I loved it, when I was permitted to have it. My parents were responsible enough not to permit me to feed my soda monkey at will. I could not drink it at dinner, unless the meal was pizza; my mandated beverage at meal times was milk. I could get away with it in the evening, or with an afternoon snack. Gradually, as I came within sight of adulthood, I drank milk less and less, and Pepsi more and more. I went away to college, where no one was around to tell me what I should be drinking with dinner, or lunch, or in between meals.

I have easily drank 10,000 Pepsis in my life; the real number could be half again as high. I drank it out of cans, glass bottles and, when neither of those were available, plastic bottles, and could taste the difference in each container. I figured out just how much ice to put in a glass to chill the liquid without diluting it too much; if it got flat, I threw it away. If I were looking for a place to grab lunch and had no particular taste for anything, I would pick a franchise that served Pepsi over one that didn’t. I didn’t drink it at breakfast, but I drank it pretty much any other time, with every food short of chocolate cake.

And now, to quote Henry Hill, it’s all over. I have been diagnosed with seriously high blood sugar and a severe (and surely not coincidental) sensitivity to cane and corn sugar. I drank my last Pepsi this past Tuesday, May 8, at lunch.

It’s not that I ever had any illusions that Pepsi, or any soda, was good for me. One reason why I refused to drink soda that had gone flat was because I knew there was no sense in drinking something so unhealthy if you didn’t even enjoy how it tasted. I knew that the steadily growing spare tire around my midriff was at least partially the result of my Pepsi habit. I knew I was so dependent on the daily caffeine jolt that kicking it would be murder. And I rationalized that it wasn’t as though I were a man of many vices: I don’t smoke, I don’t drink coffee, I rarely drink alcohol; I don’t gamble or use hard drugs. So if my worst habit was drinking a lot of soda pop, was it such a big deal?

Turns out it kind of was. It turns out I had no idea how bad this stuff was making me feel until I stopped drinking it.

See, I thought it was normal to feel run down most of the time, and to hit that post-lunch period and want to lay your head down at your desk and sleep the afternoon away. Doesn’t everyone feel that way? Isn’t that why they sell those five-hour energy shots and all the other products designed to save us from our own fatigue? Maybe everyone does feel that way, but if they do, they don’t have to. Within a day of quitting Pepsi, I noticed something odd and wonderful: I no longer got tired. I no longer felt bloated with ounces and ounces of carbonation struggling to escape. I felt normal, give or take.

It hasn’t been all sunshine. About two or three days after quitting, the caffeine withdrawal symptoms hit. I drove home last Friday all but holding my eyelids apart to keep from dozing off on the road. I am, as I type this, trying to ignore a spiteful, stinging headache. I don’t drink coffee, but I know there are other ways to get caffeine if I want it. Screw it, though. As long as I’m starving the monkey, I might as well go all the way.

There’s much more I found out about myself from this allergy specialist, and possibly one day soon I’ll write an encomium for cheese, or popcorn, or some other food I’m newly forbidden to have. (In addition to cane sugar, dairy and corn are out as well.) But for now, I’m celebrating the slaying of my biggest vice. It’s been more than a week as I write this, and I have not been seriously tempted to backslide; in fact there’s most of a twelve-pack of Pepsi Throwback still sitting in my fridge, waiting to be donated to someone who wants it. If I drank it, all it would do is make me sick again. I might say I wish I had done this much sooner, but that’s the simplicity of hindsight. The truth is I’m just glad I’m finally doing it now.

Many diehard music listeners today continue to curate a substantial collection of vinyl LPs, or else went back to vinyl after it began to resurge a few years ago. Not me. I am firmly of the digital age — in fact, the primary reason I became so finicky and exacting about my music was the sense of empowerment digital music grants you. It’s not that I can carry nearly my entire collection in a device the size of my wallet; I’m so used to that I expect nothing less. It’s that all this wonderful stuff is lying supine and exposed in iTunes, where I can manipulate it at will. A vinyl record is fixed, a physical artifact; a digital song is an assemblage of bits, malleable and subject to whim. Most people who buy songs from iTunes or Amazon probably don’t even stop to consider the awesome power literally at their fingertips. You can name anything anything you want, sequence it in any way you want. You can put Sergeant Pepper in its original running order, so that side 1 ends with “She’s Leaving Home,” or reconstruct Infidels to include “Blind Willie McTell” instead of “Neighborhood Bully.” Whether you’re the type to take such liberties or not, programs like iTunes allow you to get your music right — to tend it with as much care and respect for detail as you like. As I suggested above, how far you take this practice depends on, and reveals a lot about, who you are. To illustrate, let me show you a few of my common MP3 hoarding practices.

