The reading list for the course on greed that I’m teaching this fall continues to expand. I’m probably not going to go with a textbook, but if I did, I’d lean toward McMafia, which I’m currently reading.
Also looking for a handful of films to show: I need to re-watch Wall Street to see if its too dated and Boiler Room to see if it’s too cheesy. Also thinking I may throw Trainspotting into the mix. And I’d love to show Casino or Goodfella, but damn those films are long.
In any case, keep sending article and film suggestions, and I am starting to look for guest speakers with a unique take on the subject. For those of you who have no idea what I’m talking about, here’s the course description:
Gangsters, Meltdowns and Greed: Social Deviance in American Society
Why can some people so easily break the law while most of us choose to obey it? The goal of this writing-intensive course is to understand behavior that goes against accepted social norms. We’ll look at career criminals, kidnappers and scam artists and show what social situations prompted them to make life choices most of us would never consider. A key focus of the class will be the current economic recession and the greed-fueled decisions that partially caused it. The instructor will draw on his work as a journalist who has covered financial wrongdoing, corruption and organized crime and will include some unlikely guest speakers.
I once took an I.Q. test and scored 145 which, those of you familiar with these kinds of things will know, labels me as a “borderline genius.” Which is kind of cool at first but then, when you really start to think about it with your ample mental capacity, is kind of depressing.
Because while I’m proud of my accomplishments, I’m not out using my 145 I.Q. to cure diseases or solve the world’s problems. No think tank would hire me, and while I understand and embrace free markets, I don’t thrive in them. I take some comfort in knowing that much of the stuff I write entertains and/or informs, and teaching is fulfilling. But I’m also realistic and realize if you didn’t get a chance to read Blood & Volume, which is all but a few thousand of you, you were reading or doing something else. And if I didn’t teach you how to write, someone else would have.
So the more I think about it, the more I realize the accomplishments I have scored in life would be so much more impressive if I had fallen on the other end of the I.Q. scale. As in I’d be an over-achiever instead of an under-achiever if my I.Q. score came in at “borderline retarded” as opposed to “borderline genius.” (And yes, lest I be accused of being politically incorrect, “borderline retarded” is an actual classification for people whoe score between 50 and 70 on I.Q. tests).
“You wrote a book? You? That is so….special!”
“You live by yourself? Alone? That is incredible.”
Ten years ago, the well-dressed men catching a matinée at the Union Square theater in New York may have been recently wealthy, dot-com whiz kids with time and money on their hands. They were part of the creative class that made its own hours and lots of money. I know they were there because I was working for Dow Jones at the time (as the company’s storied Industrial Average was about to cross 10,000 for the first time) and spent a week of afternoons at the theater when I pulled the graveyard shift and the little window A.C. unit wasn’t enough to fight back the heat wave that hit New York that month.
But now, ten year later, the well-dressed men symbolize a different kind of economic period. They are salesmen watching the 1:50 p.m. showing of “Tyson” because they have no sales calls to make, or they are job hunters killing a few hours between interviews. I suspect if I probed deep I’d find more than a couple hadn’t told a spouse they had lost the job and were on the brink of losing the house.
Around the corner the Circuit City — once a massive anchor in the bustling neighborhood — is out of business, and men are pushing recently-purchased store fixtures out of the Virgin Megastore next door. The record store is holding a going-out-of-business sale of its own, and, according to the sign in the window, everything must go. Once trendy Manhattan apartment buildings have brochure racks out front that advertise rent reductions. In one building, tenants are speculating whether a 27-year-old stock broker fell or jumped off a 12th-story roof deck last week.
And pessimism is prevailing; in an elevator a broker says the market has gone straight up for three months and for no good reason. Some places find sick humor in all of this. Perhaps the most cynical sign of the recession is the one on a boutique clothing store in Greenwich Villages that promises “20 percent off if your name is on the Madoff list.”
