I’ve tried to bite my tongue. I’ve said, “They’ve just launched, they just need to work out the kinks.” I’ve said, “it’s just my revulsion at the unfamiliar, I’ll get used to it.”

But no. It’s not that.

The New Republic’s redesign is an embarrassment. Seriously, this is what having a billionaire white knight publisher gets you?

Last week Andrew Sullivan updated his readers on how the fundraising for his bid for independence is coming along. Quick take: it doesn’t look great.

But before I get into it, I should say how grateful I am that Andrew is being so open with how his project is going. There’s so much speculation in the increasingly doomed-feeling publishing industry as to what might and might not work. Many people in publishing—myself included—have long wondered whether a lean and mean ad-free reader-supported online news publication could make the numbers work out in its favor. Furthermore, especially as a reader, I was thrilled that the Dish had chosen to forego advertising. Most online advertising manages the remarkable feat of being both less effective and more obtrusive and distracting than its print sibling (though certainly not in all cases—more on that later). Due to Andrew’s commendable transparency I’m getting to see if an incarnation of my own ideal business model is feasible online.

And as I said at the outset, I’m not heartened by his early numbers. Here’s the telling chart:

Andrew himself is not all that pleased with the shape of this thing, as evidenced by his guarded tone in the post itself:

The first big wave of subscribers and their high percentage of donations were likely driven by that feeling of “loyalty”, but that initial wave of support has dropped off significantly. So we presume - hope! - that a much larger swathe of fence-sitters will only subscribe once they are nudged by the meter.

I wouldn’t bet the farm on that. And here’s why: I don’t think consumers value ‘news’ nearly as much as news producers think they do (or think they ought to). What got me thinking along these lines was a brief blog post by Aaron Swartz that I happened to stumble upon on the occasion of his death. The argument—that actively avoiding reading the news on a daily basis not only doesn’t impoverish an individual but rather makes him better off—sounds preposterous on first read to a news-junkie like me. But upon some reflection, it makes perfect sense.

And not just anecdotally—I feel much healthier and no dumber or worse-off when I’m physically unable to access the news—but from looking around at how people go about consuming news in the age of the Internet. News is solely a form of entertainment to most people—entertainment and nothing more. It’s something people like to send to friends, either to provoke or to commune in the shared emotional charge of the story. It’s something people increasingly consume explicitly packaged as entertainment (see The Daily Show or one of the Gawker properties for ample evidence). It’s something people look at to pass the worthless time at breakfast or lunch, or during the commute. It’s something they read to have something to talk about with strangers at a bar or with friends at a party or with the bemused spouse at dinner. It’s the exact equivalent of watching a TV show or going to the movies… or remembering a clever joke. “Did you read the one about…?”

To Andrew’s credit, he’s figured out at least part of this implicitly. His website is entertaining if nothing else. It’s lively, chatty, human, infuriating, hilarious, and almost always compelling. It’s certainly not ‘old media’ in the sense of presenting the news as something you should give a shit about because it’s good for you. Unfortunately for Andrew, however, the Internet has so grimly commoditized news-as-entertainment that it’s fiendishly hard to get people to pay for any of it. For what is the marginal value one gets from a site like The Dish as opposed to any of the other chatty opinionated sources out there that are actively giving it away for free? (Evidence: sites are seeing increases in traffic coming through social media and search at the expense of their homepage, which indicates to me that readers see news-as-entertainment as a largely fungible commodity.) This is not to say that The Dish is not uniquely charming, nor to undervalue the passion of its most devoted readers. But, say, to an average-but-not-fanatical reader (such as myself), being deprived of it would be no worse than having a beloved TV show get canceled: I’ll find something else to waste my time with.

