“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then — and only then — it is handed to you.”

Annie Dillard on Writing

“At its best, the sensation of writing is that of any unmerited grace. It is handed to you, but only if you look for it. You search, you break your heart, your back, your brain, and then — and only then — it is handed to you.”

What does it really mean to write? Why do writers labor at it, and why are readers so mesmerized by it?

From Annie Dillard’s timelessly wonderful The Writing Life (public library) – which also gave us her vital reminder that presence rather than productivity is the key to living richly and her meditation on what a stunt pilot teaches us about creativity and the meaning of life – comes her infinitely resonant insight on the magic and materiality of writing, a fine addition to famous writers’ collected wisdom on the craft. Read more of this post

Cronies and capitols: Businesspeople have become too influential in government

Cronies and capitols: Businesspeople have become too influential in government

Aug 10th 2013 |From the print edition

IN 1994 many Italians voted for Silvio Berlusconi in the hope that he could use his skills as a businessman to revive a sclerotic economy. He had built a property-and-media empire out of thin air. He had reinvigorated one of the country’s great football clubs, AC Milan. Surely he would do a better job of running the country than the old guard of corrupt politicians and introverted bureaucrats? Well, si monumentum requiris, circumspice. Mr Berlusconi was prime minister of Italy for eight of the ten years between 2001 and 2011. During that time Italy’s GDP per head fell by 4%, its debt-to-GDP ratio rose from 109% to 120%, taxes rose from 41.2% of GDP to 43.4%, and its productivity stagnated. Rather than using his business skills to revive the Italian economy, Mr Berlusconi used his political skills to protect his business interests. The great seducer is an extreme example. And with luck Italy’s long Berlusconi-themed nightmare is drawing to a close. But the problem at the heart of Mr Berlusconi’s Italy—the commingling of power and business—is a growing worry around the world. In “Can Capitalism Survive?” (1947) Joseph Schumpeter argued that the answer to that question was probably “no”. The great battle of the 20th century was between the state and business. And the state was likely to win because the thinkers and bureaucrats at its service were better at occupying the moral and intellectual high ground. “A genius in the business office may be, and often is, utterly unable outside of it to say boo to a goose—both in the drawing room and on the platform,” he said. Times have changed. Most politicians now believe that businesses are better than bureaucracies at generating growth. Prime ministers and finance ministers flock to Davos not to lay down the law to businesspeople but to court their favours. Businesspeople have learned not just to say boo to a goose but to put a ring through its beak. Today the problem is often the very opposite of the one that Schumpeter imagined: not the marginalisation of business but its excessive influence.

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Why Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox

Why Founders Fail: The Product CEO Paradox

BEN HOROWITZ

posted 12 hours ago

Editor’s note: Ben Horowitz is co-founder and partner ofAndreessen Horowitz. He was co-founder and CEO of Opsware (formerly Loudcloud), which was acquired by HP, and ran several product divisions at Netscape. He serves on the board of companies such as Capriza, Foursquare, Jawbone, Lytro, Magnet, NationBuilder, Okta, Rap Genius, SnapLogic, and Tidemark. Follow him on his blog and on Twitter@bhorowitz.

If I knew what I knew in the past
I would have been blacked out on your a** —Kanye West, Black Skinhead

Because I am a prominent advocate for founders running their own companies, whenever a founder fails to scale or gets replaced by a professional CEO, people send me lots of emails. What happened, Ben? I thought founders were supposed to be better? Are you going to update your “Why We Prefer Founding CEOs” post? In response to all of these emails: No, I am not going to rewrite that post, but I will write this post. There are three main reasons why founders fail to run the companies they created:

The founder doesn’t really want to be CEO. Not every inventor wants to run a company and if you don’t really want to be CEO, your chances for success will be exceptionally low. The CEO skill set is incredibly difficult to master, so without a strong desire to do so the founder will fail. If you are a founder who doesn’t want to be CEO, that’s fine, but you should figure that out early and save yourself and everyone else a lot of pain.

The board panics. Sometimes the founder does want to be CEO, but the board sees her making mistakes, panics and replaces her prematurely. This is tragic, but common.

The Product CEO Paradox. Many founders run smack into the Product CEO Paradox, which I explain below. Read more of this post

Christians, Muslims and Jesus: How two global monotheisms view the same prophet

Christians, Muslims and Jesus: How two global monotheisms view the same prophet

Aug 10th 2013 |From the print edition

Christians, Muslims and Jesus. By Mona Siddiqui. Yale University Press; 285 pages; $32.50 and £20. Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

RELIGION is a tricky subject for scholarship. Even the most professional academic is bound to have personal feelings about the faith under scrutiny. Some see this as cause for concern. Indeed Reza Aslan, one of America’s best-known writers on religion, recently came under fire for his new book about Jesus (“Zealot”, reviewed in the July 27th issue of The Economist). Because he is a Muslim who once embraced Christianity and then dropped it, Lauren Green of Fox News accused him of writing with a “clear bias”. No, Mr Aslan replied, he was writing as a scholar. His response was articulate and dignified, and the interview has helped sell quite a few books, but it will hardly sway those who believe Mr Aslan is writing with a Muslim agenda. Read more of this post

The perils of sitting down: Real science lies behind the fad for standing up at work

The perils of sitting down: Real science lies behind the fad for standing up at work

