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Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives by Ruth W. Grant

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 12:00:02 +0000

Incentives can be found everywhere–in schools, businesses, factories, and government–influencing people’s choices about almost everything, from financial decisions and tobacco use to exercise and child rearing. So long as people have a choice, incentives seem innocuous. But Strings Attached demonstrates that when incentives are viewed as a kind of power rather than as a form of exchange, many ethical questions arise: How do incentives affect character and institutional culture? Can incentives be manipulative or exploitative, even if people are free to refuse them? What are the responsibilities of the powerful in using incentives? Ruth Grant shows that, like all other forms of power, incentives can be subject to abuse, and she identifies their legitimate and illegitimate uses.

Grant offers a history of the growth of incentives in early twentieth-century America, identifies standards for judging incentives, and examines incentives in four areas–plea bargaining, recruiting medical research subjects, International Monetary Fund loan conditions, and motivating students. In every case, the analysis of incentives in terms of power yields strikingly different and more complex judgments than an analysis that views incentives as trades, in which the desired behavior is freely exchanged for the incentives offered.

Challenging the role and function of incentives in a democracy, Strings Attached questions whether the penchant for constant incentivizing undermines active, autonomous citizenship. Readers of this book are sure to view the ethics of incentives in a new light.

About Ruth W. Grant

Ruth W. Grant is professor of political science and philosophy and a senior fellow of the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University. She is the author of “John Locke’s Liberalism” and “Hypocrisy and Integrity”.

Editorial Reviews

“Strings Attached offers a fascinating tour of the history, morality, and unintended consequences of the modern obsession with using incentives to change behavior. Exploring cases from plea bargaining in criminal courts to paying students to earn good grades, Grant compellingly argues that using material incentives to get people to do things they otherwise would not raises important and previously unexamined questions about ethics, power, and character.”–Lynn Stout, University of California, Los Angeles

“This remarkable book asks some deceptively simple questions: With what norms should we judge the use of incentives? How can we compare incentives to coercion and persuasion? With characteristically lucid prose and a productive blend of theory and case studies, Ruth Grant illuminates an often neglected arena of inquiry. At a time when philosophers advocate ‘libertarian paternalism’ as an alternative to coercion and governments deploy ‘conditional cash transfers’ as instruments of social policy, Grant’s reflections could hardly be more relevant.”–William Galston, The Brookings Institution

“Moving comfortably from Plato, modern philosophy, and organizational science to plea bargaining, medical research, and IMF loans, this impressive book lays bare some of the ethical complexities raised by the use of incentives in various social and political contexts. A comprehensive look at an underanalyzed topic, this book is a pleasure to read.”–Alan Wertheimer, National Institutes of Health

When Life Is a Bunch of Carrots

The New York Times Book Review – February 4, 2012 (Excerpt)

WHAT does it mean to treat human behavior as if everyone has a price? That’s the broad question animating “Strings Attached: Untangling the Ethics of Incentives” (Russell Sage Foundation and Princeton) by Ruth W. Grant.

When the government offers tax deductions for charitable donations, when a soup kitchen feeds the homeless on the condition that they attend church, or when the writer of a will attaches stipulations to a bequest — all these situations involve incentives.

Dr. Grant, a political science and philosophy professor and senior fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, says we tend to view such incentives as some form of voluntary trade. In fact, she says, they often indicate an imbalance of power, and thus raise ethical issues.

“How can legitimate uses of incentives be distinguished from illegitimate ones — bribery or blackmail, for example?” she asks. She puts forth three standards for evaluating incentives: legitimacy of purpose, the autonomy involved in choosing to accept an incentive, and the effect on the character of the parties involved.

She explains that the current notion of incentives emerged in three spheres in the early 20th century. The first was the young field of scientific management, in which Frederick Taylor experimented with paying workers by the task to increase productivity and reduce idleness. [Read the full article...]

Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World by Sam Sommers

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:43:12 +0000

An “entertaining and engaging” exploration of the invisible forces influencing your life-and how understanding them can improve everything you do.

The world around you is pulling your strings, shaping your innermost instincts and your most private thoughts. And you don’t even realize it.

Every day and in all walks of life, we overlook the enormous power of situations, of context in our lives. That’s a mistake, says Sam Sommers in his provocative new book. Just as a museum visitor neglects to notice the frames around paintings, so do people miss the influence of ordinary situations on the way they think and act. But frames- situations- do matter. Your experience viewing the paintings wouldn’t be the same without them. The same is true for human nature.

In Situations Matter, Sommers argues that by understanding the powerful influence that context has in our lives and using this knowledge to rethink how we see the world, we can be more effective at work, at home, and in daily interactions with others. He describes the pitfalls to avoid and offers insights into making better decisions and smarter observations about the world around us.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Sam Sommers

Sam Sommers is an award-winning teacher and researcher of social psychology at Tufts University outside Boston. His research specialties include how people think, communicate, and behave in diverse settings, as well as psychological perspectives on the U.S. legal system.

At Tufts Sommers is known for his engaging lecture style and has won multiple teaching awards, including being selected by the Student Senate as the Professor of the Year in 2009. (His wife would insist on mentioning that he was also voted by the student newspaper the “hottest” male professor on campus; however, being well-versed in the power of situations, he’d note that the honor had less to do with him than with the anything-but-fierce state of the competition.)

Sommers has given talks at dozens of colleges and universities, including Harvard, Yale, M.I.T., Dartmouth, Cornell, Emory, UMass, and Rutgers. His research has been featured by a wide range of media outlets, and he has testified as an expert witness in criminal trials in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Oregon.

In his free time, Sommers enjoys hanging out with his wife and two daughters, blogging on the Psychology Today website, batting lead-off for the vaunted Tufts Psychology summer softball team, and exerting more effort than he probably should editing Seinfeld and Daily Show clips for use in the classroom.

Editorial Reviews

“In this wonderful and witty book, Sam Sommers reveals one of the most important factors driving human nature. (Hint: Look around.) He demonstrates time and time again that who you are is shaped by where you are.” —Jonah Lehrer, author of How We Decide

“Understanding and appreciating the power of situations gives you a leg up in life, and Situations Matter is the best place to start investigating this challenge. It is excellent, entertaining reading for anyone interested in classic human questions about morality, conformity, and the real differences between men and women.” — Tyler Cowen, professor of economics, George Mason University, and author of Create Your Own Economy and The Great Stagnation

“It can be easy to overlook how ordinary situations shape behavior. It might seem like Sam Sommers is brilliant for choosing to write a book on this important topic, but he’d probably just explain that circumstance drove him to it. Still, we’re all lucky he did.” — Leonard Mlodinow, author of The Drunkard’s Walk and coauthor of The Grand Design

“Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World,” b y Sam Sommers

The Washington Post Book Review – February 3, 2012 (Excerpt)

Most of us consider ourselves to be objective, consistent people who make decisions that reflect our core principles, no matter what the situation. In “Situations Matter,” psychology professor Sam Sommers throws this common-sense notion out the window. Our environments are actually much more powerful than we think.

Statistics show that people are more likely to marry someone who lives in the same neighborhood than someone from farther away. And the idea that women are more nurturing and less aggressive by nature? An experiment that allowed women to anonymously blow their opponents away during video games showed that they were just as trigger-happy as the male participants. Our perceptions, both of ourselves and of the actions of others, are heavily influenced by context. We are, Sommers suggests, unconscious of the way that different scenarios can manipulate our seemingly objective understanding. [Read the full article...]

I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy by Lori Andrews

Wilfried F. Voss — Sat, 28 Jan 2012 12:52:24 +0000

BUY THE BOOK AT

Social networks are the defining cultural movement of our time, empowering us in constantly evolving ways. We can all now be reporters, alerting the world to breaking news of a natural disaster; we can participate in crowd-sourced scientific research; and we can become investigators, helping the police solve crimes. Social networks have even helped to bring down governments. But they have also greatly accelerated the erosion of our personal privacy rights, and any one of us could become the victim of shocking violations at any time. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest nation in the world; but while that nation appears to be a comforting small town, in which we socialize with our selective group of friends, it and the rest of the Web is actually a lawless frontier of hidden and unpredictable dangers. The same power of information that can topple governments can destroy a person’s career or marriage.

As leading expert on social networks and privacy Lori Andrews shows, through groundbreaking in-depth research and a host of stunning stories of abuses, as we work and chat and shop and date (and even sometimes have sex) over the Web, we are opening ourselves up to increasingly intrusive, relentless, and anonymous surveillance—by employers, schools, lawyers, the police, and aggressive data aggregator services that compile an astonishing amount of information about us and sell it to any and all takers.

She reveals the myriad ever more sophisticated techniques being used to track us and discloses how routinely colleges and employers reject applicants due to personal information searches; robbers use postings about vacations to target homes for break-ins; lawyers readily find information to use against us in divorce and child custody cases; and at one school, the administrators actually used the cameras on students’ school-provided laptops to spy on them in their homes. Some mobile Web devices are even being programmed to listen in on us and feed data services a steady stream of information about where we are and what we are doing. And even if we use the best services to get our personal data removed from the Web, in a short time almost all that data is restored.

As Andrews persuasively argues, the legal system cannot be counted on to protect us—in the thousands of cases brought to trial by those whose rights have been violated, judges have most often ruled against them. That is why in addition to revealing the dangers and providing the best expert advice about protecting ourselves, Andrews proposes that we must all become supporters of a Constitution for the Web, which she has drafted and introduces in this book. Now is the time to join her and take action—the very future of privacy is at stake.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Lori Andrews

Lori Andrews is a law professor, a public interest lawyer and mystery novelist. She’s taught at Princeton, written for a television legal drama, and advised governments around the world about emerging technologies. Now she’s focusing on how social networks are changing our lives, for good and for ill.

Lori started her consumer activism when she was seven and her Ken doll went bald. Her letter to Mattel got action. She’s been fighting for people’s rights ever since.

A professor of law at Chicago-Kent College of Law, Lori frequently appears on television, including on Oprah, 60 Minutes, Good Morning America, and Nightline. The American Bar Association Journal calls her “a lawyer with a literary bent who has the scientific chops to rival any CSI investigator.”

Editorial Review

Unnerving narrative about the misuse of personal online information—without our knowledge—to track, judge and harm us in innumerable aspects of our lives.

Social-network executives often dismiss online privacy concerns: “You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it,” said Sun Microsystems’ Scott McNealy. But the constitutional freedoms of millions of people posting personal data on Facebook and other networks are violated routinely, and the law has not kept up with the new technology, writes lawyer Andrews (Institute for Science, Law and Technology/Illinois Institute of Technology; Immunity, 2008, etc.). Noting that social networks make their profits on users’ data, she describes the multibillion-dollar industry of data aggregators who mine online data for the advertising industry, often “weblining” people, denying them certain opportunities due to observations about their digital selves. Most users have no idea how much information is being collected about them: “People have a misplaced trust that what they post is private.” The results can be devastating: A Georgia teacher posted a photo showing her drinking a glass of Guinness at an Irish brewery, and she was forced to resign after the photo was e-mailed anonymously to her school superintendent. After seeing a mother’s MySpace page showing her posing provocatively in lingerie, a judge awarded custody of her young children to her husband. “Virtually every interaction a person has in the offline world can be tainted by social network information,” writes the author, who proposes creating a “Social Network Constitution” to govern our lives online. Her governing principles would protect against police searches of social networks without probable cause, require social networks to post conspicuous Miranda-like privacy warnings and set rules for the use or collecting of user information. – Kirkus Reviews

The Dangers of Sharing

The New York Times Book Review – January 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

It may surprise anyone under 16, but even before the advent of social networking we faced threats to our privacy. A hospital accidentally releasing patient records or a shady marketing firm engaging in Stasi-like data collection — such violations were substantial enough and disturbing enough to make the evening news. Today, however, the “death of privacy” is more like death by a thousand cuts: information leaks out slowly and invisibly, and so routinely that we’re hardly shocked when it does. Internet companies, which use the word “sharing” almost as a euphemism for “oops,” like to pretend these lapses are normal, even natural. If Mark Zuckerberg’s private photos are up for grabs (as when a recent glitch exposed his Facebook account), what can the rest of us expect?

Such sloppy reasoning is under fire in “I Know Who You Are and I Saw What You Did: Social Networks and the Death of Privacy,” by Lori Andrews, a law professor and bioethicist whose previous books include “The Clone Age” and “Body Bazaar.” For Andrews, the Internet is a natural subject. She ventures far beyond the social networks of her subtitle to consider the ramifications of search engines, data mining, targeted “behavioral” advertising and other technologies. Likewise, she covers a range of issues beyond privacy, including discrimination in the workplace and free speech in schools.

Some of her questions are challenging and potentially explosive. Is it valid to expect judges to refrain from “friending” lawyers they work with? Should sitting jurors be prevented from using social media? If a parent once wrote on Twitter that he or she didn’t want children, should that statement be admissible in custody hearings? [Read the full article...]

