I am a suit.

I will sit at a conference table or at an elegant luncheon, in my suit, quietly radiating calm, authority and steely reserve. Leaning back in my chair at the appropriate angle, my fingers curled under my chin, I will take in everything said around me, nodding or simply fixing the speaker with a respectful and attentive gaze. At meetings, I will take notes on a legal pad tucked into a rich leather portfolio, using a Waterman pen with my initials engraved on the barrel. My handwriting is bold and angular, stylish while still preserving legibility, and you will notice how decisively I underline my major headings.

At no point will I pull out a Blackberry and begin typing on it — I do not own one, and my Louis Vuitton briefcase contains no laptop. (I am available with an optional laptop-bearing assistant; please speak to me for details.) Instead you will find a region-appropriate copy of Crain’s; my Kindle; several neat file folders containing documents of obscure but impressive purpose; a pair of Prada men’s sunglasses in a black leather case; a Netflix envelope, sealed and ready for mailing (Ratatouille, I explain with a smile; my daughter loves anything Pixar, and we ought to just buy the movie for all the times she’s seen it but we don’t like to use the TV as a babysitter); and my portfolio and pen, should I not be working with them.

I may, in a lighter moment that illustrates my humanity and approachability, show you a photo of my wife and aforementioned young daughter on my iPhone. Their names are Marisol and Kendall, respectively. I will humbly thank you when you tell me how beautiful they both are and then make a self-deprecating remark about my daughter inheriting her looks from her mother. We will both know I am lying; I am a gorgeous man, with captivating hazel eyes, unblemished skin and a jaw like the prow of a yacht.

I will politely deflect all other inquiries into my background and history. As far as you are concerned, I am a man from nowhere, a blank slate, an abstraction made flesh. (I am available with a full background, including university associations and professional organizations, for a modest upgrade charge.)

My suit itself? Contemporary and elegant, with a cool slate-grey hue, stylish lines that accentuate my physique (I work out rigorously and have a resting pulse rate of 45) and a subtle texture to the weave that you may well find yourself admiring during our many conferences, in moments when I happen not to be speaking. My silk tie is custom-made and tied in a flawless, bullet-hard Shelby knot; other knot styles up to and including a full Windsor can be accommodated on request.

As far as my handshake is concerned, I have a grip like a tiger shark’s jaws and can split walnuts between my fingers — did I not assure you that I work out? In addition to my full regimen of cardio, weights and resistance training, I also study Jeet Kune Do, the fighting system devised by the late Bruce Lee. This training allows me to precisely attenuate my handshake to communicate fellowship, encouragement or menace as appropriate to the situation. Without even speaking I can assure the lowliest hourly employee that I am firmly on his or her side; let a supplier know that he is in for toughest negotiation of his life; or so frighten an opposing counsel that his balls shrivel between his sweating thighs like a puppy cowering before a rolled newspaper.

As we work more closely together over the days and weeks, you come to appreciate the awesome intellectual resources I can command, along with my willingness to put them completely at your disposal. Soon I will begin finishing your sentences for you, and then speaking your thoughts before you have a chance to utter them. Days rush by in a blur as achievements you had previously dismissed as impossible suddenly appear tantalizingly close. You notice I never appear nervous and rarely blink. Dimly, you begin to understand that I am capable of doing, and actually may have done, terrible things. You will be grateful I am on your side.

My fingernails are immaculate, my hair perfectly in place. My wristwatch is rated to a depth of 400 fathoms as well as the vacuum of space. My shoes glisten like the hood of a black Ferrari. And I can be yours for a surprisingly modest fee. After all, what price is too high to surpass your ambitions, redraw the competitive landscape and leave your opponents broken in the dust? Contact me today for a quote.

(References available upon request.)

For instance, there was a great deal of attention given recently to a study that tried to persuade people to reduce their energy usage at home. Notices were sent to the highest-consuming households with gentle suggestions that the household in question could do better in conserving energy. The study found that Democratic households were likely to reduce their usage in response; Republican ones, by contrast, were likely to increase it. As noted in the linked article, Rush Limbaugh even encouraged his listeners to turn on all of their lights during Earth Hour, a gesture that certainly cost his audience many thousands of dollars in wasted utility spending. Glenn Beck told his audience not merely to refrain from using their own grocery bags, but to use as much plastic as possible. That’ll show us tree huggers!

It is a commonplace among conservatives that liberals are bereft of humor and joy, hate individual liberty and derive their sole pleasure from curtailing other people’s happiness. A popular conservative slogan goes “Annoy a Liberal: Work Hard and Be Happy.” As a liberal myself, I think it’s only fair to confess that this supposition is true. At our secret monthly meetings (which we totally have, usually in mosques or Whole Foods stores), my fellow liberals and I like to swap stories about the various successes we have had in jealously undermining the successful and the hard-working, persuading women to have abortions and redistributing as much of America’s material wealth to undeserving poor and minority households as possible. We like to strategize about which decadent cultural practice we ought to demonize next: how about off-roading, or fishing? And we speak of the true ache in our hearts when we contemplate those who are prosperous and happy, and who bear the lowest tax burden of nearly anyone in the First World. It is our mission to destroy such comforts, and we will get there one day, Dawkins willing.

At any rate, in the spirit of free discussion, I would like to confess on behalf of my fellow liberals several other activities we liberals hate, and which our conservative countrymen may feel compelled to adopt.

1. Punching Yourself in the Face
As a liberal, my reflexive compassion compels me to help people whether they want it or not. Were I to see a successful American savagely pummel his own mug into swollen, eggplant-like mush in defiance of my touchy-feely values, I would want to see him restrained, evaluated and possibly commited for his own protection. You’re not going to just let me get away with that, are you?

2. Setting Fire to $100 Bills
Little-known fact: the smoke from burning American currency is actually deadly to liberals, and the higher the denomination, the more toxic the fumes. If you were to bring a $5,000 bill to a David Sedaris reading and set it on fire, you would kill most of the audience in the space of a few seconds. You probably don’t have a $5,000 bill, so an equivalent amount of Benjamins would probably do the trick (I haven’t actually tried it).

3. Giving Away All of Your Possessions to a Poor Family
Hey, it’s the government’s job to confiscate your wealth and redistribute it! Stop that!

I offer these suggestions in the hope that my conservative countrymen will make reasoned decisions based on what is actually good for them, rather than what they imagine to be bad for someone else. If that doesn’t work, well, maybe someone will actually punch himself in the face, which would be kind of funny. Glenn Beck, care to take this one up?

Then one day you put on a pair of sunglasses and see things you never saw before, and your world goes to shit.

John Carpenter’s They Live looked unflinchingly at the underside of Ronald Reagan’s Morning in America. While Gordon Gekko was rhapsodizing about the goodness of greed, migrant worker George Nada trawled through a stunted shadow economy that grew like a fungus on America’s underbelly. They Live presents an America that seems decent enough to justify George’s faith: the squatters’ camp where he finds shelter runs on compassion and good old American hard work, a true expression of the generosity we hold as one of our core values. The problem, as it turns out, is the ultimate viper in the garden: the elite feeding on America’s underclass are actually aliens in human form, hopscotching rapaciously across the galaxy like a cross between Gordon Gekko and Galactus. Even more heartbreaking is when George discovers why he was able to maintain his faith in the American dream while it fell apart around him. The aliens have submerged the culture in subliminal messages, with every surface blaring a mute clarion of stasis and conformity. Thanks to a pair of sunglasses invented by the revolutionaries fighting the aliens, George walks through L.A. and finally sees, in literal black and white, the new guiding principles of America. SLEEP 8 HOURS A DAY. MARRY AND REPRODUCE. WATCH T.V. STAY ASLEEP. CONFORM. OBEY.

What makes They Live resonate so much for me, a decade after I first saw it and well after it was first released, is what it reveals about paranoia and the comforts of conspiracy. While the film bears the trappings of a sci-fi-based horror movie, its central conceit — that American society is being undermined by alien invaders — is actually more comforting than frightening, because it supports the premise that people are too fundamentally decent to create the kind of society depicted in They Live. Suddenly, we didn’t do it — it was done to us. This preserves our ideas of our own goodness while offering a tantalizing promise of redemption. An alien menace is a menace that can be fought and destroyed; what came from outside can be sent back outside. Sure, defeating a technologically advanced alien race is not going to be a walk in the park. But if there’s one thing we know how to do as humans, it’s kill those who are different from us. Whether the solution proved to be sunglasses, computer viruses or red anti-alien virus powder, we’d find a way. If, however, the problem turns out to be us — if we, not alien invaders, made the world around us, with all its greed and its waste and its callousness — then we’re probably screwed.

Being the object of a conspiracy, with untold numbers of nefarious actors working tirelessly to keep us in the dark and helpless, confirms our importance — it reassures us that we are dangerous and worth going to great efforts to deceive and subjugate. Furthermore, a world beset by conspiracy is a world that is at least governed by some kind of order and meaning, even if that order is largely bent against us and we are helpless to do anything about it. The world of They Live is a perversely tempting one, because then at least things would make sense — there would be a reason why everything was so fucked up and wrong.

As I get older, I find that in addition to constantly beginning statements by saying, “as I get older,” I increasingly subscribe to what I call the Belzer Dichotomy of Human Cognition. That is an affected way of saying that I agree with comedian Richard Belzer when he said:

You are either a conspiracy nut or a coincidence nut.

Conspiracies of course are Belzer’s schtick, and he’s carved out a secure niche for himself as the thinking paranoid’s comic of choice. To a conspiracy buff, “coincidence” is a slightly dirty word, a mark of intellectual pansyhood, a confession that one lacks the imagination or the courage to see life as it really is. But I think Belzer was actually on to something quite universal and profound when he said that. We could rephrase the line like this:

You either believe that everything, no matter how trivial, happens for a reason, or you believe that even seemingly important things can happen for no reason at all.