1. Always set Sort Artist to “Lastname, Firstname”It amazes me that more people don’t do this. Well, actually it doesn’t amaze me because it’s kind of a pain in the ass to alter nearly every single thing that goes in your music library. I guess what amazes me is that not doing it doesn’t bug everyone else as much as it bugs me. Johnny Cash should not appear under J, he should appear under C. That’s so fundamental that to flout it feels like spitting in the face of logic itself.

2. Add cover art to my imported tracks

This is pretty obvious, and a lot of people probably do this. I believe iTunes will even do it for you, though I would never entrust iTunes with so exacting a task. But here’s something not everybody does:

3. Add separate cover art to mono and stereo releases

Well, because they’re different, goddamn it.

4. Add individual years to every track in a multi-year compilation

To be honest, I’ve only done this with a few such compilations in my library so far, because as pains in the asses go, this one is on a par with re-grouting your bathroom, which I have never done and which sounds only slightly less bothersome than simply replacing the entire bathroom. Even if I know the artist’s work pretty well already, I usually don’t know it enough to reel off the year each song was released with perfect accuracy, necessitating many, many visits to Wikipedia to fill these little tags in. What makes it worthwhile? The fact that I can generate a smart playlist of songs from a given year and know with certainty that each of those songs came out in that year, regardless of when some record company decided to slap them together and reissue them for a quick buck. Don’t you wish you were me right now?

5. Maintain consistent spellings of artists’ names

Anyone with even a few, er, alternatively acquired music tracks understands that people who share music files don’t spell any better than anyone else who uses the Internet. Fixing them sounds like a no-brainer, but I’m constantly surprised when I look at friends’ iPods and see that in addition to, say, the Rolling Stones, they’ll have tracks by Rolling Stones (no definite article), Roling Stones, Rolling Stone, Stones, or the subtle but ever-popular “Rolling Stones ,” wherein an unobtrusive extra space at the end registers in iTunes’ primitive cerebrum as a distinct artist. This kind of stuff can make an iPod damn near unusable to my mind. How do people stand it?

6. Distinguish between albums by Paul McCartney, Wings, and Paul McCartney and Wings.

Goddamn it, they’re different.

(At this point, our hypothetical FBI profiler is jotting in his notebook: Low anxiety threshold. Feelings of lack of control, helplessness.)

Now, lest you think I’ve gone completely off the cliff, there are some organizational behaviors that are too nit-picky and anal retentive even for me. These include:

1. Filing Ram under “Paul and Linda McCartney”

The only reason Macca gave his wife label credit on this one is that he was being sued by Allen Klein and his assets were frozen; giving Linda half the album was the only way to bring any money into the McCartney household. As fun and quirky a bit of trivia as this is, I don’t see the need to enshrine it in my album collection. (Side note: at the last Paul McCartney concert I attended, he dedicated “Too Many People,” the lead track from this album, “to all the Wings fans.” Does McCartney really not remember, or care, which of his albums were Wings and which weren’t?)

2. Filling in the Composer tag

This is no less geeky a thing as a lot of other things I actually do, but I’ve just never gone here. Maybe one day I’ll think to myself, “I wish I could make a smart playlist of all the Holland-Dozier-Holland songs that begin with a hard consonant.” Until that day, this field can stay blank.

3. Filing Elvis Costello’s King of America under “The Costello Show”

What am I, crazy?

4. Filling in the Beats per Minute tag

I guess this is a big thing for people who exercise. I wouldn’t know anything about that. I think I might get around to something like this if the day somehow became four or five hours longer.

So there you have it. Don’t be afraid to stick your head down the music-nerd rabbit hole for a while. Take control of your music. Sort it, catalog it, clean it up and fiddle with it. Just remember: Band on the Run is by “Paul McCartney & Wings.” That’s very important. Don’t ask me why — it just is.

