IN WHICH A FORBES ECONOMIST GETS ANGRY, CONDESCENDS, UNDERESTIMATES HIS OPPONENT, AND ENDS UP CONCEDING ALL THREE OF THE ARGUMENTS SUPPORTING HIS ARTICLE

Well, I got a response from Mr. Worstall. It is posted to his personal blog, as opposed to his Forbes one—I don't know why.

It might be as a way to simply show status—his posting makes a lot of hay about how I am an "actor", which he uses often as a kind of epithet. He also uses "twit" in the title of his post. He doesn't even link to my actual post, which is pretty lame.

I don't play that way. Here's his post.

He opens with:

Apparently, Mr. Daisey is an actor, author, commentator and playright. Perhaps I should have heard of him too.

Actually, Mr. Worstall should have, if he is talking about this story at this time. My work is part and parcel of the conversation happening around Foxconn and Apple--I've been researching, investigating, and telling these stories for three years, and this work is responsible in large part for where this conversation is at this moment.

He’s getting shouty about this, saying that I’m a racist neoliberal who knows nothing about the issue and therefore I should shut up.

It would be more accurate to say that Mr. Worstall makes a neoliberal argument with racial undertones, and I wish it had been smarter, better sourced, and engaged with the real issues of the working conditions that are the heart of the issue. I had no desire for him to shut up.

Though I do start to want him to shut up when he says this:

Just as a little stylistic note:

<QUOTING MIKE DAISEY> We have no idea what the actual suicide rate is at Foxconn—we only know a large number of people were throwing themselves off of the roof of the workplace, again and again. </END QUOTE>

People who throw themselves off a roof again and again are not commiting suicide, they are bungee jumping. Suicide by leap is a one time deal not something repeated: perhaps this is why I have not heard of Mr. Daisey as an author or playright.

Hmmm. Clearly I meant the "again and again" to modify the occurrence of people throwing themselves off the buildings, not that the same individual is killing themselves over and over again. But point taken. Thanks for the grammar suggestion.

It's been my experience that the kind of people who do this—who mock people's grammar, publicly—are really some of the most craven online presences. There's a Venn overlap with people who call you "twit" in their titles, or won't even link to the words they are refuting. It's a losers game—you do it when you're an angry, small person to puff oneself up.

And maybe Mr. Worstall isn't angry and small—he may just be doing it for some purpose I can not fathom, believing it furthers his arguments.

Mr. Worstall next promises,

Now let us take his arguments in order:

Which would be lovely, but in fact he never does this. He hopscotches across my post, cherry picking what he feels like responding to, as you'll see.

He starts by questioning my statement, "Yes, conditions are terrible across the entire Special Economic Zone," saying:

Are they? Isn’t that something that has to be proven, not asserted? And terrible compared to what?

That's a valid criticism. I am, of course, talking about labor standards, and my metier is the electronics industry—and by any conventional measure, the standards are terrible as a whole. What attempts to adhere to any standards even with lip service exist only in what are known as Tier One electronics firms, and those are of course places like Foxconn where we hear stories of abuse today.

SACOM and China Labor Watch have covered these issues between them for seven years and a decade, respectively, and their reports show an arena where as you move down the electronics food chain, the labor standards go from poor to dreadful in terms of enforcement and compliance. In all my years working in this arena I have never heard anyone assert that labor standards are anything but terrible across the SEZ as a whole.

And what is terrible? I'd define terrible very simply—out of compliance with China's existing labor laws, which make an excellent baseline. Apple, for instance, reports that only 38% of its suppliers this year are in compliance with these laws for overtime, and that's in Tier One alone. And only in one area.

Then Mr. Worstall took issue with this statement of mine: "This is the economic engine in which all of our devices are made—we created that revolution over there, and we exported and created those jobs."

He seems to be talking about how we did not create the revolution--the Chinese government did. But of course, any conventional reading of that sentence in context is that we're talking about the collusion of corporations and the authoritarian government of China in the creation of the SEZ.

He then spends seven extensive paragraphs arguing something I've never contested—that the changes wrought in China have brought prosperity to many, and lifted the economic tide of millions. I have no idea why he is doing this, though it is similar to his extensive quoting of Krugman in the first piece, and perhaps serves the same purpose—it does sound good to talk about how everyone is getting rich. He's certainly not arguing with me.

As readers by now know, except perhaps Mr. Worstall—we are here to talk about the working conditions in Chinese manufacturing. The fact that people are getting wealthier is good, and one I endorsed in my debate with Nicholas Kristoff on THIS AMERICAN LIFE—I am simply asking why we have not exported our values for safe labor conditions alongside those jobs.

We don't get answers to that yet. We do get a few more condescending "actor" asides, and then four more paragraphs because I tagged his statement by calling it neoliberal. He doesn't seem to deny that they are, but just wants us to know that neoliberalism is awesome and has made the world rich and prosperous.

Then he gets upset because I called him out on the racial undertones of what he's written. I said this:

"The clear implication is that because these are “poor people living in a poor country” they don’t deserve safe working conditions, or working hours that don’t result in people dying on the production line, or factories that don’t have explosions that could be prevented. Because they are Chinese they deserve less working protection that we would afford Americans. It’s a nasty streak of thinly-veiled racism that underlies a lot of the neoliberal arguments: that the people who suffer in other parts of the world are less human than we are in the first world, and this ameliorates our responsibility to give these jobs the basic protections we believe in for American workers."

This is Mr. Worstall's repsonse.

Yes, quite, it’s racist to suggest a method by which the poor can get rich. Racist to suggest a method which we know works. Racist to suggest that Chinee, Muslim and Hindoo might indeed be both worthy of and able to enjoy the levels of wealth and leisure that we pinkish people have. Racist even to suggest the method by which all of this can happen: division and specialisation of labour and trade in the resultant product.

No. I didn't suggest any of the things Mr. Worstall lists have a streak of thinly-veiled racism. I said...Fuck, I'm not going to summate it again—it's right above for rereading.

None of the rhetorical list of things Mr. Worstall lists have anything to do with what I talked about. So it appears he simply concedes the point, and his defense would be, "But...but...neoliberalism is AWESOME because you get RICH, and later you won't mind all those years when we were abusing you!" or something like that. I don't know—he doesn't address it.

