James Fallows

Last from me on this topic, until Jeremy Lin is MVP of the NBA Championships, followed by leading the U.S. to an Olympic win this summer. For maximum drama, the gold medal game should be against the team from China. Until then:

1) From a cultural, social, business, and individual perspective, every aspect of Jeremy Lin's identity adds to the fascination. That he's Asian; that he's Christian; that he's from Harvard; that overnight he became a star. It's legitimate and natural to dwell on each of these elements, including his race.

   1A) On the cultural front, David Brooks's observed about Lin this morning that "we shouldn't neglect the biggest anomaly. He's a religious person in professional sports." This observation is ... surprising. Brooks might want to spend a little more time watching athlete interviews ("I want to thank Jesus for helping me on that field goal") on ESPN.

   1B) Non-surprisingly, the Daily Show trumps all in cultural-social-racial coverage.

2) When it comes to his athletic performance (as opposed to cultural significance), I strongly believe that none of those "identity" elements means anything. I agree with Ta-Nehisi Coates that what matters about Lin's basketball achievements is that he is exceptional as an athlete. Many commenters on TNC's post explain the shock of having known people who had made it as pro athletes: these people are different. They're different not in being black or Asian or Christian or anything else, but in being faster, stronger, better coordinated, better conditioned than the rest of us.
 
My story: in high school, I was a bad member of a tennis team whose #1 player won the national under-18 championship that year (the Kalamazoo tournament). He was just playing a different game from ordinary people -- and was faster, stronger, better coordinated, better conditioned. (Even so, he wasn't a big success in the pros, because there was a level above his of speed, coordination, durability, etc.)

Jeremy Lin is showing us his athletic skill now. Not his Harvard book-learning, his oriental heritage, his Silicon Valley optimism, or anything of that sort. Here he is doing his two-hand dribbling drill. Can you do this? No matter what your race?




3) Because a number of serious writers have based their theories of "Asian" behavior on the same social-science experiment, it is worth going into exactly what that experiment showed. Mark Liberman lays it out at Language Log, but here is the crucial chart. It tracks where different groups of people directed their attention when shown a set of pictures:

To simplify, the difference between "Asian" and non-Asian perspective  is the gap between the red and blue lines. Among other things, the chart shows that on initial, "at a glance" perspective, for the first half-second or so, there's virtually no difference. Everyone is looking at the same things. For a point guard, or a fighter pilot, that first half-second would be what matters. This chart is the basis of the "Asian different perception" arguments you're hearing. Again see Language Log for more.

4) Alan Paul, former resident of Beijing and author of Big in China, tells about his experience with the Chinese hoops world.

5) Another reader who knows the Asian basketball scene writes:

As a long-time hooper and resident of Taiwan maybe I can add something to this.  Unlike in the US, where many more kids get coaching in rec leagues or basketball camps, in Taiwan the athletics path is limited to a small number of kids.  This is not so much due to 'the system' but rather because most parents view sports as a waste of time / distraction from studies (which as you know, compared to US schooling, is gruelling).  The result is that most people playing in the average pick-up game have never been drilled in the fundamentals, so mostly what they do is imitate what they see on TV / Sportscenter highlights.
 
As for why China hasn't produced an NBA point guard, well China has only had a handful of NBA players and they've pretty much all been big men.  One possible explanation is that big men who can play are rarer than little men who can play - if you're 6'2, you are competing against many more people (locally and worldwide) for the limited number of spots than if you are 7' - so the best Chinese big men are naturally more in demand than the best guards.

After the jump, one more bit of eyewitness testimony.

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Last week I mentioned Mike Lofgren's observations on the strange media-political history of the "Iran threat." The world is full of, ummm, imperfectly governed states, at least two of which actually have nuclear weapons: North Korea and Pakistan. But discussions of a potential nuclear weapon in Iran take on a ticking-time-bomb, apocalyptic tone usually missing when we talk about North Korea and Pakistan. All these countries pose serious problems, but on the editorial pages and in this year's campaign speeches we hear disproportionately, and with disproportionate shrillness, about Iran.

A young academic who has recently worked in the executive branch chimes in about the pattern Lofgren described:

I worked for the State Department as an intern early in the Administration. One of my main tasks was to keep track of Congressional activities regarding Iran.

The language that Republicans on the Hill used about Iran was absolutely stunning to someone new to D.C.. Every time they held a hearing on how to ratchet up sanctions, most of the politicians and "experts" compared Iran to the next Nazi Germany and invoked clear, but not perfectly explicit imagery of a nuclear bomb being dropped on the United States and a second Holocaust.

