True/Slant Network News and Activity

By John F. Wasik

Could you read another report that shows how little Americans have saved for retirement in these troubled times? I know it’s difficult, so I came up with a simple formula for figuring out how much you need.

Pencil in how much money it would take for you to live comfortably for 25 years. Include items that are not covered by insurance – deductibles, travel, home maintenance, taxes. Then project how much Social Security and retirement income you will have by the age in which you cast that not-so-longing last glance at your office door.

The difference between your comfort zone amount and your retirement kitty is the worry gap. That’s the amount you need to make up by working longer, saving aggressively or downsizing your lifestyle.

For millions, the worry gap is a pretty deep crevasse. It’s hard to fill it up with money when your 401(k) is underfunded and the bills keep arriving. In a job-losing, no-raise economy, it looks like a bottomless pit.

A recent survey – one that I always take note of – showed that some two-thirds of those polled in the two lowest pre-retirement income levels will be running short only 10 years into retirement. These folks, as monitored by the annual Employee Benefit Research Institute’s Retirement Readiness study are saving the least for retirement.

Yet even those in the highest-income groups are still going to be facing problems paying for basic expenses and uninsured medical bills. Remember that Medicare has co-pays for hospital and medical services and is in severe fiscal trouble.

The EBRI study also broke down who was most at risk. “Early” boomers (those aged 56-62) had a 47 percent chance of running out of retirement funds. Their younger peers (ages 46-55) and “Generation Xers” (ages 36-45) are about 44 percent at risk.

Where do you stand? If you are going to come up short, there are myriad ways of conquering the worry gap. Here are some options:

• Downsize. Do you expect to live in the same space when you’re older? Can you live in half the square footage? A smaller home or apartment lowers your living costs. A move from a single-family home to a condo, co-op or townhouse can mean lower property taxes, maintenance and financing costs. This makes most sense for empty nesters. The key theme is that the American Dream shouldn’t be tied into the size of your shelter — it should revolve around what you can afford and how much you save.

• Rethink Retirement. For many, completely retreating from the workforce completely is a bad idea. It may lead to poorer health, early death and annoying one’s spouse/partner full time. Being in the workforce longer means continued benefits and the ability to save. You may also get a free match in an employer savings plan. If you suffer from a disabling condition or chronic illness, this is not an option, so look at how you will cover medical expenses.

• Automate Savings. If you’re in a 401(k), sign up for automatic enrollment and increases. If you don’t have to think about contributions, you’ll save more. Even if you don’t have an employer plan, you can set up auto-debits into Individual Retirement Accounts.

• Fund Your Roth. Roth IRAs and 401(k)s are looking good right now. While your contributions are taxed, your withdrawals are not (subject to a few rules). Most retirement plan withdrawals are taxed at full marginal rates. I think income taxes are going up to cover Medicare’s shortfalls, so Roths rule.

The best thing you can do is survey yourself, your family/spouse/partner and take a hard look at your comfort zone. You may have to throw out some preconceptions about retirement, but don’t ignore the possibility that some adjustments may be needed.

John F. Wasik is the author of The Cul-de-Sac Syndrome: Turning Around the Unsustainable American Dream (www.culdesacsyndrome.com. This is from his reuters.com column).

Activity here at True/Slant has wound down, as you know.

(Well, except over at David Rees’s page. He threw an “Empty Hotel Party” earlier this month, which involved tapping the keg in Conor Friedersdorf’s comments.)

The Not-So Private Parts will party on, too, but it will be over at Forbes.com. You can find the NSPP (with archives intact, including your past comments) over at http://blogs.forbes.com/kashmirhill/.

I hope past readers will continue to follow and to comment over there. My latest post is on Facebook’s new location-check-in service, “Places.” Next week, I myself will be checking in to an eco-tent in the Virgin Islands, but I’ll be back in the full swing of blogging after that.

Follow the Not-So Private Parts at Forbes.

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The Austrian take on where we are on the monetary inflation front and what’s next…

Where We Are

The money supply aggregates based on the Austrian definition of the money supply (TMS) slipped in July, with broad TMS2, THE CONTRARIAN TAKE’s preferred money supply metric, down an annualized 2.6%.  However, the more important year over year growth rate on TMS2 was a robust 10.3% in July, down just slightly from June’s 10.6% rate, making this the 19th consecutive month that TMS2 has posted double digit year over year growth.  The last time TMS2 saw this kind of string was during the run-up to the now infamous housing boom-bust, a string that saw 36 consecutive months of double digit growth.  True, not housing bubble worthy, at least not yet, but still a lot of inflation.