Next Mr. Worstall wants to talk about the suicides. He does engage with my first argument, about how we do not actually know how many suicides there were at Foxconn, so the idea that the number is acceptable or unacceptable can't be extrapolated from this.

Excellent, then we have two alternatives here. We know that the recorded rate, the one that is being campaigned about, is one tenth of the rate in the general Chinese population. Our alternatives are thus that we note that, according to the figures we have, conditions at Foxconn are less likely to lead to suicide than conditions in China in general. That’s one way of putting it certainly.

The other is to say: Ah, well, yes, I know I was making lots of noise about 18 suicides in 2010. But that was bollocks, yes, sorry, don’t know what came over me.

The argument that is actually being tried, we don’t know the number of suicides, no idea whether it’s high or low, but it’s a damning indictement all the same: that’s not wholly and entirely convincing, is it?

I get where he's going with this, but I'm not a partisan hack—I'm a monologist. So I don't have a "campaign" to defend. So he seems to be arguing that I'm right, and we don't know the number, but that's not going to work out for people who want that number to be as high as possible and indicate a massive social problem. I don't have that agenda. I'm gratified he agrees with me on the facts here.

Mr. Worstall also seems to have no response to my arguments about clustering, or Apple's negligence. I am assuming his silence indicates that he's simply ceding those points.

Now things get odd. Mr. Worstall says he's going to address industrial safety...and then quotes a much earlier section about ameliorating protections for American workers. (listed above.)

What is odd about this is that he completely dodges answering my dismantling of his use of the death rate, much as he used the suicide rate, to justify everything. He completely ignores it.

I think this is fascinating. Did Mr. Worstall think I would forget? Let's remember, Mr. Worstall's entire argument in this first post rests on three legs:

1) THE SUICIDE RATE IS A NON-ISSUE ARGUMENT. This has now been conceded by Mr. Worstall, because he agrees we don't have numbers so that he can run the statistics argument, and he has chosen to ignore my clustering argument and the negligence arguments.

2) THE DEATH RATE IS BELOW AMERICA'S, SO THE WORKPLACE IS GREAT ARGUMENT. He simply ignores my demolishing of his argument, where I point out that the labor issues at Foxconn are much, much larger than the death rate alone, that this is a ridiculous metric to measure whether a workplace is humane.

3) THE WAGES AREN'T LOW ARGUMENT. I was clear that this was a straw man—no one that has done serious work in this area is even proposing that wages are low. It's a non-argument, that makes Mr. Worstall look like he's winning something that no one serious contested.

This means that Mr. Worstall has actually conceded the entirety of his article.

But this will not stop him. When one is desperate, you get ad hominems like this:

But in the end so far we’ve just had the usual shouty from a luvvie who has had his preconceptions challenged. What do you mean that I’m not a knight on a white charger saving Johnny Foreigner from exploitation?

Mr. Worstall does have one last bit of fight in him, and it comes after I call him out on speaking endlessly about wages, and I make the point that wages do not have to be coupled to safe working conditions.

No, sorry matey, you do not get to violate the basic law of economics. There are no solutions, there are only trade offs. We have no magic wands, we cannot all have a pony and unicorns do not poop rainbows.

This again is not new: Adam Smith points out that all jobs are in fact paid the same when we adjust for how difficult they are, how dangerous, how noisesome, the skills required to do them and so on.

Safety in a factory, paid vacation time, the quality of the food in the cafeteria, the wages paid, these are all traded off against each other. For they all come out of the same pot: that portion of the value added by labour which is to be paid to labour.

Except that we do not live in a perfectly closed economic system—we live with and under governments and regulation. And in fact what we are talking about, the enforcement of labor standards that prevent workplaces that injure, maim, poison, and sometimes kill their employees, are in fact regulated. Even in China—the regulations exist on the books, despite rampant abuse where they are ignored.

The fact that Mr. Worstall would term the idea of the enforcement of such sane, safe measures as a fantasy made of unicorns who poop rainbows is discouraging.

Even if for some reason you don't believe in the rule of law and feel that all labor standards should only exist when they serve the marketplace absolutely, the fact is that the standards that are not being enforced in China are not onerously expensive to remediate. We are talking about a company with $100 billion in the bank today doing nothing, whose labor cost for the creation of an iPhone is just over six dollars. Incredibly escalated overtime that becomes mandatory could be controlled by putting Apple employees in factories. Auditing could go from a yearly occurrence to a monthly one if Apple got serious. Workers could be rotated on their lines to avoid the kind of career-ending maimings I saw firsthand in my research. Many of these strategies involve working with suppliers to change the way that workers exist in the supply chain, and with relatively simple, humane changes achieve a tangible improvement in the lives of millions.

Which is, as I say, where our speech declaimer really goes off the rails. Of course safety standards are lower in poor places. This is because people are poor, see, and they take different decisions about the trade off between risk and income that we plump pink people do.

For us to insist upon greater safety than those exposed to the risks insist upon is, well, colonialism, isn’t it? For we are imposing our risk/income desires on others who have a different set of desires.

Except that the labor standards in question are the ones that currently exist in China. The ones we are failing to meet so spectacularly. So this is pretty far from colonialism.

And it's absurd to say, "Of course safety standards are lower in poor places". The reason Mr. Worstall lists exerts a downward pressure on safety—but that is why we have standards. The industry knew its responsibility, and has shirked it, using some of this kind of logic to worm its way out of doing what's right.

Finally there's a recap about some hypothetical "campaigners" who are not whom Mr. Worstall is actually debating with in the post—he's supposed to be debating me, the person he called a twit. Unsurprisingly, he soundly defeats them—I guess when you've conceded all your points, what's really left but creating a new opponent whom your assumptions about will be true, and which you can beat.

Mr. Worstall tries to close with a nice gesture, which is good of him after impugning my art form and craft a lot. (I decided to refrain from talking shit about economists, because...well, sometimes you don't need to gild the lily. It is the dismal science for a reason, after all.)

Yes, the industrial revolution is the only way we humans have found of improving the living standards of the average guy in the street. I, as a liberasl (even if neo) would like the living standards of the average guy to increase. Thus I support the industrial revolution. Yes, in all it’s mess and clamour: for it is making things better.

