James Fallows

... be sure to come by the 5th anniversary Air Show / celebration for the Hangar 24 craft brewery. If I weren't necessarily at a policy big-think event in DC this weekend, I would be there myself.

I was living in Beijing when I saw news of Hangar 24's opening five years ago: that long-sought combination of small-airport aviation and micro-brewing in my original home town. I ended up spending more time there than I expected in 2008, as I went back and forth from China in my dad's final months. I've been there in happier circumstances as often as I can recently. Have a Columbus IPA or Orange Wheat for me if you go there -- or for my dad, whose 88th birthday it would be. And enjoy the air show!

After this item late last night.3) Many, many readers are unhappy with my assertion last night that the AP leak investigation is the one of these episodes that should be held against the president. Samples:

Is it your position that any government official should be able to leak any classified information to a journalist with impunity even when that leak endangers lives and compromises national security? Where are your boundaries?

And:

I don't think you're really grappling with President Obama's argument in favor of the leak investigation. His argument is straightforward: revealing national security secrets is a matter of life and death for Americans overseas. Anyone who reveals those secrets should be arrested and prosecuted as a matter of justice and deterrence. That's a solid argument, and for you to rebut Obama by talking about the lessons of history is an exercise in evasion. When Aldrich Ames exposed the names of CIA agents and sources to the Soviet Union, those agents and sources were promptly arrested and executed. It seems very likely that the wikileaks data dumps had the same result, especially since Julian Assange refused to redact any of the information. The Bradley Manning court case has been an embarrassment, but it's hard to argue that the federal government should not have moved heaven and earth to find the culprit and prosecute him.
 
I could be persuaded that AG Holder was wrong ... and that President Obama was wrong in backing him. But I am skeptical that the verdict of history is self-evidently against the president, who after all does have a responsibility to protect national security. One of the temptations that presidents should avoid is worrying about looking better in history's eyes. As you know, history is greatly influenced by journalists, who have a certain conflict of interest on issues like this. I am sure the President would rather not prevent journalists from talking to sources (in contrast to President Bush, who would have been overjoyed to send a few journalists to prison), but it's not his top priority. Should it be? You still have to do the hard work of arguing that this tactic, in this instance, was misguided.

Several people also pointed out this item, by Kevin Drum, on why the government took such a hard line in this leak case (although they've been consistently hard on leakers all along). And a university math professor said, in response to my claim that "secrets always get out," "My jaw dropped reading that, given the selection bias inherent in the claim!" (If I had said "all secrets always get out," I would have to respond Touché. My point is that every president has had to cope with "shocking" and "dangerous" releases of classified information.)

In explanation of my own hard-line tone, let me be more precise. On the "Administration's side" of the case, I recognize these points:

1) Leaks can do genuine, terrible damage -- mainly by exposing vulnerable informants and sources, in the way Kevin Drum explains. One reason I was never a fan of the Wikileaks approach is that I knew how many sources in China, in particular, were likely to be harmed by this indiscriminate info-dump.

2) Organizations can and should take reasonable steps to police themselves -- that is, to encourage their own members to observe codes of confidence, and to identify and if necessary punish those who transgress. It matters tremendously to me and other staff members of this magazine that we protect the confidence of people who share information with us. That matters in corporations; it matters in government agencies; it matters for doctors and teachers and detectives and on down a long list.

So what is my complaint?

3) There is a very long history of presidents losing all perspective about leaks, and compounding the problems the original leak through a disproportionate reaction. Jonathan Bernstein explains some of that here (thanks to AS). That is the history that I said a figure as level-headed and unflappable as Barack Obama should be aware of. Also see James Traub on this pattern in Obama's time.

3a) There is also a history of leaks usually (though not always) being less damaging than initially claimed. See: the history of The Pentagon Papers.

4) An important exception to point (2) above is that these post-leak punitive hunts are most likely to lead to trouble when they spill over to the press. The CIA giving its own members lie-detector tests or intercepting their mail to see who's disloyal is one thing -- and generally a proper thing, in my view. Same for a police department, a military unit, or within reason a company.

It is something else to force reporters to testify (or go to jail if they refuse), or to seize records of their phone calls or meetings. Let's leave aside the First Amendment issues: the complications are similar to those involved in forcing clergy members to talk about their parishoners, or doctors about their patients, or attorneys about their clients, or husbands about their wives, and parents about their children. The CIA investigating its own is straightforward. Dragging in the press is different and has very rarely turned out well. That is the reality that I expected a leader with Obama's Niebuhrian awareness of tragic possibilities to be guided by.