This is about as basic a distinction between human consciousnesses as you can make, and it doesn’t take a great deal of observation to perceive that conspiracy nuts vastly outnumber coincidence nuts. We are biologically hardwired to notice patterns and to ascribe significance to them. In a nutshell, it is why religion exists. Religions vary greatly over times and places, but the one thing they virtually all have in common is the reassurance that the world around you was created, and is advancing, with some kind of purpose. That sense of purpose is why people profess to believe things that are, by any waking, rational standard, absurd. What follows is not an original observation by any means, but even so: if you could have somehow reached adulthood without any religious indoctrination or awareness, and then been approached by a Christian or a Hindu or a Muslim aiming to make a convert out of you, would you take his or her claims at all seriously? Would it seem reasonable to believe that Jesus was born of a virgin and rose from the dead, or that illiterate Mohammed was given the power to read by an angel, whatever that is?

I think the honest answer has to be no, but I understand now that the question is beside the point. I think a great many people who consider themselves religious either don’t actually believe the tenets of their doctrine or else are so indifferent to them that it makes no difference. It is the consolation and comfort that are important; the precepts and dogma are just tools, arbitrary elements to give the conscious, waking part of the brain something to do, like playing solitaire on a computer.

There was a story recently published on Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish (I couldn’t find it again to link it) about a devout Christian who lost his child in an accident. He was overwhelmed with grief, as anyone would be. Where he perhaps took it a step further was when he asserted that the accident was God’s punishment for his sins — that the “accident” was, in effect, his fault. His family and friends tried to insist that he was wrong, that God did not work that way and that sometimes bad things just happened to those who apparently did not deserve them. He would not be persuaded, and eventually explained that he preferred to believe God had murdered his child to expiate his own sins (I’m paraphrasing slightly), because to contemplate the alternative — that his child had died, and his world been destroyed, for no reason at all — was actually more horrifying.

The point of all this is to illustrate that people will go to tremendous intellectual lengths to see the world as being guided by some kind of purpose, and that if they have to choose between an evil purpose and no purpose, they will mostly choose the former. You can see this all too clearly today. There has always been a paranoid strain in American politics, and I’m not going to claim that it’s worse today than it has ever been in the past. But the advent of the Internet and the coarsening of network news (which exists almost entirely to frighten people into watching) has expanded the scope of our fears to a degree that seems without precedent. We believe that the president is a foreign-born socialist mole aimed at instituting either a secular Communist paradise or sharia law, we can’t quite decide which; we believe that the Bush administration knew of the September 11 attacks and allowed them to occur. We believe scientists are making up global warming and hiding the evidence that vaccines cause autism. We believe in a “gay agenda” to convert straight people into homosexuals, as if the gay community were organized like the Mormon church. We believe that the media is hiding the truth about both Obama’s birth certificate and high-fructose corn syrup. Whatever we believe, there’s always a “them” to blame it on. If only we could take care of them, fix them or teach them or avoid them or just plain get rid of them, things would go back to the way they’re supposed to be. How appropriate that Carpenter named his film with that anonymous, ominous pronoun. They do live, and They are everywhere.

"It figures it would be something like this."

Me, I admit it: I’m a coincidence nut. Sometimes — most of the time — shit just happens. I’m not saying that there aren’t instances where evil or self-serving people collude in secret for their own ends. And I’m certainly not saying the government and the media are to be trusted. I’m just saying that the global, sweeping, everyone-else-is-in-on-it kind of conspiracy is a figment of our collective imagination — an understandable but irrational belief stemming from our need to occupy a purposeful universe. There simply aren’t enough people in the world smart enough, wicked enough or determined enough to fake global warming or hide Barack Obama’s true identity or whatever. Someone always screws up, and someone always talks. It’s human nature. There are very few conspiracy theories that can’t be explained by a mix of incompetence, happenstance and ordinary self-interest.

We are small beings on a big world in an incomprehensibly vast universe. Even the best and brightest of us are terribly limited in our perceptions. Our brains take cognitive shortcuts that make us feel smarter than we are, and because we spend our entire lives stuck in our own heads, immersed in our subjectivity alone, we naturally interpret everything around us in terms of how it affects us personally. It takes a certain leap of imagination to jump out of this view, and it takes something perhaps more difficult: a willingness to see yourself as one tiny, tiny part of an immense whole, a whole that is largely indifferent to what you do or even to whether you’re there at all. There is no plan. There are just atoms in their peculiar orbits, joining and separating, colliding or drifting for a time into emptiness.

I get why people find this scary. True freedom always is. It scares me sometimes. I have no one to blame if I am unhappy or end up frittering my life away. And if I live in a world in which people seem to be greedy, short-sighted or just out for themselves, I have only to think of the too-frequent times when I have been one or more of those things, and to reflect on the multitudes of people in the world who have those qualities to an even greater degree than I do. It doesn’t take special sunglasses to see why a world made by people as flawed as us would turn out to be so flawed.

When I was growing up, 40 was the official over-the-hill birthday. A 40th birthday party involved novelty canes, ear trumpets, black armbands, walkers and other unfunny, made-to-be-thrown-away crap that occupied a dedicated shelf at Spencer’s Gifts. It still does, somewhat, but as I’ve aged I’ve noticed that culturally, we have tacitly agreed to move back the point beyond which “it’s all downhill from here.” As more Baby Boomers edge closer to the abyss, we have grown less willing to draw the line at which we must admit to ourselves that we are, finally, old.

I am a bit unsure of what to make of it all. Statistically, the odds are that my life is more than half over. When I think of all the things I would like to have done by this age – mostly involving writing and traveling, neither of which I’ve done to anything like the extent I once hoped – I am torn between two competing realizations: that youthful dreams rarely come true and mostly aren’t even meant to, and that I have squandered too much of the only existence I will ever have.

How badly should I feel that I have never lived abroad (well, apart from that semester in college), written a novel or been to Italy? That I work in the corporate world and have often substituted workplace ambition for personal or artistic goals? Is there any point in regretting the many mistakes I’ve made — situations where I sacrificed my happiness for someone else, gave into fear and laziness or knowingly made a bad decision to spare someone’s feelings?

I tell myself that any mistake is worth making as long as I learn from it. I tell myself that it is never too late to do the things that matter to me: to live in a place I don’t know, to use my talents for my own ambitions rather than for my bosses’, to live a life I will be grateful for once it’s over. I think these are valid views — but I would, wouldn’t I?

Shortly before he died, Christopher Hitchens said, “You have to choose your future regrets.” We can never fulfill all our dreams — not if our dreams are worth the name. I haven’t fulfilled all that many of mine. But I do have a beautiful, intelligent and fantastically talented woman to share my life with; reasonably good health; and that persistent, nagging urge to do something more than show up to a job every day — to make something lasting that reflects who I am.

Yes, I wish I had more time ahead of me. But do I wish I were younger? Not a chance. What wisdom I have has been very dearly bought. I wouldn’t rather be anywhere else than where I am today.

Happy birthday? Why, yes it is, thank you.

You have no fucking idea what it’s like to be me.
— Steve Jobs

While I have deliberately avoided reading most of the critical reaction to Walter Isaacson’s biography of Steve Jobs, the broad consensus seems to be that Isaacson had the biographer’s opportunity of a lifetime, and blew it. Despite having unprecedented access to one of the most relentlessly private of public figures, Isaacson’s is a book without insight: his Steve Jobs is the same collection of contradictory impulses he has always been, a self-centered, unlikeable man who somehow created products that people adored, changing whole industries in his wake. In a world full of assholes, critics complain, what set Jobs apart? What made it possible for him to do the extraordinary things he did?

Let me say first that I agree in principle with the critics: Steve Jobs is a lousy book. I believe I arrived at the conclusion via a different route from a lot of other people, and I’ll get into that soon. First, let’s consider the argument, articulated well by Thomas Q. Brady, quoted on Daring Fireball:

I know lots of people that could be described [as “self-absorbed, immature, emotionally unstable control-freaks”], and none of them started a company in their garage that became one of the most valued corporations in the world. What made Jobs different? This isn’t really answered.

Actually it is, at least to a point. There is the asshole half of the Jobs equation, and then there is the other half, which Isaacson documents and which everyone already knows about: his fanatical obsession with spare, minimalist design; his belief that he was destined for greatness and his determination to achieve it; his tremendous persuasiveness; and his knack for infusing technology products with an underlying human friendliness. Unlike Jobs’s more unsavory characteristics, these are not common traits. Combine them with the ones above, and the story of Steve Jobs begins to seem, if not inevitable, then at least somewhat plausible.

Our civilization has spent centuries debating the origins of genius — even the definition of genius — and yet with each new transformational figure that comes along, we start the debate all over again. The truth is that genius has no formula. It cannot be predicted, reconstructed, feigned (for very long) or dissected, at least not in any way that is remotely edifying. You can quantify the factors that make it possible for people to be successful; for instance, Jobs acknowledged how lucky he was to grow up in Silicon Valley, surrounded by people who could nurture his talents and fire his ambitions. Had his parents opted to raise him in the suburbs of Wisconsin, we’d likely never have heard of Steve Jobs. But creativity — or inventiveness if you prefer, since we don’t tend to associate creativity with non-artistic pursuits — is a process that ultimately operates beneath the threshold of awareness. Indeed, it can operate in no other way; inspiration is not an algorithm.

Many people seem to have expected Isaacson’s book to provide the missing piece of the puzzle — the key that would finally unlock the secret of his genius and forever solve the enigma of Steve Jobs. They were never going to get what they wanted, because it didn’t exist. There was no “one more thing.” The enigma is its own solution.

I don’t want to give the impression that any inquiry into the inner workings of a genius is futile, or that Isaacson should be let off the hook for writing a superficial book about a man who was anything but. I merely suspect that no one could have written an entirely satisfying book on Steve Jobs, because the things people want to understand about him aren’t really explicable. What made Jobs different? How did he look at a Rio MP3 player and conceive what would become the iPod, where everyone else just saw a clunky, half-assed music player? You can posit various intermediary reasons — because he was driven to achieve perfection, because poor design caused in him something akin to physical pain — but what do those explain? What are the reasons for the reasons? The truth is that Steve Jobs did what he did because his unique blend of innate qualities, combined with the people and places that helped to shape his worldview, allowed him to. His career was the result of a confluence of circumstances so unlikely as to appear impossible. “What made Steve Jobs different?” is more a rhetorical question than an actual one. It is a way for our mathematically hampered brains to acknowledge the  baffling unlikelihood of his achievement — the incredible fact that in this world, a man like him could exist at all.