Mr. Worstall must be aware that the industrial revolution wasn't alone in making those living standards what we see today. It was those economic engines coupled with a century of labor struggles to create safe, humane working conditions. Those conditions did not naturally emerge out of economic ferment, but were fought for by workers tooth and nail by organization and struggle. When we export work to Shenzhen, when we send our manufacturing base abroad, we have a responsibility to attach the basic labor standards we know are right to that work, and to have the determination to see that they are enforced.

There's no debate about this—it's why these standards are embedded in China's labor standards, and in Apple's Supplier Code of Conduct. Instead of excuses and explanations for why there aren't problems, we need to admit they exist and set our shoulders to the wheel to change them. That is how things are made better.

A CAMPAIGN TO STOP STEPHEN FRY, WHO IS OTHERWISE WONDERFUL, FROM BEING AN IDIOT

Stephen Fry, brilliant comedian, wonderful actor, and bon vivant just posted this in his Twitter feed:



As a fellow raconteur it's painful to have to confront Mr. Fry with this fact, but he's being a total idiot.

He's in good company—most of the Mac universe is in the midst of a massive propaganda campaign, trying to convince itself and the universe that the cognitive dissonance they are feeling at this moment isn't real.

So you're going to see some good people, like Mr. Fry, who happen to love their Apple products very much, say some horrible things because they don't actually understand how to reconcile the beauty and grace of their wonderful Apple products with the unvarnished, verified truth of how they are produced.

Let's take apart Mr. Fry's tweet. First is this contention:

Less than 25% of Foxconn make Apple products, the rest is Dell, HP &c.

I see this all the time as a defense. It is actually the preferred defense of Mac fanboys and tech apologists of all stripes, and it's pathetic.

Yes, Foxconn makes things for many different companies. Yes, conditions are terrible across the entire Special Economic Zone. But it is bizarre tech fannishness in the extreme to somehow think that because others are implicated in a crime that this somehow absolves Apple. It's like a child being caught with their hand in a cookie jar pointing at other children and saying, "They did it too!"

Stephen is smart enough to recognize this, which is why he puts most of his weight in the Forbes article he links to. Now that popular consciousness is beginning to understand just how poorly Apple has lived up to the image it has always portrayed to the world, it was inevitable that there would be a round of articles claiming anyone in favor of safe workplaces and working standards to be a foolish opponent of global capitalism.

This one is from Tim Worstall, writing for Forbes. Mr. Worstall is a smart fellow, with good credentials, but he isn't addressing the real issues in this post, because he knows if he engages with them directly, he will lose. Here's his full article, and now I'll go through it.

After admitting to the charges in the NYT articles, Mr. Worstall tips his hand by saying:

Well, yes, they’re poor people living in a poor country. That’s what being poor means, having to work extremely hard to make very little. Yes, that is a harsh thing to say but then reality can indeed be harsh.

First—may I say—daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaamn. It is refreshing to see the neoliberal model laid out so glaringly. This must be the Forbes house style.

I do love that he said it, because it makes it so clear to refute: these are not just "poor people living in a poor country". This is the economic engine in which all of our devices are made—we created that revolution over there, and we exported and created those jobs. We have a direct and clear ethical responsibility to create safe working environments for those people.

What's disgusting here is the underbelly. The clear implication is that because these are "poor people living in a poor country" they don't deserve safe working conditions, or working hours that don't result in people dying on the production line, or factories that don't have explosions that could be prevented. Because they are Chinese they deserve less working protection that we would afford Americans. It's a nasty streak of thinly-veiled racism that underlies a lot of the neoliberal arguments: that the people who suffer in other parts of the world are less human than we are in the first world, and this ameliorates our responsibility to give these jobs the basic protections we believe in for American workers.

Then Mr. Worstall goes on to quote Mr. Krugman at great length, who has never shied away from talking about how much he loves sweatshops. He quotes pages and pages of his writing, but none of it actually engages with labor standards. None.

It is instead all about wages, which as I have argued for years do not have to be coupled to safe working conditions—when I challenged Nicholas Kristoff on this he had no effective response, because there is no defense.

So we are hearing from Krugman here because he has a Nobel prize, so it makes Mr. Worstall look as though he's building an argument, but there's nothing here.

Mr. Worstall then goes on to say:

But now to the specific complaints that are being made. There are three that are being repeated around the intertubes as being particularly outrageous.

The first issue he addresses are the suicides, by using the same discredited logic of playing with statistics that people used in mid-2010 to make themselves feel better. He writes:

Foxconn employs some 1 million people in total so, if the Foxconn workforce were to have the same suicide rate as the general Chinese population (which, to be accurate, it won’t for suicide is not equally divided over age groups and the workforce is predominantly young) we would expect to see 220 suicides among such a number each year.

We actually have an outcry therefore about a suicide rate which is under one tenth of the general suicide rate in the country under discussion. If people were being rational about this instead of spouting nonsense then this would be something that was praised, not vilified.

Yes, let's give Foxconn a medal for their humanitarian work.

Trolls have been running this argument for almost two years now, and that doesn't make it more true. Let me break it down:

1) Those numbers aren't comprehensive. We have no idea what the actual suicide rate is at Foxconn—we only know a large number of people were throwing themselves off of the roof of the workplace, again and again. We have no idea how many more killed themselves in a more conventional manner. So that invalidates this argument from the top—the suicide rate could be lower or higher than "normal", we have no idea.

2) Even if we ignore that we have no numbers, it isn't the number of suicides—it's the cluster. I talked about this on THIS AMERICAN LIFE—if people kill themselves over and over in the same dramatic way at their workplace, it means something. Dan Lyons took this apart here.

3) The NYT feature makes clear Foxconn's culpability in failing to respond to attempts to implement measures that could prevent suicides, and obstruction of efforts. This is pertinent to any discussion of these suicides now...but all we get are statistics that have been tarted up to sound convincing. If you don't address the particulars, you haven't addressed anything.

Mr. Worstall goes on to his next charge:

The second is that there have been two explosions at separate plants, both involving aluminium dust, which have killed several and injured many more. Dealing with aluminium dust (which, if very fine and dispersed through the air, can be explosive) is indeed something which we’ve known how to deal with for near a century now.

However, knowing how to deal with this or any other industrial danger does not, regrettably, mean that it is always dealt with. To judge whether safety really is ignored at Foxconn we would like to, well, why not, compare it with US workplace safety?

He then uncorks a new set of statistics proving that more people die at American factories, and therefore Foxconn is a humanitarian wonder—perhaps they will be given a second, even bigger medal to go next to their first one.