I think this is it for me on this theme. I hope the first two faux-scandals peter out, and that the issues of secrecy and disclosure in the era of long twilight war get more serious examination.

This follows my dispatch last weekend on the proper and improper bounds of foreigners finding fault with a big, contradictory, quickly changing, disorderly-but-progressing society.

I have been in China, offline, and in other ways removed from the US news ecosystem through the blossoming period of the three simultaneous problems for the Obama administration. Here is how they look after a day's worth of catching up:

More »

Reader WSR, who has spent a lot of time in Shanghai, alerted me to this one just now. It's from our old friend The Shanghaiist:

Sidney Rittenberg's The Man Who Stayed Behind (with Amanda Bennett) is a genuinely astonishing book. To be more precise, it is a dramatic account of a genuinely astonishing life.

Rittenberg, who grew up in Charleston, South Carolina in the 1920s, went to China in the 1940s as a language expert with the U.S. Army (right) -- and stayed for decades, as a committed believer in Chinese Communism and the new path being blazed by Chairman Mao. His loyalty to the country and its leaders survived his two long stretches, totaling 16 years, in solitary confirement as a political prisoner there in the early 1950s and again in the late 1960s. He still travels back and forth to China and, in his 90s, is actively involved in US-China affairs.

This evening -- Tuesday, May 14 -- I will have a chance to talk with Sidney Rittenberg about China then and now, at an event in Seattle sponsored by the Washington State China Relations Council. It's at 6pm at the ACT Theater; details here. I understand that C-SPAN intends to film his remarks, but if you're in the vicinity, please consider coming. I have met him before but am tremendously excited to have a chance to ask him about his experiences and views. It is an opportunity to hear about history, first-hand.

This took place while I was on the road in China, so I didn't catch up with it until just now. It is an editorial in (surprise!) the WSJ ten days ago that represents a certain kind of perfection in false-equivalence / black-is-white thinking. As a reminder:

I've been thinking quite hard about the amount of negative China articles that have appeared on your blog, usually in the form of links to Western laments about Chinese life and culture, as well as, of course, pictures of Beijing's pollution [1]. This is part of what I view as a general media trend of China-bashing [2]. Clearly, you love China, so I'm not accusing you in any way of being anti-China or malevolent, but I think you would agree there has been a rise/change in tone in coverage of China over the last year and a half.[3]

A prime example is the piece you linked to two days ago, where the author made sweeping generalizations based on singular anecdotes that paint the entire Chinese populace as rude, shallow and sub-human (or at least sub-Western.)[4] In analyzing a country of over a billion people, how can we take seriously someone who can paints with such a biased (and shockingly untruthful, if we were going to compare anecdotal memories) brush? Wouldn't it be similarly possible to write a similar anecdotal and nonfalsifiable story about America? Or any other country? Would we assume a fair appraisal if a Chinese person did the same to us?[5] I doubt it.

So why does this piece get coverage from you and the rest of the internet? I believe it's because it fits a media narrative that has been growing in strength over the last year or year and a half. I would summarize this narrative  as: "News Stories That China is Not As Good As The West."[6] Examples of these stories include the story making the rounds the last week on the quality of lamb in restaurants,[7] ubiquitous reports on various degrees of Chinese corruption and of course, pollution pictures.[8]

Now these are big important stories (except the lamb one,) but the focus on on China as opposed to say, India seems particularly acute. I am assuming that this is due to the news media's need for a rival to the United States in the post Soviet Era.[9] As China actually has some potential to pass the US in GDP (kind of meaningless) and perhaps have a say in regional (and maybe global?) security matters, I guess this is makes for news? I am assuming it's the present version of the Cold War Era "look how long the Soviets had to wait in line for bread" stories.[10] 

 

But at least China is open for Westerners to visit,[11] as opposed to the USSR of the 70s, leading to a particularly annoying narrative: the disgruntled foreigner leaving China because of excess pollution/corruption/hurt feelings. What kills me about this type of article is the total lack of acknowledgement of a huge advantage any Westerner gets when living in China: a five or ten fold increase in purchasing power.[12]

Some small examples from my time there:

• You can ride the Beijing subway, whose frequency and coverage exceeds all American lines with the possible exception of New York, for 30 cents (2 yuan.)
• You can take a taxi for 2 miles (maybe 3 or 4?) for an initial fee of 10 yuan in Beijing, or $1.60.
• You can swing into a hutong restaurant and order enough (incredible) food for 4 easily for 80 yuan, or maybe 3$ a person.
• You can hire a maid for 50/100 yuan to clean your likely cheap apartment. 