So having put that issue in perspective, what is my primary objection to the book? I will put it in straightforwardly Jobsian terms:

The writing sucks.

This is a dull book, and I don’t mean that in a small way — I mean that in a big way. Isaacson’s prose is as flat and limp as a boned fish. Writing about the most fascinating inventor and visionary of our time brought out no poetry in him, no spark, no consciousness that a man of Jobs’s caliber merited an uncompromising effort. Steve Jobs is a Bill Gates kind of biography: unflavored, drily factual (which is not to say it is accurate), pedantic and, despite the occasional adverbial interjections the author makes to demonstrate he hasn’t been completely taken in by his subject’s point of view, cringingly deferential.

The purpose of a biography — of any kind of writing — is to make its subject come alive for the reader. Empathy and imagination are two of the writer’s most powerful gifts, and to the biographer they are essential tools to bridge the gap between the subject’s consciousness and the reader’s. On my bookshelf near my desk is a copy of Schulz and Peanuts by David Michaelis (the dust jacket of which features a laudatory blurb by Walter Isaacson). I opened it, flipped around for a few moments and came upon this passage, describing the young Charles M. Schulz making his first drawings:

Having dutifully put away the table arrangements, he would bend over the paper, tense, almost sick with excitement, as his pen followed the arched back of the panther threatening Tim Tyler last Sunday. Sometimes he drifted just far enough outside the forms of the cartoonist he was imitating to find himself watching in surprise as his pen point twisted a mouth or curved an eyebrow in a way that seemed somehow distinctively his. But design, proportions, pacing still belonged to the masters, and his drawings still lacked the professionalism that he was ever more aware of pursuing.

Michaelis gives himself license to depict Schulz’s artistic process from the artist’s own point of view; reading this passage, you feel one with Schulz, sharing his struggle and triumph as he experiences them. Note the forceful, dramatic verbs: “his pen point twisted a mouth or curved an eyebrow.” Even the picture Schulz draws adds drama and tension to the scene. The arched back of the threatening panther reinforces how much is at stake here: for Charles Schulz, getting this right is everything, and his best efforts still land him short of where he knows he needs to be. A driven, almost monomaniacal artist is born virtually before our eyes.

There is nothing in Steve Jobs that comes within a hundred miles of this. Despite (or even because of) the 40 interviews Isaacson conducted with his subject, which are reproduced on the page in great undigested gobs, we never feel close to Jobs or get swept up into his story. This I think is the real reason so many have found the book unsatisfying. It’s not because Isaacson didn’t tell us “what made Steve Jobs different” — he explained that as much as it probably can be. It’s because we never get a sense of what it was like to be Steve Jobs, and thus never understand how truly different he was, or wasn’t, from everyone else.

Is this merely a matter of Isaacson not knowing what questions to ask, as some critics have said? No, because interviews are only one of the biographer’s tools, and not necessarily even the primary one. Better interviews would have resulted in a better book than we have now, but I doubt even then that it would have made a great biography. If anything, his easy access to Jobs actually undermined the finished work. Isaacson seems to have believed that simply quoting his subject at length would, ipso facto, provide the definitive word, with a contrasting recollection by a former associate thrown in for balance. This is the stuff of magazine profiles, not biographies. A great biography of Jobs would have required an author willing to get inside his subject’s head by whatever means necessary, a writer with the determination to make his subject his own and the writing chops to convincingly show us the world as he saw it.

Maybe someone someday could still write that book using Isaacson’s materials, should he be generous enough to make them available. In the meantime, we’re stuck with the longest commemorative issue of Time magazine ever written.

If you want to buy an iPod shuffle or iPod classic from Apple, you should do it sooner rather than later. We’ve heard those two iPods are getting the axe this year. (Courtesy TUAW)

Assuming this is true, is it likely that Apple is going to release a 128-gigabyte iPod touch this Christmas, so that die-hard music lovers might find something in their stockings that comes close to suiting their needs? I’m guessing not. The mp3 player market is dead. They are to this young decade what digital watches were in the ’80s: formerly sleek emblems of progress reduced in price and stature until they ended up being sold out of gumball machines.

Time was that Apple needed to offer a high-capacity iPod model to stand out from the competition. Now that race is run, and music playing is just one more function on a smart phone, or a handheld gaming and Internet device (to describe the iPod touch accurately). If the rumor is true and the shuffle is in line for the axe along with the classic, that means that the iPod nano will be the only remaining device Apple makes whose primary function is to store and play music — and i think it’s reasonable to assume that the nano will itself continue to exist only until Apple can price an iPod touch below $199. (Side bet: if the above rumor comes to pass, watch the nano drop to $99.)

So why is this a big enough deal that I keep harping on it? Because there is no smartphone or iPod touch that can do what an iPod classic does: hold a library of songs numbering in the tens of thousands, all stored locally and accessible without a network connection. And it does not offer a hardware interface optimized for playing music.

Don’t mistake this for sentimentality or Ludditism. (Ludditery?) I recently started using Rdio and was sufficiently taken with it that I thought it might obviate the need for my iPod classic. It offers a sizable library to choose from, the mobile app is pretty slick and it has some nice music discovery tools. But it doesn’t offer the granularity of iTunes: the ability to rate songs, tag songs, construct dynamic playlists or change metadata. In short, it doesn’t afford the kind of advantages that come from owning and curating your own music files. So Rdio on my iPhone is like having two different, mutually incompatible music libraries, one of which has everything by the Beatles (in mono, even) and not much else, the other of which is so ungainly it has 12 different songs called “Learning to Fly,” just because I wanted to see how many there are. (There are more than 12, but it was starting to get ridiculous.) And if I want to, say, make a playlist with “Flying” and Kate Earl’s “Learning to Fly”? Well, that ain’t happening. I can put Kate Earl on my iPod, but I can’t put the Beatles on Rdio.

If the classic is going away, then I and thousands of others like me are marooned. Our choices are to either keep our devices operating until Apple offers a new product that can serve our needs (mine is already three years old and on its second battery), or jump ship for something else. Such a change, for all I know, may not be possible, or if it’s possible, it may not be worth the trouble. Leaving the iPod will also mean leaving iTunes, and the information that app has stored about my music — my ratings, my playlists, which songs I’ve played or skipped in a given time — is, given the nerd-tastic way I listen to music, almost as valuable as the music itself.

So while I am chagrined to arrive at the end of the road with my iPod, I am hopeful that some competitor out there will finally seize the opportunity to build a music player that offers us what Apple will not. People are still buying vinyl records, for god’s sake. You mean to tell me there is really no return on catering to rabid music listeners — people who have already demonstrated their willingness to devote a lot more of their income to music than the average person?

Anyone want to sell me an mp3 player?

Yah wah
Torment
Eee chop yah wah
Today brings torment
Toe meet toe pee chee keene
We lick the blood from our paws
G’noop dock fling oh ah
And taste our victory

Coat ee chah tu yub nub
All the world is slaughter
Coat ee chah tu yah wah
All the world is torment
Coat ee chah tu glo wah
All the world is ruin
Allay loo ta nuv
Until we end in fire

Glo wah
Ruin
Eee chop glo wah
Today brings ruin
Ya glo wah pee chu nee foam
Let ruin fall from the trees
Ah toot dee awe goon goon daa
And rain down on our foes

Coat ee cha tu goo (Yub nub!)
All the world is war (Slaughter!)
Coat ee cha tu doo (Yah wah!)
All the world is blood (Torment!)
Coat ee cha tu too (Ya chaa!)
All the world is tears (Glory!)
Allay loo tu nuv
Until we end in fire
Allay loo tu nuv
Until we end in fire
Allay loo tu nuv
Until we end in fire

Glo wah
Ruin
Eee chop glo wah
Today brings ruin
Ya glo wah pee chu nee foam
Let ruin fall from the trees
Ah toot dee awe goon goon daa
And rain down on our foes
Allay loo tu nuv
Until we end in fire

To our beloved Cassie [for example] — you would have been 16 years old today. Daddy and I miss you so much and we carry you in our hearts every day. We love you!

Hmm. I take it something happened.

I am not making light of anyone’s tragedy. Truly — the thought of losing a child is horrifying to me and I don’t even have any children. But being a person who suffers from a degree of social awkwardness, I have a masochistic fascination with this kind of social cul-de-sac. The person who posted about this loss obviously did so in the knowledge that those close to her would know what she was talking about. I have not spoken to her in person in twenty years, and barely even pass the time with her on Facebook, and so I have no idea what she’s talking about, apart from what I can infer. The dilemma, obviously, is this:

Is it appropriate to ask for more details when a distant Facebook friend refers to a personal tragedy you know nothing about?

On the one hand, the simple answer appears to be, why not? If they posted it to Facebook of their own accord, it would seem they are capable of engaging with the subject on at least a limited basis. Imagine the corollary real-world experience: you are making the rounds at your high school reunion. Having already met and greeted this friend earlier in the evening, you find yourself near her in a quiet corner where you can exchange words. And she says to you, My daughter would have been 16 years old today. I still think about her all the time. In this situation, it is obviously completely appropriate to ask for more information — indeed, it would be rude not to, and your friend certainly wants to be able to share with you the pain and loss that she has carried with her.

But Facebook is not real life, and it is really not even close to real life. There is nothing in the real world that maps to Facebook’s strange social stew of acquaintances, ex-boyfriends, bosses, grade-school friends, parents and that really nice gal you met at Subway all bobbing around in the same virtual medium. Unless you take the time to stratify these people into castes and direct certain posts only at certain groups — which, judging by my personal experience, virtually no Facebook user knows how to do — your tragic outpouring is hitting every pair of eyeballs with the same force. It seems crazy to think that someone would compose a reflection on the death of her own child that is equally suitable for both her mother and for a schoolmate she hasn’t seen since Please Hammer, Don’t Hurt ‘Em came out. Therefore, I think she can’t be doing it on purpose: the Facebook settings that would allow her to target her post to a select group of readers must either be too opaque to figure out or she just doesn’t know about them. Which leaves me thinking, again, that I really ought to not say anything.

I don’t know. I really have no clue what is the appropriate thing to do. But I can tell you this: if you came to this post through a link on my Facebook wall, it’s because I wanted you, and you specifically, to see it. I think I’ve had all the social ambiguity I can take for a while.