While I was at State, it seemed to be policy that it would be preferable to keep Congress out of foreign relations with Iran because our European allies were irritated at our attempts to force sanctions on their business and political institutions. But the administration never really came out and did anything to push back on the rhetoric. And despite multiple national intelligence estimates that publicly stated that it was unknown whether Iran was developing a nuclear weapons program, Hillary Clinton was going around claiming that Iran was building a weapons program. By the time I finished my stint there, it became clear to me that the administration was going to give in to any type of war mongering from Republicans because the fight wasn't politically worth it.

At the end of my internship State offered me a job to work exclusively on Iran issues. I immediately turned it down because I was really worried that we would end up in the exact situation we are in now after imposing more sanctions. My experience was so discouraging that I quit working in international affairs altogether, despite supportive mentors. I had moved to D.C. right after Obama was elected, thinking that Afghanistan and Iraq were two good reasons why our foreign wars would slow down. But the drums of war were growing louder and stronger even with a new administration that lauded "smart power" and international cooperation. The foreign policy community in D.C. is really a scary club of warmongers with very few exceptions.

Anyways, all that's to say, I agree with Mike Lofgren. And if you had been on the Hill in 2009, I think you would see the headlines today as a predictable development of a concerted campaign.<<

Also see Robert Wright today on the difference between Iran-coverage and the way we discuss most other problematic regimes. UPDATE: Also something I should have mentioned the first time, this excellent argument by Fareed Zakaria against the ticking-time-bomb view of Iran: "Nations have often believed that they face a closing window to act, and almost always such thinking has led to disaster."

[Housekeeping note #1: Having been on the road for most of the past two weeks, and with more of that in the week ahead, I'm getting a number of short items out of the the pipeline today.

Housekeeping note #2: The departure of Andrew Sullivan and the defection policy shift of Jeffrey Goldberg mean that mine is the now the only part of the Atlantic's site that doesn't take reader comments. I started doing items for the Atlantic's site back when it didn't even have a commenting function, and I've stuck to the policy for reasons explained here and here. In short, I think good comments sections have to be moderated, and I didn't want to commit the time to shape that community in the way that Ta-Nehisi Coates, for instance, does so well.

But, the world is ever changing, and ... we'll see.]

We all know the limits of online "polls." There's no random sampling, zealots can skew the results, and so on.

But the poll of most- and least-favorite achievements of the Obama administration that has just gone up on Ranker is more interesting than most, mainly for the list of choices it presents. I know that this is the season for assessments of the president (including our own) and for detailed analyses of what he has gotten right and wrong. I found this one valuable for collecting in one place a wide range of the Administration's results. It's worth a look.

Here's one good reason to Subscribe!™: it keeps us in business. Another: for our current issue, which really is good*, many subscribers got their in-the-mail issues a few days before the magazine went online or appeared on newsstands. As a rule it's nicer to read long articles on a page than on a computer screen. And, the clinching argument, in this month's physical magazine (or iPad subscriber version) you get to see the unusual photo below, on page 67.

It was taken a year ago, at the White House, and it shows President Obama next to President Hu Jintao of China. I invite your attention to the side of President Obama's neck.


* If you don't want to dig into one of the long articles or essays in this issue, by all means start with Tim Heffernan's "Iron Giant," a wonderful brief evocation of one of the biggest machines in the world.

A 20-something American now working as a translator in China sends this report:

Having lived in Beijing for five years now, I've played in more than my share of Chinese pickup games. Something that becomes obvious very quickly is that people here--especially young people--model their games more on the Kobes of the world than the Nashes. While you will sometimes see someone who's a willing distributor, or someone who has an outside shot, many times pickup games here quickly degenerate into a series of dueling "drive-to-the-hoop/rebound/kick-out" possessions. Setting picks is rare, the pick-and-roll is even rarer, and the concept of spacing on offense is practically non-existent (actually, now that I think about it, I'm probably doing Kobe a disservice. At least he knows how to come off a pick!).

Why? One of the Chinese micro-blog users you quoted cites the system as the main reason why China has yet to produce a great point guard. I completely agree. Despite the prevailing stereotype of "collectivist" Asians, in basketball, at least, people here aren't taught how to function as a team. And it shows on the pickup court. Or at least it does in Beijing (You harp constantly on China's diversity, and you're completely right on that count. Maybe they ball it up differently in Guangzhou!).

Just part of expanding the data-set on how "Asians" bring their special, spatial perspective to ball sports.

The other notable aspect of this message, of course, is that the reader has evidently been away from a native-English environment long enough that he says "harp constantly on" when he means "devote admirably consistent attention to." Otherwise, excellent note!