So why wouldn't someone expect a tradeoff if they moved to China between prices paid and living standards? And why isn't it explained by China watchers that while Chinese GDP per capita is 1/6th the US? That China is not a developed country, and that it's nowhere close to being one, despite it's massive growth of the last few decades? That Westerners who travel or live there that are expecting the comforts of home are fooling themselves?

Excuse the rant. I'm not sure why I'm responding to you about this. I think it's my fear that over the coming decades, the US and China will be thrown into an antagonistic relationship that will be an antagonism of choice.[13] And people who do not share the love for China and the Chinese people you and I do, will  look to this rising negative tide for rationalization of fear and hatred of the other. But in doing so, both countries will be turning their backs on incredible places and peoples that offer so much to each other. 

Thanks for listening. And here's hoping you have many future sunny Beijing days. The mountains ARE beautiful when you can seem them.

On the assorted points of disagreement:

• I should probably underscore the context of the "I hate China, and that's because I hate the Chinese people" rant I provided a link for [4]. The initial surprise value is that it comes from a site whose usual tone is "We hate foreigners, and that's because they criticize China." This post, equal in fury though opposite in direction to what normally appears, was from an ethnically Chinese foreigner who was having difficulty in his several months of living here.
  
  The central message of that post was: the Chinese people are worse than their system. As I pointed out in linking to it, my view has been the reverse: "Even though a thousand aspects of modern Chinese life drive me crazy, I still can't help liking the openness, the vim, the life of most of the people I meet here. That is, I find it easier to get along with the people than with the whole system." For instance, see a moment from one of my early visits to the Qingdao Beer Festival, at right.
  
  
• What's the reason for noting harshly critical material like this at all? It is because modern China -- like America, like Israel, like Turkey, like Mexico, like any other place that matters or any topic that deeply engages people -- is the subject of ongoing, passionate debate. People have strong views pro and con; opinions interact with one another and evolve; realities are so complex that many contradictory statements can all be "true" at the same time. I didn't agree with this (pseudonymous) writer or think that he had provided a "fair" [5] overview of everything Chinese. But I thought his venting was worth noting as part of the mix.
  
  
• Anyone, including me, needs to struggle against being defensive when criticized, and I realize that the reader-in-Boston is going out of his way to say that he doesn't think I agree with the ranting guy. But for record, the balance I've tried always to convey, and that I actually believe, is this: China is a society with enormous problems and probably-greater strengths and assets; life in China was, for my wife and me, usually harder than in other places, and usually more rewarding; the relationship between China and America involves very serious disagreements, but much more numerous areas of common interest; and so on. Check out here or here or here for chapter and verse.
  

Skipping past a bunch of other incidentals, here is the big point of agreement: Like the reader in Boston, I think it's possible (1) that the U.S. and China could end up in a snarling position of mutual suspicion and hostility, (2) that if this happened it would be self-induced, since it is not inevitable, (3) that a mainly hostile rather than mainly collaborative US-China relationship  would be bad for people in the two countries and everywhere else, and so therefore (4) it is very important that it not occur.

Where I differ from that reader is on whether "critical" stories about China -- carefully alarming ones, about food safety or pollution, or insanely hostile ones like the "I hate China" rant -- are driving the countries apart. To me, on balance, they suggest a properly realistic portrayal: neither too rosy and credulous, nor too resentful and suspicious. This is why in everything I write and everything I say I urge Americans to "take China seriously, without being afraid of it." Americans understand the realistic mix of goods and bads in our own country. Of course it's easier to maintain that balance about your own self/family/country than to apply it externally. But I think the range of good and bad coverage of China now being presented to the world -- like the mixed goods and bads about America that have long been on display to everyone  -- is in the long run indispensable to, rather than destructive of, a real relationship.

Enough in that vein. The book-length version of the argument above is China Airborne. For the record, specific annotation points:
____

[1] It is worth harping on pollution, because (according to me) "sustainability" in all its aspects is the major threat to China's continued development, and the major challenge China's economic growth poses for the world as a whole.

