From an NYT blog, a Steve Jobs quote bashing Amazon’s (no longer new) e-book reader:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”

So, fellow writers, fellow readers, throw up your hands in defeat, the iPod generation has triumphed. Burning books is so twentieth century, we will simply declare reading to be a waste of time, a marketplace irrelevance, and move on.

What a prick.

(via Appalachian Geek, who has much smarter things than I to say about it)

Because I am a fervent believer that the unrestrained free market has the best possible answers to all problems, I would like to propose to the Internets at large a solution to the problem of meat, and a way of reigning in the pork and cattle industries that have become nothing less than environmental disasters.

The industrial world has shown us the way. Carbon credits, in which over-polluting companies can buy what are essentially rights to pollute from companies that have cleaned up their act, are obviously turning around the entire global warming problem. Lickety-split, as they say. Thus, we simply need to apply this model to the agribusiness world, and we’re in good shape.

Here’s how it will work. All people on the planet will be given an appropriate level of meat consumption. Say, three-quarters of a pound a week. That’s three quarter pounders at McDonalds, more if you figure that not all that mashed-up stuff is actually meat anyway. Anybody who wants to consume more than that can go onto to MeatOffsetCredits.com and buy credits, and chow down to their heart’s content.

The credits themselves will come from people who can document that they’ve eaten less than the 3/4 lb per week. Veggies, tofu- and bean-lovers. The less meat you eat, the more money you’ve got in the bank.
Think of the advantages. It’s a perfect way to funnel developed-world funds to poverty-stricken, or even voluntarily vegetarian nations. Give every citizen in the world a MeatOffsetCredits.com account, and we can even skip some of those pesky foreign aid issues where development funds get diverted by (dare I say steak-loving) dictators and generals.

And for those of us bean-lovers who are living in say, Berlin, skimping on meat budgets so we can enjoy our palatial two-room apartments, well, let’s just say we won’t have to worry about the falling dollar anymore. We’ll be subsidized by the international brotherhood of the Fleisch.

Who’s with me? Anybody have Ban Ki-Moon’s email address?

(Thanks to Kean for the link to this NYT story, which is a good luck at the genuinely terrible state of industrial meat production and consumption in America)

I’m thrilled about Obama’s win in Iowa. I’m not as surprised as maybe I should be, reading the headlines, but maybe this is one of the advantages of being overseas, and not steeped in the daily horse-race reporting. From here, the story emerging after Obama’s win — that Democrats are more focused on the prospect of a complete and cleansing change than on the promise of competence — seems a bit obvious. Yet that’s simplistic, too. What Obama seems to have done is convince people in Iowa that in addition to being a genuinely new and healing force, he can still be a competent leader. More power to him, that’s what the country needs.

The coverage here is fascinating. I was a little shocked to read this in Der Spiegel, a magazine I ordinarily respect deeply.

But the Iowa snow king has scant hope of reaching the White House. He’s too young, too inexperienced, too vague, and for many Americans, too black. His magic words about the era of change, of hope, of an America he will unite — all that will evaporate like morning mist. …

Yesterday morning in my hotel, at the breakfast table next to mine, two sisters, perhaps six and eight years old, greeted each other with the following exchange. “Are you fired up?” said one. “Are you ready to go?” replied the other. That’s the battle cry of Obama’s supporters. Children love fairy tales.

Compare this to Arianna Huffington’s take:

Obama’s win might not have legs. Hope could give way to fear once again. But, for tonight at least, it holds a mirror up to the face of America, and we can look at ourselves with pride. This is the kind of country America was meant to be, even if you are for Clinton or Edwards — or even Huckabee or Giuliani.

It’s the kind of country we’ve always imagined ourselves being — even if in the last seven years we fell horribly short: a young country, an optimistic country, a forward-looking country, a country not afraid to take risks or to dream big.

Huffington’s right, I think, even if it’s a bit starry-eyed. A kind of optimistic political innocence is a defining American characteristic. It can go horribly wrong, as the Bush years have shown. But at least today, Americans still genuinely believe in — even expect, as in a Hollywood movie — healing and redemption after periods of darkness.

The Spiegel article rejects this idea. Obama represents the triumph of this innocence, and Americans are silly to believe in fairy tales, it argues. I think there’s more, too; America has screwed up so badly, so viciously, in ways with such awful consequences for the rest of the world, that it doesn’t deserve a healing process. And maybe there’s something to this. We voted Bush in twice, inflicting his ignorance and violence on the rest of the world; maybe it’s time we stopped believing in fairy tales.

But I think that’s a misreading of America. Voting for Obama is neither a rejection of our own history or a childlike misunderstanding of the difficulties of the future. It’s the expression of a people and place that for more than 200 years has been defined by constant self-reinvention. It’s an ugly spirit at times, when we not only refuse to admit our mistakes, but actually forget them. But genuine hope is not only a fairy tale. Sometimes healing happens.