As was the case in June, one would not know it by looking at M2.  This mainstream money supply aggregate, the one so closely watched by the deflation “hawks” at the FOMC, but in the opinion of the THE CONTRARIAN TAKE a grossly misleading measure of the money supply, is showing a year over year growth rate of a mere 2%.

To an Austrian, inflation is alive and well.  To the FOMC, mainstream economists and investors alike, deflation is lurking right around the corner.

A Look at TMS2 Internals

Before discussing the prospects for inflation going forward, a look at the TMS2 internals is instructive.

To begin, inflation springs from two basic sources:

The Federal Reserve, via the issuance of currency and covered money substitutes, the combined total popularly termed base money, the bulk of which springs directly from the Federal Reserve’s power to monetize assets by writing checks on itself.

Private banks, via the issuance of uncovered money substitutes, which springs from the ability of those banks to pyramid deposits on top of base money (read create money out of thin air), when making loans or purchasing assets.

With that as background, a look at the chart below quickly reveals who has done the heavy lifting when it comes to inflation; i.e., who’s responsible for that string of double digit growth rates.  Hands down, it’s been the Federal Reserve, as private banking institutions have been generally unwilling to pyramid money substitutes on top of that mountain of base money.

So, with the bulk of the heavy lifting currently in the hands of the Federal Reserve, it should come as no surprise that with the cessation of the Federal Reserve’s asset purchase programs in March, and resultant leveling off of Federal Reserve Credit, money supply growth as measured by TMS2, although still robust, has eased, down from a year over year growth rate of 16.5% in November 2009 to July’s 10.3%.  And to repeat, in the eyes of the FOMC, with their focus on M2, a money supply rate of growth wallowing at a mere 2%.

All that could be changing soon, as it looks like the deflation hawks at the FOMC are about to step up and put a charge into the monetary aggregates.

What’s Next

Let’s begin with the August 10th FOMC press release, bold type THE CONTRARIAN TAKE’s:

Information received since the Federal Open Market Committee met in June indicates that the pace of recovery in output and employment has slowed in recent months. Household spending is increasing gradually, but remains constrained by high unemployment, modest income growth, lower housing wealth, and tight credit. Business spending on equipment and software is rising; however, investment in nonresidential structures continues to be weak and employers remain reluctant to add to payrolls. Housing starts remain at a depressed level. Bank lending has continued to contract. Nonetheless, the Committee anticipates a gradual return to higher levels of resource utilization in a context of price stability, although the pace of economic recovery is likely to be more modest in the near term than had been anticipated.

Measures of underlying inflation have trended lower in recent quarters and, with substantial resource slack continuing to restrain cost pressures and longer-term inflation expectations stable, inflation is likely to be subdued for some time.

The Committee will maintain the target range for the federal funds rate at 0 to 1/4 percent and continues to anticipate that economic conditions, including low rates of resource utilization, subdued inflation trends, and stable inflation expectations, are likely to warrant exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period.

To help support the economic recovery in a context of price stability, the Committee will keep constant the Federal Reserve’s holdings of securities at their current level by reinvesting principal payments from agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in longer-term Treasury securities.  The Committee will continue to roll over the Federal Reserve’s holdings of Treasury securities as they mature.

The Committee will continue to monitor the economic outlook and financial developments and will employ its policy tools as necessary to promote economic recovery and price stability.

First, the obvious.  While it is true that TMS2 has been decelerating, the fact is TMS2 is still running at double digit growth rates. Simply said, there is a lot of inflation around, supported by a still huge Federal Reserve balance sheet. Yet, citing little signs of inflation, likely supported by that 2% M2 growth rate, it is clear that the FOMC has no idea inflation is this robust.

Second, and as a consequence, the FOMC has decided to not only continue to maintain exceptionally low levels of the federal funds rate for an extended period, but to exit its exit strategy, as it will now keep constant the Federal Reserve’s holdings of securities at their current level by reinvesting principal payments from agency debt and agency mortgage-backed securities in longer-term Treasury securities.

Third, fully aware of the banks unwillingness to extend credit (again read create money), the FOMC ends its press release by assuring the market that when it comes to money it is prepared to do the heavy lifting once more, not only by ending its exit strategy, but employing whatever other policy tools it deems useful to insure the economy gets all the inflation it needs.