So I was talking to my boss the other day and I was like, “Does anyone know what they’re doing on this project?” And he was like, “I wish.”

Now, what did I just say there?

People have been lamenting the decline of the verb to say for a surprisingly long time — at least as long as I’ve been around, which is enough. When I was growing up, the culprit was goes:

“So he goes, ‘What are you doing this weekend,’ and I go, ‘Going to a stupid family reunion’.”

I never liked goes very much. As a writerly type, I always felt an obligation to speak properly, whatever that meant, and to not give in to imprecision, trends, laziness or other bad linguistic habits. (That doesn’t mean I correct other people when they do it, but that’s for another post.) In college I took some linguistics courses — well, all of two, but it didn’t take much to change the way I think about language. The thing that struck me most was the distinction linguists make between being descriptive and prescriptive. As far as I had always known, as far as I had ever been taught, the only relevant issues concerning writing, speaking and language related to what you should do. Don’t end a sentence with a preposition. (Actually, it’s OK to do that.) Avoid double negatives. Make positive statements rather than negative ones (“I forgot” versus “I didn’t remember”). It hadn’t really occurred to me that it was possible to take a different stance: that of the impartial observer, dissecting the ways in which people bend and shape the language to suit their needs, just as they’ve been doing ever since they started talking.

That’s the other thing that a few linguistics courses will do for you (well, that and some Old English courses): give you an appreciation for how old this language of ours is, how many competing influences it has absorbed and how its speakers have worried about and denounced what their fellow speakers have been doing to it since long before people started replacing said with like. I’m not suggesting that because linguistic standards are always in flux that there’s no reason to enforce them; I’m no anarchist. On the other hand, it’s difficult to get too worked up over a process that is not only inevitable but healthy: without people using English however they damn well pleased, we wouldn’t have the rich, endlessly adaptable tongue that has become the closest thing on the planet right now to a universal language. It’s a good thing that English is changing right under your feet, because that means it’s still alive, and it’s not going to wait for you to get on board as it grows and evolves.

If you start noticing a widespread trend, it usually indicates some aspect of the language that had become inadequate and needed shoring up. Here’s a simple example: the phrase “beg the question” refers to a logical fallacy in which the speaker assumes his own conclusion or uses a restatement of his conclusion as evidence. “We’ve always done it this way because that is our established procedure” is begging the question. Chances are good that you use it differently. “He went out every night this week without calling her, which begs the question of who he was out with.” It doesn’t beg the question — it prompts the question, or suggests the question or leads to the question. But those phrases lack a certain oomph, and “begs the question” was there, minted and ready to be picked up and adopted by those who needed it. To say that they’re using it incorrectly at this point is futile. If a great many people use a word or phrase in a way that makes sense and is mutually intelligible, how can it be wrong?

Which brings us back to like. Linguistically I’m still too much a of a tight-ass to use like very much. But I like like. I like it because to me it can fill a very specific function. Let’s consider two examples:

My boss told me he wasn’t happy with my work, and I was like, “The feeling’s mutual.”

My boss told me he wasn’t happy with my work, and I said, “The feeling’s mutual.”

You can see the distinction right away. To say that you were “like” something means “my initial reaction to this was.” To say that you said it means, obviously, that you spoke it aloud. Like encapsulates a spontaneous emotion or a thought that isn’t quite articulated — possibly the most memorable moment of an interaction. The word is also something of a double-edged sword, because you can be “like” something you never spoke aloud. To elaborate on our example above:

My boss told me he wasn’t happy with my work, and I was like, “The feeling’s mutual,” but I just told him I’d try to do better.

Most people would find that a perfectly comprehensible sentence: you thought one thing, but spoke another.

My preferred way of using like, when I do, is a bit different. Convinced as I often am that I’m being boring, I tend to be concise when I talk, and if I’m reporting a conversation I usually try to impart the essence of it without getting into the nitty-gritty details, which in all likelihood I don’t remember anyway. So I might say something like this:

Bob came over to me and was like, “You agreed to pay me fifty bucks,” and I was like, “No I didn’t; I told you I can’t afford to pay you that.”