[2] For the record, I'm against any variant of the term "bashing" to describe international discourse -- Japan-bashing, China-bashing, America-bashing, etc. It assumes, rather that argues, that any criticism reflects prejudice rather than actual grounds for complaint. Saying that America has a Guantanamo problem -- or a social-class-divide problem or a drone-warfare problem -- is not America-bashing. Saying that China has problems of its own is not China-bashing.

[3] I think there has been both "good" and "bad" coverage (ie, both positive and negative stories) about China in that time. It is inarguable that in 2010 and 2011 China's foreign policy claims (based on its increased economic confidence) provoked reactions in many other Asian countries. Similarly, the Bo Xilai case occurred in this time; pollution levels rose; etc.

[4] Yes, this was a rant, revealing as much about the author as about the subject.

[5] Yes, but people make extreme complaints about America all the time -- I do it myself. For a subject as vast as America, or China, no single assessment can be perfectly "fair." If it tried to be, it would be really boring. You hope that the  flow of info and argument in its entirety will be enlightening and thus "fair" over time.

[6] Speaking personally, I have zero interest in whether China is "better" than America, or vice versa. It's like asking whether a car is better than a baseball game. These are societies with some points of similarity and a lot of points of difference. Even the Cold War-era arguments on whether the "American model" or the "Soviet model" offered a better path to development don't apply here. For reasons of scale, history, geography, and other factors, China and America are each a category-of-one internationally. Neither offers a realistic model for others to apply.

[7] The lamb-meat-or-is-it-rat? stories are important rather than trivial, because they're connected to larger concerns about food-safety that matter to much of the Chinese public.

[8] Again: pollution and the environment constitute Issue Number One.

[9] As I argued in a long story here, during America's era as a world power, it has often projected fears about its own economy or society onto foreign rivals. I think it's a big mistake to do so with China. Whatever is wrong with America now would be just as wrong if China didn't exist. The converse is mainly true for China. The right way to use the Chinese "challenge," in my view, is the way Obama has in some of his big speeches. That is, as a positive challenge: If China can develop wind energy, so can we, etc.

[10] I agree on this. Whether from Americans or Chinese or anyone else, the "well, what about your problems" reflex gets you nowhere. China has pollution problems; to say, "Well, America has too many schoolyard shootings" doesn't get you anywhere. America has violence problems; to say "Well, China is polluted" also does no good.

[11] China is more open than the Soviet Union generally was, and more than it used to be. It is not as fully "open" as it should be. Ask the Western journalists and scholars whose visas are denied or yanked on purely political grounds. (Yes, I know, the US also has a visa problem, but one of different nature and scale.)

[12] For what it's worth, the China-as-bargain-basement angle is, for me, not a significant part of its appeal. Some things are very cheap; others are expensive. Mainly, as noted, it is the life and vividness of the typical day in China that attracts me.

[13] Back to our agreement. From Richard Nixon's through Barack Obama's, an otherwise completely different sequence of American administrations has adopted policies based on the premise that the United States and China need to find ways to work together rather than become enemies. That the relationship between China and America has been as constructive as it has been reflects credit on people on both sides. It's worth working to continue it.

Now preparing for the trek back to the U.S. -- and in the knowledge that the airport from which I begin the trip, Beijing Capital, will be far more convenient, modern, and pleasant than the one where I'll arrive, Washington Dulles. I suppose you could fairly call me a Dulles-basher.

I mentioned two days ago that I had encountered famous Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (and famous Spanish/American chef Jose Andres) in the evening in Beijing. I didn't mention that a few minutes after the picture I used was taken, I had seen Ai Weiwei giving a highly stylized haircut to someone in the courtyard outside a restaurant.

Ai Weiwei, oversized personality that he is, must understand the cult and farce of celebrity and those who would fawn in the face of it. At the risk of reading way too much into this, perhaps that's the wry, mischievous reasoning behind his deliberately woeful haircuts: because he knows you -- you - will appreciate it, since it came from him. It's why you'll wear it for a day, a week, a month after the fact, looking ridiculous because no one else understands the context. You know, however. You got a haircut from Ai Weiwei.

The past week in China has been as packed and enlightening as any comparable span I've spent anywhere, but since I have to get up in a few hours for a very early-morning (China time) muster, I will wait until tomorrow to begin a description.

I don't know who at Google had the wit to think that the 93rd birthday (?) of the late Saul Bass (??) was an occasion calling for celebration via a "Doodle" -- a one-day tribute on the home page. 