What are those policy tools?

As St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard, a supposed hawk and voting FOMC member, laid it out recently – Q.E. II, meaning more asset monetization, before as he says the U.S. slips into a Japanese style deflation.

A position Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke supports?  You bet.

Perhaps some short-term weakness still in TMS2, but don’t count on it for too long.  A few more disappointing economic reports, perhaps two or three more ugly employment reports, or maybe another credit event, and THE CONTRARIAN TAKE is thinking another round of Federal Reserve engineered inflation is right around the corner.

This time likely starting  from an already robust rate.

Based on the monetary insights of the Austrian school of economics, THE CONTRARIAN TAKE offers up the latest monthly money supply metrics for the U.S., Eurozone and Japan currency blocks.

To see the entire monthly series offering – the latest money supply data for all three currency blocks, with full historical data and chart work, as well as supporting definitions, sources, notes and references – click here on Austrian Money Supply.

For a quick link to money supply definitions, sources, notes and references, click here on Austrian Money Supply Definitions, Sources, Notes and References.

For the logic behind the formulation of Austrian money supply, read Money Supply Metrics, the Austrian Take.

Everyone loves to go for a picnic in Bhutan.

Lama Drukpa Kuenley, who came to Bhutan from Tibet, was a great Buddhist saint who used the phallus as a 'medium' to subdue and discipline the malevolent spirits.

The young do not feel intruded when the old tag along with packed lunches. The old have no qualms about sharing high school jokes with their grandchildren as the pines and the cypresses shade their walk to the picnic.

They carry packed lunches in wooden tiffins and tea in Chinese-made flasks with pictures of scary dragons. Picnics are for everyone, as the destination is a monastery.

National dress is mandatory in Bhutan to enter religious sites. So, men can be seen in a Scottish-styled knee-length robe (gho) and women wearing a highly colorful and intricately designed ankle-length dress (kira).

If the climb to the monastery is too inaccessible, then the gho and the kira are stuffed into a backpack along with the lunch.

The picnickers wear jeans, jackets and sneakers and listen to Curt Cobain or Britney Spears from their ear plugs. Some mobile phones scream out loud FM stations playing local Dzongkha songs.

Chimi Lhakhang will not seem far away as you climb up to the monastery enjoying the blend of music, nature and the gurgle of River Punatsangchhu.

Tourists who come to this 14th Century monastery, drive up the hill and have to stop by the rice fields. Then it’s a leisurely walk until the complex wood work on the roof become clearer.

But the first time I went there, I took a different route from the northern side. It was a walk up from Punakha, the former capital of Bhutan, till the culvert on the road from were you could see the monastery of the Divine Madman who subdued demons and women with his enormous phallus.

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Then we descend to the banks of the river, walk alongside it till we reach the foot of the monastery hill.

The climb uphill was always punctuated by the stories about the maverick saint, whose blessings the local females and tourists seek to become pregnant. The walk would become smoother with the stories and chants about him.

Here is a smooth prayer, which the saint had apparently taught:

The mind of a Bodhisattva is smooth,
The talk of self-seekers is smoother,
But the thighs of a virgin are smoother than silk:
That is the teaching on the Three Smooth Things.
Women in the group would giggle as the men would further be inspired and continue churning out more outrageous ones.

The divine thunderbolt

Lama Drukpa Kuenley, who came to Bhutan from Tibet, was a great Buddhist saint who used the phallus as a ‘medium’ to subdue and discipline the malevolent spirits. The use of phallus was also intended to free up the social inhibitions enforced by the established values.

The blessing of the phallus kept in the monastery is considered sacred especially to barren women. And once they give birth, the child, male or female, is named after the saint, Kuenley.

The phallus of the saint is drawn on walls of houses across the country and one cannot miss it or avoid it.

Elsewhere it would seem scandalous, but that’s what makes Bhutan different and makes even a picnic spiritually satisfying.

I no longer stay near the temple. Almost 70 kilometers away, I stay in the capital of Bhutan now. But I have been there, a couple of times after on taxis and motorbikes.

In the last week of August, I had the opportunity to talk about the temple to a small group of students pursuing a Masters degree in cultural psychology.