This conversation was probably longer, involving several supplementary exchanges as well as some profanity, which I might be eliding in deference to the sensibilities of my audience. By attributing the utterances with like, I am (at least in my own mind) saying, “This is the essence of what was said, but you should not quote me verbatim or think this sums up the entire exchange.” I do this because I am enough of a linguistic tight-ass (see above) that when I use the word said, I take it literally: if I don’t relate as precisely as possible the words that someone used, then it means I’m sort of lying. “OK, so first you said Bob called you a ‘festering wad of day-old horse offal,’ and now you’re saying he actually called you a ‘steaming pile of day-old horse offal’. Can you let me know when you get your story straight?”

Obviously not many people share my little tics when it comes to like and said. But it’s worth the effort to come to some sort of accommodation with this. Like may go away; people don’t say goes as much as they used to, and it’s possible that said will make a comeback. It’s even more likely that some new euphemism will take its place. What about straight-up to be? That one’s happening already: “So then she’s all, ‘Get out of my face!’” Whatever it proves to be, we have evidently decided as a culture that to say doesn’t get the job done. I’m pretty confident this clever language of ours will adapt to help us out.

The giant birds’ nest was created “as a prototype for new and inspiring socializing space, which can be seen as a morph of furniture and playground … Ready to to be used, to be played in, and be worked in.” I think it’s a marvelous idea, and one I am certain to have in my house, once I win the lottery and begin establishing my network of seasonal homes across the globe. But a work space? The thought of clambering into this thing with my colleagues to discuss our latest projects gives me the heebies. It would feel way too much like climbing into bed and I really want to stop thinking about it. Besides, I sometimes have a terrible time staying awake in meetings, and nestling into this, well, nest would be like mainlining an Ambien drip straight into my cerebellum, or whatever part of the brain gives me that happy tired feeling at the end of the day.

So I won’t be pushing to have the giant birds’ nest installed in our office anytime soon. But it did remind me of an idea I had a long time ago that I can’t seem to let go of. It concerns hamsters.

Hamsters, you may have observed, tend to live in little plastic or wire enclosures with everything they need: food, water bottle, exercise wheel, toilet paper tube (not sure what that’s about, I think they like to climb in it, and besides, it’s not like you don’t have a million of them lying around) and, on the floor, some kind of bedding or nesting material, usually wood shavings. I bet that the simplicity of the hamster existence — eat, drink, run around a bit, sleep and pee and crap in the shavings — can exert a primal, healing influence on stressed-out humans. My idea then was to adapt the hamster habitat into a unique retreat: the hamster hotel.

The hamster hotel room is large, about 500 square feet. It has no furniture. It has a ceiling-mounted flatscreen TV, which you watch while lying on your back. A slot in the wall dispenses your food and drink on demand, whatever you want whenever you want. There is no fancy table service. There is, for a modest upgrade charge and if you really feel you need it, a piece of exercise equipment such as a treadmill or stationary bike. You can have a giant cardboard roll if you want; it might be fun to climb in it. There are no toilets, no baths or showers. The temperature is a steady 85 degrees. And you’re naked. Did I forget to mention that? No clothes allowed in the hamster hotel. But you know what you do have?

Shavings. Atop the industrial-grade rubber floor is a comforting, aromatic bed of wood shavings a foot and a half thick. You can lie on it. Roll around on it. Burrow into it. Make shavings angels in it. Throw great handfuls of it into the air and watch it flutter back down. Turn onto your side and spin Curly-style. And when you’re done, breathe a contented sigh and lie back in the shavings … the soft, feathery embrace of the shavings.

Wait a minute, you’re saying — what about my bed? And I ask, do I have to draw you a diagram? You are living the hamster life. Do what hamsters do: build up a nice mound of shavings and nestle into it. The temperature is high enough to lull you into a state of warm, animal-like contentment. Have you ever stepped into a bath so perfectly aligned with your body temperature that you almost can’t feel the water at all? That is what it’s like to snuggle naked into the shavings for a night’s sleep. And if for some reason you feel the primal fear of being preyed upon or feel especially vulnerable sleeping nude, you can always crawl into the giant cardboard tube for a nap away from threatening eyes.

You noticed above that there is no toilet in the room. Well, you don’t see hamsters futzing around with toilets, do you? Just pick a corner and do whatever you need to do right on the spot, kicking over some fresh shavings to cover it. Our premium-quality shavings naturally absorb odor and moisture. Or better yet, just lie there, staring up at your big-screen ceiling TV, and let it come. That’s right. When you’re done, roll over to a new spot or stay there and let it dry. Seriously, you have no idea how liberating this is — it’s enough to make you question the entire premise of civilization itself.