This is an even stupider argument. The NYT piece talks about a huge number of human rights violations, many of which Apple cops to, and none of which Apple disputes. Mr. Worstall chooses not to address the excessive working hours, the exposure to toxic chemicals, the rampant abuse—instead he simply focuses on one raw statistic of how many people died at the workplace.

That makes a lot of sense. I'm sure that's how most of us judge our workplaces is by the death rate. I'm sure that when Mr. Worstall took his position at Forbes, he checked to see what their death rate was, and was gratified to find that it was low.

Of course Forbes doesn't work that way. No workplace functions that way. We assess our workplaces on a variety of factors to judge whether they are humane or not, many of which are detailed at length in the NYT stories Mr. Worstall is linking to. He is failing to address them because he has no answers, and if he ignores the arguments he can create his own fantasy.

Finally, Mr. Worstall says:

The final point is low pay.

Except that this is a straw man. No one who has done serious work in the area believes that low pay is a serious issue in this conversation. I don't, the NYT features don't—it's a fantasy cooked up to discredit this movement for better labor standards.

A much bigger issue I've reported on, and covered by the NYT, is that people can't get paid the money they are owed, and that excessive overtime is mandatory and continuous. Conveniently Mr. Worstall ignores this completely, and goes on for a number of paragraphs about an issue that is not related to the labor complaints people have been making against Foxconn for years.

The infographic reiterates points I have refuted above, though it is well laid out and uses nice fonts.

I would ask that people reading this message, if they feel it has merit, please forward to Mr. Fry via Twitter and his website. If you are feeling so inclined you can also contact Mr. Worstall and make him aware of this response, as I would love to see if he has anything to say.

My hope is that Mr. Fry, being the upstanding gentleman that he is, will see the inherent humanity in what I have presented here. It is hard to hear terrible news about a company that we all have a lot invested in—I have been a huge Apple fan my entire life—but I feel certain Mr. Fry has the kind of spirit and will to speak the truth when he is confronted with uncomfortable, but undeniable, fact.

Best regards,

Mike Daisey
http://mikedaisey.com

Nowadays, anyone who wishes to combat lies and ignorance and to write the truth must overcome at least five difficulties. He must have the courage to write the truth when truth is everywhere opposed; the keenness to recognize it although it is everywhere concealed; the skill to manipulate it as a weapon; the judgement to select those in whose hands it will be effective; and the cunning to spread the truth among such persons. These are formidable problems for writers living under Fascism, but they exist also for those writers who have fled or been exiled; they exist even for writers working in countries where civil liberty prevails. What is necessary for all writers in this age of perplexity and lightning change is a knowledge of the materialistic dialectic of economy and history. This knowledge can be acquired from books and from practical instruction, if the necessary diligence is applied. Many truths can be discovered in simpler fashion, or at least portions of truths, or facts that lead to the discovery of truths.

Bertolt Brecht

I'm inundated with media requests, which is great. But it has to be said--none of the requests coming in are from technology journalists. None. The silence is still defeaning...when they do cover any of this, they do as little as possible as quickly as possible. These are, ostensibly, journalists who should be covering stories in technology. I find it incredibly sad.

Brad Pitt, Actor - Parabasis:

Opacity in performance—an acting style in which the subtext of a character is present but kept secret—is made possible by film. Without the close-up, the reaction shot, the bit of closely observed business, keeping secrets from the audience is difficult. I know of only two actors who regularly pulled this off on stage (James Urbaniak and T. Ryder Smith). Film enables it, but our preference as audiences is always for revelation, to be embraced (or at least charmed) by a performance rather than held at a distance by a man presenting an unsolvable mystery.

My appearance on CBS Sunday Morning:

Becca Blackwell, Performer, On Being Naked in the Untitled Feminist Show - New York News - Runnin' Scared:

​First off, what is it like being naked on stage?

I think everybody in the ensemble would agree that baby wipes are essential. This isn't my first time being naked on stage, but being naked in Untitled Feminist Show feels different. I have no props or words to draw attention away from the loadedness of my junk while I'm trying to be myself, which is a pretty masculine. So it's really the most naked I could possibly be. I never have identified as female, but I'm sure I read that way to an audience on a bare white floor and five other vaginas (or what-have-you) dancing with me.

It's hard knowing people won't necessarily decide that I am a masculine person right away. It magnifies something a little more subtle that happens to me daily. It's really challenging, sometimes crushing. I worked through a lot of my own gender issues in the process of developing the piece.

Dear MSNBC and CBS visitors—

If you'd like to see THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS, you can click here for tickets.

Mike Daisey loved the New York Times Apple investigation | JIMROMENESKO.COM:

I’ve been telling this story nightly for eighteen months, and I’m absolutely thrilled that the NYT is doing this reporting. It’s what I’ve been hoping for — that journalists would dig in and pull this story out by its roots, and the NYT has done that here.

I’m a monologist, and not a journalist in any traditional sense. I see our roles as utterly complementary –journalism reports the facts that fill our world, and I tell stories that create connections that make audiences engage in a human way.

I know that reporters who have worked on this series saw my monologue in the fall, and I spoke with Charles Duhigg then about my experiences. If my work helped them in any way I am very glad.

As a monologist, I’m passionate about stories told fully and deeply, so there can be a way for us to see the truth in a human way. The NYT’s work on this series does that magnificently, and they deserve all the credit for their hard work. I think it’s a great day when a work of art and a piece of journalism can both be in the public sphere affecting change in their own ways. More than anything else, I am grateful to the reporters who are telling this story because when I speak from the stage I feel less alone.

NYT Tech Columnist David Pogue’s Silence on Foxconn Persists, Even After the Times‘s Damning Expose | Betabeat — News, gossip and intel from Silicon Alley 2.0.:

Mike Daisey—the critically-lauded monologist whose one-man show about these very problems with Apple, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which played at New York’s Public Theater to critical acclaim last year—actually singled out David Pogue for failing to investigate Apple’s practices.

In an interview with The Daily Beast, Mr. Daisey, whose show ran for a number of weeks, and who actually ran an Op-Ed in the Times, was shocked at Mr. Pogue’s silence on his show, let alone Foxconn, who he covers for the Times and writes users manuals for.

