Build The Wall

This piece about the future of high-end journalism, by the great Simon, is interesting. Wrong, in parts - particularly that NYT and WaPo should charge for everything on their site. That would rule out any possibility that someone might follow a link to the NYT or WaPo out of interest, and then subscribe. Self-defeating. Anyway, I have no time for this now, I have more dead trees to publish.

Gladwell on overconfidence

This week's New Yorker carries a Malcolm Gladwell piece about overconfidence - how it contributed to the collapse of Wall Street and everything else. So, the bankers were overconfident? No kidding. In another writer's hands, this might have been an investigation into ursine defecation patterns, but MG handles his topic with typical elegance. I liked this:

Of course, one reason that over-confidence is so difficult to eradicate from expert fields like finance is that, at least some of the time, it’s useful to be overconfident—or, more precisely, sometimes the only way to get out of the problems caused by overconfidence is to be even more overconfident.
From an individual perspective, it is hard to distinguish between the times when excessive optimism is good and the times when it isn’t. All that we can say unequivocally is that overconfidence is, as Wrangham puts it, “globally maladaptive.” When one opponent bluffs, he can score an easy victory. But when everyone bluffs, Wrangham writes, rivals end up “escalating conflicts that only one can win and suffering higher costs than they should if assessment were accurate.” The British didn’t just think the Turks would lose in Gallipoli; they thought that Belgium would prove to be an obstacle to Germany’s advance, and that the Russians would crush the Germans in the east. The French, for their part, planned to be at the Rhine within six weeks of the start of the war, while the Germans predicted that by that point they would be on the outskirts of Paris. Every side in the First World War was bluffing, with the resolve and skill that only the deluded are capable of, and the results, of course, were catastrophic.


Still, not classic Gladwell, and certainly not the wonderful underdog story from earlier in the year.

New Stuff

Towards the back of today's Culture section you will see a short review of a bad book.

Cartoon Despot

One man who takes a significant chunk of Newhouse's payroll is Michael Lewis (I read somewhere that he signed to Vanity Fair on a two-pieces-a-year contract worth six figures, which is decent work if you can get it). On the evidence of this month's Vanity Fair, he may be worth the money. His disturbing piece about the extraordinary risks taken on by AIG in the lead-up to the financial collapse introduces a new villain into our understanding of the apocalypse, a toy-throwing bully named Joe Cassano.

I particularly liked this section:

According to traders, Cassano was one of those people whose insecurities manifested themselves in a need for obedience and total control. “One day he came in and saw that someone had left the weights on the Smith machine, in the gym,” says a source in Connecticut. “He was literally walking around looking for people who looked buff, trying to find the guy who did it. He was screaming, ‘Who left the fucking weight on the fucking Smith machine? Who left the fucking weight on the fucking Smith machine?’” If that rings a bell it may be because you read The Caine Mutiny and recall Captain Queeg scouring the ship to find out who had stolen the strawberries. Even by the standards of Wall Street villains, whose character flaws wind up being exaggerated to fit the crime, Cassano was a cartoon despot.

Si Newhouse and the Conde Nasties

I missed this lovely piece by Steve Fishman, about Si Newhouse, head honcho at Conde Nast, and the future for his magazines. The whole thing's worth reading, but two money quotes:

"Si loves being surrounded by divas and egomaniacs," says one former editor. When one editor called another a "fucking bitch", Newhouse didn't mind. "Yes, but she's our bitch," he said.

And another, about David Remnick:

As we walk to a nearby diner in New York's West Village, Remnick checks in with his wife, greeting her in Russian - he won a Pulitzer for his book on the fall of the Soviet empire. Remnick is charming but wary, a working journalist who prefers the role of interviewer to interviewed. He reviews for me the differences between off-the-record and background conversations, and then we order salads. ("That's pretty gay," says Graydon Carter, editor of Vanity Fair, and patently not a salad eater, when I mention my meeting with Remnick.) Remnick salts his conversation with references, and they are all over the place, proudly high and low - JD Salinger; the baseball legend Mel Stottlemyre, Perry White, Clark Kent's editor at the Daily Planet, and Heraclitus, a Greek philosopher in the 6th century BC. Much like in his magazine, there's showy, apparently effortless cultural fluency, though part of the message seems to be: Can you keep up?

New stuff

Yesterday, in the Sunday Times, I interviewed the staggeringly-gifted Eleanor Catton and reviewed Buzz Aldrin's Magnificent Defecation.

Five Easy Pieces

This blog is about the dying art of the magazine feature.

I don't mean "at home with" interviews in Hello!, as wonderful as they are. I mean in-depth feature reporting, as practised most notably by several American magazines, such as Harper's, Esquire, GQ, the New Yorker, New York Magazine, and Vanity Fair, and also by my employer, the Sunday Times Magazine. It's the kind of journalism accountants don't like.

Here are five features I love. Read them, then we'll talk.

First, the original new journalism masterpiece, Frank Sinatra Has a Cold. Gay Talese wrote it for American Esquire in 1966, after a proposed interview had gone tits-up.

Then, go up and down on Nick Paumgarten's epic New Yorker piece about elevators.

Admire Sebastian Junger's cojones in Blood Oil, a profile of the Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta, which he wrote for Vanity Fair in 2007.

Watch Jennifer Senior bring Graydon Carter to a park bench in 2000, for New York Magazine.

And know hope, with Barack Obama and Larissa MacFarquhar, in the New Yorker.