Most clients find a single day’s accommodation at the Hamster Hotel sufficient, and they return to their lives with a renewed vigor and sense of purpose. A few hardy or needful souls stay for days, even weeks, gradually shedding the burdens of their humanity and embracing the hamster within. We like to think of it as “going native,” the act of leaving behind such confining constructs as career, parenthood, family, even speech and bipedal locomotion. Can living in a pile of wood refuse, nude and crawling and rooting like an animal really be worth those things? Wouldn’t you love to find out?

Well, sometimes the marketer in me takes over and I get a little carried away. This is my vision, such as it is. Perhaps it can come true once I’ve won the lottery, after I’m set up with a few giant birds’ nests.

Faith, defined a little too simply, is a belief one holds without evidence. Perhaps that definition sounds somewhat derogatory or appears to contain an implied rebuke. But people of all stripes have beliefs they cling to for no intellectually defensible reason, whether they be common superstitions (“Crime is more prevalent during the full moon” — it isn’t), personal idiosyncrasies (“Something good always happens to me when I wear my lucky sweater”) and even moral or philosophical precepts (“If I make a point of being trusting and kind, others will be encouraged to follow my example”). Most beliefs of this sort are quite harmless, a few are beneficial and the rest are a small price to pay for the freedom to be occasionally irrational. I think it would be a terribly dull world if everyone had a solid empirical basis for everything they did. Besides, I’d probably have to stop buying lottery tickets, and I like having something to fuel my daydreams.

The snag is that a belief held without evidence is also extremely resistant to change. Christopher Hitchens once said that anything that is claimed without evidence can be dismissed without evidence. That’s an intellectually justifiable position, but not a very satisfying one, at least not if you find yourself wrangling with someone whose judgement you otherwise respect about an issue you can’t agree on. Faith beliefs are felt in the gut; they accord with our sense of how the world operates and are the result of influences we are mostly unaware of, from our parents and families to the media messages we’re exposed to every day. Though I defend recreational irrationality, I don’t hold it as justification for never changing your mind. Resistance to evidence is usually rooted in fear: fear of admitting you may be wrong and feeling stupid, fear of having your worldview attacked, fear of having to start at square one in determining just what it is you believe. This kind of fear is unhealthy and ought to be stood up to, at least once in a while. So occasionally I undertake the mental exercise of determining what it would take to change my mind on an issue I care deeply about. Today’s issue: religion.

I am an atheist, and I am an atheist of a particular stripe: I do not believe in a god or gods. That is not the same as saying “there is no god.” The latter is a statement about the nature of reality, the former about one’s own knowledge and the limits thereof; another way of saying it might be “I have seen no evidence of a god.” This distinction is sometimes called “soft atheism” versus “hard atheism” (neither of which are to be confused with agnosticism, an oft-misused word that describes the belief that true knowledge of god’s existence or non-existence is unknowable by human standards). In practical terms, there is not much daylight between the two positions, and holders of either belief/nonbelief would be indistinguishable in how they lived their lives. The only difference is that one has come to a conclusion and the other hasn’t. In the spirit of jiggling a knife into that small chink in the armor of certainty, and in keeping with Carl Sagan’s dictum that “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence,” here are the conditions I would require to renounce my atheism and adopt a belief in god.

1. I would require access to a secure room, shielded against any outside transmissions or energy sources. All illumination and video equipment (see below) would be portable and powered by batteries. The room would have no windows and one door to which I would possess the key.

2. Inside this room should be a table and three chairs, along with a tripod-mounted portable HD video recorder, thermographic sensor and a copy of Snooki’s beach read A Shore Thing. All items would have been purchased by me personally and kept in my possession until the experiment begins. The first chair is for me.

3. Joining me in this room would be an impartial observer of a non-Judeo-Christian faith, a person previously unknown to me whose mental health has been certified by an independent expert. (I am approaching this experiment from the point of view of a Christian because that is the faith I was raised in. It is a simple enough matter to imagine the process conducted from a differing point of view.) This man or woman would take the second chair.