“David Pogue—I’ll call him out—hasn’t actually been in to see the show. What I know of David Pogue, David Pogue would travel on his hands and knees, over broken glass, to see anything about the Mac or Steve Jobs, but…he hasn’t been here.”

Tomorrow's Roundtable: Could Apple build iPhones in U.S.? | Apple - CNET News:

Two great pieces of journalism on Apple and its place in the manufacturing economy appeared recently: First, there's a series developing in the New York Times that kicked off in the Sunday, Jan 22 edition: How the U.S. Lost Out on iPhone Work. A follow-on piece, In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad, ran yesterday.

You must read these stories.

Second, listen to the This American Life episode, Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory. In this gripping program, playwright and performer Mike Daisey tells of his trip to the Foxconn plant in China, where iPhones are made.

You must also listen to this podcast.

After you've done your homework, you will have questions. About Apple and all other electronics companies, about your ethical responsibility when it comes to buying gadgets, and about America's place in the world economy and whether or not it will ever be possible to bring modern manufacturing jobs back home.

On Reporters' Roundtable tomorrow, at 10am Pacific Time (live link), we'll be talking with Charles Duhigg, one of the authors of the New York Times series, and Mike Daisey as well. I'm excited to get these two journalists together to discuss the ongoing issues that their stories reported on. I'm sure this is going to be a fascinating discussion.

Apple in China: The New York Times goes for the Pulitzer - Apple 2.0 - Fortune Tech:

When monologist Mike Daisey flew to China to find out why the workers who assemble electronic devices for Apple (AAPL) -- and every other major U.S. manufacturer -- were jumping from the roofs of their factory-city dormitories, he was shocked to discover that most of the American reporters writing about the suicides had never visited the plants or talked to any of the workers.

Well that's changed. A few months ago, the New York Times assigned a team of reporters led by Charles Duhigg, Keith Bradsher and David Barboza to investigate the hundreds of Chinese companies that make our iPads and iPhones -- starting with Foxconn, the world's largest manufacturer of electronics components.

Globalization, Capitalism, and China at Reports from the Economic Front:

In fact, China’s growth has generated few decent employment opportunities for urban workers, regardless of their employment sector. The International Labor Organization did an extensive study of urban employment over the period 1990 to 2002. Although total urban employment increased slightly, almost all the growth was in irregular employment, meaning casual-wage or self-employment—typically in construction, cleaning and maintenance of premises, retail trade, street vending, repair services, or domestic services. More specifically, while total urban employment over this thirteen-year period grew by 81.7 million, 80 million of that growth was in irregular employment. As a result, irregular workers in China now comprise the largest single urban employment category.

The issue here isn’t even one of China versus the United States. It also isn’t one of dictatorship versus democracy. Rather it is one of capitalism’s logic. Said simply, large multinational corporations and their allies in both the United States and China have successfully created a global system of production and consumption that gives them maximum freedom of operation. It is this logic that keeps pushing more free trade agreements, attempts to create more flexible labor markets, and more attractive conditions for business investment, both here and in China. And it is this logic that needs to be challenged on both sides of the Pacific.

Corbin Hiar: Laurene Powell Jobs: Obama's Awkward State Of The Union Guest:

That's what makes the invitation given to Laurene Powell Jobs so unusual. Most well-known as wife of recently deceased Apple founder Steve Jobs, the bio sent out to reporters by the White House Press Office only mentions education reform work and the boards she sits on. Her late husband doesn't even get a mention. That may be because the Obama administration hopes to mention Powell Jobs' education foundations while ignoring the new attention being paid to how Apple and other high tech companies have benefited enormously from lax Chinese labor standards and the outsourcing manufacturing jobs.

The White House did not respond to questions about the omission. Powell Jobs could not be reached for comment.

Newt Gingrich, Mitt Romney and GOP Forget Iraq Mistake in Push for Iran War - The Daily Beast:

The extraordinary thing about today’s Iran debate is that being wrong about Iraq has barely undermined the hawks’ influence at all. In 2012, as in 2002, Republicans are driving the political discussion, and in 2012, as in 2002, Democrats are petrified about being seen as too soft. Once again the media, which did not cover itself with glory in the run-up to Iraq, bears part of the blame. To allow Gingrich, Santorum and Romney to saber-rattle on Iran, as they have in debate after debate, without forcing them to confront the consequences of their saber-rattling on Iraq, is professional malpractice.

Hello All,

I can't tell you how excited I am to write this.

First, if you haven't heard, during this break in the run at the Public we spent a month collaborating with Ira Glass and THIS AMERICAN LIFE to adapt THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS for the radio.

It aired the weekend of January 6th in a special episode of THIS AMERICAN LIFE where the only story was our excerpt of the monologue adapted for the radio, followed by a discussion featuring TAL doing extensive fact checking, interviews with Chinese labor activists, and a debate between myself and Nicholas Kristoff.

You can listen to the show here.

Apple was asked to be on the show or to respond in any way. They refused.

In its first week the episode was the most downloaded in THIS AMERICAN LIFE's history. The internet exploded, and the story went everywhere—I received over a thousand emails in just a few days; the response was overwhelming.

That same week news broke that hundreds of Foxconn workers had a stand-off that lasted two days, where they were all threatening mass suicide by throwing themselves off the roof of the plant over their working conditions. Details

This is at Foxconn, a company which Apple's own 2011 Supplier Responsibility Report said was completely up to code, and which Apple applauded for their efforts. This is the company about which Steve Jobs said the employees enjoyed a virtual paradise of movie theaters, swimming pools, and luxury.

A week after our show was broadcast, Apple made an abrupt announcement. After years of stonewalling and silence, they released the full list of their suppliers, and agreed to outside, independent monitoring of working conditions in the factories they use. It is not everything, but it is a small step down the right road. Details

Many news outlets are crediting THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS for being a large factor in Apple's decision. I've received a number of emails from Apple employees who have told me they believe that hearing this story on THIS AMERICAN LIFE, a program many Apple employees listen to with their families and their children, created "a morale situation" that finally compelled Apple to begin to do the right thing.

I would like to thank everyone who has heard this story and then told it on to the next person. In theater we sometimes doubt that we can effect change—I think we all doubt it, sometimes. The truth is that telling stories, person to person, is the best way we have ever had of connecting to the human—and whatever this show may or may not have achieved, it has come out of the conversations happening night after night after night.