“That’s All Right,” Elvis Presely

Originally recorded by Arthur Crudup
My ranking: #7

One of the challenges the self-styled critic faces in compiling a list like this is the temptation to nominate songs because they’re “classics”: songs that mark a pivotal movement or moment without necessarily meaning anything to the critic on a personal level — precisely the level at which music should matter to us most. (This was the reason that the eventual Popdose winner, Aretha Franklin’s “Respect,” placed a relatively low 21 on my list: I recognize it as a great song, but I rarely stop to listen to it.) Bearing that in mind, I think I was on firm ground in naming this primal Elvis number to such a high place on the list. Say what you will about “Blue Suede Shoes;” for my money, this is where it begins, both for Elvis and for rock n’ roll in general. Its recording is one of rock’s great legendary origin stories. Having pestered local record producer Sam Phillips for ages for a chance to record, Elvis found himself struggling to get a passable performance of “I Love You Because,” the kind of schmaltzy ballad his mother loved. Between increasingly futile takes, Elvis and the hired musicians began messing around with this old Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup number, and Sam Phillips heard his young singer suddenly come to life. The rest we all more or less know, but you don’t need to know the rest to hear greatness here: the originality is palpable, the spontaneity of a kind almost completely vanished from modern music.

“Way Down in the Hole,” the Blind Boys of Alabama

Originally recorded by Tom Waits
My ranking: #13

OK, so a lot of people know this one as “The Theme to Season One of The Wire.” I get that. And I accept that my affection for this song is probably colored by my admiration for its use on that show. But it’s not hard to look past that association to an already great song become even greater. Tom Waits’ take on the song is laced with his customary and distinctive irony, a subtle flavoring of the material that, rather than undercutting the song’s spiritual content, seems to afford it a range of plausible interpretations. The Blind Boys of Alabama by contrast serve it up straight, opening a window directly onto a rich musical and spiritual tradition that Waits views through a funhouse mirror. I’m an atheist, but I still know a great spiritual when I hear one.

“Mr. Moonlight,” the Beatles

Originally recorded by Dr. Feelgood and the Interns
My ranking: #79

This may well be the most underappreciated and misunderstood track in the Fabs’ canon. Ian MacDonald in Revolution in the Head called it “excruciating.” Jonathan Gould in Can’t Buy Me Love thought it “falls completely flat.” I happen to love John Lennon’s unhinged vocal, the comically straight backing vocals by Paul and George, and of course that organ solo, as though a member of the Lawrence Welk Orchestra popped into the Cavern on a bet and decided to briefly sit in with the house band. In fact, far from being an aberration, this is exactly the kind of song the Beatles loved to do — a vital and often-forgotten element of their greatness. For one thing, it was obscure; it actually came out as a B-side, a favorite tactic of theirs to ensure no competing act would be playing their material. For another, it was goofy — the Beatles relished taking oddities like this and turning them into raving rock n’ roll songs. And finally, it helped to fill out what were often extremely long sets: the Beatles played for as long as eight hours some nights, forcing them not only to become tight, accomplished musicians but also to assimilate nearly any raw material into their act and make it their own. If you had happened to stumble into the Star Club in Hamburg in 1961, or the Cavern in Liverpool, this song or something like it is probably what you would have heard: an R&B relic given an unlikely second life by the greatest cover band in rock history.

This is not to say he is leaving Apple. He is continuing on as Chairman of the Board, so it seems reasonable to assume he will still exert considerable direct influence on Apple’s products and overall direction. That face-saving news probably helped insulate Apple’s stock from the bad news. As of this writing, it has taken a five-percent hit, much less than the cataclysm many predicted would befall Apple should Jobs have died, quit or otherwise left the company abruptly.

Apart from sadness and a vague sense of unease or disquiet, I have these thoughts on hearing this news.

Whatever health issues Jobs has been dealing with, he has not been able to overcome them. Jobs must have reached a point where he and his doctors realized his recovery would make no more significant progress. It is possible (and I certainly hope) that Jobs has many years ahead of him in which to contribute to Apple and to enjoy life with his family and friends. However, it is just as possible — and knowing Jobs’ concern for his privacy, not at all unlikely — that there may be more bad news about Steve Jobs ahead, and that it will come sooner than anyone wants to accept. I take no pleasure in thinking that. But I do think it.

In a sense, we are about to see the ultimate test of Jobs as a businessman and leader. How well has he inculcated his values and expectations into Apple’s culture? How well, in other words, has he enabled it to continue as though he were still there? The answer to this question will not be apparent for some time; Jobs will, as noted, continue to be involved with Apple, and it will take months or even years for the efforts he has overseen to come to fruition. That will not, alas, stop the tech pundits from clucking over Apple’s “loss of vision” at the first post-Jobs bump in the road to come along. For example, if the iPhone 4′s “Antenna-gate” issue had happened at a post-Jobs Apple, no one would skip a beat before denouncing the scandal as the inevitable result of Apple adrift in the leadership vacuum left by its departed visionary: “This would never have happened if Steve had been there.” There’s going to be a lot of bullshit like this in the months ahead, I’m afraid.

But it is true that, at some distant point, people will look at Apple and have to decide, as well as they can, whether the company they see is truly living up to its founder’s standards, or whether it shows the first signs of an inevitable decline. Apple could easily remain unassailable with no input at all from Jobs for at least three years, and probably closer to five. By then, the tech landscape may have shifted sufficiently to allow a smaller, faster competitor to undermine Apple’s dominance or to establish a new computing paradigm ahead of it. This is going to happen eventually; it’s just a matter of when. The only real question is: will it happen sufficiently far in the future that no one can reasonably blame it on Jobs’ absence? Indeed, could Apple remain dominant for so long that Jobs himself one day becomes a hazily remembered, almost mythic figure like Henry Ford, with no direct associations with any of Apple’s then-current products?

I think it could happen. If it does, that will be the true confirmation of Steve Jobs’ genius. He would not have merely started Apple. He would not have merely rebuilt it from a teetering computer company into the world’s most valuable technology company, capable of redefining entire markets at a stroke. He would have given it a soul, and not just a soul but his soul — the one thing even some of his greatest admirers were convinced he could not do. He would have achieved a kind of immortality: a cluster of dedicated people who absorbed his ways of thinking and distilled them into an essence that can be taught and passed on after he was gone. If he succeeds in this, then there is no telling how long Apple could remain in its present dominant position. Jobs came back to Apple 15 years ago. What could Apple be in another 15 years? It could come back down to earth, become just another successful purveyor of computers, gadgets and lifestyle accessories. Or it could be something that no one today can see, an integral part of industries we haven’t yet imagined. We might even one day call it the most powerful and innovative company that has ever been — greater than U.S. Steel, greater than Ford, greater than AT&T or Microsoft — a company so ingrained in our lives that it literally has no precedent.

Knowing what little I do about Steve Jobs, I am guessing that is the legacy he strives for. Will he succeed? I wouldn’t bet against him. How amazing it is to think that for all Jobs has accomplished, today really only marks a new beginning.

There is a complicated flood of emotions that arises in this moment. The first was blind fear: was the cat all right? (She was.) There is helplessness, a kind of grief, and in my case at least, a deep, sour rage. I couldn’t keep still, pacing relentlessly back and forth waiting for the police to arrive, and after them, the evidence technician. I prowled our rooms again and again, spotting what was missing, trying to notice everything that had changed. The DVD player was definitely gone. My wife’s laptop bag was rifled, the computer missing. The jewelry dish on the dresser was empty; what was in it again? Her sapphire engagement ring. Maybe her antique watch. Was that bag sitting on the bed when we left? Did I leave that drawer open? “What about your camera?” my wife asked. Checked the windowsill in the office where the camera bag was. Gone.

The initial shock wore off, after a night or two. Our broken door was replaced and fortified with a piercing battery-powered alarm. I called my insurance company and put the wheels in motion to have our stuff replaced, inasmuch as it can be. (If you rent and don’t have insurance, stop reading this and call your agent now.) What remains is the sense of violation — I try not to imagine the burglar actually walking through our apartment, sizing up our possessions for their pawn value, perhaps glancing at the cat regarding him quizzically from her carpeted perch — and the knowledge that we are not safe, at least not from anyone determined to do whatever necessary to steal from us and invade our lives. The worst injustice is not that our stuff was taken; it’s that someone can rob you of your sense of control over your own life, and that they can do it so easily and with so few consequences.

I suppose there is a chance that some of our items will be recovered. The police have told us, that our best bet for finding our things is to check the pawn shops ourselves, on the principle that we are best suited to recognize our possessions when we see them — and a tacit admission that, absent a really lucky break, there’s not much they can do. I am not holding out hope. The things are gone. We’ll get new ones. The sense of security and control is another matter. I’ve been burglarized once before, and I can attest that you do get over it; at any rate, you forget to be afraid. You could argue that we shouldn’t, that illusions of security are ultimately dangerous. But we all know that’s bunk. Living in fear is no life at all, and it’s easy to forget in a time like this that most people actually are decent. I think that setting my alarm when I leave the apartment is a sensible precaution. And I hope I won’t lapse back into the lassitude that had me believing that locking my door was my only responsibility in maintaining my safety. I won’t live in fear, but I really ought not to live in ignorance either.

As for the experience of singing or watching karaoke, I realized this: karaoke is like jet-skiing, in that it is an enjoyable pastime for those actually doing it and a grating annoyance for everyone else. I have jet-skied and thought it was a blast. Yet watching jet-skiers roar across the placid surface of a lake, frightening wildlife and disturbing everyone’s peace, makes me angrily denounce the steady decline of civilization itself.

I have never sang karaoke. It’s bad enough I like jet-skiing.

Arrived at office. Changed shoes, stopped at coffee machine and chatted with copywriter about her sons, one of whom is returning to live with her.

9:07

Entered office of Ran Bao-tu, Senior Creative Director and kung-fu master of unmatched skill, nobility and judgment, for morning conference only to find room in shambles and Master Ran lying sprawled on floor, severely beaten and on the brink of death. Cradled master’s head on my knees, imploring: “Who did this?”. Marshaling last ounce of strength, master weakly named Bai Tiao-man, leader of rival kung fu school Cobra Whisper, as his assailant. Master then croaked final breath, dying.