4. I would then lock the door, commence recording and take my seat. The video camera would be set up to take a wide shot of the entire table and anyone sitting at it.

5. At some point following step 4, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah whose coming was foretold in the Old Testament and reaffirmed in the New, must appear before me as he did in life (i.e., looking like a first-century Jew, not a pale-skinned hippie). When I say “appear,” I mean he must fully manifest himself as a corporeal being with weight and volume, capable of being perceived by all five human senses.  (I’m guessing a guy from the first century would not smell like a guy from the 21st.) I would employ the thermograph to make sure Jesus gave off an appropriate heat signature. His physical reality thus confirmed, Jesus and I would exchange pleasantries — I am assuming the language barrier represents no obstacle for the Son of Man, and would indeed be quite suspicious if he appeared in the flesh only to stare uncomprehendingly at me and babble in Aramaic — and he would take the third seat.

6. Jesus would then reveal three facts about myself that only I know. These would have to be of sufficient obscurity that they could not be discovered by any conventional means of research. It’s possible that Jesus and a team of investigators could find out, for example, that as a boy I was obsessed with the Sears Tower and once even had a small statue of it on my birthday cake. To demonstrate his divine nature, Jesus would have to reveal something on the order of, “You once had a nightmare in which you were exploring a construction site and a chimpanzee in a green Army shirt fired a laser pistol at you.” (That is true.) After three such revelations (that latter one no longer counts as it is now public), Jesus must then perform a small miracle: he must make the text disappear from the pages of A Shore Thing while leaving the book itself otherwise intact. As a final formality, I would ask Jesus to confirm that he is, in fact, the Son of God and that the stories of him in the New Testament are essentially true. These deeds accomplished, Jesus would then be free to depart by whatever manner suited him.

7. My impartial observer and I would then discuss what had just transpired while reviewing the video footage. If our recollections matched each other and were corroborated by the filmed record and if Jesus confirmed to me personally that he is the divine manifestation millions believe him to be, I would be forced to admit that my atheism was no longer justified and become (or, as it were, re-become) a Christian.

A religious reader — the laws of probability suggest I must have one or two — may find the above crass and bordering on offensive. “Why,” they might well ask, “should God go out of His way to prove Himself to a wiseass like you?” While it must require a truly cataclysmic circumstance to force a deity to “go out of his way,” I think it’s still a good question. I can’t think of a reason. If I had to have a god, I think I actually prefer one with better things to do than worry about whether someone somewhere doesn’t believe in him. But let me climb onto my anticlerical soapbox just long enough to say that this kind of exercise is never carried out the other way. That is, the devoutly religious, as far as I have ever observed, don’t bother pondering what it would take to break up, or at least shift, the bedrock of faith that has supported them their whole lives.

The reason, I suppose, is that nothing would. As we noted above, faith is largely impervious to facts and logic — otherwise it wouldn’t be faith so much as a passing fancy. We live in a world that has seen the Holocaust, the Rwandan genocide, the totalitarian regimes of Stalin and Pol Pot, and the recent, terrible natural disasters in Haiti and Myanmar. We all know perfectly kind and decent people who have suffered senseless tragedy, and others who never got a chance to enjoy the gifts that life offered them. So if you can wrap all that up into a belief that there is still a benevolent someone up there who loves you and is looking out for you, just what would it take for you to question that belief? And if you’re reluctant to confront the question, why?

As the chairman and CEO of BuyAbsolutelyAnything.com, I wanted to take a moment to personally apologize to you for the extreme inconvenience that resulted from a mistake in fulfilling your recent order.

I have conducted an extensive internal investigation into this matter, and could find no satisfactory reason why our fulfillment system substituted your original order of a case of Nev-R-Die D-Cell Flashlight Batteries 12-Count (KI139809) with a Live African Bull Elephant (WL897189). I further understand that the animal arrived dead in its shipping crate, and that it had actually been dead for some time, evidently long before it was dispatched from our warehouse. This was traced to fraudulence on behalf of our supplier and you may rest assured that our relationship with this supplier has been terminated and a strongly worded letter of opprobrium sent.