Aug 10th 2013 |From the print edition

WINSTON CHURCHILL knew it. Ernest Hemingway knew it. Leonardo da Vinci knew it. Every trendy office from Silicon Valley to Scandinavia now knows it too: there is virtue in working standing up. And not merely standing. The trendiest offices of all have treadmill desks, which encourage people to walk while working. It sounds like a fad. But it does have a basis in science. Sloth is rampant in the rich world. A typical car-driving, television-watching cubicle slave would have to walk an extra 19km a day to match the physical-activity levels of the few remaining people who still live as hunter-gatherers. Though all organisms tend to conserve energy when possible, evidence is building up that doing it to the extent most Westerners do is bad for you—so bad that it can kill you. Read more of this post

Commercialising neuroscience: Cognitive training may be a moneyspinner despite scientists’ doubts

Commercialising neuroscience: Cognitive training may be a moneyspinner despite scientists’ doubts

Aug 10th 2013 | NEW YORK |From the print edition

“OUR primary goal is for our users to see us as a gym, where they can work out and keep mentally fit,” says Michael Scanlon, the co-founder and chief scientist of Lumos Labs. For $14.95 a month, subscribers to the firm’s Lumosity website get to play a selection of online games designed to improve their cognitive performance. There are around 40 exercises available, including “speed match”, in which players click if an image matches a previous one; “memory matrix”, which requires remembering which squares on a matrix were shaded; and “raindrops”, which involves solving arithmetic problems before the raindrops containing them hit the ground. The puzzles are varied, according to how well users perform, to ensure they are given a suitably challenging brain-training session each day.

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Crazy Rich: Power, Scandal and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty

The Johnson & Johnson dynasty: A headache-inducing biography of the Johnson family

Aug 10th 2013 |From the print edition

Crazy Rich: Power, Scandal and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty. By Jerry Oppenheimer. St Martin’s Press; 496 pages; $27.99 and £18.99.Buy from Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk

“CRAZY RICH” ought to be good. It has a bestselling author, Jerry Oppenheimer. It has a fascinating subject, the family that founded Johnson & Johnson, the company that invented Band-Aids and now peddles everything from painkillers to antipsychotics. The Johnson scions include drug addicts, a sculptor and the owner of the New York Jets football team. Yet somehow this book is unreadable. The problem is hardly the raw material. Robert Wood Johnson, the son of a poor Pennsylvania farmer, founded Johnson & Johnson with his brothers in 1886. After his death in 1910, his brother James led the company’s expansion during the first world war, creating the plasters and gauze used by soldiers at the front. Robert Wood Johnson’s son, named after his father, may have been the company’s most forceful leader. He steered it through the Depression and oversaw its initial public offering in 1944. He served in the army for a few months during the second world war and called himself “General Johnson” for the rest of his life. His son Bobby (Robert Wood Johnson III), was the firm’s president for just four years before the General helped oust him in 1965. They were the last Johnsons to be in the family business. The book’s many other characters include Evangeline, the General’s sister. She had three husbands and, if Mr Oppenheimer is to be believed, a lesbian lover. There is the strange case of J. Seward Johnson junior, whose wife shot an investigator hired to track her. There is Keith Johnson, who parked his BMW on a beach, dropped acid and then watched the tide carry away his car. The most delectable titbits involve Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV, who owns the Jets and was a leading supporter of Mitt Romney, the Republican presidential candidate last year. His public persona has been rather staid. Mr Oppenheimer paints him as a dolt. He earned poor marks at the University of Arizona, hardly a bastion of academic rigour. When drunk once, he fell off a bridge and severely injured his back. As a young man in Florida, he courted a business partner by supposedly saying, “My dad told me that I have to learn business from somebody who made their own money without inheriting it, and preferably he should be a Jew.” All this should make for juicy reading. But “Crazy Rich” is all guilt and no pleasure. The sources for this “unauthorised biography” are patchy. Mr Oppenheimer’s long sentences are packed with clichés. The narration ranges from sloppy to preposterous. Must he compare the Johnsons to a Greek tragedy twice in two pages, or to the Kennedys even more frequently? When Woody Johnson’s daughter criticised a family member in a tabloid, Mr Oppenheimer opines that she “was now considered a tabloid terrorist, and her act of vengeance their own personal 9/11”. The Johnsons have had many sad stories, including drug overdoses and fatal accidents, not to mention ugly fights over inheritance. One might think this would inspire sympathy, or at least greater interest in its subjects. Yet “Crazy Rich” arouses few feelings other than the desire for it to end. Best then not to start it in the first place.

Crazy Rich: Power, Scandal, and Tragedy Inside the Johnson & Johnson Dynasty Hardcover

by Jerry Oppenheimer  (Author)

From the founders of the international health-care behemoth Johnson & Johnson in the late 1800s to the contemporary Johnsons of today, such as billionaire New York Jets owner Robert Wood “Woody” Johnson IV, all is revealed in this scrupulously researched, unauthorized biography by New York Times bestselling author Jerry Oppenheimer. Often compared to the Kennedy clan because of the tragedies and scandals that had befallen both wealthy and powerful families, Crazy Rich, based on scores of exclusive, candid, on-the-record interviews, reveals how the  dynasty’s vast fortune was both intoxicating and toxic through the generations of a family that gave the world Band-Aids and Baby Oil. At the same time, they’ve been termed perhaps the most dysfunctional family in the fortune 500. Oppenheimer is the author of biographies of the Kennedys, the Clintons, the Hiltons and Martha Stewart, among other American icons. Read more of this post