9:08

Swore revenge in the name of my ancestors on Cobra Whisper and its contemptible, craven master, Bai Tiao-man.

9:09

Began catching up on email.

9:19

Sent Outlook meeting request challenging Bai Tiao-man to combat to the death at 5:00 pm. Request was promptly accepted.

9:30

Met with members of Media, Production and PR teams to coordinate efforts on new brand rollout scheduled for next month. Received numerous condolences and expressions of sympathy on death of Master Ran.

10:18

On way to water fountain, chanced upon my counterpart in Marketing at Cobra Whisper, who disgraced Master Ran’s good name with vile falsehoods and insults. Confrontation quickly escalated into combat. Fight ranged throughout Accounting and Human Resources, ending in front of vice president’s office, where I finally bested my opponent with rapid combination of Crane Plucks Eggs from Nest and Swift Tiger Pounce.

10:22

Stood out in lobby alone, silently mourning Master Ran, a single stoic tear streaming down cheek.

10:30

Met with Associate Vice President to discuss upcoming product launches. Before adjourning meeting, AVP warned me that my skills were not sufficient to defeat rival kung fu master in battle. Referred me to Chief Creative Officer, rumored keeper of Sword of Hands, the deadliest of all kung fu styles.

11:10

Sent Outlook meeting request for appointment with CCO at only time available: 4:45. No reply forthcoming; received an email from secretary saying that CCO was in meetings all day and 4:45 appointment could not be guaranteed.

11:30

Impromptu memorial service for Master Ran in break room. Bai Tiao-man, accompanied by several direct reports, brazenly attended service, laughing derisively and promising to swiftly bring death to me and to our school. Melee promptly broke out. In rash fit of anger, rushed Bai Tiao-man intending to strike him down. Rival master quickly parried my enraged and wild kicks and blows. Though a fiend with neither honor nor courage, he nevertheless easily knocked me to the ground, laughed and confirmed our meeting for 5:00 p.m.

12:15

Lunch with members of Public Relations and Media Development. Discussed strategies for facing Bai Tiao-man and split large platter of nachos.

1:20

Met with members of Marketing, IT and Web to discuss ongoing rollout of new CMS. General agreement that initial schedule was too aggressive and so several milestone deadlines were revised.

1:45

Worked at desk on drafts for several upcoming marketing pieces. Thoughts invariably went back to earlier years, when I chose to pledge my loyalty to Ran Bao-tu over mother’s objections. Remembered leaving home for last time, watching through window of bus as mother wept to see me go, father standing behind her, gruff and implacable, his emotion visible only in the sorrowful cast of his jaw.

3:20

Googled “Sword of Hands.” Found links to several demonstration videos on YouTube but was blocked from viewing them by company firewall. Also surreptitiously followed several BuzzFeed links and checked fantasy baseball team standings.

3:39

Spoke by telephone to CCO’s secretary. Was assured I was “pencilled in” for 4:45 conference.

3:41

Delegation of several direct reports visited me in office to ask me not to fight Bai Tiao-man. Though a worthy pupil of Ran Bao-tu and a winner of several regional awards for excellence in advertising copywriting, I was assured my kung fu was no match for that of Bai Tiao-man, and that I could not hope to master the Sword of Hands in time to defeat him. Calmly assured my colleagues that if my only remaining service to Ran Bao-tu was to die in the defense of his honor, I would consider such a death eminently worthwhile.

3:56

Team designer and student of kung fu Ma Xia-hui came to office to flatly inform me she could not allow me to face Bai Tiao-man and bring even greater ruin and disgrace to our school. To my astonishment, she presented the Crane at Eventide stance, a clear invitation to combat. At first I offered no defense, refusing to raise a hand in anger at a fellow pupil and colleague of several years’ standing. It became clear that though Ma Xia-hui fought reluctantly, she was nevertheless in deadly earnest, striking swiftly and with great power. After twice enduring blows strong enough to knock me to the ground, as well as the destruction of a new iMac and several items of office furniture, I rose and counterattacked with a combination of Drunken Beggar and Tiger’s Shadow on the Leaves. With the fight with Bai Tiao-man heavy in my thoughts, I resolved to bring the duel to a swift conclusion and felled Xia-hui with Executioner’s Hood, tempered to leave her unconscious but alive.

4:15

Called into impromptu meeting to discuss revisions to a campaign slated to start several weeks hence. Even with client’s repeated objections that our approach was “too sophisticated — we’re not selling BMWs here,” my thoughts strayed to my imminent confrontation with Bai Tiao-man. Though I knew I would bring honor to the duel, I could find no way in which I might prevail against Bai or restore our school’s shattered reputation. Teammates appeared reluctant to look me in the eye, and client admitted she hadn’t read most of the draft copy I had supplied her, saying it simply hadn’t “felt right.”

4:26

Received request for meeting tomorrow regarding upcoming healthcare campaign. Responded with “Accept Tentatively.”

4:31

Returned to cubicle and began preparing status report for all ongoing projects, to assist my colleagues following my inevitable death at the hands of Bai Tiao-man. Ma Xia-hui, recovered from our battle, appeared and promptly fell to her knees, begging my forgiveness. I assured her she was not at fault and hoped that, as the leader of our school following my demise, she would continue to uphold the integrity and values of Master Ran. Choking back tears, she hoarsely thanked me for the honor of fighting and creating award-winning direct-mail and point-of-sale advertising at my side. My own emotions nearly overwhelming me, I replied that the honor had been mine, and turned back to my screen, lest my tears betray me.

4:45

Entered team shrine for solitary meditation prior to fighting Bai Tiao-man. Lit incense cones in tribute to my ancestors and to Ran Bao-tu, asking all those who watched over me for the strength to fight with honor and courage. A shadow darkened the altar; it was the team secretary, informing me that the Chief Creative Officer, Wu Xuan-ke, would see me. I looked at my iPhone and saw that it was 4:53.

4:54

With no time to spare and fear getting the best of me, I pleaded with Venerable Master Wu to teach me anything he could of the Sword of Hands, surely my only hope of escaping death at the hands of Bai Tiao-man. He smiled. “Master Bai’s weakness is not in his arm or his fist, but in his thoughts. Your late master, the honorable Ran Bao-tu, has already given you all the skills you need to defeat Bai Tiao-man and the blackguard arts of Cobra Whisper.” When I related my earlier disgrace at his hands, he raised a finger. I fell silent. “He who cannot recall the lesson when it is needed most is a poor student. And according to your annual performance reviews, you are an excellent student indeed.” A soft chime emanated from his MacBook Pro on the desk in front of him. He folded his arms and looked kindly upon me. “And now I believe you have a meeting to attend.”

5:00

Arrived at the Executive Board Room to find Bai Tiao-man waiting for me. He was alone. He expressed frank surprise that I would have the courage to face him in the end. Like all of Bai’s utterances, it only further revealed him as a man to whom honor and respect were alien. The time for words had passed and I did not dignify his craven taunt. I assumed Crane at Eventide. He laughed and took a further opportunity to slander our school’s good name and to promise that it would die with me this afternoon. He went so far as to take no defensive stance at all, simply waiting for the first blow which, as the challenger, it was my duty to strike.

Enraged at the panoply of insults I had endured at his hands, I lashed out with Crane Catching Pebbles, and was easily turned aside; I responded with Spider at Compass Points, and he struck me a blow that sent me sprawling across the hard oak conference table. He laughed, still having assumed no posture of defense. I rose and we circled, a sneer playing across his thin lips. There was no hesitancy in his movements, no telltale wavering of concentration; he was like a solid wall, impervious to my arts. Determined to break his mocking demeanor, I struck with Firefly Dagger and landed a stinging blow to his sternum. His anger flared and he howled and came at me with arms like pistons, brushing aside my defenses and striking me hard in the chest. Again, I lost my footing, and my head struck the floor and rang with the blow.

I rose, my feet unsteady beneath me. Bai now stood in the Venom Brood stance, his fingers bent like fangs of oak ready to strike me down. My attack was clumsy and obvious. He struck my side and my throat, then haughtily kicked my weakened legs out from under me and I fell yet again.

Fear overtook me as I lay on the blue and gray carpeting, and I struggled to remember some words of my master, anything that would bestow the clarity I needed to prevail. Bai circled near me, fully alert and ready for me to engage him again. I hauled myself to my hands and knees. I saw blood ooze from my mouth onto the carpet. My wounds throbbed with a pain that rippled throughout my body. In an instant the scene around me dissolved and I was in Master Ran’s office, in precisely this posture, having just failed a combat trial in one of my annual performance reviews. He had knocked me to the ground again and again, and this time ordered me to remain on my knees.

“Do not get up,” he said, “until you know why you get up — until you can engage the opponent with thoughtfulness and purpose. Let the enemy come on like the black storm, his heart knowing only rancor and destruction. It is a fool who fights the rain storm. Fight not on the enemy’s terms, but on your own. Face your enemy with honor where he is dishonorable, courage where he is cowardly, mercy where he is cruel. Where he rushes headlong, looking only for the quick path to victory, you must see the blow that is yet to be struck. Look not to the lightning strike, but to the dark clouds that are its portent.”

In an instant the vision had passed and I was back in the conference room, bleeding and stiff with pain. I had not fully understood the lesson that day. But now, facing my own black storm of an enemy, I knew what I must do.

I rose to my feet but assumed no stance. I looked at Bai Tiao-man and for the first time I pitied him — pitied his shrunken heart and his coldness, his pleasure in the weakness and failure of others. I saw how his own lost honor haunted him and drove him to destroy the good and noble wherever he met them. Bai unleashed another taunt, but his words had lost their force. I raised one hand in a parrying stance, a posture one would adopt in facing a novice. In fury he lunged and I stepped beyond his reach. Again he lunged, and again, each time coming within a hair’s breadth. He saw cowardice, for that was what he looked for; and I saw the simple crudity of his attacks, their single-minded dullness. He struck out with great power at that which most easily presented itself. I knew then I could defeat him, and my pity for him grew.