Of course, we realize it takes more than a strong letter to correct a situation of this magnitude. It is one thing to say that a dead elephant was delivered to one’s doorstep; it is quite another to have to deal with the consequences. I can only imagine the horror — I believe no other word will suffice — on opening the crate and being confronted with the carcass, a once-majestic beast surrounded in a blinding cloud of flies, its skin rippling with the movements of dozens of rats that had occupied the husk as though it were some ghastly putrefying mansion. I do not doubt that your children continue to have nightmares about it, nor that it raised a host of questions about life, death and the laws of nature that you had had no expectation of addressing for at least several more years. Furthermore, our customer service team “dropped the ball” in processing your return, and while the laws for transporting animal remains are admittedly obscure, that is no justification for our failing to retrieve the crate for eight days. I understand your homeowner’s association levied numerous fines against you and our legal department is currently reviewing your claims in this manner.

I further want to assure you that the anti-Semitic graffiti on the interior of the crate was in no way the doing of BuyAbsolutelyAnything.com and that we addressed this with the aforementioned supplier. Finally, please accept my apologies regarding the behavior of the delivery driver. We use this courier service on millions of deliveries a year and they are normally the picture of reliability. That your driver was intoxicated and repeatedly challenged your family to “step up and see if you can take” him is so far beyond the realm of what we typically experience from this firm that I am at a loss to explain it. Sometimes misfortunes come together in a “perfect storm” and that seems to be what happened in your case.

With that said, what is BuyAbsolutelyAnything.com going to do to rectify this situation? Here are the remedies I have personally instructed our Customer Service team to provide:

You want Nev-R-Die D-Cell Flashlight Batteries 12-Count (KI139809)? You’ve got them! I am shipping you a complimentary order of batteries this month, and the month after that, and the month after that. In fact, I will ship you an order of Nev-R-Die D-Cell Flashlight Batteries 12-Count (KI139809) free of charge every month for the rest of your life, and every month for the rest of your children’s lives and of their children’s lives as well. Your family will enter the 22nd century never having known the inconvenience of being without a fully charged flashlight, by which time a superior alternative to alkaline batteries should be well established.

Are you familiar with the German concept of schadenfreude? This word describes the pleasure one naturally feels at the misfortune of an enemy, and while we at BuyAbsolutelyAnything.com like to consider ourselves your friends, we understand why you might hold a different view. That’s why I’ve ordered a company-wide program of mortification and abasement, effective beginning today. I will spare you the details — the document I distributed this week runs to three single-spaced pages — but let me give you the 10,000-foot view.

First of all, you have likely already seen the apology blimp I dispatched to your residence; it will hover there for a full thirty days, cycling a series of “we’re sorry” messages on its illuminated sign. Every BuyAbsolutelyAnything.com employee was required to memorize and recite a litany of self-abuse that leaves each man and woman in no doubt about the severity of this transgression and his or her role in it. The Customer Service representative in charge of your case was terminated and her work space and computer ritually destroyed. The temperature in the BuyAbsolutelyAnything.com offices cycles without warning between sweltering and freezing; chairs and desks have been replaced with cheaper, ergonomically punishing office furniture reclaimed from a former Soviet military base; and employees are subject to random emotional and psychological assaults from a squad of hooded ex-CIA operatives given license to roam the building at will. Our IT department will be sending you a link to a private web portal featuring live feeds from our internal security cameras, allowing you to watch these efforts in action. This program will continue for a year and a day, at which point the executive team will evaluate its efficacy. During that time, rest easy knowing that the emotional trauma you suffered, that sense that the entire universe was arrayed against you, is now being visited a hundredfold on the architects of your misfortune.

Lastly, I may or may not have ordered further compensation that I am legally barred from discussing or even acknowledging. For instance, it is not impossible that the attractive courier sent to hand-deliver this letter is in fact a prostitute who is performing an expert, wildly creative act of fellatio upon you even as you read these words. It is even possible, though not legally provable, that she was instructed so far as to time your climax to occur just as you are reading the following paragraph:

Remember, at BuyAbsolutelyAnything.com, we do anything it takes to keep you satisfied. Absolutely Anything™.

Sincerely,

Marie Levy-Marston
CEO, BuyAbsolutelyAnything.com

Mastered for iTunes means these albums have been specially tuned for higher fidelity sound on your computer, stereo, and all Apple devices. Browse a range of music across all genres below, and keep checking back as we add more music that is mastered specifically for iTunes.