A good way to swap the years in and out. The streets of Berlin on Silvesternacht (New Years Eve night) were as always marked by heavy artillery. Even after describing it a hundred times to people in the States, I had forgotten the visceral effect of letting everybody in the city have dozens of rockets far more powerful than anything we had as kids, and then having everyone shoot them off at once.

We visited Unter den Linden again, where at midnight there’s roughly 7 zillion rockets going off at once. The smoke was thick enough that we could barely see the official, professional fireworks down by the Brandenburg gate. But who needs the pros when you have artillery in your bag, and so does everyone standing arm-to-arm for a mile.

And beautifully, the city was covered in snow the next morning. Or roughly morning. Noontime, morning enough for New Year’s day. Thick flakes that coated the trees and covered the red gunpowder stains on the sidewalks, and melted by the close of the day. But enough to bracket the world with fire and ice.

Below is my first experiment with YouTube. Let’s see what happens:

Update: Answer, it broke things. So instead, here’s a link to a little video of New Year’s Eve. Too bad!

Unter den Linden today, or more specifically, the few hundred meters between the Schlossplatz and the Opera House, offers a lovely contrast in Christmas concepts.

One of the biggest, or at least most elaborate, Weihnachtsmarkts is hosted every year on the empty Schlossplatz, a parking lot in more ordinary times. For non-German readers, a Weihnachtsmarkt (also known as Christ-Kindl-Markt, or just Christmas Market) is traditionally where vendors set up little huts and sell all kinds of ornaments, candles, Christmas breads and cakes, and so on. These days they vary from unbelievably quaint to perfectly carny. Carny or corny, your pick.

The Schlossplatz falls on the carny end. A giant ferris wheel looms over what’s really carnival with extras. Other rides are aimed at the stronger-of-stomach, including the tallest “Transporter” free-fall tower drop in Europe. All kinds of games are on offer, of the throw-a-ring-around-a-bottle, shoot-a-basketball variety. One such game blinks “LOSE… LOSE…” at its top. You can’t say they’re not honest.

My favorite is the haunted house, based somehow on the Terminator 2 movie, that advertises itself in huge neon letters as “Gate Of The Time.” But a close second is the sign on the roller coaster offering half off prices to riders who are 60 years or older. I don’t think we’ll be seeing that innovation in the U.S. anytime soon.

Everywhere, of course, are sweets, and other odd German carnival foods. Cotton candy, cookies, crepes and the Nirvana that is Quarkkeulchen (fried dough balls with a bit of quark, like sour cream, in the mix). Lots of brats. Then also Grünkohl mash, and chicken livers. One of these days I’ll give these a try.

For a full report on the goodness of Christmascarnyfood, read Aimee’s post on our food blog, Hungry In Berlin, here.

But walk down the street a block or so and you’ll find the Operaplatz markt, quiet and placid, as though it’s a different century. Actual handcrafts are on sale here, and a booth with handmade German fruit brandies that are stunning, and just the thing to warm you up after a few too many dough balls.

Here’s the New York Times with yet another entry in their strikingly finely described, spot-on series on Why Berlin is Super-Groovy.

This was the original cool Berlin, with its own brand of gloomy, spooky glamour, well before East Berlin’s Mitte and Friedrichshain districts were on the tourist map.

Another Weimar love letter, right? Caberet and modernism, sex tourism and the sparkling, fun side of post-inflationary misery? Well no, this “original cool Berlin” is David Bowie’s West, or actually, the new West of a bunch of very wealthy media types (villas on an unnamed lake in West Berlin, places in Charlottenburg) who think the “New East” is now just too cliched for words.

So, uh, they’re going back to what was cool when they were in their 20s. Or rather, a nostalgic, packaged-and-priced version of it. That’s very original. Yes, indeed, regular cultural trailblazing.

Right, then — throw off that shabby chic of the East, get your late-boomer yuppie on and start glorying in the memory of those Bowie years, whether you were actually there or not. Apparently it helps if you start throwing down for 20 Euro entrees in the West. That’s where the action is now, my friends. I read it in the NYT.

From this column here, which sorta gets inflation and falling currency valuations mixed up, but it’s funny anyway:

Dubyah has turned us into a third world banana republic. We’re Costa Rica to the rest of the World. With lousier snorkeling.

Who can blame the hordes of Eurotrash from clogging the aisles of our Tiffany franchises like an extended family of hillbillies at a dollar store? Everything here is so incredibly cheap. We’ve turned into a discount playground for the world’s trust fund babies. High-end restaurants, the good hotels, VIP sections of our most exclusive nightclubs, Saturday night movie tickets: pretty much off limits to anybody holding an American passport. We’re the minimum wage security guards of a giant high-end outlet mall known as America just one cut rate Virgin flight away from true civilization.