I stepped within his reach and parried his attacks with the Bending Reed form — a form useless for counterattack, but my enemy’s frustration mounted, as I had known it would. His blows grew wilder, and I could now read them in his face before he threw them: now was the subtle flicker of eye and mouth that betrayed the opponent at war with himself. I struck with Fist of Hummingbird and he staggered. There was fear in his eyes now as the specter of defeat entered his mind for the first time, fed on itself and grew larger. Now would he be at his most dangerous — and his most vulnerable. I closed on him with the Hundred Eels Fists, giving him no room to counter, and his will broke. He gave ground and I advanced, diverting his desperate blows and choosing my attacks for maximum effect on my opponent’s mind and body. He cursed me helplessly, unable to see how he himself had given me the key to his defeat. He was now mine to finish. I struck with Hungry Oak and sent him to the floor.

“Why continue?” I asked, with what I sincerely hoped was a note of kindness in my voice. “Has there not been enough death today?”

I watched the struggle of emotions play across his face, his fear and rage and pride combating for dominance. I had little doubt which would be the victor, but honor demanded I offer him a final choice.

“No,” he spat at me between heaving breaths. “There is not quite yet enough death today, little pupil.” He lurched to his feet and came at me one last time.

He was still fast, still powerful, but his will had already surrendered. I was ready with Executioner’s Hood, and I felled him.

5:18

Returned to my desk to find Ma Xia-hui waiting for me. Her demeanor was dignified but I read the joy in her eyes. We embraced without embarrassment. She asked if Bai Tiao-man still lived.

I laughed. “Our school still lives. Our honor still lives. Whether Bai Tiao-man still lives is for him to decide.”

5:19

Changed response to tomorrow’s meeting to “Accepted.” Shut down computer and left for the day.

But the fact that OS X 10.7 is being released to the public for the measly price of $29.99 (side note: what’s with the double-decimal pricing?) is a huge deal, and not merely because it will likely be the most successful — that is, the most immediately widespread — OS release Apple has ever had. It symbolically closes an era that began 16 years ago with Windows 95: the era of the retail software event. Back then, the country went crazy for Windows 95 in a way that hasn’t been seen since, well, the iPhone came out. People lined up for it, bought it in droves, gossiped and kibitzed and complained about it. A lot of people liked it, a lot didn’t (at least at first), but everybody had an opinion. Windows 95 was more than the tech story of the year: it was the heart of the tech universe, a symbol of how much more than mere technology computer software was becoming. And it was Microsoft’s baby.

I’ve written before about Microsoft’s nostalgia for that era. Each Windows release since then has tried to capture some of that ol’ time OS religion, to steadily diminishing returns. Apple is finally and definitively saying goodbye to all that — and revealing these twentieth-century theatrics for the relic they are. Oh, they’ll make a big deal out of OS X Lion; there will be marketing, commercials, gargantuan enlargements in the windows of Apple retail stores. But there will be no more lines snaking out of those stores, no more giveaway t-shirts and bottles of water handed out to the waiting faithful. Lion is simply a conspicuous stage in an ongoing, iterative process, an inflection point in the otherwise smooth and steady evolution of the Macintosh computing experience. The software itself is a big deal, but acquiring it will not be — in fact, even the time-honored process of installing from physical media seems now a distasteful relic of an earlier age, like handcranking your car to start it.

So what does this mean for the future of the Mac OS? I don’t mean to be one of those discontented types always looking ahead to the next upgrade. I frankly can’t imagine how the operating system will evolve from here. But I do wonder about OS X’s future as both technology and product. When Mac OS X came out ten tumultuous years ago, Apple touted it as the platform that would grow with the Mac for the next decade or more. That decade is up. Could Mac OS X become obsolete? Short of a revolution in computing that obviated the microchip itself, I’m hard pressed to imagine a scenario in which OS X is not the foundation for every platform Apple ships. I’m no developer, but I think the technological underpinnings are sufficiently abstracted that even a kernel rewrite could be brought off relatively smoothly.

So assume that OS X will be with us, in form if not precisely in name, for the foreseeable future. What of Mac OS X the product? When Windows ruled the computing landscape, operating system upgrades were infrequent, ponderous events, accompanied with massive fanfare, scores of helpful books and magazine articles — an entire ecosystem of media and symbiotic technology. Apple changed that model by releasing OS X upgrades, for a time, every year. Eventually Microsoft got the message: you can’t spend seven years fiddling with your software anymore. Now that Apple has ended the era of the retail software release, what else might it dispense with? Does Mac OS X even need milestone updates? I feel quite certain that Steve Jobs finds it distasteful to even bother his users with something so esoteric as software upgrades. Why should you have to know, or care about, the version of the system software you are running? With an electronic app store, it is a simple matter to tag a potential purchase: “The application you have chosen will not run on your computer as it is presently configured. Click here to upgrade your system software and return to this purchase.”

Apple’s WWDC keynote represented a bold step into a new era of computing: one more decoupled, constantly in flux, yet potentially more liberating than anything we’ve yet seen. It’s impossible to say yet what it all means. But the rules have changed, and the future will become ever trickier to predict.

Not that it will stop any of us from trying.

AppleInsider

This source, who has an unproven track record, claims that Apple higher-ups were pushing for an aggressive price point on Lion — an approach the company already employed with great success when Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard launched in late 2009. Snow Leopard debuted with a $29 price tag, and that strategy resulted in sales that doubled the previous record-setting launch of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard.

The article goes on to note that Apple software released through the Mac App Store is often significantly cheaper than the same software’s boxed retail version, so there is a further precedent should Apple decide to go this route.

I plan to upgrade to Lion no matter what it costs, so I’d be delighted to get it for $20 rather than the customary $129. However, there are a couple of reasons why I won’t think this will happen:

1. Cheap now, cheap forever

It’s easy to make a product expensive and then gradually reduce the price. It’s much harder to start cheap and then get more expensive. Apple may not be forever inclined to effectively give away major releases of their operating system. It’s generally a bad idea to “train” the market to expect high value at cheap prices. Which leads me to the next reason:

2. Perceived value

Have you ever shopped for wine and found yourself selecting the second-least-expensive bottle? We like things to be cheap, but not too cheap, especially when it’s something to be enjoyed; we don’t like to feel as though we’re skimping on our own pleasure. Apple, of course, is all about perceived value, and their computers are marketed not just as powerful tools but as fun to use in themselves. Along with industrial design and a certain aspirational, clever-but-not-hip advertising approach, price has been one of the chief means by which Apple sets its products apart in the market. It’s not that the products are overpriced, for they usually compare quite favorably, even aggressively, with products of similar calibre. It’s that Apple doesn’t make cheap stuff. Even the entry-level Apple products, like the iPod shuffle, have a certain robustness and elegance that communicates that they were made with care — and not cheaply. (Apple got away with underpricing Snow Leopard by explicitly managing expectations. It was clear from the get-go that there was not a lot of user-directed innovation in that release.)

So I am guessing that Mac OS X 10.7 Lion will appear on Apple retail shelves for the customary $129, with the App Store version (it seems increasingly certain there will be one) offered at a modestly reduced price, say $79. If you’re selling “the world’s most advanced operating system,” after all, you ought to charge what it’s actually worth.

One thing I was expecting to find, and did, was this:

There are lots of pictures of the Beatles clowning around with Cassius Clay, as he was still known then, and this one and the variations of it are the best known. It might not occur to you on seeing it that the Beatles and Clay had no idea who each other were. The photo opp was arranged by their respective handlers, who had some inkling of what it might mean to bring these two phenomena together: the British invaders who were taking over American popular music, and the African-American dynamo who, not content to redefine the sport of boxing, went on to create the template for mass-media sports celebrity — he had already started doing it when this shot was taken.

We see this photo now and marvel that it happened, that these five people ever occupied the same space together. It’s like an improbably real version of those cheesy prints that show Bogart, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe hanging out in the same pool hall. The Beatles and Muhammad Ali, to give him his proper name, are titans, figures who stand outside of popular history. It looked a little different to viewers back then. The Beatles were a teenybopper fad in February 1964, when they went to visit Clay as he trained for his first title fight. No one, perhaps not even the Beatles themselves, realized how pivotal their presence would be as the 60s took their strange, epochal course. And Clay was something of a nine-day-wonder himself, a braggart expected to have his clock cleaned by Sonny Liston. Probably a lot of people simply wanted it to happen, wanted to see the loudmouth get his comeuppance, just as a lot of people waited, and waited, for the Beatles to fall on their faces and prove how shallow and fleeting their presence in the culture really was.

But the Beatles went on to prove that rock music could expand beyond anyone’s preconceptions, taking politics, manners and culture along with it. And Ali proved not only that he was a great fighter — indeed, that he was as great as he said he was, which hardly seemed possible — but that a sports figure could be just as culturally radical, just as transformational, as any artist, politician, philosopher or pop musician.

It hadn’t happened yet. No one was seeing it coming. This is a photo of the moment before the plunge — before everything changed.

He is young, almost child-like, with round cheeks and curly close-cropped hair. Dressed in jeans and a coarse denim shirt, clutching a guitar with unclipped strings winding off the tuning pegs like whiskers, he might be mistaken for a roadside ragamuffin, but the grin gives him away, even more than those babyish cheeks do: a grin of knowing impetuousness, a charmer’s grin, a grin that knows luck is on its side, or fate or destiny or whatever you choose to call it. Yet how to account for the contrast between the puckish demeanor and the voice? How does someone barely distinguishable from the average small-town twenty-year-old — for it is apparent to the keen observer that the hardscrabble mannerisms are an affectation, given away with a subliminal wink — sing so forlornly, so emphatically and so unaffectedly of things he could never have experienced? The words he sings are infused with the morality and vision of an Old Testament prophet, strained through the vocabulary of an itinerant brakeman. He chides and insinuates and accuses and finally takes it all back onto himself: Ah, but I was so much older then. Always his voice prowls among the words like a hunter nosing for prey in the rocks, investigating dark corners, overturning and exposing hidden things, ignoring what lies in plain sight. It remakes old sayings and never utters the same word in the same way. Not a conventionally attractive instrument, but one that seems to say, Would I be saying these things, in this way, if they weren’t true?