Thank you,

md


PS: THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS returns to the Public Theater on January 31st. You can use the code "iFriend" for discounted tickets to the first two weeks—I hope you'll join us and see how the show has grown. Tickets and details here.

FAIR Blog » Blog Archive » NYT's Apple Debate Factcheck, Without Facts:

If you want to know why Apple does what it does, Steve Jobs might not be the best source. You could ask one of the company's critics, like Mike Daisey. A recent Times review of Daisey's recent Steve Jobs monologue revealed this about Daisey's research into Apple's Chinese manufacturers:

While the official Chinese workday is eight hours, the norm at Foxconn is more like 12 and even longer when the introduction of a product is at hand. One worker died after a 34-hour shift. Some of the workers he meets are as young as 13, and because of the repetitive nature of the labor, their hands often become deformed and useless within a decade, rendering them unemployable.

It doesn't sound like the substandard American educational system explains Apple's corporate philosophy. But it's apparently what the Times believes, because Steve Jobs once said so.

CEO OF APPLE PARTNER FOXCONN: 'Managing One Million Animals Gives Me A Headache':

According to WantChinaTimes, Terry Gou, the head of Hon Hai (Foxconn), the largest contract manufacturer in the world, had this to say at a recent meeting with his senior managers:
"Hon Hai has a workforce of over one million worldwide and as human beings are also animals, to manage one million animals gives me a headache," said Hon Hai chairman Terry Gou at a recent year-end party, adding that he wants to learn from Chin Shih-chien, director of Taipei Zoo, regarding how animals should be managed.

An Eighth-Grader's Letter to Apple's CEO, Tim Cook:

On the first day of class, I had the students listen to the episode themselves. Then I gave them a homework assignment to write to Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, to share their thoughts, feelings and ideas. I wanted these students to have the opportunity to use their voice to help change this unjust and inhumane system, since they couldn’t use the power of their wallets to simply choose more humane electronics.

Below is just one of their letters. I hope it will inspire you to also use your voice to create change.

Dear Mr. Cook,

I am an eighth grader from Maine, and I have recently listened to the Public Radio broadcast, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” This story, which I assume you may have heard, was told by a man named Mike Daisey, who is a devotee of your company, and independently went to one of your supplier’s factories in Shenzhen, China.

I am writing to you and Apple because of what Mike Daisey, and other sources, have witnessed in the Apple Factory, Foxconn. I learned many things in Mr. Daisey’s talk, the first being that your products are assembled manually by humans in massive Asian factories. The second fact is Foxconn’s workers, the hundreds of thousands of them, have very low wages. And the third and most distressing thing that Mike Daisey saw was the employee’s hands. Carpal tunnel at young ages, hands ruined by the continuous motions of assembling the same piece over and over again. I, at this moment, feel so lucky to live in a place where I will never have to do such a job.

I feel it is my civil duty to write to you in the hope that with a collective effort, your prestigious company can rise out of the cult of inhumane factories.

I am not suggesting that you change your whole system, for I am aware that it is important for Apple to make money, and these people to have jobs, but Apple can make small changes, like shorter work hours, rotations on the lines, and/or slightly larger wages, to deeply change many lives.

Thank you for your consideration, Mr. Cook.

Respectfully,

Abigail Frost (age 13)

These were sketched during ALL THE HOURS IN THE DAY, my 24 hour monologue which was performed at the T:BA Festival in Portland last fall. To see the artist's complete collection, click here.

Report: Mass Suicide Threats at Xbox 360 Plant:

On Jan. 2, over 300 employees at a Foxconn plan in Wuhan, China threatened to throw themselves off a building in a mass suicide. Foxconn makes Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony products. These workers manufacture Xbox 360s.

According to Chinese anti-government website Watch China Times, the workers were protesting denied compensation they were promised.

On Jan. 2, the workers asked for a raise. Foxconn told them they could either keep their jobs with no pay increase or quit and get compensation. Most decided to quit with compensation. However, the agreement was supposedly terminated, and the workers never received their payments.

Hello THIS AMERICAN LIFE listeners!

If you came to this site by way of this week’s TAL episode, I thought I’d give you a quick guide to information on my work and myself.

First, you may be interested in hearing the rest of the story: my monologue THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS. The show returns to New York City at the Public Theater on January 31st, and you can buy your tickets here.

I’m very proud of what Ira and I created for THIS AMERICAN LIFE, but if you’d like to experience the full story, being there live is the best way to do that. Some of the most fascinating, heartbreaking, and hilarious moments had to be cut for the radio, and it fleshes out the story fully in unexpected ways. For those of you who don’t usually go to the theater, I hope you’ll consider it.

If you’re curious about what I do, my monologues page has extensive details on my other works. A good example is THE LAST CARGO CULT, a show about my journey to a remote South Pacific island whose people worship America and its cargo,and that narrative is then woven against a searing examination of the international financial crisis. The show became well-known for the fact that I would give away all of the money I was paid for the show in every performance, only keeping money given to me freely in a bowl on the stage at the end of the show, as part of a way of examining the abstraction of money. Over hundreds of performances we didn’t lose money—people, when free to choose, chose to see that we were paid. You can view a trailer of that show here:



Most recently I created a monologue called ALL THE HOURS IN THE DAY, which was a 24 hour performance—a single braided narrative with many strands that lasts an entire day, and which I perform the entirety of. It happened in Portland at the Time Based Art Festival, and some great pieces about what that show was like for the hundreds of people who came on the journey can be found here, here, and here.

On the lighter side, here is a performance I gave at an Occupy Wall Street event which culminates with me disrobing and openly challenging Mike Bloomberg to a Mexican wrestling match:



This site is kept updated with where I will be performing, and you can subscribe through the sidebar to get occasional emails with updates and invitations to events the public doesn’t get to hear about. I don’t spam or sell your name or engage in any form of ass-hattery.

If you need to reach me directly, the best way is the email link at the top of the page—I don’t always respond immediately, but it does get to me.

Be seeing you,

md

BEST NYTIMES CORRECTION EVER:

Comment: Un-American Activities : The New Yorker:

Several things are worth noting here. The first is that, in today’s Republican politics, one reliable way to reach beyond the Christian base is by whipping up nationalistic hysteria with language lifted straight from the McCarthy era. If criminalizing all abortions and nullifying all gay marriages are a little too sectarian for you, surely you’d like to try some old-fashioned traitor-hunting. (Santorum has also accused Obama of “sid[ing] with evil” in Iran, a country with which he plainly wants to go to war.)