We had a lively discussion for about two hours, but I didn’t recite this centuries old Drukpa Kuenley son:

The bed is the workshop of sex,
And should be wide and comfortable;
The knee is the messenger of sex,
And should be sent up in advance

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Congressional bean counters are unhappy at the State Department’s budget for Iraq. (Look at the Washington Post’s story on State’s budget request here.) As troops draw down to 50,000, the State Department civilian advisers and police trainers are going to lose the security of having quick reaction forces on call and military helicopters and humvees available for getting around the country. The State Department’s solution? Triple the current number of security contractors.

We’re seven years into Iraq and nine years into the Long War, and State Department planners are still treating this new threat environment as a temporary condition. Security contractors are useful if you have to quickly enlarge and then draw down your security force. Contractors are an expensive, but scalable solution in the short term but outrageously expensive in the long term. The State Department has not developed a comprehensive plan to increase its own internal capability to protect its diplomats and advisers.

The threats aren’t going away. Nor is our need to have a civilian presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. And these places aren’t getting safer in the near term.

Obama, in a 2008 campaign speech in Colorado Springs called for the creation of a civilian work force abroad that is as robust and well-funded as the military. The State Department is asking Congress for the money, but doesn’t have a plan to permanently increase its own ability to do the work and protect its workers.

The reality is, even when at some point our commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan draw to a close, there are other places (Yemen? Sudan? Somalia?) in which our diplomats and aid workers will find themselves ordered to work. The State Department can’t keep relying on temporary fixes.

Fast Company just ran an article about advertising guru Alex Bogusky called, "Alex Bogusky Tells All: He Left the World's Hottest Agency to Find His Soul."  He disagreed with some parts of it, and had comments to make on others.  Why lobby for a correction, or get into a tiff with the writer?  Just annotate it yourself.   And he did, on his personal blog, in two parts (Part 1, Part 2). Not only is it really interesting to read in-line comments from the subject of the original piece, his annotations are garneringon some level more interest than the original article – just the first part of his material has way more comments than the Fast Company piece.  The art of the personal.   Perhaps this is a good reason for famous people to have blogs.  Real blogs.  Not just Twitter feeds, and not fancy websites for retail stuff.  Blogs.  Now when someone writes about you, you can tell your side of the story, immediately, in your voice, and also host a discussion about the discussion.  In fact, pulling the discussion away from the publication that got it wrong to your own personal media property.  Innovative stuff.  

Posted via email from Mark’s Cheeky Posterous

With True/Slant folding up shop, I continue to be found every day under the initials M.S. at the Economist’s blog on American politics, Democracy in America. For posts that don’t fit in that venue, I’m back at my old blog, Accumulating Peripherals.

So that’s where you can find me if you want to tell me what an idiot I am. Enjoy!

Let’s party! Burn everything.

Responding to an argument I made over at the Economist’s Democracy in America blog, Kevin Drum says he’s not so optimistic that the Iraq-war disaster has made America unlikely to engage in foreign military adventures for the next few decades.

We left Vietnam in 1975 and were supposedly so scarred that we’d never do anything like that again in any of our lifetimes. Your definition of “like that” might be different from mine, but a mere five years later we dipped our toe into Afghanistan and then, over the next 30 years, intervened militarily in Grenada, Nicaragua, Panama, Iraq, Somalia, Haiti, Kosovo, Afghanistan 2.0, and Iraq 2.0. In other words, once every three or four years, which is about as frequently as we did this kind of thing before Vietnam. Some scarring, eh? Right now it looks like we’ve learned a lesson because, aside from a bit of chest beating from frustrated neocons over Iran, no one’s banging the war drums. But no one was banging the war drums in 1976, either, which is why it looked like maybe we were going to enter a new era back then too. Then the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and suddenly everything changed. So let’s not declare a victory for common sense in foreign policy just yet. I’ll believe things have changed when something actually happens overseas, a president tries to build support for intervention, and Congress and the public—including Joe Klein and me—balk. That will mean things have changed.

I think Kevin is basically right about this, but would clarify a couple of things. First, what I meant wasn’t that the US has been dissuaded from engaging in any kind of foreign military shenanigans for the foreseeable future. I was really thinking of the particular brand of nuttiness encapsulated in the invasion of Iraq: an unprovoked “pre-emptive” attack predicated on the idea that our troops will be welcomed with flowers, democracy will break out all over, and we’ll be able to bring the troops home fairly quickly at a modest cost, leaving behind a pro-American, pro-Israeli government. I think that kind of madness is off the table for quite some time. Somewhat more broadly, I doubt we’ll see any unprovoked American attacks on other countries, regardless of how “threatening” they seem, unless perhaps Cuba tries to buy a nuke from North Korea or something.