Collaborate or Perish!: Reaching Across Boundaries in a Networked World by William Bratton And Zachary Tumin

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 18:48:52 +0000

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In Collaborate or Perish! former Los Angeles police chief and New York police commissioner William Bratton and Harvard Kennedy School’s Zachary Tumin lay out a field-tested playbook for collaborating across the boundaries of our networked world. Today, when everyone is connected, collaboration is the game changer. Agencies and firms, citizens and groups who can collaborate, Bratton and Tumin argue, will thrive in the networked world; those who can’t are doomed to perish.

No one today is better known around the world for his ability to get citizens, governments, and industries working together to improve the safety of cities than William Bratton. At Harvard, Zachary Tumin has led senior executives from government and industry in executive sessions and classrooms for over a decade, burnishing a global reputation for insight and leadership. Together, Bratton and Tumin draw on in-depth accounts from Fortune 100 giants such as Alcoa, Wells Fargo, and Toyota; from masters of collaboration in education, social work, and the military; and from Bratton’s own storied career. Among the specific strategies they reveal:

• Start collaboration with a broad vision that supporters can add to and make their own
• Rightsize problems, and get value in the hands of users fast
• Get the right people involved—from sponsors to grass roots
• Make collaboration pay in the right currency—whether recognition, rewards, or revenue

Today companies and managers face unique challenges—and opportunities—in reaching out to others, thanks to the incredibly connected world in which we live. Bratton and Tumin provide practical strategies anyone can use, from the cubicle to the boardroom. This is the ultimate guide to getting things done in today’s networked world.

About William Bratton And Zachary Tumin

WILLIAM J. BRATTON is chairman of Kroll, one of Altegrity, Inc.’s three core businesses. Mr. Bratton joined Altegrity in November 2009 after serving as chief of the Los Angeles Police Department for seven years. Prior, he served as chief of the New York City Transit Police and commissioner of the Boston Police Department and the New York City Police Department. A frequent lecturer, writer, and commentator, Bill Bratton is known as one of the world’s premier police chiefs. Mr. Bratton also serves on the Motorola Solutions board of directors. In 2009 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II recognized Bratton with the honorary title of Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (CBE).

ZACHARY TUMIN is special assistant to the director and faculty chair of Harvard Kennedy School’s Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program, the most recent of a number of key posts that Mr. Tumin has held at the school. In addition to leading research programs and executive teaching at Harvard, Mr. Tumin served in senior executive roles for industry and government, including as head of public safety for the New York City public schools, on the executive staffs of the Brooklyn District Attorney and the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, and as director of the Financial Services Technology Consortium. A frequent lecturer, Mr. Tumin is also author of numerous teaching cases, working papers, reports, and essays.

Editorial Review

It would be hard to argue that collaboration was ever an entirely alien concept in government, business or private spheres. What former Boston, New York City and Los Angeles police chief Bratton (The Turnaround, 1998) and co-author Tumin assert is that technologically up-to-the-moment collaboration is now virtually a matter of survival. Either learn to create shared-goal cyber platforms linking all the players or, as they exclaim in their title, perish! With Bratton drawing on his front-line policing experiences, the authors present a series of highly informative, wide-ranging and frequently unsettling examples showing the rapidly expanding impact of collaboration-enhancing technology. They also suggest techniques for effective collaboration, ranging from right-sizing problems to coercing participation, if it comes to that. Their purpose, they write, is to share the wisdom they have gathered over their 40-year careers from government leaders, top executives, managers, researchers and others. “It is a book that will help you collaborate better,” they write, “and get on with the business of transforming the world as it is into the world that should be”—though they never get around to explaining the exact nature of that world. That it might be repressive, given the immense new powers of top-down control that come with collaboration as the book defines it, never arises as a topic. – Kirkus Reviews

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Economic Historian Louis Hyman

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 17:28:40 +0000

In this lively history of consumer debt in America, economic historian Louis Hyman demonstrates that today’s problems are not as new as we think.

Borrow examines how the rise of consumer borrowing—virtually unknown before the twentieth century—has altered our culture and economy. Starting in the years before the Great Depression, increased access to money raised living standards but also introduced unforeseen risks. As lending grew more and more profitable, it displaced funds available for business borrowing, setting our economy on an unsustainable course. Told through the vivid stories of individuals and institutions affected by these changes, Borrow charts the collision of commerce and culture in twentieth-century America, giving an historical perspective on what is new—and what is not—in today’s economic turmoil.

About Louis Hyman

Louis Hyman attended Columbia University, where he received a BA in history and mathematics. A former Fulbright scholar and a consultant at McKinsey & Co., he received his PhD in American history in 2007 from Harvard University. He is currently an assistant professor in Cornell University’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations, where he teaches history.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“The story of how Americans learned to love debt—and became dangerously addicted to it. Anyone who has ever wondered how we got into the mess we are now in must read this powerful book.”
—Lizabeth Cohen, author of A Consumers’ Republic

“The author traces consumer debt beginning in the 1910s and through the 1920s, when personal loans became legal and mortgages were in demand. After WWII, consumption continued to be financed by debt, particularly television sets. . . . As the century progressed, we learn about the rise of discount stores over department stores, loans financed by issuing corporate debt, securitization, and credit cards. Hyman indicates that although policymakers declare the worst of our current financial crisis ended in mid-2009, important causes continue, and he concludes, ‘Debt, along with every other aspect of capitalism, is something that we have created and have the capacity to master.’ This is an excellent book.”
—Booklist

“Stocked with colorful personalities and trenchant insights, Hyman’s lucid, entertaining, and timely treatise illuminates the murky processes by which debt became the troubled center of economic life.”
—Publishers Weekly

“An evenhanded account aimed at the general reader baffled by today’s economic crisis. From Model-Ts to TVs to McMansions, Hyman uncovers the credit story behind all the glittering prizes and offers a prescription to prevent the American Dream from turning into the American Nightmare.”
—Kirkus Reviews

First Principles: Five Keys to Restoring America’s Prosperity by John B. Taylor

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:19:27 +0000

Leading economist John B. Taylor’s straightforward plan to rebuild America’s economic future by returning to its founding principles.

America’s economic future is uncertain. Mired in a long crippling economic slump and hamstrung by bitter partisan debate over the growing debt and the role of government, the nation faces substantial challenges, exacerbated by a dearth of vision and common sense among its leaders. Prominent Stanford economist John B. Taylor brings his steady voice of reason to the discussion with a natural solution: start with the country’s founding principles of economic and political freedom—limited government, rule of law, strong incentives, reliance on markets, a predictable policy framework—and reconstruct its economic foundation from these proven principles.

Channeling his high-level experience as both a policymaker and researcher, Taylor then zeroes in on current policy issues—the budget, monetary policy, government regulation, tax reform—and lays out in simple terms bold strategies designed to place the country on sound footing in each of these areas.

About John B. Taylor

John B. Taylor is the Raymond Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George Shultz Senior Fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. He was Treasury Under Secretary for International Affairs from 2001 to 2005.

Editorial Review

Former treasury undersecretary Taylor (Economics/Stanford Univ.;Getting Off Track: How Government Actions and Interventions Caused, Prolonged, and Worsened the Financial Crisis, 2009, etc.) looks to get back to the good old days “of economic freedom upon which the country was founded.”

These “first principles” are merely the ones of unrestricted free trade, meaning without pesky regulation and without government intervention or interference. Wave a wand and return to that, and voilà: “we can restore America’s prosperity and our confidence in the future.” It’s up to the worker who wants to be competitive to secure the skills and education necessary to the task, all a matter of incentives and rewards. But what if such a worker finds his or her job outsourced to Asia? To do anything in the way of protecting a job would be “interventionism,” while efforts to even out some of the turbulence of the so-called free market constitute dreaded and despised “short-term Keynesian discretionary” remedies. Taylor fair-mindedly notes that Republican and Democratic presidents alike have been more interventionist than less; readers who do not remember Richard Nixon’s experiments in wage-and-price freezes, for instance, may be surprised to realize how, well, socialistic they seem in today’s context. And the author is surely right to point out that the flaws in the banking system were far deeper than a mere bailout could fix, adding, “The extraordinary bailout measures that began with Bear Stearns before the panic were the most harmful interventions.” Yet Taylor’s neolibertarian prescriptions seem more dogmatic than helpful, his attacks on health-care reform a species of I’ve-got-mine privilege. His befuddlement at the thought that the Chinese government might jail vendors for selling nonorganic pork as organic (“there was no safety issue”) hints at a failure to connect with the world outside the pages of Ayn Rand, to say nothing of grasping the concept of truth in advertising. – Kirkus Reviews

Inside Apple: How America’s Most Admired–and Secretive–Company Really Works by Adam Lashinsky

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 12:07:54 +0000

INSIDE APPLE reveals the secret systems, tactics and leadership strategies that allowed Steve Jobs and his company to churn out hit after hit and inspire a cult-like following for its products.

If Apple is Silicon Valley’s answer to Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory, then author Adam Lashinsky provides readers with a golden ticket to step inside. In this primer on leadership and innovation, the author will introduce readers to concepts like the “DRI” (Apple’s practice of assigning a Directly Responsible Individual to every task) and the Top 100 (an annual ritual in which 100 up-and-coming executives are tapped a la Skull & Bones for a secret retreat with company founder Steve Jobs).

Based on numerous interviews, the book offers exclusive new information about how Apple innovates, deals with its suppliers and is handling the transition into the Post Jobs Era. Lashinsky, a Senior Editor at Large for Fortune, knows the subject cold: In a 2008 cover story for the magazine entitled The Genius Behind Steve: Could Operations Whiz Tim Cook Run The Company Someday he predicted that Tim Cook, then an unknown, would eventually succeed Steve Jobs as CEO.

While Inside Apple is ostensibly a deep dive into one, unique company (and its ecosystem of suppliers, investors, employees and competitors), the lessons about Jobs, leadership, product design and marketing are universal. They should appeal to anyone hoping to bring some of that Apple magic to their own company, career, or creative endeavor.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Adam Lashinsky

Lashinsky is a Senior Editor At Large for Fortune Magazine, where he covers technology and finance. He is also a Fox News contributor and frequent speaker and moderator. Prior to joining Fortune, Lashinsky was a columnist for TheStreet.com and the San Jose Mercury News. He lives in San Francisco with his wife and daughter.

Editorial Review

The author writes clearly and efficiently but is repetitive in his analysis of this secretive cultural giant. “For years it was an article of faith in Silicon Valley that Apple should not be emulated,” he writes. Yet his narrative picks apart Jobs’ entrepreneurial philosophy and the company’s remarkable post-1997 trajectory—when it first revolutionized personal computing, then introduced the iPod and iPhone—in attempting to discuss such a strategy. One problem, as Lashinsky writes, is the company’s cultivated lack of transparency. The author seems to rely on secondary sources, and comments from current and former Apple employees are often unattributed. The basic narrative of Apple’s resurgence is well known: After Jobs left his own company due to corporate squabbling, it declined rapidly in the Internet era. Yet Jobs’ return in 1997 ushered in a season of risky corporate paring-down, followed by a string of success, starting with the iconic iMac. Jobs introduced compartmentalization and hyper-competitiveness to every aspect of the company. For example, his annual “Top 100” meetings were pointedly exclusionary, which Lashinsky suggests is not the norm at such retreats. Apple as a workplace is portrayed as nearly monastic in employees’ willingness to sacrifice their personal lives, remain incommunicado and achieve the extreme interdepartmental cooperation Jobs sought, even at the end. Lashinsky describes Jobs’ successor Tim Cook as “a Mr. Fix-it who blended in but didn’t take no for an answer.” Among other late corporate innovations, Jobs quietly created a management-training program, Apple University, to “record, codify, and teach Apple’s business history.” Such points allow Lashinsky to support parallel assertions throughout—that Jobs’ management style may or may not be transferable, and that Apple’s special success may or may not endure once Jobs-approved projects pass through the pipeline. – Kirkus Reviews

Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun by Paul M. Barrett

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 12:14:16 +0000

Based on fifteen years of research, Glock is the riveting story of the weapon that has become known as American’s gun. Today the Glock pistol has been embraced by two-thirds of all U.S. police departments, glamorized in countless Hollywood movies, and featured as a ubiquitous presence on prime-time TV. It has been rhapsodized by hip-hop artists, and coveted by cops and crooks alike.

Created in 1982 by Gaston Glock, an obscure Austrian curtain-rod manufacturer, and swiftly adopted by the Austrian army, the Glock pistol, with its lightweight plastic frame and large-capacity spring-action magazine, arrived in America at a fortuitous time. Law enforcement agencies had concluded that their agents and officers, armed with standard six-round revolvers, were getting “outgunned” by drug dealers with semi-automatic pistols. They needed a new gun.

When Karl Water, a firearm salesman based in the U.S. first saw a Glock in 1984, his reaction was, “Jeez, that’s ugly.” But the advantages of the pistol soon became apparent. The standard semi-automatic Glock could fire as many as 17 bullets from its magazine without reloading (one equipped with an extended thirty-three cartridge magazine was used in Tucson to shoot Gabrielle Giffords and 19 others). It was built with only 36 parts that were interchangeable with those of other models. You could drop it underwater, toss it from a helicopter, or leave it out in the snow, and it would still fire. It was reliable, accurate, lightweight, and cheaper to produce than Smith and Wesson’s revolver. Made in part of hardened plastic, it was even rumored (incorrectly) to be invisible to airport security screening.

