Six Ideas That Made Us Think

1. What Does an Editor Do?

At a time when new ventures come and go, Commentary, the intellectual monthly magazine, is celebrating its 75th year. In its history, Commentary has had only four editors, including Norman Podhoretz and his son, John. In this month’s anniversary issue, the two of them share their thoughts on what it means to work as an editor. Here is the senior Podhoretz:

Good editors, really good editors, are very rare, in fact even rarer than good writers. It’s a special kind of talent because it ties two qualities that rarely go together in the same person. On the one hand, great arrogance, and on the other hand, great selflessness. The arrogance lies in the fact that you, the editor, thinks he knows better than the author, who is usually a specialist, on how to say what it is he wants to say. The humility or selflessness, which is very important, is that you are willing to lend your talents to someone else’s work without getting any credit for it.

2. Horror Show: Why Movie Theaters Are Empty

Movie critic Sonny Bunch goes to see Tenant in a Washington cinema. He hears someone snoring nearby: “My mind raced. ‘Is he wearing a mask?’ He is, but fear sets in anyway.” Bunch goes on:

Yes, I know Jose-Luis Jimenez, a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder who studies disease transmission, told the Atlantic that theaters haven’t been tied to a single outbreak in the medical literature. Yes, I know Robert Lahita, chairman of medicine at St. Joseph’s Health in New Jersey, told Vulture that there’s no reason theaters in New York City should remain closed while restaurants, gyms, barbershops and tattoo parlors reopen with safety measures in place. Yes, I know that South Korea’s amazingly effective contact-tracing program hasn’t tied a single infection — not an outbreak, mind you, but a single infection — to the 31.5 million people who have visited that nation’s movie theaters.

But still. The snoring! I worried. Fear crept in.

3. Will America Become Japan?

Nicholas Eberstadt’s recent lecture at the American Enterprise Institute is the year’s most bracing assessment of America’s economic and social strains. Eberstadt identifies a host of culprits: businesses that rely on government, inadequate immigration, insufficient R&D spending, and the decline of stable families. He warns the US to avoid the Japanese model:

Before COVID, Japan had been creeping along for three decades on less than 1 percent a year growth in per capita output—a pace that takes nearly 80 years to double incomes. The specter of “Japanification” is already haunting Europe; soon it could be coming to your town too.

Japanification was not a natural disaster. It was man-made, largely through years of inadequate reform and response in the face of a major crisis, the bursting of the Japanese financial bubble. Japan, you see, kept accepting excuses for extending special “emergency” budget and banking measures, year after year.

4. Is the American Internet Over?

Ben Evans argues that the global spread of software-driven innovation is inevitable – and that era of the American monopoly of popular apps is ending. Evans believes a new mindset for regulation is needed:

There are all sorts of issues with the ways that the US government has addressed Tiktok in 2020, but the most fundamental, I think, is that it has acted as though this is a one-off, rather than understanding that this is the new normal - there will be hundreds more of these. You can’t one-at-a-time this. You need a systematic, repeatable approach. You can’t ask to know the citizenship of the shareholders in every popular app - you need rules that apply to everyone.You can listen to a broadcast of the opera on November 7th, 2020.

5. Font Master

Ed Benguiat, who died this month, may have been the most influential logo maker in history. He designed the credits for many movies, and he created or edited the logos for The New York Times, Esquire, Ford, and AT&T. A 2001 profile in MacWorld explains his unique stature in the world of design:

There was a time when someone had to draw by hand those beautiful typefaces, those elegant characters we throw around our system folders so cavalierly. Edward Benguiat is one of those someones. While modern typography can trace its history back to Gutenberg or Aldus Manutius, the roots of digital typography are harder to find. It's rare to be able to point out a living being who actually created a typeface – Benguiat being a notable exception.

New York Times obituary is here. Interesting 2017 interview with him here.

6. Soft Serve Software

McDonald’s sells soft serve ice cream – when its machines are functioning, which they frequently are not. One customer developed “McBroken” – and app that reports when a nearby McDonald’s has a functioning ice cream machine:

IThe data-picture painted by the bot is weirdly fascinating. At the time of writing, for example, just under 10 percent of McDonald's ice cream machines are broken nationwide. But in New York City, it's almost 24 percent. It's also a solid 20 percent right now in Seattle and about 14 percent in the Washington, DC, area.

Websites Worth Reading

Tableau Public: Collection of great data visualizations

Why Remote Learning Sucks: Aubrey Hirsch’s Graphic Illustration

COVID Graphs: Visual updates from Texas Medical Center

Feeds We Follow

@pollsandvotes: Voting updates and analysis

@modeledbehavior: On talent, economics, and getting work done 

@mlipsitch: Harvard epidemiologist, lots on COVID