But I don’t think it impossible that we might see other kinds of limited military interventions, and I think some of the examples Kevin provides are illustrative of the kinds that may still occur. As he says, the US got out of Vietnam in 1973, and got into Afghanistan by 1980. But we intervened in Afghanistan by supporting local tribal-religious rebels in the hopes of handing the Soviets their own Vietnam. We weren’t trying to establish anything in particular in Afghanistan; we didn’t really care what happened to the country so long as it made things hard for Moscow. And, by its own lights, that strategy worked. In hindsight, Afghanistan would probably be better off today if the Russians had won, but the Afghan quagmire was among the reasons why the Gorbachev faction decided to forego military intervention as a means of quelling anti-communist political turmoil in the near abroad, so a Soviet victory in Afghanistan might have meant no velvet revolutions in Eastern Europe in 1989. Anyway, the point is, it’s not at all hard to imagine that the US might use limited force or special forces to back local allies against a foreign adversary in some third country in the near future.

This would be similar to the model of US intervention in Nicaragua and El Salvador, which Kevin also cites. And again, one thing to note about the US military efforts in Nicaragua and El Salvador is that, by their own lights, they worked. Certainly, they were bloody and unconscionable messes that involved American support for terrorism and war crimes, but the aim was to crush left-wing Soviet-backed authoritarian agrarian-socialist movements in favor of right-wing US-backed authoritarian plutocratic pseudo-democratic regimes, and that aim was achieved.

You could get deeper into the reasons why US interventions in Central America, and later in the Balkans, more or less achieved their own aims at an acceptable cost, while the interventions in Vietnam and Iraq (and, probably, Afghanistan) failed, at unacceptable cost. I would concentrate pretty heavily on proximity and zones of influence: Central America is the US’s restive backyard, the Balkans are Europe’s, and these things make a very big difference. But the main point is that I think the US won’t be cooking up excuses to launch pre-emptive attacks on supposed rogue states in the next couple of decades. Whether the US will send in Green Berets to back, oh, Christian rebels in southern Sudan, or whatever, is another question.

Contrary to the popular consensus, monetary inflation is alive and well and quite possibly set to accelerate.

The Austrian take on where we are and what’s next…

Where We Are

The money supply aggregates based on the Austrian definition of the money supply (TMS) surged in June, up 15.6% on narrow TMS1 and 8.4% on the broader TMS2.   Not too shabby.  And although TMS1 is only showing a 2.4% rate of growth year on year, the more important TMS2 metric, the metric THE CONTRARIAN TAKE views as the best overall measure of the money supply in the U.S., is growing at a very robust 10.6 % rate.

In other words, inflation is alive and well.

One would not know it by looking at M2, would they?  This mainstream money supply aggregate, the one so closely watched by the Federal Reserve, mainstream economists and investors alike, but in the opinion of the THE CONTRARIAN TAKE a grossly misleading measure of the money supply, is showing a year over year growth rate of a mere 1.9%.

Having said this, the growth in bothTMS1 and TMS2 has been decelerating of late, reflecting a Federal Reserve balance sheet that has clearly plateaued, particularly since March when the Federal Reserve ended its mortgage asset purchase program.

So then-  yes we have double digit TMS2, but where to from here.

What’s Next

First, lets start with the obvious.  While it is true that the Austrian money supply aggregates have been decelerating, the fact is the all important TMS2 measure is still running at double digit growth rates, and at growth rates still above the median of the last 10 years.  Simply said, there is a lot of inflation around, supported by a still huge Federal Reserve balance sheet.

What’s more, and more importantly, the prospects for even more inflation seem to be growing by the minute.  Indeed, given the Federal Reserve’s preoccupation with the relatively subdued nature of the popular price indices, the persistently high unemployment rate and the continued weakness in housing juxtaposed against the anemic growth in that faulty M2 metric, one could make a strong case that the next big move in TMS will be up.

The reason?

A FOMC worried silly about what all these metrics suggest; namely, brewing deflation, prompting the Federal Reserve to begin expanding its balance sheet in earnest once more.