What this means is anyone’s guess, at least until people prod Apple for details and if Apple deigns to respond. Most likely they’re just compressing the tracks to make them sound louder and punchier. This would make them sound worse rather than better, especially on an iMac or a pair of pack-in iPod earbuds, but that does seem to be where modern tastes have landed us. I don’t suppose I will ever know, as I’m not going to re-buy any of my (relative few) iTunes purchases to compare old and new versions.

What caught my eye was the categories of music available in this new format. You have your Jazz, your Classical and whatnot. And then you have this:

Tastes come and go, but any format meant to appeal to serious audiophiles has to have the Floyd catalog. One day, music players may be able to stream music directly into our brains, leveraging the mind’s extraordinary sensory powers to make you feel as though you are within and surrounded by the music, inhabiting it in every fiber of your being, every nerve ending ablaze with it. And no one will buy it until you can play Dark Side of the Moon in it.

Edited the title to improve the Floyd reference. I can’t believe I got that wrong.

Check out the piece here.

The word “kidnapping” actually comes from the court of pre-Revolutionary France, when marauding noblemen would don kid gloves and nab commoners right off the streets, scooping them into their carriages and force-feeding them croissants and heavy cream. As for the poor bastards lying here in the Groupon offices, they’re probably thinking a croissant wouldn’t be so bad right about now, that anything would be an improvement over being trussed up like a hog by an obviously disturbed person with a neckbeard, a sawed-off shotgun and a MacBook Air, a person who I want to assure you is quite willing to shoot the face clean off any or all of these hostages unless the following demands are met:

1. Like cigarettes in prison, the size of your yacht and those bead strings they hang over pool tables, money is a handy way to keep track of who’s winning and losing in life’s ongoing Darwinian struggle. It can also be used to buy accordion repair training, stuff an extremely expensive scarecrow or perhaps save the lives of a dozen quietly sobbing office workers, their hands slowly turning purple as the ropes binding their wrists cut off their circulation and placate the otherwise vengeful and jealous hemp gods. So go ahead and deliver one million dollars in used twenty, fifty and one hundred dollar bills, financing my new life on the lam and depriving a pica-stricken bank employee of an illicit snack.

2. Before the invention of the automobile, loose wheels careened freely through the streets, bowling over helpless pedestrians and making horses rear up in fright. Help to avert bouncing, circular chaos by providing a brand-new, fully fueled automobile with four securely fixed wheels, as well as a police scanner and dark tinted windows. Said auto should also have sufficient room to accommodate two bound and gagged abductees, who will be released only when I’m certain I’m not being followed by law enforcement, TV news crews or hostage fetishists.

3. In addition to providing a valuable way to rid the world of old tin cans, firearms can bring families together over a mutual loathing of clay pigeons or a shared passion for earmuffs and tinted safety glasses. They can also, when delivered to the foyer of the Groupon offices in sufficient quantities, aid in the escape of a copywriter who once had dreams of being the next Thomas Pynchon but who now has written so many absurd come-ons for restaurants, hair salons and health spas that he is all but incapable of expressing a thought without resorting to nonsensical metaphors or made-up history or some other labored exercise in smirking hipster bullshit. Do you know I keep a notebook under my pillow just in case I wake up at three in the morning with a new euphemism for tanning bed? Yeah. You do now. That’s why you’re going to deliver two revolvers with five hundred rounds of ammunition, a hundred 20-gauge shotgun shells, a ballistic vest and a gas mask. Also supply six fragmentation grenades, suitable for thwarting pursuing FBI agents, enticing shrapnel collectors or removing sugar glider infestations.

Bring the cash and weapons to the sixth floor of 600 W. Chicago Avenue and leave the vehicle parked outside, the engine running and the doors unlocked. No tricks, snipers, double-crosses, voodoo hexes or skunk eye. Follow these instructions and these twelve people will go on living, dutifully recycling oxygen for trees and robbing the funeral industry of sought-after revenue for many years to come.

In a Nutshell

Fed-up Groupon scribe demands money, escape vehicle and weapons, as well as renewed sense of dignity and purpose, in exchange for lives of twelve hostages

The Fine Print

Expires in two hours, at which point one hostage will be executed, followed by another hostage for each additional hour these demands are not met. Limit 1 per order. Valid only for option purchased.

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.