My own personal favorite was being in fairly rural Romania last summer, a country not really known for powerful economic performance, a country that literally has plastic, washable money, and a friend-of-a-friend says: I love going to America, everything is so cheap!

We are unstoppable. Watch out, Costa Rica! What a good time to be paid in dollars.

I don’t mind the rain so much. I grew up near Seattle, and I’m pretty sure I can’t remember a single instance when the near-constant drizzle got me down. It lends itself to reading, cups of coffee, jazz on the speakers.

I don’t even mind so much the lack of light. Don’t get me wrong, I like the sun, I like the beach, when it’s around. But when the sun goes down at 4:15, or I have to turn my desk lamp on at 3:00, well, I’m usually still staring at my computer anyway. What good is the sun doing me anyway?

No, what really bugs me are the wet socks.

If you’re allergic to cuteness, just move right along. I prefer to think of it as an study in parasitic evolution.

So anyway, I’m walking around Charlottenburg earlier this week, meeting some friends to go to an exhibit on the history of the Chinese population in Berlin (small exhibit, a few interesting historical notes, displayed “like an 8th grade science fair” as Ben rightly said). I’m hungry, so I stop in a Backerei for a quick belegte Shrippe.

I start to leave, but as I come to the door, three black, panting French bulldogs — squat, almost puglike creatures with bat-ears and bulging eyes –  set themselves expectantly in front of the door outside. I pull it open and step carefully through them; they look up at me impatiently, moving not a centimeter for me.

As I walk away, the proprietress comes out and bends down, talking to them too quietly for me to hear. She hands one of them a little bakery bag. It takes the package carefully in its mouth, and then all three trot off down the street, to meet an owner who is holding an apartment door open for them.

This takes the already very high standards of German canine malleability to an absurd level. No, I don’t have pics, because my camera was out of batteries.  But I’m sure cute overload has some that will do.

I won’t say it’s exactly amazing how often I hear music critics — or anyone — of a certain age lamenting the lost music of the ’70s. When I covered digital entertainment closely, I was on an influential mailing list full of ostensible music lovers, smart people, and every few weeks someone would argue that the problem with music biz today is that nobody’s making any good music.

Pah. David Brooks’ column in the NYT today is slightly smarter, but not much. He has interviewed Steven Van Zandt, Springsteen’s guitarist, and together they wistfully remember a time when big bands like the Stones and Springsteen meant something, or meant something to huge masses of people. Not like today, where music consumption is fragmented into micro-genres, bands can’t fill stadiums (remember how great the sound and view in those stadium shows are?), and the kids picking up instruments just can’t play.

He says that most young musicians don’t know the roots and traditions of their music. They don’t have broad musical vocabularies to draw on when they are writing songs.

As a result, much of their music (and here I’m bowdlerizing his language) stinks.

He describes a musical culture that has lost touch with its common roots. And as he speaks, I hear the echoes of thousands of other interviews concerning dozens of other spheres.

Did I say slightly smarter? Forget it. Music cultures change. Everything is fragmented. But why in hell is that bad?

A musical monoculture is like any monoculture. It stagnates. Innovation happens within a strictly circumscribed sphere. What really happens is that it produces rebels, punk, new wave, and then what happens… it fragments. I’m a deeply music loving music geek, who today has the ability to listen to everything from Johannes Ockeghem to Valerio Cosi’s Italian free-jazz drones (if you haven’t heard him, GO LISTEN NOW), with long detours through the Middle East, Africa and Asia. That perpetually blows my mind.

Kids can do this too. The ability to get in touch with musical roots beyond Zeppelin and the Doors and the Beatles and a bunch of very good 60s blues bands is overwhelming today. Not everyone takes advantage of this, but many, many do. It’s creating vast amounts of new and innovative music even despite the industry’s implosion. It ain’t the Stones, ’cause frankly that sound’s come and gone at least three times.

Music, and music culture, moves with the times. Brooks gets part of this. He finishes with this, which was his real point all along:

We live in an age in which the technological and commercial momentum drives fragmentation. It’s going to be necessary to set up countervailing forces — institutions that span social, class and ethnic lines.

Music used to do this. Not so much anymore.

This is the old end-of-shared-culture argument. We listen to different things, think differently, read different Web sites. We don’t all watch the same TV news at 8, don’t listen to the same Rolling Stones albums. Terrible, right?

Pah. Before, “technological and commercial momentum” created the impression of cultural monocultures — although underneath, unlistened to by Brooks and his besuited buddies, were other vibrant scenes. Maybe the culture business wasn’t fragmented back then, but culture was — what were the jazzheads listening to, or the folkies, or the deeply weird Tony Conrad or Eternal Music drone aficionados? They sure weren’t in stadiums.

Diversity of cultural opportunity allows people to stretch their minds and expand their experiences, and breeds creativity. Even if people who want to hear the same thing over and over again don’t want to hear it.

Thanks to Alex Ross for the pointer.