Filled with corporate intrigue, political maneuvering, Hollywood glitz, bloody shoot-outs—and an attempt on Gaston Glock’s life by a former lieutenant—Glock is at once the inside account of how Glock the company went about marketing its pistol to police agencies and later the public, as well as a compelling chronicle of the evolution of gun culture in America.

About Paul M. Barrett

PAUL M. BARRETT is an assistant managing editor of Bloomberg Businessweek. He is the author of American Islam: The Struggle for the Soul of a Religion and The Good Black: A True Story of Race in America. Barrett lives and works in New York City. For more information, go to GlockTheBook.com.

Editorial Reviews

“This book—from a top-notch reporter—will enlighten you about both gun culture and business culture. It’s fascinating, even-handed, and packs considerable punch!” —Bill McKibben, bestselling author of The End of Nature, Deep Economy, and The Age of Missing Information

“Glock is a riveting tale with masterful pacing and meticulous research. Paul Barrett knows his subject intimately, and it shows. . . . It’s a must-read for anyone with an interest in handguns or the firearm industry or even American pop culture.” —Cameron Hopkins, editor in chief, Combat Tactics magazine; American Rifleman’s Industry Insider blog

“With his customary insight and crystal-clear style, Paul Barrett has told the story of how a simple toolmaker from Austria came to be the dominant force in the manufacture and sale of pistols in the United States. . . . Glock is not at all just for the gun enthusiast. This book is for anyone concerned about the level of gun violence in America, and that should be all of us.”
—Richard Aborn, president, Citizens Crime Commission of New York City; former president, Handgun Control, Inc.

“Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun,” by Paul Barrett

The Washington Post Book Review – January 20, 2012 (Excerpt)

As you pass through airport security, graphics depict items prohibited in your carry-on luggage. While the representations of a knife and an aerosol spray can are fairly generic, the pictograph of a handgun is unequivocally the silhouette of a Glock pistol.

In 1982, an obscure Austrian engineer named Gaston Glock, who worked in a radiator plant and had a side business with his wife making curtain rods, knives and belt buckles, invented a type of pistol that changed the worlds of law enforcement and firearms and powerfully influenced politics and popular culture. Glock is now 82, and his surname has become synonymous in some circles with “handgun.”

Less than three decades ago, few had heard of Glock, the man or the gun. Just how a pistol developed by an unknown engineer with little firearms experience became the dominant, if not iconic, law enforcement handgun in the United States is the subject of Paul M. Barrett’s “Glock.”

Thirty years ago, Glock knew that the Austrian army wanted 20,000 new service pistols made in Austria, and no suitable gun existed. So he set out to design one. As former Austrian Lt. Ingo Wieser, who tested the new pistol in 1983 for the military, put it: “Mr. Glock was at the right place at the right time.” [Read the full article...]

Our Favorite Weapon

The New York Times Book Review – January 27, 2012 (Excerpt)

You rarely pull a gun to start a conversation, but when I recently told an in-law that I was writing about Glock pistols, he improvised a research project. Reaching beneath his jacket, he quickly unholstered, unloaded and handed me his Glock 9 millimeter — this was in Kentucky, land of permissive concealed-carry laws. “I always carry this, and I always will,” he said before giving me a primer that could have been used in a promotional video for both the pistol and “Glock: The Rise of America’s Gun,” Paul M. Barrett’s engaging if uneven history of the most famous handgun in contemporary America.

The Glock is everywhere, in innumerable TV shows and movies, strapped to most law enforcement personnel, name-dropped in hip-hop songs. The no-firearms sign posted at airports features the distinctive, squat Glock silhouette. As Barrett writes, the Glock is “the Google of modern civilian handguns: the pioneer brand that defines its product category.” Barrett argues that the Glock achieved such market penetration and cultural cachet as much because of timing and marketing as any native characteristic of the gun. Barrett’s argument isn’t unique — what business thrives without luck and opportunism? — yet on balance “Glock” offers an instructive examination of American weapons fetishism. [Read the full article...]

The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption by Clay A. Johnson

Wilfried F. Voss — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 11:59:19 +0000

The modern human animal spends upwards of 11 hours out of every 24 in a state of constant consumption. Not eating, but gorging on information ceaselessly spewed from the screens and speakers we hold dear. Just as we have grown morbidly obese on sugar, fat, and flour—so, too, have we become gluttons for texts, instant messages, emails, RSS feeds, downloads, videos, status updates, and tweets.

We’re all battling a storm of distractions, buffeted with notifications and tempted by tasty tidbits of information. And just as too much junk food can lead to obesity, too much junk information can lead to cluelessness. The Information Diet shows you how to thrive in this information glut—what to look for, what to avoid, and how to be selective. In the process, author Clay Johnson explains the role information has played throughout history, and why following his prescribed diet is essential for everyone who strives to be smart, productive, and sane.

In The Information Diet, you will:

Discover why eminent scholars are worried about our state of attention and general intelligence
Examine how today’s media—Big Info—give us exactly what we want: content that confirms our beliefs
Learn to take steps to develop data literacy, attention fitness, and a healthy sense of humor
Become engaged in the economics of information by learning how to reward good information providers
Just like a normal, healthy food diet, The Information Diet is not about consuming less—it’s about finding a healthy balance that works for you

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Clay A. Johnson

Clay Johnson is best known as the founder of Blue State Digital, the firm that built and managed Barack Obama’s online campaign for the presidency in 2008. After leaving Blue State, Johnson was the director of Sunlight Labs at the Sunlight Foundation, where he built an army of 2000 developers and designers to build open source tools to give people greater access to government data. He was awarded the Google/O’Reilly Open Source Organizer of the year in 2009, was one of Federal Computing Week’s Fed 100 in 2010.

The range of Johnson’s experience with software development, politics, entrepreneurism, and working with non-profits gives him a unique perspective on media and culture. His life is dedicated to giving people greater access to the truth about what’s going on in their communities, their cities, and their governments.

Editorial Reviews

“It’s a good read on several levels for the individual and has plenty of thought provoking ideas and concepts to ruminate over: we are being overrun by information options and increasingly need all the help we can get to get our time back under control.” – ZDNet

“‘The Information Diet’ Should Be Your New Year’s Resolution” -Forbes

“The Information Diet is definitely the kind of book that we need to read going into 2012 with all of the junk information online and on our TVs trying to creep into our lives and not making us think critically.” -LifeHack.org

Is It Time For You To Go On An ‘Information Diet’?

NPR Book Review – January 14, 2012 (Excerpt)

We’re used to thinking of “obesity” in physical terms — unhealthful weight that clogs our arteries and strains our hearts. But there’s also an obesity of information that clogs our eyes and our minds and our inboxes: unhealthful information deep-fried in our own preconceptions.

In The Information Diet, open-source-Internet activist Clay Johnson makes the case for more “conscious consumption” of news and information. Johnson, the founder of Blue State Digital, which provided the online strategy for the 2008 Obama campaign, talks with NPR’s Scott Simon about ways to slim and stretch our minds. [Read the interview highlights...]

Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live by Jeff Jarvis

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 16 Jan 2012 12:11:00 +0000

A visionary and optimistic thinker examines the tension between privacy and publicness that is transforming how we form communities, create identities, do business, and live our lives.Thanks to the internet, we now live—more and more—in public. More than 750 million people (and half of all Americans) use Facebook, where we share a billion times a day. The collective voice of Twitter echoes instantly 100 million times daily, from Tahrir Square to the Mall of America, on subjects that range from democratic reform to unfolding natural disasters to celebrity gossip. New tools let us share our photos, videos, purchases, knowledge, friendships, locations, and lives.Yet change brings fear, and many people—nostalgic for a more homogeneous mass culture and provoked by well-meaning advocates for privacy—despair that the internet and how we share there is making us dumber, crasser, distracted, and vulnerable to threats of all kinds.

But not Jeff Jarvis.In this shibboleth-destroying book, Public Parts argues persuasively and personally that the internet and our new sense of publicness are, in fact, doing the opposite. Jarvis travels back in time to show the amazing parallels of fear and resistance that met the advent of other innovations such as the camera and the printing press. The internet, he argues, will change business, society, and life as profoundly as Gutenberg’s invention, shifting power from old institutions to us all.Based on extensive interviews, Public Parts introduces us to the men and women building a new industry based on sharing.

Some of them have become household names—Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and Twitter’s Evan Williams. Others may soon be recognized as the industrialists, philosophers, and designers of our future. Jarvis explores the promising ways in which the internet and publicness allow us to collaborate, think, ways—how we manufacture and market, buy and sell, organize and govern, teach and learn. He also examines the necessity as well as the limits of privacy in an effort to understand and thus protect it. This new and open era has already profoundly disrupted economies, industries, laws, ethics, childhood, and many other facets of our daily lives. But the change has just begun. The shape of the future is not assured. The amazing new tools of publicness can be used to good ends and bad. The choices—and the responsibilities—lie with us.

Jarvis makes an urgent case that the future of the internet—what one technologist calls “the eighth continent”—requires as much protection as the physical space we share, the air we breathe, and the rights we afford one another. It is a space of the public, for the public, and by the public. It needs protection and respect from all of us. As Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said in the wake of the uprisings in the Middle East, “If people around the world are going to come together every day online and have a safe and productive experience, we need a shared vision to guide us.” Jeff Jarvis has that vision and will be that guide.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Jeff Jarvis

Jeff Jarvis blogs about media, news, technology, and business at Buzzmachine.com. He is associate professor and director of the Tow-Knight Center for Entrepreneurial Journalism at the City University of New York’s Graduate School of Journalism, and lives in the New York area.

Editorial Reviews

“This is a superior work. Not only is it well researched and elegantly argued but he makes some original observations about how digital technology is changing the nature of human self-expression.”—John Gapper, The Financial Times

“Jarvis offers a persuasive and personal look at why sharing things publicly on the Web should become the norm… Jarvis works methodically in Public Parts to unravel long-held beliefs about why openness online is dangerous… Jarvis’ message of openness will be provocative to many, but what he explores is only the beginning of a revolution that will continue to change how we use the Web—and how the Web uses us.”—Mark W. Smith, Detroit Free Press

“The author of What Would Google Do? returns with another thoughtful look at the Internet age. A welcome and well-reasoned counterpoint to the arguments that social-networking sites and the easy availability of personal information online are undermining our society and putting our safety at risk… A must-read for anyone interested in the issue of connectivity versus privacy.”—David Pitt, Booklist

“Public Parts: How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live,” by Jeff Jarvis

The Washington Post Book Review – January 13, 2012 (Excerpt)

According to Jeff Jarvis, defenders of self-exposure on the Internet need all the support they can get. “I have learned that the more we share, the more we benefit from what others share,” he writes in “Public Parts.” “I am a public man. My life is this open book.” Jarvis has built up a speaking and consulting career as a sparring partner for privacy advocates, who he believes “swarm,” “fret” and “worry” too much about the dangers of personal exposure online. Styling himself an advocate of “publicness,” he has attracted attention by blogging in graphic detail about his successful treatment for prostate cancer. Now, in his second book, he offers himself as a model for citizens across the globe, promising to demonstrate how sharing on the Internet is “a means for real people to connect with one another.”

For a so-called “open book,” Jarvis is surprisingly selective in the personal details he reveals. We learn that he was proud to go on the Howard Stern show and to talk about his malfunctioning private parts. He also liked taking naked saunas at the World Economic Forum at Davos, especially after a reader of his blog recognized him in the nude. A German friend explains that Europeans are comfortable being naked in anonymous saunas because “no one knows who you are,” but Jarvis draws the opposite lesson. After “living online,” he says, “I found it was, indeed, no big deal to be naked in front of men and women, even people I knew.” [Read the full article...]

One Click: Jeff Bezos and the Rise of Amazon.com by Richard L. Brandt

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 17:14:15 +0000

Amazon’s business model is deceptively simple: Make online shopping so easy and convenient that customers won’t think twice. It can almost be summed up by the button on every page: “Buy now with one click.”

Why has Amazon been so successful? Much of it has to do with Jeff Bezos, the CEO and founder, whose unique combination of character traits and business strategy have driven Amazon to the top of the online retail world.

Richard Brandt charts Bezos’s rise from computer nerd to world- changing entrepreneur. His success can be credited to his forward-looking insights and ruthless business sense. Brandt explains:

Why Bezos decided to allow negative product reviews, correctly guessing that the earned trust would outweigh possible lost sales.
Why Amazon zealously guards some patents yet freely shares others.
Why Bezos called becoming profitable the “dumbest” thing they could do in 1997.
How Amazon.com became one of the only dotcoms to survive the bust of the early 2000s.
Where the company is headed next.