This performer soon gives way to a new face — and the transformation is shocking. In place of the fresh-faced, Jimmie Rodgers-like troubadour now stands a dandified Mod in a tight-fitting striped suit, a wild nimbus of hair radiating from his head like sunbeams, his sallow face guarded by a pair of dark glasses. But the most noticeable transformation — before he starts to sing, that is — is the Fender Telecaster guitar slung high on his chest. He begins to pick at it tentatively, his long-nailed fingers not quite used to the guitar’s weight and action. From the shadows, he is joined by four other musicians, and this ensemble explodes into a roaring barroom blues, tough and loose and fearless, that batters the walls of the club. The gangly singer steps to the microphone and cuts loose in a voice like a police siren amplified through a Marshall stack; he howls, wails, croons, giggles, moans, an unfathomable conviction undergirding everything and holding it together. The words are as arresting as the voice — in fact, the words don’t seem as though they could be delivered any other way. There are torrents of imagery, as though a hundred years of newspaper headlines, shared memory and tall tales were compressed into some cultural singularity before bursting out again, coalescing into a fractalized landscape where Beethoven, Jack the Ripper and Ezra Pound rub elbows with gamblers, old widows, strutting commanders-in-chief and the unnamed lost and lonely. There is jarring silliness, surprising pathos and mystifying juxtapositions of time and place. And most piercing and memorable is a question, thrown out to the audience like an unanswerable taunt: How does it feel?

The audience who are witness to this onslaught — the club is now packed — are left breathless as the performer rushes off stage, irrepressibly energetic to the last. Now nursing a pale drink, the old man near the stage nods, though the gesture is at least as much in wonder as in approval or sympathy. His attention seems to waver a small degree as the next performer comes up. Less sallow-looking, more contented than his predecessor, this singer leads a lean country ensemble through a series of weird, off-kilter parables that give way to more conventional, even mawkish ballads. The audience is intrigued but not quite with him; a few spectators begin to trickle out. The next performer galvanizes the crowd with searing, heartfelt songs of breakup and loss: If you see her, say hello. After him, as the evening lengthens into deep night, a succession of new singers ascends the stage, each one a bit older than the previous, a bit more undirected and less compelling. There is the Christian singer, at first accommodating and then increasingly strident and condemning; the hopeful ’80s pop star, sounding lost amid reams of dated arrangements; an aging folk-rocker delivering almost willfully inconsequential songs; and, in a strange echo of the day’s first performer, an older man with just an acoustic guitar, scratching out folk songs and ballads with a voice from which nearly all the contours have been shaven away. These are performances without irony, taking each song’s outlandish truths and fanciful occurrences as read. I rode all day and I’ll ride all night and I’ll overtake my lady. Whatever he is channeling, it fails to reach very far — the club has grown mostly empty now, and many of the people still present are lost in conversation, reliving and debating what they have already heard earlier in the evening.

The stage light dims, the last performer shuffles off to scattered applause, and for a long time it seems as though there will be no more music here.

Then the old man rises from his table. He adjusts his hat, fiddles with it some more until it’s nested back in the same spot before he started fussing with it. And then he climbs onto the stage.

He sits at an electric piano. From behind him a lonely electric guitar picks a frail chord on every beat. He leans into the microphone.

I’m walking … through streets that are dead.

The audience, distant at first — they have heard much tonight that either disappointed or baffled them — gradually allow themselves to be taken in, surrendering to the words, and to this music that sounds piped in from some juke-joint of the subconscious, every dive bar anyone ever imagined rolled into a single place. The sound as it unfolds picks up and reconciles most of what was great from everyone who came before on this stage: the snatches of quasi-remembered standards, the competing stories telescoped into one fractured narrative, the unabashed humor, the taint of Biblical judgment and overhanging doom. Your days are numbered and so are mine. The loss within these songs is overwhelming, every turn of a corner revealing another ghost, yet despair never overtakes them — or the singer. The man plays on, crouched behind his keyboard, barreling through one song after another, untwisting each one in new and unexpected directions. The playing has taken on a new meaning, here in the waning minutes of night: the act of performing itself, the perseverance to faithfully deliver these words and these melodies is an ennobling one. The perseverance and devotion are the antidotes to despair. As the set at last winds down — I feel a change comin’ on, and the last part of the day is already gone — the man finally brings his gaze from some indeterminate point in space to rest on the faces turned to him. “Thank you.” And out of nowhere a grin, wicked and impish. And then he’s gone, the final chord still ringing in the air.

The sun has returned to the solitary window overlooking the floor, revealing seats that are nearly full again, with both new listeners and those who have sat here stubbornly for what must feel like ages, accepting the mediocre and the execrable as the occasional, and inevitable, price of the sublime. The stage light once again dims. All that remains is the audience, restive yet still miraculously willing to keep their place as they watch the empty stage for whatever is going to happen next.

… to extricate Bob from the treacly, reductive, crushing embrace of the Bobolators. (My name for those writers and cultists who still make Dylan into a plaster saint, incapable of imperfection, the way Shakespeare’s indiscriminate “bardolators”—one of my targets in The Shakespeare Wars—refuse to believe it possible The Bard ever wrote a flawed line or a poorly chosen word.)

Similarly, the Bobolators diminish The Bob’s genuine achievements by putting everything he’s done on the same transcendentally elevated plane. With their embarrassing obeisance, their demand for reverence, their indiscriminate flattery, they obscure the electrifying musical—and cultural—impact he’s actually had.

Perhaps I should begin by confessing that Rosenbaum is a writer who I find grating even when I agree with him. Take the example above. First there is that term “Bobolator.” On first glance, it is easily misread as “Bobulator,” like a human calculator of all things Dylanesque. Once you’ve arrived at the correct spelling, how to pronounce it? The most natural and immediate pronunciation is BOB-oh-later, which sounds like an overpriced fishing gadget; or, if you’re a gorilla buff, BO-bo-later. Reading the rest of the paragraph, we find the reference to “bardolators” — presumably a coinage of Rosenbaum’s, and which leads us to conclude that “Bobolator” is a pun on “idolator” and thus pronounced bahb-AH-lah-ter. Except that doesn’t flow off the tongue quite so trippingly, and I for one am apt to simply read it as BOB-oh-later, despite ostensibly knowing better.

And this is just the first paragraph. Leaving aside for the moment the straw man argument Rosenbaum sets up here, was there not an easier way into this subject than by means of a labored coinage that reads strangely and has the surely-not-coincidental effect of reinforcing its creator’s cutting wit and contrariness? People who invent pet names for other people and things always get my hackles up; usually they want you to ask them what they mean, the better to show off their cleverness and originality. I once knew a woman who, in the midst of a conversation on theater, kept referring to Kenneth Branagh as Roman. I put the name in italics because that is how she pronounced it — if you’ve ever heard someone talk like that, you know what I mean. It’s a distinct inflection whose unmistakable subtext is, Do you not wonder why I use this word, when the rest of you are all using a different, more common word? Does it not make me an object of even greater fascination? Usually I refuse to indulge masturbatory crap like that; on this occasion I gave in, and found out that Roman was the name of Branagh’s character in Dead Again, which at the time (1993) I had not seen. Why she insisted on using that name, rather than Mike (his other role in that film), or even Henry the Fifth, she did not explain. It didn’t matter — the only point was to make people notice her. She might just as easily have called him Orson.

See, this is how it is with Rosenbaum for me. Points that I might find perfectly unobjectionable are wrapped up in excess verbiage, intellectually overwrought and/or propped up with attacks on straw man caricatures, so I’m too busy picking nits to fully get behind his arguments. For example, is there a more deserving object of attack in pop music than Billy Joel? So why then does Rosenbaum’s take-down of the man seem to whiff it so much? I mean, sarcastically making fun of Joel for attempting to be “deep”? Every hack entertainer does that; that’s what makes them hack entertainers. (To be fair, his identification of “It’s Still Rock ‘n Roll to Me” as the epitome of Joelian dreck is dead-on.) I wanted to love this essay; I wanted to paper my office walls with it. As it is, too much of it amounts to a child blowing raspberries. I’m sure it felt better to write it than it does to read it.

Back to Dylan. In trying to establish the unbearable sycophancy of Dylan’s greatest admirers, Rosenbaum focuses predominantly on the recent dust-up over Bob’s recent concert in China. In the wake of Maureen Dowd’s shrill attack on Dylan for supposedly kowtowing to the Chinese authorities, the Bob-o-laters rose as one to defend their Bard’s unassailable reputation. Rosenbaum takes us through each line of argument, a web of shifting rationalizations bereft of intellectual honesty, their sole purpose being to defend, explain and excuse Bob Dylan from all dissent.

Funny thing about that, though — except for one link from the “historian in residence” on bobdylan.com (and come on, what kind of argument do you expect from a guy who’s practically on Dylan’s payroll?), not one citation is offered that illustrates these casuists in action. How hard could that have been, if these people argue in such numbers as Rosenbaum suggests? Surely the interwebs are crawling with Bobulators, ready to pounce on the slightest sign of irreverence toward their living deity? Or maybe Rosenbaum has trawled the comment boards for these stories and extrapolated the whole thing out of a few isolated incidents? Maybe most Dylan fans — even most dedicated Dylan fans — don’t really care one way or the other?

When not knocking down straw men, Rosenbaum is dismissing the terms of the debate altogether. The real issue, he says, is “not what he sang but whether he should be singing at the sufferance of torturers at all.” Along the way, we get this “argument”:

Would it be OK with him [the resident historian of bobdylan.com] if, back in the day, Generalissimo Augusto Pinochet of Chile wanted to hear the soothing strains of “Lay Lady Lay” over the screams of his prisoners? Or how about today, Assad in Damascus must have some time off from piling up his dead citizens to enjoy a little live (non-protest) music. They just do these things out of sight in the People’s Republic.

This is not technically a straw man argument, as those things were done in those places by those people, but its appeal to outrage seems more intended to shut down debate than to invite it. Really, if Rosenbaum thinks Dylan’s decision to perform at all is “the real issue,” why not engage with it? There is an ethical case to be made that performing in repressive regimes like China is beneficial: that any exposure to outside points of view is worthwhile, that maintaining cultural ties to the outside world ultimately strengthens independent thought and expression. And does the regime really suffer if Dylan chooses not to play there? Does that suffering outweigh the considerations of Dylan’s Chinese fans, who likely never imagined they’d be able to see him perform in person? There is, to be sure, an equally strong case to be made on the other side, but Rosenbaum doesn’t bother to make it — to him the matter is beyond debate, and Dylan admirers who don’t see his point of view just demonstrate their craven sycophancy.

