Taking Note

The Future of Publishing, and an Afterword on the Debate at Ol’ Miss

In April 1960, Nan Talese, then a young editor at Random House and now a publishing sage, came home and said to her husband, Gay, a reporter at the New York Times, “Oh God, it’s the end of publishing.”

“Why do you tell me that?” asked Gay.

“‘Well, I heard a rumor that Random House is buying Knopf. And if that happens, the whole sky is going to fall.’”

Gay chased the story. The sale went through. Knopf has been a part of Random House for nearly fifty years and, by all accounts, is doing fine.

The anecdote is contained in The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Publishers, Their Editors and Authors (St. Martin’s Press) by Al Silverman, a former head of the Book-of-the-Month Club in its heyday and a publisher at Viking. On the same day Silverman’s book went on sale, New York magazine featured an article called “The End,” by Boris Kachka, with this keynote: “The book business as we know it will not be living happily ever after. With sales stagnating, CEO heads rolling, big-name authors playing musical chairs and Amazon looming as the new boogeyman, publishing might have to look for its future outside the corporate world.”

The Public Calls for a New International Order

With the presidential debate on foreign policy under our belts, it's worth stressing that the public is looking for a new strategy for America’s role in the world. Some recent data from a survey by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs make this very clear indeed.

When asked about the importance of various foreign policy goals, the top priority in the public’s eyes is improving America’s standing in the world, followed by protecting the jobs of American workers.

Africa rolls snake eyes on Sudan chairmanship

What is wrong with Africa? 

The continent is beset by overwhelming problems of poverty, disease, famine, and war. The world has stirred fitfully and too often half-heartedly to help Africans rebuff these four horsemen of the Apocalypse.  External aid resources have allowed some headway to be made on achieving the Millennium Development Goals to which world leaders have committed us at successive global summits—even if the progress has been uneven.   

But what outsiders cannot provide for Africa is sound political judgment.

Who Will Organize Citizen Voices on the Bailout Bill?

One of the vaunted capacities of the internet is that it enables people to organize for action.  MoveOn.org won its spurs articulating a position on impeachment that attracted hundreds of thousands of American citizens to sign a petition urging Congress to censure President Clinton and move on.

Now comes what by all lights looks like an epic piece of legislation.  The lobbyists are already active.  There’s no time for grassroots involvement –or is there?

Most Results of Drug Studies Never Published

Today, The Guardian UK published a story that should be shocking--but isn't: "More than Half of U.S. Drug Studies Never See the Light of Day." This serves as further proof--if we needed it-- that pharmaceutical companies should not be allowed to control what doctors and patients know, and don't know, about new drugs.

The story follows below.

What $700 Billion Could Buy

Estimates of the cost of the proposed bailout of our financial system, at the moment, put the number at $700 billion, a sum so spectacular that most people cannot get their heads around it.  Some stories in the media help explain it by saying, for example, that if that money were divided by the U.S. population, it would be more than $2,000 for every man, woman, and child in this country. A CNN story said that would be 2000 McDonald’s apple pies per person, and noted that it was nine times what the United States spent on education last year.

The Perils of Putin

Vanity Fair’s annual listing of “The New Establishment” has a surprising number 1 this year: Vladimir Putin, prime minister of Russia. He beat out last year’s topper, Rupert Murdoch, with Sergey Brin, a Russian by birth and the co-founder of Google, at number 3. Number 8 is Roman Abramovich, one of a slew of new Russian billionaires who was up from number 30 on the strength, according to Vanity Fair, of his “investing and spending on a czar-like scale.” All in all, to Vanity Fair (and the compilers of a similar list at Esquire), today’s Russia is on a roll.
    Putin’s oil-fueled autocratic rule was underscored by his summertime invasion of neighboring Georgia, whose president, Mikheil Saakashvili, poked and prodded Russia recklessly in the established tradition of Caucasus swashbucklers. Anyone who knows much about the history of Kremlin ties to Georgia—homeland of Joseph Stalin and his monstrous security chief, Lavrenty Beria—could have predicted this would end badly, at least for Georgia. Putin called in reporters to his vacation villa in the Crimea and declared, in defending Russia’s actions: “Should we have wiped the bloody snot off and bowed our heads again this time? What did you expect us to do, defend ourselves with catapults?”

"Flight to Worthless IOUs"

Amidst the recent carnage in the financial markets, those seeking safety have rushed to invest whatever cash they can lay hands on in U.S. Treasury obligations. It’s called a “flight to quality,” in financial parlance. In fact, the demand for Treasuries has been so great that their yield was approaching zero. Apparently, in this scary time, safety is enough.

If the situation weren’t so grim, one would have to acknowledge a certain humorous side. After all we have just experienced nearly eight years of a president, Secretaries of the Treasury, assorted Republicans running for high offices, and their allies telling us that the best way to think about treasury obligations is to think of them as worthless IOUs. The President said so directly when he went to check up on the Social Security Trust Funds, and found, not vaults of cash, but rather the Treasuries which by law and for safety the Social Security Administration must invest in. As Bush put it, “There is no Trust Fund, just IOUs that I saw first hand.”  Granted this was from a man who may have a limited grasp of the alternatives to insider stock in oil companies, but still…

Put Russia's isolation on the record

In signing treaties of "friendship and mutual assistance" with the ethnic separatist leaders of Georgia's breakaway regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, Russian president Dmitri Medvedev yesterday escalated Russia's rupture not only with Europe, but even with countries like China that regularly join it in striving to contain George Bush's America.  It is a Manchukuo moment -- and the United Nations General Assembly needs to register an overwhelming vote of nullification, setting out a marker of illegality.

After the Dance is Over

Anyone who claims to know how we could have prevented the current financial and economic crisis, or how we must fix it, is talking through his hat. If history teaches us anything about capitalism, it is that market economies generate periodic financial and economic crises and that occasionally these will shock us with their severity. There are lessons that we can learn (that we should long ago have learned) and that we can use to reduce the frequency and the severity of crises of capitalism in the future.