Still, and particularly outside of New York City, this is a mostly silent recession. Friends of friends may have been laid off, but other people who are simply friends can still keep dinner plans and meet for post-work drinks. We grew accustomed to ignoring the warning smoke throughout the 1990’s and the mini-recovery following the 2001-02 recession, and that has apparently conditioned us to ignore the fire now burning all around us.
But times have changed. Deep in this New Yorker article — which is the best account of what has happened and what is happening and what will happen — is a simple sentence that sums up what many now believe is coming: “People will work harder for less.”
A friend of mine is taking a screen writing class this summer where the only prerequisite was to have an idea. He emailed and said he was having trouble with that, which is fairly common. This is what I wrote in response:
I teach what amounts to a magazine feature writing class at Bridgewater and spend about half the semester on idea generation. Because to me, half of any good writing is having an incredibly good idea. Most people take something like a screen writing class with an idea in mind — for example, Brad hired me to write a screenplay based on his experiences on the shady side of the music industry, and I took the class.
I’m not sure what advice I can give, other than to be proactive. Since I still make the brunt of my income writing feature articles, ideas are pretty much rent payments. It’s really a matter of reevaluating how you go through life and thinking things out. And the problem is, ideas are often market driven — what may be a unique and original idea now will be played out if you sit too long on it (i.e. Blood & Volume, which is essentially Goodfellas 15 years after the fact). Conversely, you can be ahead of the curve and an idea you have now won’t sell for a few more years.
An anecdotal example: I have a student who is a talented writer but I’m worried because she’s graduating and going to spend the summer bartending and not writing. And her excuse is she doesn’t really have anything to write about. But then we start talking about her job and how she gets sexually harassed five times a shift. And how since the economic downturn has gone mainstream, people have been ordering retro, Depression-era cocktails. In five minutes she had two feature article ideas based on something she deals with everyday.
The point is she took it for granted because it’s routine, but when she told it to someone who doesn’t work in the restaurant biz, she got a fresh set of eyes on her life experiences and found out they’re fairly interesting.
I guess the only thing I can say is you have to be proactive — you can’t wait for inspiration to strike. Finding ideas is exhausting at times. I read a lot, write a lot, watch a lot of tv and movies, and talk to a lot of different people from a lot of different fields in hopes that great idea will take root. It’s not a formal method, and I’m hoping I helped more than I confused you, but it is what has worked best for me.
And yes, you will see me at the camp reunion. Really looking forward to it and it sounds like a lot of people are going up that weekend.
Throughout its coverage of the arrest of a suspect in the Craigslist killing, the Globe references the wedding Web site of Philip Markoff and Megan McAllister. Yet there is no link given to the Web site.
He says what I’ve thought all along — the only way to save the Boston Globe is to stop printing it and start charging for online content (although I do think people will always crave a printed, Sunday paper; perhaps it could be reformated to include new articles as well as a “best of the week” section with updated versions of the article that appeared in that week’s online edition).
Needless to say, I’m glad I started transitioning my career away from newspapers five years ago; I’d be screwed right about now if dead tree journalism was still the only thing I knew how to do.
No one sane ever went into journalism for the money, and neither did I — which was a good thing. I’ve made my first million as a professional newspaper writer/editor but it took nearly 36 years.
Every morning from 4 to almost 9 a.m. I write stuff like this:
U.S. retirement assets fell by 25% last year
U.S. retirement assets fell by $2.4 trillion, or 25%, to $7.86 trillion in 2008, according to a report released Wednesday by Spectrem Group. The drop-off in both traditional defined-benefit pensions and defined-contribution plans was attributed to 40% declines in domestic and global equity markets.
I write stuff like this 10, 20, 30 times a morning depending on how bad of a day it is. It’s getting old, and sad and scary. That’s all.
This is a snippet of a note from a former colleague at the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, and I think it pretty much sums up the state of the industry:
“I lead a media relations team now, so I am unfortunately an eyewitness to this collapse of newspapers. Sometimes we’ll arrange an interview in the morning and the reporter will have been laid off by the afternoon. Crazy.”