Following this item earlier tonight about the ethnic element in Jeremy Lin's athletic skills, and emphasizing that what follows is explicitly not related to Robert Wright's original post on the topic, several intriguing leads:

1) Adam Minter, a good friend from Shanghai, has a great item on Bloomberg about the way people in China are debating the racial / national / cultural aspects of Lin's recent success. Sample:

[One Chinese person's] observation raises an awkward question that's been ricocheting, in various forms, within Chinese microblogs since Lin first broke out on Feb. 4: Why is the first ethnic Chinese point guard to star in the NBA not a Chinese national?

It's a sensitive question with political implications for China's state-run sports establishment, which is responsible for training China's elite athletes. On Feb. 12, Mao Maozi, a cameraman with the state-run Shanghai Education Television network, tweeted an answer to that question on Sina Weibo:

>>If Jeremy Lin lived on the mainland, he would either be a semi-literate CBA [Chinese Basketball Association, China's state-run professional league] player or an ordinary undergraduate who likes basketball in his spare time. We admire him not because he is an ethnic Chinese, but because he has proved for a fact that the main reason that Chinese don't play basketball well is because of the system, and not their physique!<<

And, Yes, for the record, that's all one tweet! The writing system of the Chinese language has its drawbacks, but one of the pluses is that with 140 characters you can say a whole lot more in Chinese.

2) About the "bigotry of pattern matching" -- assuming that Asians (or Asian-Americans) won't be good at sports, and other groups will be bad at other things -- an essay from a venture capitalist.

3) About a now-forgotten cultural explanation of basketball success, several readers pointed out an essay on Jewlicious.com. It describes the days when basketball was considered a Jewish sport:

Along with stickball, basketball was the game of choice for the little Jewish ragamuffins living in the tenements of the Lower East Side of New York and elsewhere in the US. The poor little yidden, first generation immigrant kids, freed from their shtetl yoke of religion, needed something to do with their spare time and for many, sports was their new religion.

New York Daily News sports editor Paul Gallico wrote in the mid 1930s that basketball "appeals to the Hebrew with his Oriental background [because] the game places a premium on an alert, scheming mind and flashy trickiness, artful dodging and general smartalecness." We see how qualities such as cunning and wiliness were posited as the keys to Jewish basketball success and how these kinds of statements were indicative of early 20th century America.

4) David Ryan, former guest blogger in this space, points out a book about Jewish "dominance" of American basketball before World War II, and the ethnic/religious reasons for their success. As the abstract of the book's argument says,

During the interwar period, public recognition of Jewish basketball led both Jews and non-Jews to describe basketball as a uniquely 'Jewish game.' The 'Jewish game' existed not simply because of the prevalence of Jewish players, but also because Jews were considered inherently good at basketball.

More here. That's it for now.

Once again I am on the road and off the Internet, so let me be the last person on Earth to weigh in about Jeremy Lin. I'll do so by disagreeing totally with my longtime friend and recent colleague Robert Wright.

In his item about Jeremy Lin yesterday, Bob Wright made the argument that Lin's "Asian heritage," including its philosophical aspects, helps explain his current success on the court. Some social scientists have contended that "Asians" -- a grouping that covers maybe two billion people -- perceive reality in a more "group"-like than individually centered fashion. No wonder Lin has such great court sense and can dish off those assists! Wright asks:

Is it crazy to think that the perceptual tendencies that [these social scientists] documented in East Asians could equip them for this sort of thing?

To answer that question: Yes, it's crazy. More precisely, it's horseshit. I say so in the friendliest possible way, but again: horseshit.

Everything about the Lin story explains why he is such a phenomenon. That he's Asian is part of it. Plus that he went to Harvard, that he's playing in New York, that he's a devout Christian, that he was undrafted, that he has come from absolute nowhere to outmaneuver Kobe Bryant -- and that he has done all this with a suddenness whose main American pop-culture precedent is the story of Joe Hardy (look it up). Some of these elements might have been enough, on their own, to get him extra attention. Think how the "Harvard quarterback" angle added to coverage of Ryan Fitzpatrick on the Bills, or how religion has added to the Tebow saga. To have all these elements together for Lin is truly riveting. I'm even willing to concede that his Asian identity, such a rarity in the NBA, is the single most attention-getting theme, though the Harvard angle is a close second.

But being Asian has nothing to do with how he plays ball. (Nor does going to Harvard.)