Watching the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (center) advise the Spanish/American chef Jose Andres (right) in the flair and nuance of creating iPhone videos, when they crossed paths this evening in Beijing. I have no larger point here -- except to say that I will try to explain later what it was like seeing two such room-filling personalities in the same place at the same time.

I was around guns much of my life. Grew up in the Congo, hunting.  Marine Corps recon, professional training and use. CIA paramilitary, more training and use. Three wars: upcountry in Vietnam I had a bunker full of exotic weapons that had been collected over a ten-year period but were not on the inventory and could not be taken home by our military when they left -- we'd take them out and fire them every week; we carried guns everywhere we went, again upcountry just a few miles from the enemy's battalions; then in the Angola War I hired and organized three bands of professional mercenaries, killers by definition. 

In the consulate in the Katanga I had an impressive collection, bought out the weapons of the retiring elephant hunter. And I hunted. And at the family ranch in South Texas I hunted deer and javelinas.  

Then I lost all interest in hunting. I killed a beautiful animal and looked at the carcass thinking how much more beautiful it had been alive. I shot a bird and had the same feeling. Both dead so I could have the dubious Freudian pleasure of pulling a trigger and killing them.

The Katanga had been flush beautiful wildlife; it had been alive, the hills crawling with beautiful animals.  Then came independence and arms turned over to the new armies.  And our war in the Katanga (JFK/CIA), thousands of modern semiautomatic and automatic weapons left in the hands of our disbanded army, and the animals were broadly exterminated, the rolling plains were lifeless--we could drive all day and not see an animal.

In Burundi, where I served, President Micombero got himself a helicopter. Began flying around the shores of Lake Tanganyika machine-gunning hippopotamuses in the water.

 Recalling as a boy in the Congo driving with my father in a truck across the plains area.  We came on a Belgian who had been hunting all day, had a camera, wanted my father to take a picture of him with his trophies. He stood with his gun and his foot on a pile of 26 heads of little gazelles he had killed. In later years we drove through the same plains, and never ever saw another antelope.

 Even here in Austin, we are retired across the street from a lovely quiet park on the river. I walk my dog. Talk to the squirrels - - they sit on limbs not far above my head. Then one morning I found my neighbor down in the park with his son and a 22, killing the squirrels to "teach his son how to hunt." I pleasantly explained to him that he could teach his son how to enjoy live animals, that the squirrels he had killed were gone, dead. (He won-- the park no longer has any squirrels.)

We won! ...Our voice combined with other voices of journalists, traveling parents, and organizations like the Campaign for a Commericial Free Childhood made this happen.

I hoped to get the full policy from United Airlines to share with you.  But I am satisfied with this for now:

"From: "CustomerCare@united.com" <customercare@united.com>

To: D... 

Sent: Friday, May 3, 2013 12:57 AM

Subject: United Airlines - 

Dear Ms. xx:  

The policy change is that the standards are in line with guidelines of  

PG-rated movies.  More review may be underway, however this is internal 

company information.

Regards, 

Cxxxx 

Customer Care

Now who wants to contact American Airlines and Delta?!?"

Congratulations to the families that asked for the change. Apart from revising its movie policy, as best I can tell United has never apologized for or acknowledged the original over-reaction -- that of humiliating the family by turning them over to the police. I've had no followup beyond the opaque statement I quoted a month ago.  I appreciate the care that went into this note, and want to take the chance to say again that when there is a troubled corporate culture, the tone is almost always set at the top. I'm also grateful to the other United employees with whom I've had interesting and revealing talks in the (many) trips I've taken in the past month.

1) Recently I mentioned some of the obstacles that might slow China's path to ever-greater prosperity and influence. In a similar vein, consider an essay from Ely Ratner, of the Center for a New American Security, on "China's Victim Complex." Ratner's item examines recent tensions between China and its neighbors in the region, and asks what the episodes teach us about China more generally. Some of the conclusions are parallel to those I offered in this article and this book, especially about the awkwardness China's leaders reveal as they they try to adjust to their country's new prominence. As Ratner puts it:

1) Scrivener Guide. Over the years, and most recently here, I have extolled the virtues of Scrivener as a major step forward in computerized writing tools. I'm grateful to my friend MG in the United Arab Emirates who has alerted me to a detailed, useful, very well-illustrated online guide to advanced fluency with Scrivener that is available free here.