Through interviews with Amazon employees, competitors, and observers, Brandt has deciphered how Bezos makes decisions. The story of Amazon’s ongoing evolution is a case study in how to reinvent an entire industry, and one that anyone in business today ignores at their peril.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Richard L. Brandt

Richard L. Brandt is an award-winning journalist who has been writing about Silicon Valley for more than two decades. He is well known in the technology community as a former correspondent for BusinessWeek, where he won a National Magazine Award. He is also the author of The Google Guys about the founders of Google. He lives in San Francisco.

Editorial Review

As any bibliophile knows, the birth of Amazon in the mid ’90s represented both a blessing and a curse to everyone involved in the book industry, from authors and publishers to bookshops and readers. It was a blessing because more than 1 million titles, many rare and hard-to-find, were suddenly available to anyone with a modem and a credit card; a curse because man local mom-and-pop booksellers folded because they couldn’t compete with the deep discounts and extremely customer-friendly policies Amazon offered. Whether readers view Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos as an entrepreneurial genius or a ruthless capitalist, there’s no denying that Amazon has grown from a three-guys-in-a-garage operation to one of the most powerful and recognized e-commerce sites on the Internet. Brandt (The Google Guys, 2011, etc.), a reporter on all things Silicon Valley for the past 20-plus years, traces Amazon’s sometimes-rocky ascent by interviewing past employees, mentors and competitors of the site. He also mines Bezos’ speeches and interviews to determine the thought process of the man behind the empire. Unfortunately, the result is skeletal and unsatisfying, mainly because Brandt never actually interviewed Bezos directly. The source material is largely what Bezos has allowed into the public realm and seems carefully polished, much like the image of Amazon.com.

Suffices as a bare-bones account of a highly successful startup but fails to deliver on the inner workings of a website that changed e-commerce forever. – Kirkus Reviews

A slim, pale, unsatisfying look at Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon.

The Washington Post Book Review – January 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

Pity poor Jeff Bezos. He can’t get any respect from major American cultural outlets, the sort that canonize business leaders. While the late Steve Jobs’s chiseled mug stares out from the cover of Walter Isaacson’s monumental biography in the front of every major book store in the country, the networks televise hearings about Google in Washington and Brussels, and the stirring visual rhythm of David Fincher’s film “The Social Network” has made Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg seem much more interesting than he really is, Bezos has to settle for the occasional appreciative magazine cover story from the likes of Wired and Fast Company.

No one dreams of making a film about the founding of Amazon. Privacy officials don’t call Amazon officials in for hearings. And the only recent book about Bezos and Amazon is this pale and lifeless summary of well-known events in his life and career.

In “One Click” journalist Richard L. Brandt manages to reveal just about nothing new about the founder or his company. While he mentions and summarizes some of the major conflicts and questions that Amazon has raised — the future of books, the future of bookstores, antitrust issues, overly broad business-method patents, etc. — Brandt does not fully describe just how influential Amazon has been on our daily lives or on the ways in which American companies do business. [Read the full article...]

Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!: Of Playboys, Pigs, and Penthouse Paupers-An American Tale of Sex and Wonder by Mike Edison

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 16:20:15 +0000

A wild and uncompromising history of four infamous magazines and the outlaws behind them, Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! is the first book to rip the sheet off of the sleazy myth-making machine of Hugh Hefner and Playboy, and reveal the doomed history of Hefner’s arch rival, Penthouse founder Bob Guccione, whose messiah complex and heedless spending — on a legendary flop of a movie paid for with bags of cash, a porn magazine for women, and a pie-in-the sky scheme for a portable nuclear reactor —fueled the greatest riches to rags story ever told.

The adventure begins in the early 1950s and rips through the tumultuous ’60s and ’70s —when Hustler’s Larry Flynt and Screw’s Al Goldstein were arrested dozens of times, recklessly pushing the boundaries of free speech, attacking politicians, and putting unapologetic filth front and center — through the 1990s when a sexed-up culture high on the Internet finally killed the era when men looked for satisfaction in the centerfold. As America goes, so goes it’s porn.

Along the way we meet many unexpected heroes—John Lennon, Lenny Bruce, Helen Gurley Brown, and the staff of Mad magazine among them—and villains—from Richard Nixon and the Moral Majority to Hugh Hefner himself, whose legacy, we learn, is built on a self-perpetuated lie.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Mike Edison

Mike Edison is the former publisher of High Times magazine, a Hustler and Penthouse correspondent, and the former editor-in-chief of Screw magazine. He is the author of 28 pornographic novels and the legendary memoir I Have Fun Everywhere I Go — Savage Tales of Pot, Porn, Punk Rock, Pro Wrestling, Talking Apes, Evil Bosses, Dirty Blues, American Heroes, and the Most Notorious Magazines in the World. Edison lives and works in New York City.

Editorial Reviews

“[Edison] takes readers on an enthusiastic romp through the rise and fall of the major porno magazines of the 20th century, while profiling the self-imploding personalities who innovated effective ways of selling sexual fantasies to the average sexually dissatisfied male . . . An interesting study of the ways influence can snowball.” —Kirkus

“Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! is a book that really lives up to it’s title. It’s not only dirty—it’s funny, highly opinionated, and—God help us—informative. Hard to believe someone hasn’t written the history of American pornography before this, but Mike Edison is absolutely the man for the job.” —Jay McInerney, author of Bright Lights, Big City

“Mike Edison can go toe to toe with some of the best writers of the (old) New Journalism. This is foul-mouthed popular history at its most entertaining. Plenty smart, too—and also, strange to say, poignant and loving.”
—Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America

“Dirty! Dirty! Dirty!” by Mike Edison

The Washington Post Book Review – January 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

It’s clear from the first pages of “ Dirty! Dirty! Dirty! ” that Mike Edison considers himself an expert pornographer. He’s written two dozen pornographic novels, contributed to Hustler and Penthouse and served as editor-in-chief of Screw. In his editorial capacities, he “looked at naked girls — some of them startlingly beautiful — all day long,” he explains. “I went on photo shoots and went to dozens of go-go bars and strip clubs.”

“Dirty! Dirty! Dirty,” a history of the porn industry and its characters, is authoritatively written and astonishingly well, um, researched. Edison traces the history of porn from the Stone Age to Alfred Kinsey’s research on sex; from “Deep Throat”’s spectacular box office success to the rise, fall and rise again of the skin magazine. [Read the full article...]

After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent by Walter Laqueur

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 12:24:44 +0000

A master historian takes us deep into the heart of Europe’s current political and financial crisis

Walter Laqueur was one of the few experts who predicted Europe’s current financial and political crisis when he wrote The Last Days of Europe six years ago. Now this master historian takes readers inside the European crisis that he foresaw. Ravaged by the world economic meltdown, increasingly dependent on imported oil and gas, and lacking a common foreign policy, Europe is in dire straits. With the authority that comes from thirty years of experience as an expert on political affairs, the author predicts the future prospects of this troubled continent. Europe is the United States’ closest ally, and its prosperity is vital to American’s success and security. This is a must-read for anyone invested in our country’s future.

About Walter Laqueur

WALTER LAQUEUR was the director of the Institute of Contemporary History in London and concurrently the chairman of the International Research Council of CSIS in Washington for 30 years. He was also a professor at Georgetown University and the author of more than twenty-five books. He has had articles published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and countless other newspapers worldwide.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Review

Laqueur (Harvest of a Decade: Disraelia and Other Essays, 2011, etc.), the chairman of the International Research Council of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, draws on past history and current insight to present a profile of the current European crisis.

The author is more concerned with broader questions of demography and culture, assimilation of immigrants and new approaches to education and social policy than to questions of political and economic integration. Noting that the continent is at a turning point, he writes that an aging population is not reproducing in sufficient numbers to secure its future and has not been for most of the past century. The second- and third-generation immigrants are not sufficiently qualified to maintain the technical and scientific levels of expertise have characterized European production and living standards. Laqueur emphasizes the importance of finding new methods of assimilating immigrant populations, and he does not agree with the view that Islam is one of the principal problems. He specifies the circumstances of their immigration and provides detailed observations of current social activities to show the particular problems that immigrants bring with them from their countries of origin, and how current policies in education and religion have succeeded or failed. Given the reality that Russia is facing the same kinds of problems and that immigration is a concern in the U.S., whatever solutions are found will be globally significant. – Kirkus Reviews

“After the Fall: The End of the European Dream and the Decline of a Continent”

The Washington Post Book Review – January 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

Just a few years ago, a spate of books trumpeted the ascendancy of a uniting Europe as the new global superpower that would run the 21st century. Europe’s mastery of soft power seemed destined to eclipse military might in the post-Cold War age. The building of a continent “whole and free” following the collapse of the Soviet empire would finally put an end to ethnic and nationalist conflicts. And the historic creation of the euro, as the coin of the realm in the world’s biggest trading bloc encompassing 500 million prosperous citizens, foreshadowed the demise of the dollar’s supremacy.

These days the European dream seems to be turning into a nightmare. The prospect of the euro’s collapse — caused by a sovereign debt crisis among its southern tier or “Club Med” members — threatens to unravel the elaborate construction of a peaceful, prosperous and united Europe that stands as one of the West’s greatest achievements in the wake of the devastation of World War II. The failure of the European project would not only cause catastrophic problems for the global economy, it would also imperil the foreign and security interests of the United States by destabilizing our nation’s closest allies. [Read the full article...]

Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right by Thomas Frank

Wilfried F. Voss — Wed, 04 Jan 2012 11:43:04 +0000

From the bestselling author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, a wonderfully insightful and sardonic look at why the worst economy since the 1930s has brought about the revival of conservatism

Economic catastrophe usually brings social protest and demands for change—or at least it’s supposed to. But when Thomas Frank set out in 2009 to look for expressions of American discontent, all he could find were loud demands that the economic system be made even harsher on the recession’s victims and that society’s traditional winners receive even grander prizes. The American Right, which had seemed moribund after the election of 2008, was strangely reinvigorated by the arrival of hard times. The Tea Party movement demanded not that we question the failed system but that we reaffirm our commitment to it. Republicans in Congress embarked on a bold strategy of total opposition to the liberal state. And TV phenom Glenn Beck demonstrated the commercial potential of heroic paranoia and the purest libertarian economics.

In Pity the Billionaire, Frank, the great chronicler of American paradox, examines the peculiar mechanism by which dire economic circumstances have delivered wildly unexpected political results. Using firsthand reporting, a deep knowledge of the American Right, and a wicked sense of humor, he gives us the first full diagnosis of the cultural malady that has transformed collapse into profit, reconceived the Founding Fathers as heroes from an Ayn Rand novel, and enlisted the powerless in a fan club for the prosperous. The understanding Frank reaches is at once startling, original, and profound.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Thomas Frank

Thomas Frank is the author of Pity the Billionaire, The Wrecking Crew, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, and One Market Under God. A former opinion columnist for The Wall Street Journal, Frank is the founding editor of The Baffler and a monthly columnist for Harper’s. He lives outside Washington, D.C.

Editorial Reviews

“No one fools Thomas Frank, who is the sharpest, funniest, most intellectually voracious political commentator on the scene. In Pity the Billionaire he has written a brilliant expose of the most breath-taking ruse in American political history: how the right turned the biggest capitalist breakdown since 1929 into an opportunity for themselves.” —Barbara Ehrenreich

“Thomas Frank has crossed the Styx and returned to sing of the tortured, tormented souls of the Tea Party and their sufferings in the Socialist America they have conjured from thin air. This he does with grace, style and humor, which not all of his subjects share. Be glad that in this election year you can read Pity the Billionaire instead of turning on the television or the radio or your computer. Pity the Billionaire? Hell. Pity us all.” —James K. Galbraith

Columnist Frank (The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule, 2008, etc.) proposes a few possible explanations. The Obama administration has been too compromised with financial bailouts and has had nothing else substantial to offer, and business sponsors have provided huge amounts of funding and air time. The author doesn’t think the principal conservatives are at all concerned with truth, but he ridicules the current administration’s insistence on sticking with policies that fail; in this sense he compares Obama to Herbert Hoover. He shows that the slightest shift in approach, like the one Jesse Jones brought to the Hoover-created Reconstruction Finance Corporation, can be crucial in reorganizing financial flows. Frank skewers the Koch Brothers and Fox News for shamelessly promoting the interests of those rescued from their own disasters, while opposing bailouts, and shows how Glenn Beck and others have built their media outreach by perverting themes from the 1930s. He also shows the political pressure groups, such as former Republican House Speaker Richard Armey’s Koch-funded Freedom Works train their activists on the “leadership secrets of the Communist Party.” Another theme Frank pursues is the trend of the new right leaning on the old left. Where it is all going, he fears, is toward dismantling the remaining social safety net in submission to the dictates of the “free market.” - Kirkus Reviews

How Conservatives Spin the Nation’s Predicament

The New York Times Book Review – January 2, 2012 (Excerpt)

“Pity the Billionaire,” by Thomas Frank, is a showcase example of the problems that can be created by the long lead time (six to nine months or more if a project has not been fast-tracked) involved in publishing a topical book in an age when news is instantaneous, and there is 24/7, wall-to-wall coverage of hot-button issues.