My evidence? Earlier this week, the Atlantic's sport columnist Jake Simpson analyzed Lin's game in terms of its real components -- shooting accuracy, willingness to take on double-team coverage, etc. I could leave it at that, with the reminder that considering his passing skills "Asian" is about as legit as saying that he has "a high basketball IQ" because he went to Harvard. Or a confident on-court manner because he's from Silicon Valley. [Update: Mark Liberman of Language Log absolutely demolishes the "science" that is the basis of this whole "Asian view" conceit.]

But let's go to the videos! It happens that there is a test case available: the millions of actual Asian people who play basketball  -- it's very popular throughout the region --  and the thousands who have played in professional or semi-pro leagues in China itself. These are real living-in-Asia Asians, without the diluting effect the immigrant experience might have brought to their "philosophical heritage." Overall do they play ball in a way the sociologists might predict?

Unt-uh. Here's one video, of the Dongguan Leopards playing at Shanxi Zhongyu, in a Chinese league. This features Stephon Marbury playing for Shanxi, one of a steady trickle of NBA stars who extend their careers with a contract in China. The first minute or so is the local equivalent of dancing Laker-girls. Some of the rest features crowd agitation, yelling at refs, general tumult, and some basketball. Virtually none of it fits with treatises on Asian "philosophical heritage" -- even though nearly every person you see on screen (apart from Marbury and a few other foreign players) is theoretically part of this tradition.
 


Or consider last summer's "basketbrawl," in which the Chinese military team Bayi Rockets slugged it out with the visiting Georgetown Hoyas. The gratuitous aggression all came from the Chinese side, as many Chinese commentators noted.



Obviously there are big differences between American culture as a whole and the varied cultures of mainland China, Taiwan, South Korea, Japan, etc. But (in my view) that has zero to do with Jeremy Lin's amazing recent run.

By happy chance, yesterday was the publication date for a wonderful book about the way those differences show up in sports, and the larger implications for U.S. and Chinese interactions. This is Brave Dragons, by Jim Yardley of the New York Times, which uses the travails of an American coach and player on a flailing Chinese hoops team as a way of explaining larger U.S.-Chinese interactions. The two countries' differing approaches to discipline, individuality, athletic training, and other matters show up on the basketball court as they do elsewhere, Yardley shows. But not in what we've seen from Lin and the Knicks.

Now you know. And for the record, I am going on at such length because I agree with Bob Wright on the vast majority of other topics.

Everyone's favorite illustration of the perils of computerized (mis)translation has been the scene at right, from a restaurant in China in the mid-2000s.

Below we have a new candidate, courtesy of a friend in Australia, who in turn relays it from a friend in the Middle East.

Ah, Babel. Ah, computers and their programmers.

(Update: I see that the Guardian is on the case too.)

There is enough self-referential content to this post to justify the apposite Escher illustration. But not enough to keep me from doing it at all!

My friend Timothy Noah has an excellent item at TNR today, about the options ahead for Barack Obama. The self-referential part is that he is responding to my own cover story about Obama. The payoff is how far he advances the argument about Obama's political choices, past and future -- and extra insight he provides on an item I mentioned in my story, a fascinating memo written by James H. Rowe Jr.

You don't often see the phrase "a must-read 66-year old memo," but it applies in this case. As I said in my article, I learned about the memo from Samuel Popkin of UCSD, who discusses it in his forthcoming book The Candidate. Tim Noah has a link to the text of this long memorandum, from the Truman Library's site, and he explains both why Rowe deserves more attention in general and why his advice for a president confronting an opposition-held Congress is so surprisingly up-to-date. Rowe told Truman that the Republicans who had taken control of the Congress in 1946 would claim they wanted to cooperate with him. "The purpose of this memorandum is to examine whether such 'cooperation' is feasible." As Noah says about the resulting prescription:

It includes a list of Don'ts. Among these are "The creation of joint or bipartisan policy committees" (can you say "supercommittee"?) and "The increase in Congressional supervision of the President's managerial agencies, or the transfer of their functions to a Congressional agency" (translation: Don't even think about letting Congress get its mitts all over the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau).

Rowe also included a handy list of presidents who had to contend with one or more houses of Congress in the hands of the opposite party. One thing I noticed almost immediately was that of the three presidents most often named as America's greatest (Washington, Lincoln, FDR), only one--Washington--ever had to deal with this problem, and I'm not sure he should even be included because, though he leaned Federalist, our first president never actually belonged to any political party.

Worth reading -- Noah's item, Rowe's memo, Popkin's book. And, what the hell, our current issue, which is full of interesting stuff.