And that’s the bad news embedded in that graph above. It sure looks like The Dish managed to sweep away a decent percentage of its devoted readership in an emotional tidal wave when they announced they’re going it alone. The steepness of the wave, both going up and coming down, indicates that passions were running high indeed. Will they be able to recreate that kind of passion among their readers next year? Given that even at these levels The Dish is decently short of its ultimate fundraising goal for the year, they certainly can’t afford not to. But even if they pull it off, will the next-less-motivated reader find The Dish’s content compelling enough to pay for when she’s confronted by a paywall, as Andrew hopes she will? In a universe of good-enough free alternatives, I’m frankly skeptical.

But all is not lost for Andrew and his faithful staff at The Dish—far from it! I’m just not sure that the pure subscription/audience support model will work out in a marketplace overflowing with good-enough free substitutes. I’m sure he is hard at work coming up with alternative plans. And the alternatives are plenty. His audience size and its quality, both in terms of demographics and purported loyalty, is something worthy of envy. Perhaps he has to offer his fence-sitting readers something of unique value, something akin to the “insider access” model which the Talking Points Memo folks are trying out. Or perhaps he should go back on his promise to his early supporters and consider advertising. Because as I alluded to at the start of this post, advertising online does not have to suck (or be shady and in poor taste). It can both be profitable and can actually add value to the reader if done right. (I’m not suggesting that doing it right will be easy in this case, but am just suggesting that it’s possible.)

As a final coda, though I’m writing this in a personal capacity on my personal blog, I should say that I work at The American Interest and reveal that we’re keenly watching what The Dish is up to over there. I’m an admirer of what Andrew’s managed to build for himself, and sincerely wish him the best. For the success of publications like The Dish (and Talking Points Memo for that matter) means that success is possible for all of us little guys—at least in theory. And in this grim media environment with display ad rates tumbling and “sponsored content” native advertising dreck becoming more and more acceptable and commonplace, even “in theory” offers a lot of hope.

What what am I missing here? Andrew Sullivan goes postal on Annie Lowrey over her recent article on DC in the Times:

Seriously, could you get any more contemptuous of the nation’s capital, one of the most pleasant, modern and livable cities in America. Unless you’re such a fucking snob you write paragraphs like that one. Makes me want to go back - just to stick it to Annie Lowrey, and her insufferable condescension.

Don’t misunderstand me, I’m a big DC booster. But there’s nothing in Lowrey’s article I hadn’t thought before: DC is very try-hard hip at times, and is overflowing with young moneyed types aching to demonstrate they’ve arrived. Anyone in denial about these basic facts is blind. Or perhaps Andrew’s been away long enough to have forgotten certain aspects of his beloved town.

Moreover, the substantive aspect of Lowrey’s article—the question of DC’s long-term viability as a vibrant metropolitan center should government largesse dry up—is something I discuss with whoever will listen to me at whatever bar I find myself in. And most people I talk to have had the same thoughts. It’s nice to have some scary figures to back up my unease, being that I’ve bought an apartment here and quite like the city despite some of its shortcomings.

And let’s not even get into that last sentence, about Andrew coming back to DC in order to stick it to her. I’m not even sure how to begin parsing it.

I had high hopes of posting every day of my stay here in India. Unfortunately the technology gods (for there must be some in this land of a million gods) conspired to rob me of Internet connectivity for the first few days of my stay. So instead of taking some time to put together my thoughts at the end of each day of the trip, I’ve instead just amassed a series of jotted notes on things that have struck me. I’ll try to reconstruct these into some kind of timeline after the fact now that my umbilical cord to the web has been restored. But before I settle down to do that, a quick rundown of my Internet troubles:

As we prepare for our overnight train to Jaisalmer out West in the desert, I have a spare moment to jot down some first impressions of India. Ideally I should have done this yesterday, but an overfull day and two large birthday beers coupled with jet lag had me dead to the world by 9pm. I took notes as I went along, so this will necessarily be a little impressionistic. And interestingly enough, some of these initially jarring things are already becoming a kind of normal.