Mr. Frank’s thesis is that in the wake of the fiscal calamities of 2008 — at a time when unemployment remains high, when many ordinary people are reeling from the recession, and you might expect anger at the deregulatory policies that enabled banks to run amok — conservatives have managed a surreal comeback. The Tea Party has become a vocal force, the Republicans surged to capture the House in the 2010 midterms, and the right, in his view, has doubled down on the dream of a “laissez-faire utopia.” Conservatives have managed this resurgence, Mr. Frank argues, by hijacking public anger over the bailouts and the bad economy and by shifting “the burden of villainy from Wall Street to government.”

In explicating this hypothesis, Mr. Frank makes only passing mention of the Occupy Wall Street movement, which began protests last September, apparently too late to get any real attention in this book. Their denunciations of corporate greed, social inequality and fiscal malfeasance have helped shift the national conversation, yet he argues, “as I write this, the most effective political response” to the worst recession since the ’30s has been a campaign by conservatives “to roll back regulation, to strip government employees of the right to collectively bargain, and to clamp down on federal spending. [Read the full article...]

The Rise of the American Oligarchy

The New York Times Book Review – January 5, 2012 (Excerpt)

Thomas Frank is the thinking person’s Michael Moore. If Moore, the left-wing filmmaker, had Frank’s Ph.D. (in history from the University of Chicago), he might produce books like this one and Frank’s previous best seller, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”

As you can tell from its ham-fisted title, “Pity the Billionaire” is not the world’s most subtle political critique. But subtlety isn’t everything. Frank’s best moments come when his contempt boils over and his inner grouch is released.

This book is Frank’s interpretation of developments since “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” was published eight years ago. Frank’s thesis here is basically that the thesis of the old book has been confirmed. He will not persuade anybody who does not already buy the Tom Frank line. But those who do (as I do, more or less) will enjoy a very good time having their predispositions massaged.

Frank sometimes writes in an arch voice that seemed familiar when I first encountered it but that I couldn’t place. Then I read in his book-jacket bio that he writes for Harper’s Magazine, and I thought, “Zounds, Watson, the man may have Lapham’s Disease.” The symptoms of this malady, named after the longtime editor of Harper’s, Lewis H. Lapham (now of Lapham’s Quarterly), include an elevated, orotund, deeply ironic prose style that, in severe cases, reveals almost nothing about what the topic is or what the author wishes to say about it except for a general sense of superiority to everyone and everything around. [Read the full article...]

‘Pity The Billionaire’: The Right’s Unlikely Comeback

NPR Book Review – January 6, 2012 (Excerpt)

How did the economic collapse of 2008 and 2009 give birth to a conservative populist revolt?

That’s the question Thomas Frank tries to answer in his new book — and sharp-tongued liberal polemic — Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right.

Frank, whose previous books include What’s the Matter with Kansas?, writes that the recent revival of the right is just as extraordinary as “if the public had demanded dozens of new nuclear power plants in the days after the Three Mile Island disaster.”

“Before 2009,” Frank writes, “the man in the bread line did not ordinarily weep for the man lounging on his yacht.” And yet, Frank says, that’s become the central paradox of our time.

“We’ve just come through this extraordinary financial collapse. We know that this was almost directly the result of 30 years of bank deregulation and of all the sort of financial experimentation that our government encouraged,” he tells NPR’s Melissa Block. “And what the Tea Party movement and what the conservative revival generally is telling us to do is … double down on that ideology that we’ve been following all these years.” [Read the full article...]

Book review: ‘Pity the Billionaire,’ by Thomas Frank

The Washington Post Book Review – January 13, 2012 (Excerpt)

Chronicling the American political zeitgeist has never been easy — voters are fickle beasts — and in the past few years it’s been nearly impossible to keep up. The tea party movement, that nascent power that drove the 2010 elections, has seen its popularity and influence wane as new movements on the left — Occupy Wall Street, for instance — have stormed onto the stage. Pity the soul who is trying to document the chaotic scene — someone like, say, Thomas Frank.

In the past decade, Frank has created a voice that is part reporter, part op-ed columnist and part late-night comic, all looking through a liberal political prism. Since 2004, when his best-selling “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” was published, he has become an important voice for the political left. He is one of its chief political decoders, explaining how conservatives have captured the votes of people who should be voting Democratic — or at least who Frank thinks should be voting Democratic. [Read the full article...]

Mondo Agnelli: Fiat, Chrysler, and the Power of a Dynasty by Jennifer Clark

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 02 Jan 2012 11:44:16 +0000

The fascinating story of a century-old automobile dynasty

Fiat is one of the world’s largest automakers, but when it made headlines by grabbing control of a bankrupt Chrysler in 2009 it was unknown in the U.S. Fiat’s against-all-odds swoop on Chrysler—masterminded by Sergio Marchionne, the Houdini-like manager who saved Fiat from its own near-collapse in 2005 – has made the automaker one of the most unlikely winners of the financial crisis. Mondo Agnelli is a new book that looks at the chain of unpredictable events triggered by the death of Gianni Agnelli in 2003. Gianni, the charismatic, silver-haired power broker and style icon, was the patriarch who had lead the company founded by his grandfather in 1899. But Gianni’s own son had committed suicide. Without a mature heir, the dynasty and Fiat were rudderless. Backed by Gianni’s closest advisors, his serious, shy, and determined grandson John plucked Marchionne from obscurity. Together, they saved the family company and, inadvertently, positioned Fiat as a global trailblazer when the global storm hit.

A classic story of ingenuity and hard work, the book portrays a business dynasty that triumphed over adversity and family tragedy because of its own smarts, sweat, and ability to bend the rules
A an engaging tale for those interested in the stories behind the economic crash, the book contains never-before reported material about how Fiat succeeded in making Chrysler profitable where both Daimler AG and Cerberus, its previous owners, had failed.

A story for a wide audience, from car buffs, business readers, lovers of Italy, and anyone fascinated by the lifestyle of Europe’s most glamorous industrial dynasty, this book tells the tale of how Fiat achieved the seemingly impossible — turning around an American automotive icon everyone else had given up for dead.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Jennifer Clark

Jennifer Clark (Milan, Italy & Chicago, IL) is Italy Bureau Chief for Dow Jones & Co, managing a staff of six and covering virtually all aspects of Italian business, politics and finance for Wall Street Journal, the WSJ.com website and Dow Jones Newswires. Prior to working at Dow Jones, Clark was a fashion reporter at Reuters, where her beat included writing about everything from runway shows to parties celebrating designers to business interview with top executives. From 1988 to 1993, she was bureau chief at Variety, the US entertainment weekly, covering the Rome dolce vita surrounding the film and television industry. Her career has given her intimate knowledge of Italy’s ins and outs.

Fiat’s Rough Road, and Its Renewal

The New York Times Book Review – December 31, 2011 (Excerpt)

NINE times out of 10, it’s possible to predict the quality of narrative books, especially those set in the business world, even before the author sits down and begins writing — even before the first interview is secure in a tape recorder. It’s not the idea or the specific angle that is the giveaway. Sad to say, it’s the access.

Without access, without hours of interviews with the people who populate the story, a narrative book is all but doomed. You think everyone would be buying Walter Isaacson’s book if Steve Jobs hadn’t decided to cooperate? Doubt it. What you get without access is an “outside” book, often cold and impersonal, typically cobbled together from magazine and newspaper clippings and interviews with analysts and others who never quite know what’s really going on.

Jennifer Clark, a onetime Rome bureau chief for The Wall Street Journal, has a rousing tale to tell in “Mondo Agnelli: Fiat, Chrysler and the Power of a Dynasty (Wiley & Sons, $29.95). It’s the story of the great Italian industrialist, Gianni Agnelli; the turnaround at his family’s crown jewel, Fiat, after his death; and Fiat’s subsequent takeover and government-financed rescue of Chrysler.

Ms. Clark has a good grasp of her narrative, especially when it remains in Italy. From the detail in her text and footnotes, it would appear that she enjoyed decent if unspectacular access to current and former Fiat and Agnelli executives. And, unfortunately, in the end, that’s what “Mondo Agnelli” ends up being: decent if unspectacular.

The book’s most serious failing is an inability to shed much new light on the Chrysler side of the story. “Most of those” at Chrysler, Ms. Clark notes, declined to be interviewed, which is a shame, given that it’s the Chrysler angle that will appeal most to American readers. [Read the full article...]

Black Market Billions: How Organized Retail Crime Funds Global Terrorists by Hitha Prabhakar

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 14:29:58 +0000

From piracy to counterfeiting to cargo theft, organized retail crime has exploded into a $38 billion industry. Synchronized global teams of thieves are pilfering immense volumes of high-value products, counterfeiting even more–and using the profits to support the world’s most vicious terrorists and criminal gangs.

In this eye-opening piece of investigative journalism, top business reporter Hitha Prabhakar connects the dots and follows the money deep into the world’s fastest-growing criminal industry. You’ll learn how the Internet, social media, and disposable cell phones have opened the floodgates for a new generation of criminals–and how buying something as innocent as a counterfeit handbag or discounted cigarettes actually funds terrorist groups from Al-Qaeda to Central America’s drug lords.

Black Market Billions draws on extensive first person interviews with law enforcement, industry, and the criminals themselves to reveal how retail crime rings impact the security in every country in which they operate. Prabhakar goes “inside” to reveal why the piracy economy has exploded…why preventive measures have failed…and what to expect next, as organized retail crime reaches a terrifying critical mass.

Organized retail crime is now a $38 billion business. Synchronized global teams are pilfering immense volumes of high-value products, counterfeiting even more—and using the profits to support the world’s most vicious terrorists and criminal gangs.

• Inside the massive, worldwide “piracy economy”

How organized retail crime went global—and what it means to you

• The money trail: from boosters and fences to consumers and terrorists

Shell warehouses and cargo theft: stealingfrom anyone, anywhere, anytime

• “Money laundering 2.0”: how terrorists are funded now

From ancient hawalas to twenty-first century gift cards

• Why the bad guys are still getting away with it

How terrorist funding keeps slipping through the cracks of today’s tougher laws

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Hitha Prabhakar

Hitha Prabhakar is a New York-based reporter for Bloomberg Television, covering business news and financial markets with a particular focus on retail. Before joining Bloomberg Television in 2011, Prabhakar was founder and principal of The Stylefile Group, a retail consulting firm based in New York City, where she served as an advisor to hedge funds and other clients with long-term holdings in retail companies. Prior to that, Prabhakar served as a retail reporter for Forbes Media, covering the luxury industry as well as men’s fashion. She has written for Time, People, MSNBC.com, ELLE India, and Metro newspapers, among other publications. Prabhakar was formerly a contributor on CNBC and has had numerous television appearances as a retail analyst on networks including CBS, CNN, Fox News, Sky News, and Bravo. She holds degrees in philosophy and economics from Smith College and a master’s degree from Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. She also studied at the London School of Economics.

Editorial Review

A labyrinthine study of how retail theft ripples down to fund international terrorism.

An idea born from instant messages exchanged with a friend pushing knock-off handbags, Bloomberg Television reporter Prabhakar decided to “follow the money trail” through the complicated billion-dollar business of counterfeit and stolen retail merchandise. Her consistently distressing research illuminates how organized retail crime (ORC) thrives amid a recessive economy as penny-pinching consumers turn to cheaper ways of purchasing everything from luxury items to prescription and over-the-counter drugs. These seemingly minor shopping decisions, she writes, fuel intricately systematic rings of thieves who funnel millions of American-earned dollars into international terrorist cells, many functioning on American soil. Prabhakar’s indignation is well supported by chapters on the many interlocking facets of black-market thievery, including the calculated machinations of insider and outsider thefts, the creation of money-laundering shell corporations, online “e-fencing,” gift-card fraud and cigarette smuggling. The author chronicles her hours of interviews with authors, industry insiders, loss-prevention experts and key businessmen, many of whom remain anonymous. Law-enforcement case studies demonstrate gradual, hopeful inroads toward thwarting ORC movements with collaborative efforts between government agencies. Countering this is a series of thief profiles revealing a cunning, professional workforce. On a smaller scale, Prabhakar offers everyday advice on how to recognize (and avoid) the work of an ORC operative both online and on the streets, yet ultimately she believes that without the cooperation of state and federal law enforcement and retailers to aggressively regulate this black market, “the cycle will continue.”

Sharp-pencil analysis on the seemingly futile battle against retail fraud. – Kirkus Reviews

Philanthropy in America: A History (Politics and Society in Twentieth-Century America) by Olivier Zunz

Wilfried F. Voss — Tue, 27 Dec 2011 13:42:19 +0000

American philanthropy today expands knowledge, champions social movements, defines active citizenship, influences policymaking, and addresses humanitarian crises. How did philanthropy become such a powerful and integral force in American society? Philanthropy in America is the first book to explore in depth the twentieth-century growth of this unique phenomenon. Ranging from the influential large-scale foundations established by tycoons such as John D. Rockefeller, Sr., and the mass mobilization of small donors by the Red Cross and March of Dimes, to the recent social advocacy of individuals like Bill Gates and George Soros, respected historian Olivier Zunz chronicles the tight connections between private giving and public affairs, and shows how this union has enlarged democracy and shaped history.