In response to previous installments one and two, an Actual Scientist writes to set us straight about what really happens to precious droplets of beer when they are housed in amber-colored glass bottles as opposed to metal cans:

Sure, cans will keep out light better than bottles. But I want to correct something one of your readers wrote regarding ultraviolet light getting through amber bottles. The reason for the amber coloration is that it allows longer-wavelength, low-energy light to pass through, but blocks the high-energy photons including virtually all of the UV. Here's one spectrum I could find online, here. (My students would look at me funny if I walked into the lab with empty beer bottles to take their spectra.)

Amber glass transmits some visible light, so yes you can still see the beer--and since beer has some color, it does absorb some visible light and in principle this can trigger some reactions. But it's UV light that does some serious photochemistry, and if your beer is in an amber bottle, you don't need to worry about UV. (You can neglect that tiny hump around 340 nm.) I would expect that the difference between amber glass and aluminum cans is minimal as far as photodegradation is concerned.

So there. Granted, this chart is from a company that makes protective glass, but at face value it suggests that no UV light at all makes its way through amber glass. I will turn to my bottles of Lagunitas or Victory or Sierra Nevada or [name your brown-bottle-using brewery] with hope and trust restored.

Further on the trail of error, a veteran of the beer industry writes to chastise not me but one of the readers I quoted.

Your post admitting a wrong opinion of beer cans contained the following quote from a reader:

>>As someone in Colorado put it, "New Belgium Brewing in Ft. Collins has their flagship brew "Fat Tire" available in cans as well as their "Ranger IPA" [JF: I have had this, and it's great] and "Sunshine Wheat".  Great for traveling.  And don't forget, ALL draft beer is packaged in aluminum kegs." <<

I work for a beer distributor and can assure you that beer kegs are not aluminum. The industry standard is steel, although some craft breweries have turned to plastic to cut costs.  I'm not aware of any beer kegs made of aluminum. Steel is used for its durability. Most kegs remain in circulation for many, many years.

Now, back to self-criticism as it applies to me. I mentioned yesterday that can-protected Dale's Pale Ale, of Colorado, had been in the "top ten" of a NYT tasting panel, rather than "winning" it, as a loyalist reader in Colorado had claimed. And in the most recent testing I was talking about, from 2010, that was indeed true. But the reader has come back to point out that in an earlier taste-test, in 2005, DPA had been the NYT's winner. So we're all right. And just as we still address George H.W. Bush and Jimmy Carter as "Mister President," even though someone else later got more votes than they did, so too can we refer to Dale's Pale Ale as a "national champion" beer, as at least once in its career it has been.

Bonus international comment after the jump.

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A week ago I confessed my bias against beer that came out of cans, rather than from a tap or one of the brown glass bottles that have come to be associated with America's craft-brew renaissance. Reminder, on the counting-our-blessings principle: for us Yanks this truly is the Golden Age of Beer.

I have the additional blessing of being able to rely on the reading public to set me straight. In case you shared my confusion on this topic, the sampling of messages below may be useful to you as well. Visual aid at right: a can of Surly Furious, one of the fine products of Surly Brewing company of Minnesota, which many readers touted.

From a reader in Pennsylvania:

Snob! Throwback! Don't you read Consumer Reports? Cans are much superior to bottles in protecting beer from light, its worst enemy. All the classy European beers come in cans. If you've ever ordered beer on an airplane, it was in a can because a canned beer weighs only 2/3 as much as a bottled one. It also doesn't shatter if dropped. The idea that the beer tastes of aluminum is an urban legend. After all, draft beer comes in a big can.

Many people wrote to hammer home the point made in that last sentence. As someone in Colorado put it, "New Belgium Brewing in Ft. Collins has their flagship brew "Fat Tire" available in cans as well as their "Ranger IPA" [JF: I have had this, and it's great] and "Sunshine Wheat".  Great for traveling.  And don't forget, ALL draft beer is packaged in aluminum kegs."

Similarly:

I remember a brewer telling me once that cans are just as good as bottles for storing beer -- in fact maybe better since they don't let light in.

The problem, he said, is that your sense of taste comes partly through your nose, by way of smell.  When you drink beer from a can, your nose is buried in the aluminum can.  When you drink from a bottle, you're not smelling aluminum.  When you pour a beer in a glass, your nose is in the glass, and you can smell the beer as well as taste it.  He held that preference for tap beer is largely rooted in this fact.

So pour your Dale's Pale Ale in a glass, and see how it stacks up.  I'm not sure a glass can help your Texas Pride, however.  The theory has its limits.

