.