Bridgewater State College has this wonderful seminar program where students take writing- and/or speaking intensive seminars in their first and second years. I mean, the students complain about it and don’t think it’s all that wonderful, but instructors love them because they get to design courses to indulge in their interests.
So heres the course description of what I’ll be teaching as a first-year, writing-intensive seminar in the fall:
Gangsters, Meltdowns and Greed: Social Deviance in American Society
Why can some people so easily break the law while most of us choose to obey it? The goal of this writing-intensive course is to understand behavior that goes against accepted social norms. We’ll look at career criminals, kidnappers and scam artists and show what social situations prompted them to make life choices most of us would never consider. A key focus of the class will be the current economic recession and the greed-fueled decisions that partially caused it. The instructor will draw on his work as a journalist who has covered financial wrongdoing, corruption and organized crime and will include some unlikely guest speakers.
In other words, this is a look at how Bernie Madoff and Robert Allen Stanford aren’t all that different from Ron Gonen and Henry Hill. I think I may have a potential hit, as many of the freshman I have been working with this semester are upset it won’t be offered as a second-year seminar.
5. The Boston Globe is, based on several accounts, losing $1 million a week. One investment bank recently said that the paper is only worth $20 million. The paper is the flagship of what the Globe’s parent, The New York Times, calls the New England Media Group. NYT has substantial financial problems of its own. Last year, ad revenue for the New England properties was down 18%. That is likely to continue or get worse this year. Supporting larger losses at the Globe will become nearly impossible. Boston.com, the online site that includes the digital aspects of the Globe, will probably be all that will be left of the operation.
The “paper,” of course, has more readers than ever because of Boston.com and, by way of full disclosure, last year freelancing for the Globe accounted for about 20% of my income. (interestingly, the Globe accounted for 32% of my freelance income last year, and a whopping 54% of my freelance income in the fourth quarter; so far this year just 23% of my freelance income has come from the Globe).
Perhaps most telling is that I often feel like I’m one of the few people under 40 who still refers to it as “the Globe.” It seems like everyone else — or at least eople who don’t work in journalism — say things like “I read it on Boston.com.”
I still have a soft spot for newspapers and hope the pirnt edition survives, but I also realize it’s not that practical — particularly if I want to continue to make money from the Globe freelancing. So here’s hoping — and hope is about all people in the newspaper business can do these days — someone finds a way to make money with newspaper Web sites.
There has been one noticeable difference in teaching in Massachusetts this semester: I haven’t had a student miss class for a court appearance on marijuana possession charges. Granted, this is all anecdotal evidence — I usually have 40-60 students per semester and so far, at least once per semester a student has explained the reason they missed class was because of such a court appearance.
I have had a student who missed a class after being pulled over and lectured by a cop who found a pot pipe under the seat. But, since marijuana possession was decriminalized in the November election, there wasn’t much else the state tropper could do.
It will be interesting to see how the data plays out in coming years, both in relation to marijuana use and court system backlogs. So far the only downside of the law I see is I can no longer use the “there’s nothing new to say” argument when I put a blanket ban on “why pot should be legalized” as a topic in my freshman writing classes.
If my students are going to use that as a topic, I hope they’ll expand the argument to cover the decriminalization of all drugs, and I hope they’ll turn to this week’s edition of the Economist as a source. The paper is marking the 100th anniversary of drug prohibition with a six-page package looking at failed efforts to “win” the war on some drugs and an editorial calling for an end to drug prohibition:
“Prohibition seems even more harmful, especially for the poor and weak of the world. Legalisation would not drive gangsters completely out of drugs; as with alcohol and cigarettes, there would be taxes to avoid and rules to subvert. Nor would it automatically cure failed states like Afghanistan. Our solution is a messy one; but a century of manifest failure argues for trying it.”
The bottom line is that decriminalization takes drugs from being a law enforcement problem and makes the issue into a social health problem. It’s worth considering, if only because I’d much rather have my students in class instead of court, and in treatment instead of jail.