Yes, I agree. Except in conditions of duress, I drink my beer out of a glass, not a bottle or can. Seeing it is part of the enjoyment! Except perhaps for Texas Pride. Also:

Aluminum canning has a ton of advantages over bottling. First, it's lighter and stronger than bottles, which means easier transportation. Weight also means that cans are supposedly more environmentally friendly than bottles (this Slate article explores the issue). Second, aluminum blocks light and glass doesn't. Even though amber glass does a reasonably good job, you can still see the liquid, right? Ultraviolet light exposure is probably the worst thing that can happen to your brew. Lastly, cans are just easier to handle on the consumer end. Lightweight, less breakable, easy to recycle, just a lot nicer on that end.

So why don't more craft brewers can beers? According to my friends, it's because it costs a hell of a lot of money to set up a canning operation. Filling bottles is relatively easy by comparison (obviously, filling kegs is even easier). That's basically the long and short of it, as far as I can tell.

After the jump, one more omnibus in-praise-of-canned-beer message. This is just a small fraction of what came in, but for now I say: Uncle! Thanks! And I'm looking for Surly.

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I assume it was by serendipity rather than design that both the New York Times and the Washington Post had bracing articles today on the way the way the Post is being forced to, or is deciding to, "right size" its news staff to cope with unending business pressures.

High up in the Times story is an eye-opening quote from Robert Kaiser, a mainstay of the Post since the early 1960s and co-author with Len Downie, the Post's long-time editor, of a book on the future of the news business. As journalistically sophisticated a figure as Kaiser must have known exactly how it would sound for him to say the following, on the record, to a reporter from the traditional-rival news organization:

"The survival of the institution is not guaranteed," Mr. Kaiser said in an interview... Over the course of his five-decade career with The Post, he has been a summer intern, a metro reporter, a foreign correspondent and the No. 2 to Len Downie, Mr. Brauchli's [the current editor's] predecessor.

"When I was managing editor of The Washington Post, everything we did was better than anyone in the business," he said. "We had the best weather, the best comics, the best news report, the fullest news report. Today, there's a competitor who does every element of what we do, and many of them do it better. We've lost our edge in some very profound and fundamental ways."

Meanwhile, in this morning's Post, the paper's current Ombudsman, Patrick Pexton [disclosure: formerly of National Journal, part of the Atlantic's corporate family], has what is overall an even tougher item. It discusses the latest round of buy-outs for reporters, editors, and designers at the paper and ends this way:

But in looking at this buyout, I worry that The Post is moving away from local news and toward a publication that covers only national politics and government and the Redskins, one that relies too much on columnists....

Ultimately, readers, online and print, will be the judges of the downsized Post. The staff here is not happy. They ask, Where is the bottom? They hate the less-is-more bromides from senior editors, so I'll not quote those. I'll quote Brauchli's most telling statement from The Post's town-hall meeting on the buyouts: "This is painful."

I've never worked at the Post. But anyone in the news business knows that the phrases I've emphasized are extremely stinging judgments. Pexton, like Kaiser, is a veteran of this business who must have chosen his words knowing exactly how they would sound.

The Post's travails are not good news for anyone, including "competitors" like the Times and the WSJ. These two articles are worth absorbing as measures of the challenges the paper now faces. This will sound glib, but like Pexton and Kaiser I am also choosing my words carefully and am sincere: I hope that five years from now some big NYT feature on the Post can refer to them as marking an early-2012 nadir from which the Post as a first-tier news-gathering organization managed to rebound.

Following my cover story in the current issue, and this message from an African-American professional woman, Nancy Wallace, about the Jackie Robinson-like pressure on Obama not to "let down his race," a few more. One reader writes:

Obama is also demeanor-constrained in the opposite direction from showing hot anger:  he can't even be seen wearing sunglasses in public, since that would be seen as looking "too cool" - in  the Malcolm X sense.   

As it happens, Obama has actually been criticized on this score!

Reader Michael Harrington writes:

I  am glad you ran that supplemental post that mentions how the president's demeanor may be sort of a construct due to the possible unfortunate implications of him getting too angry or emotional and fulfilling some awful stereotype. I am assuming that he is walking quite the tightrope a lot of the time, lest he scares America with his fury and we as a country decide he might not be able to "deal with the pressures of the job".

This is something I have been thinking about lately, partly because I am a Black man that works mostly with non-Black people in a leadership capacity and have to walk that tightrope, partly due to discussions I have been having with white associates outside of those professional settings, and partially due to reading Toure's latest book (Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness?) and thinking about what he said about some of the most recent Black politicians, including President Obama.