The second is that this kind of gutter rhetoric is so routine in the Republican campaign that it’s not worth a political journalist’s time to point it out. In 2008, when Michele Bachmann suggested that Barack Obama and an unknown number of her colleagues in Congress were anti-American, there was a flurry of criticism; three years later, when a surging Presidential candidate states it flatly about a sitting President, there’s no response at all. Certain forms of deterioration—like writers using “impact” as a verb, or basketball coaches screaming about every foul—become acceptable by attrition, because critics lose the energy to call them out. Eventually, people even stop remembering that they’re wrong.

And the third, related point is that, once demagogy and falsehoods become routine, there isn’t much for the political journalist to do except handicap the race and report on the candidate’s mood.

Proposed law prohibits TSA employees from dressing like cops - Boing Boing:

The STRIP Act, proposed in the US House of Reps, would require TSA employees to stop dressing like police officers, because they aren't cops, and when they give orders to travellers, travellers assume that these are the orders of real law enforcement officers, rather than minor bureaucrats:

The bill, which has drawn 29 co-sponsors in the few weeks since it was introduced, would prohibit any TSA employee "who has not received federal law enforcement training or is not eligible for federal law enforcement benefits from using the official job title of officer, or wearing a metal badge resembling a police badge or a uniform resembling the uniform of a federal law enforcement officer."

Friedman (unit) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

The Friedman, or Friedman Unit (F.U.), is a tongue-in-cheek neologism coined by blogger Atrios (Duncan Black) on May 21, 2006.

A Friedman is a unit of time equal to six months in the future.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8] The Huffington Post cited it as the "Best New Phrase" of 2006.

The term is in reference to a May 16, 2006 article by Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) detailing columnist Thomas Friedman's repeated use of "the next six months" as the period in which, according to Friedman, "we're going to find out...whether a decent outcome is possible" in the Iraq War. As documented by FAIR, Friedman had been making such six-month predictions for a period of two and a half years, on at least fourteen different occasions, starting with a column in the November 30, 2003 edition of The New York Times, in which he stated: "The next six months in Iraq—which will determine the prospects for democracy-building there—are the most important six months in U.S. foreign policy in a long, long time."

The term has been used in general to describe any pronouncement of a critical period for the U.S. occupation of Iraq. Such pronouncements have been made by numerous politicians and military officials involved in the war.

More generally, the concept can refer to any event or "critical period" which is repeatedly expected to happen in the near future, but repeatedly fails to occur.

In the spirit of the holidays, here is the complete audio of last night's New Year’s Eve show, WHEN THE CLOCK STRIKES, performed for a sold out crowd at the Huntington Theatre as part of Boston’s First Night festival:

Download the audio here

This is, as the kids call it, freestyling—the monologue was woven in real time in front of the audience, and it touches on death, rebirth, the horrors of the inevitable disappointment of New Year’s Eve, an insane film director in the Ukraine, Samuel Beckett’s face, the pleasures of television, Nazi stormtroopers, theatre as a metaphor for the nature of life, and a survival guide for the coming jaegermeister zombie apocalypse. It concerns the nature of New England Puritans—their origins, feeding habits, and elaborate mating rituals. It is also a document detailing how one might attempt to have a New Year’s Eve that does not suck.

The audio isn’t perfect, and the monologue was written on the wind, but take it in the spirit it is intended—a small gift for the year ahead.

Be seeing you,

md

Happy contrafactual public domain day (what you've lost) - Boing Boing:

Jennifer Jenkins sez, "What could have been entering the public domain in the US on January 1, 2012? Under the law that existed until 1978... Works from 1955. Asimov's The End of Eternity, Nabokov's Lolita, the play Inherit the Wind, Hitchcock's To Catch a Thief, Disney's Lady and the Tramp, Rebel Without a Cause, The Seven Year Itch, the music for Blue Suede Shoes and Tutti Frutti, and Laurence Olivier's film version of Richard III... What is entering the public domain today? Nothing."

Praxis Theatre’s Top 10 of the Top 10 for 2011 – Praxis Theatre:

Cult of Mac reports that in February of this year, bad publicity was at an all-time high surrounding the conditions and suicides at the Chinese factory Foxconn, Apple’s largest supplier. Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak was apparently moved to tears by the story as told by Mike Daisey when he saw the show, and urged Tim Cook, Apple’s Acting CEO to see it as well, saying “I will never be the same after seeing that show.” [Full disclosure: this list was created on two Macbooks, with some side research on one iPad, after tweeting to one another via two iPhones.]

We’re not surprised by Wozniak’s reaction to Daisey’s performance. Daisey has appeared on a number of 2011 lists across North America, and for the New York Times list of Cleverest Theatrical Moments a category was created for “most remarkable storyteller who isn’t Mike Daisey”. Daisey was a definite influence on our co-production of You Should Have Stayed Home at SummerWorks this summer, and we hope he’ll come to Toronto soon.

A Reunion with Boredom by Charles Simic | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books:

Do people still suffer from periods of boredom even with computers, smart phones and tablets to occupy them endlessly? There’s also television, of course, which in homes of many Americans is on twenty-four hours a day, making it harder and harder to find a quiet place to sit and think. Even neighborhood bars, the old refuge of introspective loners, now have huge TV screens alternating between sports and chatter to divert them from their thoughts. As soon as college students are out of class, cell phones, and iPods materialize in their hands, requiring full concentration and making them instantly oblivious of their surroundings. I imagine Romeo and Juliet would send text messages to each other today as they strolled around Verona, though I find it hard to picture Hamlet advising Ophelia to betake herself to a nunnery.