Zunz looks at the ways in which American philanthropy emerged not as charity work, but as an open and sometimes controversial means to foster independent investigation, problem solving, and the greater good. Andrew Carnegie supported science research and higher education, catapulting these fields to a prominent position on the world stage. In the 1950s, Howard Pew deliberately funded the young Billy Graham to counter liberal philanthropies, prefiguring the culture wars and increased philanthropic support for religious causes. And in the 1960s, the Ford Foundation supported civil rights through education, voter registration drives, and community action programs. Zunz argues that American giving allowed the country to export its ideals abroad after World War II, and he examines the federal tax policies that unified the diverse nonprofit sector.

About Olivier Zunz

Olivier Zunz is the Commonwealth Professor of History at the University of Virginia. He is the author of “Why the American Century?”, “Making America Corporate”, and “The Changing Face of Inequality”.

Editorial Review

A readable account of how philanthropy caught on in the United States more pervasively than any other nation.

Zunz (History/Univ. of Virginia; The Changing Face of Inequality: Urbanization, Industrial Development, and Immigrants in Detroit, 1880–1920, 2000, etc.) mixes case studies, mini-biography and academic theory to demonstrate that both the superwealthy and common folks have invested in giving to the needy as part of an effort to make America a better place. Wealthy industrialists like Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller Sr. might have started a trend that has found its way into the lives of Warren Buffett and Bill and Melinda Gates, but the author relates how the growth of charitable giving across the 50 states has transcended economic standing. Red Cross and United Way drives are just a couple of thousands of examples. Such giving seems to have become imbued across American society soon after independence from England. Visitors from other nations noticed it and remarked upon it during the early 19th century, and state laws, federal statutes, court decisions and favorable tax rulings built the generosity into the economic and political fabrics of American governance. Even segregationists did not object to philanthropists hoping to upgrade the quality of classroom education specifically and the quality of life generally among former slaves and their descendants. When devout philanthropists decided to affect public policy by working through religious organizations, American philanthropy policy expanded to allow complicated arrangements within a society that supposedly kept church and state separate. Zunz explains why numerous donors and the tax-exempt groups they form bypass helping fellow Americans in favor of helping citizens of other parts of the world. Part of the book’s fascination is how the author works through the conundrum of impure motives emanating from generous givers.

A sterling example of how an academic author can combine high-level theory with interesting, important real-world examples. – Kirkus Reviews

Screw Business As Usual – Insights by Richard Branson

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 15:42:39 +0000

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RICHARD BRANSON, one of the world’s most famous and admired business leaders, argues that it’s time to turn capitalism upside down-to shift our values from an exclusive focus on profit to also caring for people, communities and the planet

As he writes:
“It’s a vibrant and definite sea change from the way business was always done, when financial profit was a driving force. Today, people aren’t afraid to say, Screw business as usual!-and show they mean it.

“It’s amazing how I keep coming across the same message, from bustling global cities to the townships of South Africa to small villages in India to G8 climate conferences.

“It’s no coincidence that so many people are talking about the same thing. There’s a real buzz in the air. Change is happening.

“People often associate me with challenges, with trying to break records while sailing the Atlantic or flying in a jet stream in a balloon or going into space with Virgin Galactic. But this book isn’t just about fun and adventure and exceeding one’s wildest dreams. It’s a different kind of business book. It’s about revolution. My message is a simple one: business as usual isn’t working. In fact, business as usual is wrecking this planet. Resources are being used up; the air, the sea, the land are all heavily polluted. The poor are getting poorer. Many are dying of starvation or because they can’t afford a dollar a day for lifesaving medicine.

“But my message is not all doom and gloom. I will describe how I think business can help fix things and create a more prosperous world for everyone. I happen to believe in business because I believe that business is a force for good. By that I mean that doing good is good for business.

About Richard Branson

Sir Richard Branson is the founder of the Virgin Group. With around 200 companies in more than 30 countries, the Virgin Group has now expanded into leisure, travel, tourism, mobile, broadband, TV, radio, music festivals, finance, health, and renewable energy. Branson’s autobiography, Losing My Virginity, and his books on business, Screw It, Let’s Do It and Business Stripped Bare, are all international bestsellers.

Editorial Reviews

Virgin CEO Richard Branson (Reach for the Skies: Ballooning, Birdmen, and Blasting into Space, 2011, etc.) offers a stirring vision for a “new capitalism” that makes doing good for society a top business priority.

A maverick whose Virgin Group companies incorporate socially beneficial initiatives, the author seems to have anticipated the demands (“People Not Profits!”) of Occupy Wall Street, observing that people are becoming more aware of unfairness. “We must change the way we do business,” he writes, going so far as to predict that companies that exist only to maximize profits “will not be around for long.” Branson celebrates many entrepreneurs who have met people’s needs and made a profit, from pioneers like Ben & Jerry and Anita Roddick (founder of The Body Shop) to entrepreneurs around the world. The latter include Gyanesh Pandey, whose Husk Power delivers eco-friendly electricity to Indian families for only $2 per month; Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladesh-born economist and inventor of microfinance; Jane Tewson, who has reinvented British charity with Comic Relief; and Victoria Hale, creator of America’s first nonprofit pharmaceuticals company. “While the industrial age was all about wealth,” writes Branson, “unsustainable growth through depletion of natural resources and delivering profit to your shareholders, this new era, the ‘Age of People,’ is all about shifting the focus to how business can and must deliver benefits to people and the planet—as well as shareholders.” Besides recounting his own efforts to address world issues, the author describes opportunities in health, education and other areas, where fledgling entrepreneurs can help drive social change. Long known for thinking big, Branson certainly does not disappoint in this heartfelt but over-the-top view of socially engaged business. He serves it up in his engaging, name-dropping style, including a vignette about celebrity-visitor Kate Winslet saving his mother’s life during the fire that destroyed his vacation property in the British Virgin Islands.

Overwritten but inspiring. – Kirkus Reviews

Clark Howard’s Living Large in Lean Times: 250+ Ways to Buy Smarter, Spend Smarter, and Save Money by Clark Howard

Wilfried F. Voss — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:18:35 +0000

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Clark Howard is a media powerhouse and penny-pincher extraordinaire who knows a thing or two about money. A lifelong entrepreneur who is now the hugely popular host of a talk radio program and television show and the bestselling author of several books, Clark consistently delivers expert financial advice to his wide and devoted fan base.

Living Large in Lean Times is Clark’s ultimate guide to saving money, covering everything from cell phones to student loans, coupon websites to mortgages, investing to electric bills, and beyond. In his candid and friendly next-door-neighbor manner, Clark shares the small, manageable steps everyone can follow to build a path towards independence and wealth. Chock-full of more than 250 invaluable tips, the book outlines how to:

Locate missing and unclaimed money in your name
Lower your student loan payment
Find legitimate work-at-home opportunities
Get unlimited texting and e-mailing for less than $10 per month
Know what personal info not to post to social media sites
Determine the best mortgage rate, and much, much more

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

About Clark Howard

Clark Howard is a successful entrepreneur, a hugely popular talk radio host, HLN TV host, and founder of the website www.clarkhoward.com. He is the author of several books, including the bestselling Get Clark Smart.

Proud Penny Pincher’s Guide for Surviving the Tough Times

The New York Times Book Review – December 22, 2011 (Excerpt)

This time of year one’s thoughts turn toward family, friends, the best rum to decant into eggnog and — if you are like me, three years out of five — the vertiginous mountain of debt on your credit cards, and the financial reckoning that is breathing into your nostrils, a bit like a wolf.

I’m not a reader of self-help books, unless cookbooks and old poetry anthologies count. But this time of year I often find myself lingering in the personal finance section of bookstores, hoping some painless and rain-making tip rubs off on me. Sometimes I’ll buy one of these crisp-looking money books, by Suze Orman or Dave Ramsey or some other brand name, and place it by my bedside, and then read something else.

This year the book that leapt into my uneager arms was “Clark Howard’s Living Large in Lean Times,” a tightwad manifesto that’s been lingering on the New York Times how-to best-seller list all fall. Mr. Howard is himself a brand name. He has a popular daily syndicated talk radio show, a weekly program on the HLN cable channel and is the author of several previous books. He sometimes refers to himself as “El Cheapo Man.”

His new book is at once gloomy and upbeat, like an Arcade Fire song. He believes the American economy is a full 5 to 10 years away from rebounding. He also believes that if you devote yourself to his admonitions — that is, to the tormenting details of “saving more, spending less, and avoiding getting ripped off” — you can get a handle on your wallet and maybe even your life. Perhaps, I thought, while annotating this document of the current recession, I can see to it that my Christmas tree will not be repossessed. [Read the full article...]

Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation by B. Coleman

Wilfried F. Voss — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 12:22:28 +0000

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Hello Avatar! Or, {llSay(0, “Hello, Avatar!”); is a tiny piece of user-friendly code that allows us to program our virtual selves. In Hello Avatar, B. Coleman examines a crucial aspect of our cultural shift from analog to digital: the continuum between online and off-, what she calls the “x-reality” that crosses between the virtual and the real. She looks at the emergence of a world that is neither virtual nor real but encompasses a multiplicity of network combinations. And she argues that it is the role of the avatar to help us express our new agency–our new power to customize our networked life. By avatar, Coleman means not just the animated figures that populate our screens but the gestalt of images, text, and multimedia that make up our online identities–in virtual worlds like Second Life and in the form of email, video chat, and other digital artifacts. Exploring such network activities as embodiment, extreme (virtual) violence, and the work in virtual reality labs, and offering sidebar interviews with designers and practitioners, she argues that what is new is real-time collaboration and copresence, the way we make connections using networked media and the cultures we have created around this. The star of this drama of expanded horizons is the networked subject–all of us who represent aspects of ourselves and our work across the mediascape.

About B. Coleman

B. Coleman is Assistant Professor of Writing and New Media in MIT’s Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies and Comparative Media Studies. She is Faculty Director of the C3 Game Culture and Mobile Media initiative.

Editorial Reviews

“As engagingly written as it is insightful and eye-opening, Hello Avatar is the indispensable guide to the new era of X-computing.” – Nicholas Mirzoeff, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, New York University; author of The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality

“In Hello Avatar, Coleman explains to us what is happening at the edges of networked society in profound and revealing ways. She provokes the best in us by pushing the boundaries of our thinking about identity and culture in a digitally mediated world. She manages to operate at the most serious level of theory and the most immediate level of design and practice in the same text. Coleman’s new book is a true gift, to the scholar, to the designer, and to the general reader alike.” – John Palfrey, faculty co-director, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University

“Hello Avatar: Rise of the Networked Generation,” by B. Coleman

The Washington Post Book Review – December 16, 2011 (Excerpt)

In his recent cri de coeur, “You Are Not a Gadget,” technologist Jaron Lanier laments the course the World Wide Web has taken in its second decade. Far from the early visions of cyberspace and jacking into virtual worlds without end, he tells us, we’ve been given a flat world of information, an airless zoo where we find ourselves in the cages. We reduce ourselves to “multiple-choice identities” on social networks and give away our precious content for nothing, to be profited from by aggregators, advertisers and corporate conglomerates. The biggest losers online are artists, journalists, scientists and other creative thinkers, he writes, but to a lesser extent it’s all of us, except for the one-percenters at the top who profit from the Web’s “free” architecture. And, since it’s just plain dull out there on the Web, we’re getting the short end aesthetically as well.

In her new book, “Hello Avatar,” artist and media theorist B. Coleman looks at the same virtual terrain and sees, rather than impoverishment and imaginative constriction, increasing personal agency, and even fulfillment. First of all, she’d like us to get over the word “virtual,” coining the term “X-reality” (or cross-reality) to get at the way that our online experiences are actual and empowering. And we find this empowerment, she writes, thanks to our avatars. [Read the full article...]

Beethoven in America – An Image Of American Culture by Michael Broyles

Wilfried F. Voss — Tue, 20 Dec 2011 10:29:32 +0000

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Beethoven permeates American culture. His image appears on countless busts and coffee mugs; his music is heard in movie scores, TV soundtracks, commercials, and pop songs; he is Schroeder’s god in Peanuts and Chuck Berry’s freaked-out parent in “Roll over Beethoven.” In this book, Michael Broyles seeks to understand the composer as he exists in the American imagination and explores how Beethoven became a cultural icon. Broyles examines Beethoven’s appearance in a variety of contexts: American commercialism, the Afrocentrist and black power movements, and the modernist critique of Romanticism. He considers portrayals of Beethoven in American film and theater and the uses of his music in film scores, as well as references to Beethoven and his music in disco, country, rock, and rap. In the end, he shows that to examine Beethoven on American soil is to examine America itself.

About Michael Broyles

Michael Broyles is Professor of Music at Florida State University and former Distinguished Professor of Music and Professor of American History at Pennsylvania State University. His most recent book, Leo Ornstein: Modernist Dilemmas, Personal Choices (IUP, 2007), written with Denise Von Glahn, won the Irving Lowens Prize in 2007.