We make a turn at a light. On larger intersections, there’s a dedicated turn lane with its own little triangular island divider. On this one intersection at 6 in the morning, the turn-off has been transformed into a kind of unofficial bus stop. People are milling around, boarding and de-boarding various buses. And we just drive right through the crowd, honking the horn, which seems to get people the people to get out of the way at the very last second. No one seems too concerned.

A ten hour flight departing at midnight is no picnic, so take all my observations as being more than my normal level of grouchy. 

I’m sitting here killing time at a bar at Ataturk Airport, at a counter facing the main concourse where passengers are parading back and forth, themselves killing time. At first, I was pleased with myself that I was able to sit here unnoticed, using their electricity to charge my iPad and using their free Internet to my heart’s content. But now I want a beer, and I’m still sitting here unnoticed. Maybe my plane crashed and I’m a ghost now forever trapped in this concourse, and I just don’t know it yet. I guess there are worse purgatories.

A Russian woman walked by just now, her breasts trussed up in some formidable push-up bra, balancing along on platform heels at least 8” high. The platform underneath the front of the shoe was hollow like a cinder block. It must be uncomfortable to travel like that. And what is she so dressed up for? She appears to have been traveling alone. Whatever mafioso would take her seriously as a trophy and would demand that kind of getup was nowhere to be seen. 

The flight itself was decent enough—nice new plane, clean—but I got the sense that things were just slightly off. The staff seemed on the verge of losing control at meal time, which itself took far too long to get done. They kept running out of the chicken, then bread, then drinks. The toilets kept running out of toilet paper (but were restocked eventually, though grudgingly). And the plane was filthy by the time we got off, with crushed food underfoot and silverware littering the aisles.

We disembarked the plane and made our way onto the people-mover buses. On our way to the terminal, I spied a smaller bus manufactured by a company called Oto-kar—a company clearly yearning for past imperial glories.

Upon getting off the bus, I encountered a harried man beset by dozens of exhausted passengers pushing their boarding cards at him. Airport management would do well to replace him with an electronic board with connecting flights. Neither he nor the passengers were well served with the current arrangement.

The airport itself is very nice and modern. There is no airport-wide wifi that works reliably, but compared to most U.S. airports, this one is Shangri-La. Dulles, even gussied up as it has been lately, is still visibly the product of a depressing 70s nightmare. Nevertheless, it just seems like the staff here are on the verge of not being in control of things. The harried man was followed up by harried security people, who was then followed up by the staff at this bar. I still haven’t been given a beer. I made eye-contact with a staffer who seemed to be standing around idly. It turns out he’s the manager. He frowned at me and gestured at another waiter who he seemed to indicate would eventually take care of me. The waiter in question was talking to a customer two seats down from me. “How many beers did you have? Just one? OK.”

All in all, however, I’m sorry I’m not spending even a day in Istanbul. The incompetence doesn’t seem to rise to the level of inconvenience, and were I not so tired, it might even be charming. I expect mind-boggling bureaucratic incompetence in India if my visa-procurement experience was anything to go by, and I’m quite looking forward to it. I mean, for Christ’s sake, it’s Istanbul! I must return.

Finally I’ve been handed a beer. 19 Turkish Lira, or ~$10, but for a a full .7L glass. It’s a delicious, crisp pilsner the likes of which is increasingly hard to get in the States, where complex flavors in beer are fast approaching the point of diminishing returns. It’s like a Stella with a solid bottom. It’s hitting the spot.

And I’ll have to drink it quick. The big board is telling me that it’s time to head to my gate. May the alcohol knock me out hard. It’s 6:50PM here in Istanbul, but this beer is breakfast in DC. My flight arrives in Delhi at 5AM local time. I’ll need to sleep. Fingers crossed.

Those who know me know that I’m a big fan of Apple’s design aesthetic. And it’s common to assume that because Steve Jobs led Apple to where it is now, he himself had superior taste.