The guide is by Nicole Dionisio, it's part of the MakeUseOf series, you can download it as a 14MB PDF file, or you can read it on line. In whatever incarnation, it's highly interesting and valuable. Here's how it shows one of Scrivener's advanced features -- setting word-count goals for different chapters or sections of a writing project.


I don't use this when writing articles with Scrivener, but I have when writing books. Among other things, it helps in setting the daily output targets that are crucial to maintaining sanity through the months-long slog of finishing a protracted writing project.

Here's an illustration of another surprisingly useful tool: subtle but immediately recognizable variations in shading to let you compare various revisions in a piece of writing.

 
And -- why not? -- here is one more: a name generator. It's a feature that is meant for novelists and that I don't use but which indicates some of the elegant ingenuity of the program.


I have used Scrivener for years but still learned things from this guide. It is particularly useful in clarifying that Scrivener does not aspire to replace the functions of a normal word processor. Indeed, the last step you take before printing out or emailing a document from Scrivener is to export it to Word, for final formatting and spell-checking. Instead its features address the strategic aspects of writing books, academic papers, or long articles: how to keep your research material close at hand, how to organize your arguments, how to keep track of revisions and pentimenti. Check it out.

2) Google survival rate. I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was wary of Google Keep, an embryonic Evernote competitor, because Google had killed off so many similar interesting-seeming products in the previous months.

The author of the Gwern.net site replies as follows:

I think you may be overly skittish here. I collected data on 350 Google things and ran some statistics on it all.

Results: Only ~1/3 of Google products have ever been killed, and in particular, the 5-year survival estimate for Keep produced by my final model is ~60%, which seems like a pretty reasonable risk to take if the product is useful, and especially given that you correctly point
out that

> 1) Google has often orphaned services, but it has never "disappeared" data. (I am using "to disappear" in the transitive-verb sense familiar from Latin American politics.) It has been a leader in making sure you could make your own copies, or extract, any of your info that was in its part of the cloud.

The loss of Reader is a serious blow to many people including myself, but let's not go overboard and damn Google for worse than it deserves.

The study at the Gwern site is quite a tour de force. I won't attempt to summarize it but will just say, if you're interested in statistical analyses, you will find this interesting. I hope it's right about Keep, but for now Evernote does the job for me.

In the six months -- yes, it's been that long -- since Barack Obama's re-election, the drum-beats from the United States and Israel about bombing Iran have partly died down. Not totally, of course; recall the Hagel hearings, and also this Congressional resolution appearing to pre-endorse an attack if it occurs. Still, so much else has been going on -- in Syria, in North Korea, with the European economy -- that the topic has moved off the front pages for a while.

Which is why I found it so interesting to see that the possibility of an attack had literally moved back onto at least one front page. Here are our household's three papers as they looked on the breakfast table yesterday.

3. Jonathan Rowe, in his posthumous book Our Common Wealth (buy!). As I mentioned two years ago at the time of his sudden and unexpected death, Jon Rowe was a wonderful and original-minded writer who found a way to express concerns and ideas that made instant sense -- once he had pointed them out. His main contribution to The Atlantic was a 1995 cover story, with Ted Halstead and Clifford Cobb, on why GDP growth was a crude-at-best, destructive-at-worst way for a society to measure its overall progress and well-being.

At the time of his death Jonathan Rower was working on a set of ideas that now have taken form in a book edited (from his papers) by his friend Peter Barnes. Its power is, again, to give voice and form to a concept many people sense but that doesn't clearly make its way into political, journalistic, or academic discussion. That is the value of all the things to which we can't attach an immediate profit-and-loss value but that clearly matter to individuals, families, and entire societies in distinguishing satisfaction and happiness from malaise. Which is also a point Jonathan Rauch and David Runciman are addressing.

Please find the time to read these three works.

As the years wear on, my esteem grows for the writing program Scrivener as the single best bargain ever offered in the software world. And I mean: ever. It was originally for the Mac but now comes in a Windows version; it costs all of $45; and it is a program that seems ideally tailored for the way that many writers, including me, would like to approach their work. You can see its (quite impressive) list of testimonials here; read a detailed description of its power from a U Chicago student, Noah Ennis, here; and consider some previous discussion here and here. I've now written two books, two or three dozen Atlantic articles, and many other reports and presentations with Scrivener. I was pleased that its creator, Keith Blount of Cornwall, England, appeared in this space as a guest blogger two years ago.