I do not know if you read that book (I think everyone should, regardless of ethnic origin) [JF: I have not yet], but he makes the salient point that to be successful in politics or business as a black person (I feel this applies to Latinos as well), you have to be as inoffensive as possible, lest you make people feel uncomfortable or guilty. I am not surprised that the woman who emailed you the other day had a nervous breakdown, since this puts a lot of strain on Black people that I assume (I don't know if it is true) most white people don't have to deal with. I also found that talking about this with non-white people, even in a casual setting upsets them a lot. I brought up this point in regards to the president, and I was either scoffed at, talked over, or was ignored. I cannot imagine what the president and his family are going through, but I assure you that he knows very well that it is in his best interest to seem as rational and objective in public as possible, since it is apparent that many people in this country still have deep issues with race and the perception of how certain groups play out their "racial roles"...

Even though I am Black, I don't blindly support the president because of his race; I support the president because I am an American citizen and I am glad that the representative of the country is a rational, brilliant person who seems to want to learn more. I suppose most people that become the POTUS are exceptional by definition, but it is interesting that Barack Obama has to be both exceptional and for all intents and purposes, as flawless as possible. It almost seems like he has to stifle his humanity due to the color of his skin.

After the jump, one more, on the Chris Christie/Harper Lee angle.

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I'll start posting some of the reactions I've gotten to my current cover story that tries to make sense of President Obama's successes and failures in his first three years in office.

Not many people who have written in about the piece have said, "But gee, it was so short!" It's all of 12,000 words long -- but even at that scale, we left lots of stuff out. Among the cutting-room floor material was an attempt to address the issue this reader's message raises: how much of Obama's super-cool demeanor, which can seem so icily effective when it works and so ineffectively passive when it doesn't, is due to the pressures on him as America's first non-white president. If I, as a middle-aged white guy, am aware of the perils awaiting him at the slightest flash of being an Angry Black Man, I can barely imagine how much more profoundly he must have wrestled with this question.

I am therefore glad that Nancy Wallace, whose name I'm using with her permission, has written in about the issue:

I wanted to write to you because I think there's an important element of Obama's emotional responses and the perception of those responses that you didn't mention: race. I grew up in a family that was black middle-class; we actually were kind of the Cosbys. From the time I was in elementary school, I was aware, even though no one ever said it out loud, that was supposed to be "a credit to the race". I had a responsibility to be a role model which meant studying hard and going to church and getting into a good college and going on to professional school and marrying someone of the opposite gender. I was taught to deal with emotions by hiding them, because tears or anger would immediately slot me into a stereotype of Mammy or Jezebel.

In 1995, I had a nervous breakdown in the office where I worked at Harvard. I was on medical leave for two months. When I came back, I couldn't shake the sense that as the only black woman in my office, my failure to handle an unreasonable and excessive workload would reflect poorly on all black women, everywhere. It took a long time and a lot of therapy to realize that I was carrying a burden that wasn't mine, and that by repressing my emotions to avoid being seen as "too angry" or "hysterical,"  I'd just made everything worse.

Unlike me, Barack Obama IS a role model. Everything he does and says is, on some level, viewed through the prism of "First Black President". Knowing that has to constrain his public emotional responses, especially anger. If he raises his voice the slightest bit, then he'll be seen as an Angry Black Man, and Angry Black Man is scary. Jan Brewer claimed that the president was being "threatening" toward her, and I believe she probably did feel threatened because there was a tall black guy in front of her who didn't look all that pleased. At any moment, he could have whipped out a gun, or overwhelmed her with his brute animal strength!

Even the media narrative is quick to slap Obama with the "angry" label. After his speech during debt ceiling crisis where he directly criticized the GOP, his demeanor was described in some headlines as "angry", when in reality, he managed to hold it down to vaguely irritated. Can you imagine what would happen if he'd said, "Look, these clowns in the House? Dumb as a box of hammers. If they want to stop dicking around and get serious, I'm here; otherwise they need to stop acting like a bunch of spoiled whiny brats."

Jackie Robinson agreed that during his first year with the Dodgers, he wouldn't respond to any of the abuse he received from players, officials or fans, because even just yelling back would be seen as proof that "they" can't handle the pressure. I suspect Barack Obama is fairly laid back in general, but we'll never know because he can't be anything else.

Check out Flight Aware's track of the route of the Boeing Commercial Aircraft Group's flight 236 yesterday. This is the route the plane actually took, as logged by Air Traffic Control radar. Look at it for a minute, if you don't get the point immediately. Hint: the aircraft in question was a "Dreamliner," aka Boeing 787. Another hint is in the upper left hand corner of this page.