Now it’s true that Jobs was a perfectionist and was incredibly picky and fastidious about design choices. But that’s not the same thing as being able to recognize that which is beautiful.

Case in point: here is the yacht he had built in the waning years of his life.

It just goes to show that one of Jobs’ greatest contributions to Apple was discovering and believing in Jonny Ive—it was not necessarily recognizing beauty as such.

Every so often I’m reminded that I need to finally get around to reading Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim. I’d forgotten about this legendary description of a hangover—a description my friend Hank would cite at me as I lay convulsing in the throes of my own self-inflicted misery:

He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.

Sadly, I can’t really recommend the article which quoted it—it’s is a lot less interesting than it might seem at first glance.

The way Andrew Sullivan puts it here beautifully encapsulates what I think is a big problem for writers: they tend to anthropomorphize polities.

Are Americans saying they appreciate the clean-up that Obama has achieved but now want a new start? Or is this a sign of a recovery in the economy which will eventually show up in the result on election day? Or do voters approve of Obama’s record more now but like Romney as a person and so it all evens out into a dead heat?

Or could it be that, like corporations, “the people” aren’t actually best thought of as a person at all? The people—any people—don’t speak in one voice. Polls are snapshots of the state of a schizophrenic collective brain.

And in that vein, so are elections! Elections are important insofar as they legitimate a government, but they should never be elevated to the status of some kind of sovereign act of will. Remember, depending on your institutional setup (parliamentary versus presidential, electoral college versus popular vote) the same “people” could end up “telling” you completely different things.

Now I’m sure somewhere in his mind, Andrew knows he’s speaking metaphorically. And that’s fine—this kind of metaphor riddles Western political thought from Plato’s Republic onwards. But as is often the case with these things, after a while the metaphor starts to take on a life of its own, and people forget that it is not meant to be taken literally.

Here’s an example of where this kind of automatic thinking gets you:

Just ran into Leon Wieseltier in the @tnr kitchen. He told me Russia was the most disappointing country in the world.

— Julia Ioffe (@juliaioffe) October 10, 2012

Leon Wieseltier is one of the worst offenders of this type. People should never be disappointed in countries. It’s a dangerous and delusional frame of mind, and it flows directly from the people-person fallacy.

It’s funny how things work: you think you’re so busy learning something new (Objective-C in this case) that you think you don’t have any time to do anything else. You live and breathe code, you ignore your friends and family, you stay home nights and weekends, and you start to feel like your life is completely one-track. Yet since I’ve last posted to this damned venue several months ago, I’ve managed to write two book reviews for the magazine. Funny how forcing yourself to be productive yields productivity elsewhere.

One of these scribbles, my review of Philip Coggan’s Paper Promises, is up on the site now. The second one, a review of Aryeh Neier’s polished little history of the human rights movement, should be up in the next few weeks.

I went back and re-read the Coggan review the other day and found it lacking. Economics is hard to write about well, especially when you feel outcredentialed by the author you’re writing about. Some things about Coggan’s book don’t make much sense—his gold standard-without-gold fetishism, for one, which he both acknowledges as silly yet nevertheless seems to embrace—but I think I did a poor job bringing that out in the review. I was too paralyzed about making a trivial mistake to be able to write with any sort of ease. The text feels claustrophobic, constipated. Add to that some of the clarifying edits made afterwards (which at the time seemed an improvement but now appear muddying) and you get something frankly disappointing.

The Neier review, however, I’m much happier with. I have little sympathy for his movement, and though I think I gave the book a fair shake, I think I successfully pointed out some interesting contradictions which are just under the surface of his treatise. Though I don’t think it reads like a polemic, my attitude was polemical while writing. Hopefully that’ll make reading it a month from now less of a chore.

Finally, Adam Garfinkle gave me an interesting book to follow up with, probably for a web review: Universal Rights Down To Earth. We’ll see if I can pull it off in the coming weeks…