These and other thoughts came to me as I sat in a dark house for three days in the aftermath of Hurricane Irene. Being without lights and water is a fairly common experience for those of us who live in rural areas on roads lined with old trees. Every major rainstorm or snowstorm is almost certain to bring down the lines, which, because of the relative scarcity of population, are a low priority for the power company to fix. We use oil lamps and most often candles, so our evenings around the dining room table resemble séances. We sit with our heads bowed as if trying to summon spirits, while in truth struggling to see what’s on our dinner plates. Being temporarily unable to use the technology we’ve grown dependent on to inform ourselves about the rest of the world, communicate with others, and pass the time, is a reminder of our alarming dependence on them. “Nights are so boring!” my neighbors kept repeating. Our days were not much better, with overcast skies that made it even difficult to read indoors. All of this reminded me of the days of my youth when my family, like so many others, lived in a monastic solitude when the weather was bad, since we had no television. It wasn’t in church, but on dark autumn days and winter nights that I had an inkling of what they meant when they spoke about eternity. Everyone read in order to escape boredom. I had friends so addicted to books, their parents were convinced they were going crazy with so many strange stories and ideas running like fever through their brains, not to mention becoming hard of hearing, after failing to perform the simplest household chores like letting the cat out.

‘Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close’ With Tom Hanks - Review - NYTimes.com:

But it’s an impossible role in an impossible movie that has no reason for being other than as another pop-culture palliative for a trauma it can’t bear to face. In truth, “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” isn’t about Sept. 11. It’s about the impulse to drain that day of its specificity and turn it into yet another wellspring of generic emotions: sadness, loneliness, happiness. This is how kitsch works. It exploits familiar images, be they puppies or babies — or, as in the case of this movie, the twin towers — and tries to make us feel good, even virtuous, simply about feeling. And, yes, you may cry, but when tears are milked as they are here, the truer response should be rage.

The Big Lie - The Daily Beast:

I had my doubts from the beginning. A few months after I started to work downtown, I ran into an old friend from college and before, a man later to become one of New York’s most esteemed writers and editors.

“So,” he asked, “how do you like what you’re doing now?”

“I like it quite a lot,” I said. And this was true: these were new frontiers for me, the pace was lively, the money was good enough ($6,500 a year), and there was so much to learn. But there was one aspect of Wall Street that I found morally confusing if not distasteful: “There’s one thing that bothers me, though. It’s this: on the one hand the New York Stock Exchange has sent its president, the estimable G. Keith Funston, out into the countryside, supported by an expensive, extensive advertising campaign, to exhort the proletariat to Own your share of America! As if buying 50 shares of IBM or GM in 1961 is as much of a civic duty as buying a $100 war bond in 1943.”

I then added, “But here’s the thing. At the same time as Funston’s out there doing his thing, if you ask any veteran Wall Street pro how the Street works, the first thing he’ll tell you is: The public is always wrong. Always.” I paused to let that sink in, then confessed, “I have to tell you, I have trouble squaring that circle.”

2011 in Review: The Year Secrecy Jumped the Shark | Electronic Frontier Foundation:

The government has been using its secrecy system in absurd ways for decades, but 2011 was particularly egregious. Here are a few examples:

Government report concludes the government classified 77 million documents in 2010, a 40% increase on the year before. The number of people with security clearances exceeded 4.2. million, more people than the city of Los Angeles.

Government tells Air Force families, including their kids, it’s illegal to read WikiLeaks. The month before, the Air Force barred its service members fighting abroad from reading the New York Times—the country’s Paper of Record.

Lawyers for Guantanamo detainees were barred from reading the WikiLeaks Guantanamo files, despite their contents being plastered on the front page of the New York Times.

President Obama refuses to say the words “drone” or “C.I.A” despite the C.I.A. drone program being on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers every day.

Exclusive: Leaked Details of How Facebook Plans To Sell Your Timeline to Advertisers | Betabeat — News, gossip and intel from Silicon Alley 2.0.:

What most users don’t know is that the new features being introduced are all centered around increasing the value of Facebook to advertisers, to the point where Facebook representatives have been selling the idea that Timeline is actually about re-conceptualizing users around their consumer preferences, or as they put it, “brands are now an essential part of people’s identities.”

The name itself is cleverly designed to conceal the fact that your profile no longer arranges information chronologically. Yes, things are laid out by year and by month. But, when it comes to what’s displayed to your social circle at any given time, other metrics, including direct payments to Facebook itself, will now influence the ranking and placement of stories. This payola will be a crucial part of the graph rank, the new metric for placement that the social network uses to determine what appears on your profile.

A tale of two systems | Remapping Debate:

American autoworkers are constantly told that high-wage work is an unsustainable relic in the face of a hyper-competitive, globalized marketplace. Apostles of neo-liberal economic theory — both in the public and private sectors — have stressed the message that worker adaptation is necessary to survive. Indeed, Steven Rattner, President Obama’s “car czar” during the restructuring of General Motors and Chrysler in early 2009, spoke last week of his regret that the federal government had not required the United Auto workers to take a wage cut at that time to enhance the competitiveness of those companies, comments similar to those he made in a recently published book (after the outcry created by last week’s remarks, Rattner yesterday backed away from them, though reiterating his view that more “shared sacrifice” would have bolstered American competitiveness).

Governments, too, the globalists have contended, should not think that markets can or should be controlled. As Remapping Debate reported earlier this year in an article about the role of large consulting firms in the promotion of the notion that national policy can and must allow global capital a free hand, McKinsey & Co. was already arguing back in 1994 that “a national government has no choice but to move forward to embrace the global capital market unless it wants to harm its own citizens, its economy and its own purposes.”

But the case of German automakers — BMW, Daimler, and Volkswagen — tells a different story. Each company produces vehicles not only in Germany, but also in “transplant” factories in the U.S. The former are characterized by high wages and high union membership; the U.S. plants pay lower wages and are located in so-called “right-to-work” (anti-union) states.

It turns out that “inevitability” has nothing to do with the differing conditions; the salient difference is that, in Germany, the automakers operate within an environment that precludes a race to the bottom; in the U.S., they operate within an environment that encourages such a race.

Suzanne Morrison: The tour in review:

Promoting a book is . . . well, good holy hell, it's just insane. It's so much fun, and it makes you completely mentally ill. Try talking about yourself non-stop for two months, taking breaks only to switch time zones by plane, train, or automobile, and you've got the idea. It's more overwhelming than I ever would have imagined. After nearly a month on the road, I flew home with about 16 hours to kill before I was scheduled to read at Elliott Bay Book Company. During my time away, I had been on two continents, oscillating between anxiety and exhilaration, enjoying too little sleep and too much of the kind of diet I consume while traveling (whatever protein I can find to avoid passing out; red wine & coffee) and now I arrived at Elliott Bay hoping I would at least remember the name of my own book and my own self, should anyone ask me.