More »

Much of this past fall I was interviewing political figures to get their judgments on what-we-know, and how-we-know it, about President Obama's successes and failures in office so far.

The results are now online here (but of course it's always best read on paper!) plus a short video q-and-a with Corby Kummer, who was my editor on this piece as he has been for nearly all other Atlantic articles I've done since the early Reagan years.

Will have more to say about the background of this article, implications, cutting-room-floor info (yes, even with a 12,000-word piece, there's a lot left out!), and so on in the days ahead.
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Also, for the record, the Reddit AMA session I did yesterday was interesting, at least to me, and the results are here.

To lift your spirits you might watch this now-famous bit from Jon Stewart four years ago, after Romney dropped out of that year's race against John McCain. The part from time 2:50 to 4:15 is the heart of it. (Via Steve Benen.)

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Mitt Drops Out
www.thedailyshow.com
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I was indeed feeling sorry for Romney in human terms -- losing every county! - and then I reflected on the kind of person who would find solace, in time of trial, in sentiments like the ones we hear from him.

Never imagined I would end up saying this, but: Go Santorum!

Finale, at least from me. A few incoming items on the "we take your jobs" / "YellowShirtGirl" discussion.

1) From Julia Kim Smith, a further HTML exploration. 

[If you're tempted to write in: No, that's not what the HTML actually shows. <blog class="joke" > ]

2) From Funny-or-Die, a parody that is not exactly Oscar Wilde-like in its rapier subtlety but that has its moments. My favorite is in the first 20 seconds, a joke on the theme of "my excellent math ability!" Plus a Jeremy Lin reference right after that.

3) From a reader who notes our old friend "false equivalence" in an NYT item on the controversy:

While I think this is a relatively minor offense, I just thought it was interesting that the New York Times article you linked to in today's blog made certain to include this:

>Senator Stabenow has done some China-blaming of her own. From her Senate Web site: "China has a clear pattern of flagrantly violating trade rules and it is long past time to stand up to them."  And on Monday, in a conference call with reporters, she said, "We can't continue to sit back and let China's policies cost us jobs.''<

How is this even remotely comparable to the offensive commercial in question?  Why does it deserve inclusion?  It just serves to tar Senator Stabenow, unfairly, with the same brush.

I liked the NYT item but the reader has a point. It's one thing to talk about trade rules, currency valuation, etc and something else to run "me likee!" ads. The "to be sure" reflex really is deep, for all of us in the journalism business.

4) From Chauncey DeVega at Daily Kos, a clip that exactly matches the "visual dog-whistle" that I said the video was evoking, with its use of a smiling but treacherous young Asian beauty, issuing broken-English come-ons to the unsuspecting Yanks. This is a scene not from Apocalypse Now but from Full Metal Jacket -- a movie made 25 years ago about events 20 years before that, but whose imagery left a mark in the public mind. Someone involved with this ad had seen this movie. Really, the scene is a remarkable match to the Hoekstra ad:

For devotees of Reddit IAMA sessions, I will be doing a live question-and-answer session there today starting at noon east coast time. FYI it will be at Reddit.com/r/iama.

Thanks to the Atlantic's Jared Keller, whose long-time entreaties have gotten me off the ball here. See you on line.

Today's installment comes from Mike Lofgren, familiar in these pages for his observations after a career working mainly for Republicans in the Congress. He begins:

For most of my three-decade career handling national security budgets in Congress, Iran was two or three years away from obtaining a nuclear weapon. The idea of an Islamic bomb exerts a peculiar fascination on American political culture and shines a searchlight on how the gross dysfunctionality of American politics emerges synergistically from the individual dysfunctions of its component parts: the military-industrial complex; oil addiction; the power of foreign-based lobbies; the apocalyptic fixation on the holy land by millions of fundamentalist Americans; US elected officials' neurotic need to show toughness, especially in an election year. The rational calculus of nuclear deterrence, which had guided US policy during the cold war, and which the US government still applies to plainly despotic and bellicose nuclear states like North Korea, has gone out the window with respect to Iran.

You can read the rest here.

Also from Peter Beinart, an argument I don't have the same personal standing to make, about the potential for American Jewry to help spare Israel a rash error:


Yes, Iran's acquisition of a nuclear weapon would create a lot of dangers and complications. But according to the latest testimony from the most authoritative American intelligence expert, the U.S. is not sure that Iran is even trying to build a bomb. It says nothing good about our current political/strategic climate that there is so much loose talk about "preventive" war at this stage. Eisenhower would not have talked this way, or Rabin, or other strong leaders from those two countries' modern history.