Editorial Reviews

“This book fills a great gap in our understanding both of Beethoven and of American culture. The panorama of this narrative encompasses antebellum rice plantations in South Carolina and the film studios of Hollywood, music critic John Dwight and rock star Chuck Berry, Theosophy and Black Power, Beethoven’s sketches, and YouTube videos.” — Christopher Reynolds, University of California, Davis

“[Broyles] serves as an intellectual, hyper-informed but genial tour guide to a potentially sprawling subject. Though the book is dense in research, it is never pompous; it could serve as a model for how serious musicological study can be generously shared with interested parties who don’t happen to be in the same profession.” — Santa Fe New Mexican

Don’t Scowl, Beethoven, You’re Loved

The New York Times Book Review – December 18, 2011 (Excerpt)

If we are to believe the Beethoven mythology, which is based mostly on his letters and reports from his inner circle, Beethoven had an unshakeable sense of his own importance. Unlike Mozart and Haydn he refused to defer to nobility, asserting that a composer is of greater value, in the cosmic scheme of things, than a prince. And though he had patrons among the aristocracy, he revered Napoleon, their nemesis, and dedicated his Third Symphony, the “Eroica” (“Heroic”) to him, only to remove the dedication when Napoleon crowned himself emperor.

Beethoven was probably much as history painted him: the deaf painter in sound, ingenious, embattled and defiant, but also a disheveled, scowling force of nature whose unpleasantness and irritability people suffered for the sake of his brilliance. In his music he tweaked conventions and was undaunted when works like the “Eroica” were criticized for their wildness, harmonic adventurousness and, for the time, outrageous length. Such criticisms aside, an enormous constituency regarded him reverently, and unlike Mahler, who believed that his time would come long after his death, Beethoven knew that he had seized his day.

But even Beethoven probably would have been surprised at the place his name and image have found at the heart of American culture, including popular culture. Yes, it’s true that millions of Americans get through their days, weeks and months without hearing a note of Beethoven or giving him a thought. But as Michael Broyles points out in his fascinating but uneven “Beethoven in America,” just about everyone knows Beethoven’s name, if not necessarily his music, and for millions — particularly those with little interest in the symphonic world — he is synonymous with the classics. [Read the full article...]

“Beethoven in America” by Michael Broyles

The Washington Post Book Review – December 23, 2011 (Excerpt)

Sometimes I wonder what it would be like to be the ghost of a dead classical musician, looking on while the rock and rollers get all the credit for bringing music to bear on pop culture. You might start cursing your luck that you didn’t have a guitar and amp available in your century of yore. Or, if you’re in a somewhat more hopeful mood, you might turn your attention to Beethoven, as Florida State professor Michael Broyles has in “Beethoven in America,” which makes the case that not only was Beethoven the all-around musical stud of musical studs, he might be the greatest of all musical ingratiators, turning up in our American corner of the universe, again and again, and more than most of us realize.

Even though most music fans are not classical music fans, the term “classical composer” tends to suggest the same things to a whole litany of people who don’t know the difference between a bass guitar and a bagatelle. We’re apt to conjure up someone possessed of a fiery and intractable temperament, a severe and draconian guy who’s probably poor and who works feverishly into the night, inspiration coursing through him as he scribbles out his runic notations before banging away at his keyboard. In other words, you probably arrive at an image of Beethoven as he has come down to us through the years in myriad tales, accounts, films, cartoons, lampoons, drawings and history books. [Read the full article...]

Dior Couture – An Insight by Ingrid Sischy and Patrick Demarchelier

Wilfried F. Voss — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 13:34:17 +0000

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Dior is one of the most revered names in fashion, the archetype of the Parisian couture house. Famous for launching the “New Look,” Christian Dior’s landmark first collection that marked a sea change in women’s dress after the Second World War, Dior is known today for its exquisite couture line of dramatic dresses.

This book comprises a portfolio of portraits of over one hundred incredible gowns from the entire era of Christian Dior haute couture, including dresses designed by Dior himself. All of the images were shot by Patrick Demarchelier, known for his exquisite fashion portraits that grace the pages of Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, and many other magazines.

About Ingrid Sischy

Dior was started in Paris by designer Christian Dior in 1946. In addition to haute couture, Dior also produces ready-to-wear, men’s couture, accessories, and perfume. Patrick Demarchelier is one of the best-known fashion photographers in the world. His work appears in top fashion magazines, including Vogue, Elle, Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, and Marie Claire. He also shoots advertising campaigns for couture houses, including Dior, Chanel, YSL, Ralph Lauren, and Calvin Klein. Ingrid Sischy is the former editor-in-chief of Interview magazine and the international editor for Vanity Fair’s European editions.

Opening the Doors of Dior

The New York Times – November 29, 2011 (Excerpt)

SAINT LAURENT, Chanel, Dior: the names of the most famous Paris houses sort of dance off the tongue. Their histories defeat the idea that younger generations might be bored with old things. And a stream of books and films helps to assure that they won’t be.

“Dior Couture” (Rizzoli), by the photographer Patrick Demarchelier, is far and away the most gorgeous book on the house, established by Christian Dior shortly after the end of World War II. It’s not a complete record; Mr. Demarchelier, working closely with Dior, shows roughly 150 dresses, suits and coats, all of them made in the Dior ateliers from 1947 to 2011, and preserved in the archives. Obviously that’s a fraction of Dior’s output.

And it’s not a representative survey of house talent. There are examples of Christian Dior’s early work, like the famous 1947 bar suit with its neat peplum, and a natural-line Mirza dress in chic polka dots from 1951. Yves Saint Laurent, who succeeded Dior at his death, in 1957, is represented with two killer dresses, including one in a deep-red floral print with a very modern sense of shape. Marc Bohan has two outfits. Gianfranco Ferré gets none.

And while John Galliano’s work is well covered, there are omissions. None of his extreme examples of deconstruction shown in the 1999 Matrix show at Versailles are included, and there’s nothing from the 2000 hobo collection. [Read the full article...]

Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil by Tom Mueller

Wilfried F. Voss — Thu, 08 Dec 2011 12:02:19 +0000

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The sacred history and profane present of a substance long seen as the essence of health and civilization.

For millennia, fresh olive oil has been one of life’s necessities-not just as food but also as medicine, a beauty aid, and a vital element of religious ritual. Today’s researchers are continuing to confirm the remarkable, life-giving properties of true extra-virgin, and “extra-virgin Italian” has become the highest standard of quality.

But what if this symbol of purity has become deeply corrupt? Starting with an explosive article in The New Yorker, Tom Mueller has become the world’s expert on olive oil and olive oil fraud-a story of globalization, deception, and crime in the food industry from ancient times to the present, and a powerful indictment of today’s lax protections against fake and even toxic food products in the United States. A rich and deliciously readable narrative, Extra Virginity is also an inspiring account of the artisanal producers, chemical analysts, chefs, and food activists who are defending the extraordinary oils that truly deserve the name “extra-virgin.”

About Tom Mueller

Tom Mueller writes for The New Yorker and other publications. He lives in a medieval stone farmhouse surrounded by olive groves in the Ligurian countryside outside of Genoa, Italy.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

E.V.O.O. just got a whole lot more complicated. Tom Mueller’s Extra Virginity is about as explosive as an expose can get, at least if your subject is liquid fat. The road from tree to table, it turns out, is fraught with corruption, fraud, and laboratory interventions. Mueller shows how and why the trade in adulterated olive oil is about as profitable as the trade in some hard drugs, and with a lot less risk, too. There are equally entertaining detours into olive oil’s long history, the politics of regulation and enforcement, and even debates over the best way to taste it (swirl, aerate, spit, or just swig?). All in all, it’s a great read not just for foodies, but also for anyone interested in the complexities of global trade and organized crime. –Darryl Campbell, Amazon.Com Review

“Starred review. Engrossing history, vivid contemporary reporting and a cogent call to action, expertly blended in an illuminating text.” (Kirkus Reviews )

“How long have readers been waiting for a book like this? A century? A millennium? Finally, the earth’s most poetic food has found its storyteller. Essential, smart, and ridiculously overdue.” (Bill Buford, author of Heat )

Olive Oil’s Growers, Chemists, Cooks and Crooks

The New York Times Book Review – December 7, 2011 (Excerpt)

A few pages into Tom Mueller’s new book, “Extra Virginity,” there’s a funny moment when an olive oil expert holds up a bottle that’s covered with dubious claims: “100 percent Italian,” “cold-pressed,” “extra virgin.” The man shakes his head and says, perhaps with a hint of Don Rickles in his voice, “Extra virgin? What’s this oil got to do with virginity? This is a whore.”

These are sentences to savor. They underscore this book’s project, which is to demonstrate the brazen fraud in the olive oil industry and to teach readers how to sniff out the good stuff. These are also, sad to say, among this book’s few digestible lines. Earnest and sentimental from start to last, “Extra Virginity” doesn’t have a shrewd or slutty bone in its body. It’s an unintentional master class in how to say waxy and embalming things about fresh food.

Mr. Mueller is an American writer who lives in Italy. And not just anywhere in Italy but, his dust flap reveals, in a description that’s the prose equivalent of Corinthian leather upholstery, “in a medieval stone farmhouse surrounded by olive groves in the Ligurian countryside outside of Genoa.”

“Extra Virginity” grew out of a cogent article titled “Slippery Business” that Mr. Mueller wrote about olive oil in 2007 for The New Yorker, and his book is filled with information mindful eaters will wish to have. In this regard “Extra Virginity” is another reminder of why subpar nonfiction is so much better than subpar fiction. With nonfiction at least you can learn something. [Read the full article...]

Losing ‘Virginity’: Olive Oil’s ‘Scandalous’ Fraud

NPR Book Review – December 12, 2011 (Excerpt)

Extra-virgin olive oil is a ubiquitous ingredient in Italian recipes, religious rituals and beauty products. But many of the bottles labeled “extra-virgin olive oil” on supermarket shelves have been adulterated and shouldn’t be classified as extra-virgin, says New Yorker contributor Tom Mueller.

Mueller’s new book, Extra Virginity: The Sublime and Scandalous World of Olive Oil, chronicles how resellers have added lower-priced, lower-grade oils and artificial coloring to extra-virgin olive oil, before passing the new adulterated substance along the supply chain. (One olive oil producer told Mueller that 50 percent of the olive oil sold in the United States is, in some ways, adulterated.)

The term “extra-virgin olive oil” means the olive oil has been made from crushed olives and is not refined in any way by chemical solvents or high heat.

“The legal definition simply says it has to pass certain chemical tests, and in a sensory way it has to taste and smell vaguely of fresh olives, because it’s a fruit, and have no faults,” he tells Fresh Air‘s Terry Gross. “But many of the extra-virgin olive oils on our shelves today in America don’t clear [the legal definition].” [Read the full article...]

Are Brick & Mortar Bookstores Prepared For The Future?

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 16:29:49 +0000

Wilfried F. Voss is the author of The Bleeding Hills. For more information see his website at http://wilfriedvoss.com.

This morning I posted another book review on this very website. The book in question is Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back by Robert Levine. Basically, Levine addresses “parasites” like Google, Youtube, and others who benefit (i.e. make the big bucks) from culture businesses like the newspaper, music, literature, and entertainment industry, without paying a dime. Thus the title “Free Ride.”

In my personal opinion, the term “parasite” is a bit strong, and it was probably chosen for an overly dramatic dramatization of the current situation. In the business world – past, present, or future – every business is a “parasite” in the widest sense of the word.

Nevertheless, there is definitely a truth behind what Levine has to say, and I will order the book as soon as I am done with writing this post. It will be for the purpose of learning Levine’s recommendations on how the culture business can fight back. There is a great potential of disappointment in there, though, as I fear that the book focusses primarily on the problem rather than the solution or that the solution is presented in form of superficial motivational blabbering.

I am curious about the solution, because I consider the good old-fashioned brick & mortar bookstores as being a vital part of the cultural business world, and their existence is threatened by the presence of digital reading devices such as the Kindle, Nook, iPad, and others.

Who hasn’t had the dream of running their own bookstore? And yes, I am one of them, but as a business man I am aware of the overwhelming obstacles, and the initial substantial financial investment is only the beginning. Compared to online stores, brick & mortar bookstore have to deal with an extensive inventory, and to increase the burden, that inventory needs to be updated frequently by adding new book titles. If not managed meticulously on a daily basis, the whole scenario can end up in an accounting nightmare.

The ground rules for a successful bookstore remain the same as for any other foot traffic business. First, there is location, location, location. Secondly, you need a daily profound investment of blood, sweat, tears, and time. Personally, I would prefer not to run my hypothetical bookstore alone. Compare it to a restaurant where you need one person responsible for kitchen operation – ideally the chef himself/herself – and one for general business management. Add to this a reliable part-time accountant. The harsh truth is that most bookstores combine the positions of sales, management, and accounting in one person.

My point is, in order to meet the digital challenge, you need that stable foundation. If your sales are already declining, and you blame Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Apple, and their digital reading devices, it is most probably too late. The ship has already a crack in the hull, and you won’t be able to steer it away from the rocky shore and find a course out of the storm into safe waters.