Witness St. Louis Federal Reserve President James Bullard, a supposed hawk and voting FOMC member, calling for Q.E. II, before as he says the U.S. slips into a Japanese style deflation.

A position Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke supports, you ask?  You bet.  One only has to read Bernanke’s account of the Japanese experience and what the Bank of Japan should have done about it to be assured that Bernanke is on side with Bullard – lock, stock and barrel.  Here it is in Bernanke’s own words.

Another round of Q.E. and another surge in TMS from its already high level, the CONTRARIAN TAKE surmises, may soon become fact.  You see, deflation hawk extraordinaire Chairman Bernanke and his new accomplice St. Louis President James Bullard will not for long be the only deflation-fearing, inflation-bent members of the FOMC.  Three new Obama-picked, and similarly inflation-bent Federal Reserve Board nominees, all fretting about those very same metrics, are about to be become permanent members of the FOMC – Dr. Janet L. Yellen, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, Dr. Peter Diamond, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Sarah Bloom Raskin, commissioner of financial regulation for the state of Maryland.

Perhaps a bit more short-term weakness in TMS to come, but don’t count on it for too  long.  At TMS2 10.6% and counting, another round of Federal Reserve engineered inflation is likely to put a charge into the monetary aggregates.

Based on the monetary insights of the Austrian school of economics, THE CONTRARIAN TAKE offers up the latest monthly money supply metrics for the U.S., Eurozone and Japan currency blocks.

To see the entire monthly series offering – the latest money supply data for all three currency blocks, with full historical data and chart work, as well as supporting definitions, sources, notes and references – click here on Austrian Money Supply.

For a quick link to money supply definitions, sources, notes and references, click here on Austrian Money Supply Definitions, Sources, Notes and References.

For the logic behind the formulation of Austrian money supply, read Money Supply Metrics, the Austrian Take.

“No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money,” Dr. Johnson famously observed.

By the great wit’s reckoning, then, Your Author is deadwood from the neck up, since the cultural capital I’ve amassed through True/Slant, rubbing elbows with writers like Susannah Breslin and Matt Taibbi and learning from smart editors like Coates Bateman and Michael Roston, was easily the lion’s share of what made writing for the site so rewarding. That, and the rare opportunity to hook my writing desk up to an arena-strength P.A. system and rattle the Web with a 3,000-word post on whatever wild surmise or obscure obsession crossed my mind, commercial considerations be damned. Truth to tell, True/Slant’s monthly wage—like the fees most publications pay in an economy where downsized, overeducated hacks are in no short supply—is a token honorarium, compared to the glory days of freelance writing.

Obviously, those days are gone, maybe forever. Journalism and book publishing—reliable roads out of financial perdition for generations of writers, Dr. Johnson among them—are big, smoking, financial holes. Writers who’ve spent decades honing their craft, deepening their knowledge of their beats, and burnishing their brands are out on the pavement, cobbling together minimum-wage incomes from the slaughterhouse sweepings of freelance journalism, adjunct teaching, maybe even advertising copywriting (if selling their deathless prose, by the yard, to Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce doesn’t violate some Adbusters-approved code of conduct). More and more Web publications pay nothing but street cred, schwag, and name recognition on a nano scale—crack rock for dilettantes, but a death knell for anyone who dreams of earning a living in the scribbling trade. Of those sites that do pay, too many are word farms where bloggers chase bonuses pegged to pageviews, using search engine-optimized headlines to goose their clickthrough rates. “Tracking how many people view articles, and then rewarding—or shaming—writers based on those results has become increasingly common in old and new media newsrooms,” wrote New York Times reporter Jeremy Peters in a recent Times article that portrayed sites like Politico.com as sweatshops (“In a World of Online News, Burnout Starts Younger,” July 18). A reported story on PBS’s “Mediashift” (“Writers Explain What It’s Like Toiling on the Content Farm,” July 21) quoted a disaffected former “content creator” for Demand Media’s eHow.com, a how-to site whose freelance minions base their instructional articles on ideas generated by algorithm:

“I was completely aware that I was writing crap,” she said. ‘I was like, ‘I hope to God people don’t read my advice on how to make gin at home because they’ll probably poison themselves.’”

