It's officially the end of summer, not that we had too much of one here in Seattle this year. I'm back in the land of broadband, having spent 8 days in slow dial up land, a fate I would normally blame on my spousal unit, but I made the reservations, so have to take full responsibility. At one point, i had some hope that Clearwire would work on Orcas Island, but the steadily blinking lights quickly proved me wrong, and the dial up, such as it was, was so bad as to be unworkable. So off went the computer. The WSJ is available, and turned up in my mailbox a few times over the course of the week, but no NT Times at all. And since we were two miles down a gravel road, and another three miles to town, a quick jaunt out of a news fix was out of the question. As the sole owner of a cell phone with a browser in the house, I was in total control of the news flow in the morning -- i'd get up, start the coffee, fire up the phone and take a look at headlines. As the others would gradually emerge, they'll all ask -- "what's new in the world" and wait for me to play the role of news announcer. What a flashback to the days when the broadcast and metro newspapers had a total lock on news dissemination!
In the real world, my RSS feeds were overloaded when I got back. But I had a chance to catch up on a bunch of reading, for example:
Spook Country, by William Gibson. A big disapointment, I've been a huge fan for a long time, but this one and Pattern Recognition felt very light -- the stage was set, but not real character development takes place. Bummer.
The NYT Sunday Magazine has a great piece by Lynn Hirschberg profiling Rick Rubin and his potential impact on Columbia Music. It's a good review of all the mistakes made by the music industry, my one huge caution to Mr. Rubin would be that betting on word of mouth is a long shot at best.
Over in the New Yorker, a double issue about food -- yum. One I really liked was Adam Gopnik's account of trying to buy local food. In particular, the way he makes it clear that while buying local is a noble goal, not having a famine is an even more noble goal.
In the Seattle Times, a great look at the thinking that went into a pretty controversial story and photo about two potentially suspicious ferry riders. It quotes extensively from what appears to be a pretty thoughtful book, "How Good People Make Tough Choices," by Rushworth Kidder. The article says:
The book says right-vs.-right choices "reach inward to our most profound and central values, setting one against the other in ways that will never be resolved simply by pretending that one is 'wrong.' "
Kidder, a professor who founded the Institute for Global Ethics, writes that such dilemmas fall into four clusters:
• Truth vs. loyalty
• Individual vs. community
• Short-term vs. long-term
• Justice vs. mercy
"Call them what you will, these four patterns help us describe the basic issue at the heart of so many ethical conflicts — the clashing of core values that makes it hard for good people to make tough choices," Kidder writes.
"Resolution requires us to choose which side is the nearest right for the circumstances," the book says.
Good to think that there are times when there really are two right answers, and reasonable people can come down on either side. Something to consider, for sure, in an era where we appear more polarized by the minute.