I have seen it too often. Local stores went out of business, and when interviewed by the local newspapers, the owners blamed the current economical situation, Walmart, Amazon, God, and the weather. As a business man I would have liked to ask them, “Did you develop a business plan when you determined the challenges?” As a matter of fact, most such businesses were victims of sheer laziness, and selling the inventory made for some quick bucks.

However, in terms of bookstores, the challenge is real. Within the next few years, we will witness the vanishing of the majority of the good old-fashioned brick & mortar bookstores. Thus, the question of “Are Brick & Mortar Bookstores Prepared For The Future?” is valid. Are bookstore owners determined and prepared to face the challenge, or do they dwell in a mixture of apathy and ignorance?

The usual assumption is that recognizing the problem is the first step toward a working solution, yet again, the threat is overwhelming. Another business rule says you need to convey to your potential customers the difference between your business and that of your competitors. However, in case of brick & mortar bookstores compared to online stores with their digital offerings, the difference is quite obvious, and the advantages weigh heavily in favor of online stores.

Nevertheless, let’s look into the differences. One argument, I hear the most, is about the feeling of holding a real book in your hand. But how does that compare to holding a Kindle or an iPad? Primarily, it’s the cover, which can make a book a piece of art, and I believe, this makes for the biggest draw of printed books. Also, there is the feel of awe when you enter a bookstore with its numerous shelves filled with individual pieces of art. So, let’s add an appealing interior and, even more importantly, a fascinating window front to the list of requirements to run a successful bookstore.

I believe, most of the smaller bookstores operate beneath their potential by not paying attention to their appearance, specifically the window front. A mere display of the newest books in print doesn’t do it. Take the bigger cities and their shopping venues as an example. You don’t need a professional designer to develop ideas. Pablo Picasso once said, “A good artist copies; an extraordinary artist steals.”

In order to attract more customers you need to provide a convincing reason to enter your store. For example, I never understood why stores don’t hire a small brass band of one to three persons to play carols at Christmas time.

In all consequence, you need to do what online stores can not: Make your bookstore a place of happenings designed to address seasonal events such as Christmas, Easter, Valentine’s Day, Mothers’ Day, Fathers’ Day, Independence Day, Labor Day, Patriots Day, summer vacation, first day of school, or whatever. The calendar is full of suggestions.

Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny should be regular visitors to your store, where Santa Claus doesn’t need to be restricted to Christmas. Make it a Christmas all year. I know for a fact that the concept works, because we have a Santa Claus all year at the Yankee Candle flagship store a few miles to the south and the Kringle Candle store two miles to the north. Yes, they are candle stores, but what works for them – selling candles – can also work for the bookstore owner – selling books.

Another obvious promotional measure is to invite writers and artists, have readings and exhibitions. Make it a very visible point that local writers, artists, and musicians are welcome to apply for a session.

And yes, on top of all the ideas that come to mind, you need promotion, and the first promotional feature should be a functional website and a Facebook account. Most bookstores underestimate the importance of a good website, and when you look at most of them, you want to go for some TUMS. A good website does not necessarily mean you need to sell your books there, but you should give your customers a chance to browse your inventory (even in the store) and order books online for pickup at your store. I do enjoy entering our local bookstores, but I also feel overwhelmed by the vast offering, and a computer system would help tremendously. Well, libraries do it…

In general, besides my initial blaze of ideas, determine the differences between your bookstore and the big guys like Amazon.Com, but also determine what works for them, and, if applicable, steal their ideas. Regardless of whether you agree with my view or not, the most important action items remain: Don’t complain. Don’t blame others. Determine the challenge and do something.

Additional Resource:

Selling Books by Their Gilded Covers

The New York Times – December 3, 2011 (Excerpt)

Even as more readers switch to the convenience of e-books, publishers are giving old-fashioned print books a makeover.

Many new releases have design elements usually reserved for special occasions — deckle edges, colored endpapers, high-quality paper and exquisite jackets that push the creative boundaries of bookmaking. If e-books are about ease and expedience, the publishers reason, then print books need to be about physical beauty and the pleasures of owning, not just reading.

“When people do beautiful books, they’re noticed more,” said Robert S. Miller, the publisher of Workman Publishing. “It’s like sending a thank-you note written on nice paper when we’re in an era of e-mail correspondence.”

The eagerly anticipated 925-page novel by Haruki Murakami, “1Q84,” arrived in bookstores in October wrapped in a translucent jacket with the arresting gaze of a young woman peering through. A new novel by Stephen King about the Kennedy assassination, “11/22/63,” has an intricate book jacket and, unusual for fiction, photographs inside. The paperback edition of Jay-Z’s memoir “Decoded” features a shiny gold Rorschach on the cover, and in March the front of “The Song of Achilles” by Madeline Miller will bear an embossed helmet sculpted with punctures, cracks and texture, giving the image a 3-D effect. [Read the full article...]

Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back by Robert Levine

Wilfried F. Voss — Sun, 27 Nov 2011 12:38:36 +0000

Click on image to buy from Amazon.Com

How did the newspaper, music, and film industries go from raking in big bucks to scooping up digital dimes? Their customers were lured away by the free ride of technology. Now, business journalist Robert Levine shows how they can get back on track.

On the Internet, “information wants to be free.” This memorable phrase shaped the online business model, but it is now driving the media companies on whom the digital industry feeds out of business. Today, newspaper stocks have fallen to all-time lows as papers are pressured to give away content, music sales have fallen by more than half since file sharing became common, TV ratings are plummeting as viewership migrates online, and publishers face off against Amazon over the price of digital books.

In Free Ride, Robert Levine narrates an epic tale of value destruction that moves from the corridors of Congress, where the law was passed that legalized YouTube, to the dorm room of Shawn Fanning, the founder of Napster; from the bargain-pricing dramas involving iTunes and Kindle to Google’s fateful decision to digitize first and ask questions later. Levine charts how the media industry lost control of its destiny and suggests innovative ways it can resist the pull of zero.

Fearless in its reporting and analysis, Free Ride is the business history of the decade and a much-needed call to action.

About Robert Levine

ROBERT LEVINE was most recently executive editor of Billboard magazine. His articles on technology, business, and culture have appeared in the New York Times, Fortune, Condé Nast Portfolio, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, andTravel & Leisure. He lives in New York.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Editorial Reviews

“Can the culture business survive the digital age? That’s the burning question Robert Levine poses in his provocative new book. And his answer is one that will get your blood boiling. Rich with revealing stories and telling tales,Free Ride makes a lucid case that information is actually expensive – and that it’s only the big technology firms profiting most from the work of others that demand information be free.”
—Gary Rivlin, author of Broke, USA

“One of the great issues of the digital age is how people who create content will be able to make a living. Robert Levine’s timely and well-researched book provides a valuable look at how copyright protection was lost on the internet and offers suggestions about how it could be restored.”
—Walter Isaacson, President/CEO of the Aspen Institute and author of Benjamin Franklin

“This book thoroughly documents a wide-spread outbreak of cyber amnesia. Despite libertarian delusions, industries often get Free Rides, especially in their early days, but they eventually give back. Taxpayers build roads, then get hired to build cars. The Internet gives back a lot in exchange for its Free Ride, but one thing it defiantly isn’t giving back is a way for enough people to make a living. No matter how amusing or addictive the Internet becomes, its foundation will crumble unless it starts returning the favors it was given and still depends on.”
—Jaron Lanier, author of You Are Not a Gadget

Reader Review

I started Robert Levine’s “Free Ride” with a deeply skeptical mindset. As someone who has followed the topics of digital innovation, the digital economy, and piracy in the news and blogosphere, I tend to be wary of anything that really amounts to obsolete companies trying to preserve an advantage through regulatory and legal means in the face of technological innovation.

This is why I was pleasantly surprised by this book. It’s a fascinating history of the rise of digital piracy as it affected (and affects) the major “content” businesses (Music, Newspapers, Publishing, Television, and Film), and particularly the divide between the digital technology companies (such as Google) and the content industries. Quite often, I finished a chapter of the book much more sympathetic to these businesses than I had been before, particularly when Levine really delves into the economics of the “content” businesses and the piracy affecting them. While I don’t entirely agree with him (at times, I think he’s a little too wed to the idea of keeping the content businesses large and stable), I strongly recommend this book to any interested in these topics.

Levine focuses on those five main “content” businesses, but the real heart of the book (the most researched and detailed, including Levine’s proposal for dealing with piracy) lie in the sections about the Music Industry. He goes into great detail about how digital piracy unfolded on the industry in the form of Napster, File-Sharing, and Digital Lockers, and how the Music Industry reacted to these changes (and the proliferation of digital technology plus the web). Particularly interesting to me was his writings on the economics of the Music Industry and each method of distributing music (such as CD Albums versus iTunes singles), as well as the details about the rise and fall of Napster in the late 1990s.

It is from the Music Industry that Levine also draws his proposal for resolving the issue of getting rights-holders paid for the use of their content on the web: “Blanket Licenses”, or the right for people to use all the music they want as long as they pay for the license to an organization that then distributes the revenue (or if they subscribe to services that do this). He points out that this is already a system in place for paying songwriters and music publishing, and that several European telecoms/Internet Service Providers (such as TDC in the Netherlands). There is increasing support for it in continental Europe, although the US music industry continues to be wary.

This is not to dismiss the rest of the book. Levine also delves quite well into how e-books are changing the Publishing Industry, mostly in the context of the conflict between tech companies that want to sell book-reading devices using books as a “loss leader”, and the actual publishing companies that are afraid that this “loss leading” will destroy any other retailers who can’t afford to take a loss on book sales to sell physical readers. He makes a very convincing argument that it was foolish for newspapers to put all their articles online for free, instead of reserving most of them for subscribers (particularly the more profitable “print” subscribers that usually account for more than 90% of a newspaper’s revenue). Levine points out that Online Video is a major threat to cable television, the heart of the modern television business (their reaction is “TV Everywhere”, allowing anyone with a cable subscription to watch television shows and movies on any devices they own). And quite frequently, Levine points out the divide between the technology companies that have benefited from a “free web” that permits piracy (such as Youtube getting popular on the back of pirated video content that users post), and the content providers hurt by this. A great deal of his anger is particularly reserved for Google, which has been a major player in dampening efforts to strengthen copyright enforcement online.

That is not to say that I agree wholeheartedly with Levine on these issues. His chapters on the newspaper business are very convincing, and I’m much more sympathetic to the television and music businesses after reading this book. Nonetheless, I think Levine has a bias towards high-priced, professional content output, such as high-priced shows on cable subscriptions. There are several points in the book where he’s dismissive towards amateurs and “hobbyists”, and I get the impression that he would gladly make the trade-off of higher cable prices for higher-priced (and presumably better) content such as “Mad Men”. That’s a fair opinion, but it’s like complaints about how the quality of air travel degraded after de-regulation allowed cheaper airfare prices in the US: quality was lost, but far more people had access and the ability to enter the market. It’s important not to get too wedded to the present state of the “content” market, fears about a “twenty-first century economy with a seventeeth-century content business” aside.

Despite some of my disagreements with Levine, I DO wholeheartedly recommend that you read this book. It’s an excellent piece, both readable and well-supported, from a perspective that tends to be dismissed as entirely self-serving and “luddite” in the debates over digital piracy. – Brett, Amazon.Com Customer Review

Inconspicuous Consumption

The New York Times Book Review – November 25, 2011 (Excerpt)

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,” Samuel Johnson declared. As the Internet is destroying the business model that has historically supported high-quality journalism, movies, music and television, the conventional wisdom in Silicon Valley is that Johnson was wrong. “Information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower,” technology activists have insisted, selectively quoting the technology thinker Stewart Brand. (In fact, Brand said in the same 1984 speech that on the other hand, “information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable.”) According to the worldview embodied by Google and Facebook and many of the best minds in the legal academy and public-interest community, the culture business is collapsing because the old-style media executives who run Hollywood, cable television, the record companies and newspapers have failed to adjust to the expectations of a demanding new generation of media consumers who want free movies and books and music and news wherever and whenever they’re online.

In “Free Ride,” a book that should change the debate about the future of culture, Robert Levine argues, in effect, that Samuel Johnson was right, and that it’s the self-interested Silicon Valley technology companies and their well-financed advocates who are wrong. “The real conflict online,” Levine writes, “is between the media companies that fund much of the entertainment we read, see and hear and the technology firms that want to distribute their content — legally or otherwise.” By delivering content they don’t pay for, or selling content far below the price it cost to create, Levine says, information and entertainment distributors like YouTube and The Huffington Post become “parasites” on the media companies that invest substantially in journalists, musicians and actors; the distributors drive down prices in a way that sucks the economic lifeblood out of those who create and finance the best achievements of our culture. The result is a “digital version of Wal-Mart capitalism,” in which free-riding distributors reap all the economic benefits of the Internet by cutting prices, and culture suppliers are forced to cut costs in response. This dynamic, Levine argues, destroys the economic incentive to create the kinds of movies, television, music and journalism consumers demand, and for which they are, in fact, quite willing to pay. [Read the full article...]