I think “the real issue” is not whether Dylan should have played in China, at the sufferance of torturers or of anyone else. The real issue is: how long will we continue to judge this man as though he were some kind of lodestar of political liberation, whose deeds and pronouncements ought to be looked to for coherent moral guidance? Dylan has appeared in lingerie ads, accepted the French Order of Arts and Letters medal, licensed “The Times They Are a-Changin’” to a bank — for god’s sake, the man made a fucking Christmas album. The kid singing “Only a Pawn in Their Game” on the Capitol steps is gone — he is gone. He was barely around to begin with. A couple of years, three or four at the most. Hardly anyone remembers John Lennon repudiating his peace-and-love ethics for an early-70s stab at radical left-wing agitprop, yet Dylan can’t escape the shadow of songs he wrote almost 50 years ago. Enough already. He’s just a little old guy with a cowboy hat and a weird mustache, roaming around the world giving concerts. Leave it at that.

I bought this iPod, my third, shortly after the “classic” designation was first introduced. I was thrilled: this was the first iPod large enough to hold the entirety of my music collection, freeing me from the burden of curating playlists and trying to second-guess what my tastes would be on a given day. (I have largely re-assumed this burden with my 32 GB iPhone, but that is another matter.) It did not trouble me at the time that, merely by calling its former flagship product a “classic,” Apple was signaling that the iPod’s glory days as a music device were behind it. A classic is something beyond the need for evolution or change, something that provides the same pleasures over and over, something — if I may get momentarily pretentious — more associated with memories than hopes.

So, back to my ailing iPod classic. I had some extra money and, what’s more, an impeccable justification for replacing my current model. Except I dragged my feet. I looked at the refurbished models on the Apple website and noted with approval that I could save quite a bit of money buying used. Gradually it dawned on me that I didn’t want to buy a new iPod. Not because of sentimental attachment to the current one — though I love Apple technology, the devices themselves are completely fungible to me, and I have no hesitation in dumping my current object of affection for something new and improved. The problem is that the current iPod classic really isn’t improved from the model I bought in 2008. Today’s classic supports Genius playlists and … I’m not really sure what else. There is certainly no difference of any substance. I can’t think of another Apple product so little improved over so long a time. But then, why improve a “classic”?

I see the logic. Apple is about iOS devices: the iPad, the iPhone and its bastard offspring, the iPod touch. The iOS platform is Apple’s chance to directly influence the evolution of an entire new computing paradigm, in a way they didn’t quite do with the Macintosh. They’d be crazy not to put all of their eggs in that basket. And let’s face it: mp3 players are so five years ago.

Let that sink in for a moment. In 2004, the iPod was so wondrous and improbable that Newsweek put a shot of an iPod-bedecked Steve Jobs on its cover. The implications of a device that allowed listeners to carry their entire music collections (or at least listeners without 25,000-song libraries) on their person at all times had still barely begun to percolate. Pundits debated the ethics of walking around in a constant, private aural fog; newspapers told lurid stories of people mugged, and in one ghastly instance murdered, for their iPods; and some folks seriously believed the iPod’s shuffle function was secretly rigged to play the same songs over and over, proving definitively that most people don’t really understand what “random” means. The Walkman changed the way people listened to music; the iPod, by allowing people access to essentially everything they might want at any given time, changed how they thought about music, and how it could more meaningfully accompany your life.

And then all of a sudden, a few scant years later, none of that was really a big deal anymore. For one thing, people bought iPods so rapidly and in such quantities that they quickly became ubiquitous. During the 2003 Christmas holiday, Apple was pleased to sell three quarters of a million iPods; four years later, that figure had grown to more than 22 million. Today they move at a rate of about nine million a quarter — still pretty good for a product category now regarded as a technological afterthought. Which brings us to the second reason why the iPod lost its luster: in January 2007, Apple revealed the iPhone. The iPod had been a curiosity when it made its 2001 debut (“It costs how much? It only works with Macs?”); the iPhone was recognized from day one as a game-changer, and everything else looked dull by comparison to it. Especially mp3 players. “You mean it only plays music?”

Once the iPhone came to market, it quickly grew into Apple’s flagship product, pulling the bulk of Apple’s resources in its wake. The iPod’s signature dancing silhouettes disappeared from TV, replaced by simple, point-and-tap demonstrations of the iPhone’s incredible capabilities. The iPod, which had already settled into a comfortable pre-Christmas upgrade cycle, became something like a relative who appears at rare but predictable intervals at family functions, always with some new affectation to gossip about, like a blonde dye-job or a conspicuously young new girlfriend. A peculiar randomness came to dominate the iPod nano, the flagship of the iPod line. The year the iPhone debuted, the nano was remade into something like a miniature console TV, the better, it was thought, to allow people to watch iTunes video content on it. A year later, that design was scrapped entirely in favor of a return to the previous slender, vertical design; no one at Apple now seemed to mind if you had to turn it on its side to watch video on it. A placeholder update the following year added a shiny aluminum finish and new colors, while the most recent iteration seemed to test the definition of the word “update”: an almost perversely small device with no on-board controls, no video camera (added several generations prior) and a clip borrowed from the iPod shuffle. It is hard to discern a vision behind these lurches from one form factor to another. I wrote a few years ago that Apple should simply ditch the nano and start over with a new, re-conceived mass-market iPod, and this last iteration in particular confirms for me that I was right.

A Note on the iPod Touch

You will have noticed I am not including the iPod touch in the bloviating above. That is because I am considering devices whose primary purpose is to store and play music. Being simply an iPhone with the telephony hardware removed and a little extra storage in its place, the iPod touch is not a dedicated music player, more of a handheld, general-purpose computer. (Apple distinguishes it in the market by positioning it as a gaming device.) What makes something a dedicated music player? In my view, you need two things:

1. A display large enough to show many album tracks in a single view
2. Hardware controls that allow you to operate the unit without looking at it or with the display asleep

This already disqualifies every non-classic iPod Apple makes. (Apple tries to satisfy the second requirement by bundling headphones built with simple click-remotes to enable users to pause, play and skip. Needless to say, this is not what I’m looking for. Apple’s pack-in buds are uncomfortable and don’t sound very good, meaning that I never use them. Besides, unless you’re jogging, which I never do, it’s easier and more natural to simply click a button on the player itself than to thread the cord with your fingers looking for the button. I’m not even going to dignify Voice Over. A talking mp3 player is something Bill Gates would think up.)

I would add to the above a third requirement:

3. Enough storage to fit a library of tens of thousands of songs.

So the iPod classic is the only Apple mp3 player that suits my need as a more-dedicated-than-average music listener. But I am reluctant to reinvest in a device that has evolved so little in the years since it was released. Assuming Apple were inclined to invest the time and resources to make the iPod fresh and exciting again, what would a new iPod classic look like?

Well, before we even get to that, that name has to go.

Introducing the iPod Macro

As we discussed above, a “classic” is something that no longer evolves, something whose primary appeal is nostalgic. That should end. There is room for the iPod to advance, and its name should reflect that. I propose the iPod macro as the music device I want Apple to sell to me. The name communicates its primary appeal: this is for people with a lot of music, and it’s designed from start to finish with their needs in mind.

How could the iPod macro be designed for hardcore music lovers? The basic form factor would carry over from the touch: for navigating long libraries of songs, touch-scrolling beats the click wheel any day of the week. It would have two volume buttons on the left edge, just like the touch does. It would have an additional rocker switch on the right: a play/pause control in the center and forward and back buttons on either side. (I am sparing you my primitive Photoshop skills here. You’re welcome.) And leave the headphone jack on the bottom — it’s one of the best design decisions Apple ever made with the iPod line.

So is making a worthwhile new iPod simply a matter of putting another set of buttons on the side? Not quite, though I wouldn’t say no to it. There are other capabilities Apple should build into an iPod macro, such as:

• A SoundHound/Shazam-like audio recognition service, built into the OS and tied into iTunes
• The ability to make smart playlists directly on the device
• Intelligent shuffle options, similar to what you find in the Groove app. You can rather inelegantly replicate this functionality with smart playlists, but it’s much more simple and Apple-like to simply be able to tap something like, “Play three songs each by my favorite artists” or “Play five-star songs I haven’t heard in the last month.”
• A refined album track display that lets me see song ratings along with song titles. Seriously, doesn’t this bother anyone else?
• Advanced search functionality — basically like the current search but with more granularity for searching by year, title, etc.
• Local music sharing. Not the “squirting” that the Zune was originally supposed to do — christ, I threw up in my mouth a little just writing that clause — but a simple Bluetooth bridge for sending an iPod-toting friend nearby an iTunes link to a song from your library.
• And the biggie: storage. I’m thinking this sucker would debut in two capacities, 160 and 250 GB. I really don’t care if it’s flash-based storage or not. I just want the room.

Would this iPod macro, you ask, have the same capabilities as the iPod touch? On the one hand, there is no reason it couldn’t; on the other, releasing two so similar products might be confusing to the marketplace. Would I buy a touchscreen iPod that was artificially blocked from installing apps? Probably — after all, it’s not like my current iPod can run apps — but I am likely in the minority here. Instead, I am thinking that an iPod macro really wouldn’t be as confusing as all that. If Apple can help people choose between otherwise-identical WiFi and 3G-enabled iPads, I think that few people would buy iPod macros who didn’t really, really want the extra storage and the convenience of the on-board controls; the storage premium alone would ensure that only hardcore music listeners would spring for them.

So this, more than an iPad 3 or an iPhone 5, is my current dream product from Apple. If there is little likelihood Apple would actually build it, there is even less that a competitor would; other music player vendors seem to have got the message that innovation is now for smart phones. As it happens, my current classic somehow recovered from its bought of battery flu and is behaving reliably again. I’m grateful. Until something genuinely exciting and new comes my way, from Apple or anywhere else, I’m in no hurry to buy my next mp3 player.