‘Never trust anything you read on eHow.com,’ she said…”

In the wake of Forbes’s acquisition of True/Slant and T/S founder Lewis D’Vorkin’s ascent to the status of chief product officer at Forbes, The New York Observer ran a profile of D’Vorkin (“‘Darth D’Vorkin’Arrives at Forbes,” July 13) that I, as one who won’t be toiling in the fields of Forbes, Noted With Interest, as writers to The New York Times letters column like to say.

According to Observer reporter Zeke Turner, D’Vorkin

“thinks of stories as product. And the most efficient way to churn out and make money from this product is to create a more efficient editing process with fewer layers. Moving forward, when I look at an operation like Forbes, I look at a mixture of a full-time staff base and hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of freelance contributors. [...] That’s what we did at True/Slant…We let the reporter self-publish—boom! We’re working through that at Forbes: How do you create a less layered process at the magazine? [...] The editing process online is vastly different than in print…There is a fit and finish that you must have in print. Online, it’s not about fit and finish; it’s about the flow of information, the updates of information. It’s about relevance and timeliness. It’s not about craftsmanship. Quality online does not equal craftsmanship. In print, quality does equal craftsmanship.”

Let me say that I wish D’Vorkin, my editors, my former colleagues, and True/Slant every success. The thought that I might be plucked from the ranks of T/S to join the few, the proud at Forbes never entered my laughably unForbes-ian mind. I was a desultory True/Slant-er, posting infrequently and at inordinate length, on topics that were sometimes topical but often not. I’m not immune to newsiness, but refuse to be stampeded trendward, along with the rest of the goggle-eyed media herd.

In his essay “The Long Goodbye: Trying To See Past The Increasingly Harrowing Plight Of Longform Nonfiction In General Interest Magazines,” Lawrence Weschler writes,

“The magazine universe today is increasingly niche-slotted, peg-driven and attention-squeezed. There may be more magazines than ever before, but commercial forces appear to be enforcing an evermore frantic fragmentation of the readerly market. Surfers and advertisers interested in reaching surfers may have a half-dozen venues to choose from, but one is much less likely to find a beautiful extended surfing rhapsody exposed to a general audience owing simply to some writer’s glorious quirky passion. [...] Readers, after all, bore so easily nowadays—or, at any rate, editors seem convinced that they do; or maybe it’s just that the editors, squeezed by increasingly convulsive demands on their own time, can no longer themselves sustain such leisurely spans of attention.”

The unspoken goal, in too much American journalism, is not to tell people what they don’t know, or never even imagined they might want to know, but to tell people what they already know, since it logically follows that anything they don’t know is too weird to survive in what we Americans, in our inimitably irony-free way, like to call the Marketplace of Ideas. It’s this failure of editorial nerve, driven by a cringing fear of scaring off advertisers, that has rendered largely extinct the sort of narrative nonfiction Weschler elsewhere describes as “pieces you might curl into, of an evening, having no prior notion that you could even become remotely interested in their subject, and through the sheer narrative energy of the writing, you’d find yourself becoming caught and then held, completely immersed, lost to the world for hours at a time…”

And one must tell people things they already know in language they already use—PowerPoint prose that is easily bullet-ized in the reader’s mind. Like William F. Buckley, I never scrupled at sending my reader to the OED if a sesquipedalian word was the best word for the job. Nor did I feel any obligation to smilingly submit to the intellectual straitjacket that constrains too much American journalism, namely, the presumption that a writer’s allusions and references should be bounded by the cultural literacy of Kim Kardashian.

Which isn’t to say my posts were all unalloyed brilliance. Some flew high; some were big, fat piles of fail. You’ll be the judge of which was which. My point is simply that, like Weschler in his essays, I presumed in my True/Slant posts a reader who craves wonder and laughter; who isn’t reflexively hostile to having her mind stretched or the revealed truths of his ideological niche or demographic comfort zone challenged. To those of you who wandered the forking paths of longform posts that were equal parts nonfiction hedge maze and poetic topiary, I’m immensely grateful for your generosity with your time, and with your comment-thread wisdom.

That said, I blithely disregarded the received wisdom about what works on the Web, and what markets smile on, and thus had no illusions about my fitness for the new order when regime change came to True/Slant.

Consequently, the only dog I have in this fight is a philosophical one. I agree with D’Vorkin that any writer who puts pen to paper for money is self-evidently turning out “product.” But that isn’t all he’s doing. Deep down inside, most writers, even the most cynical grub-street hacks, flatter themselves that they’re Speaking Truth to Power or, hell, spinning a good yarn, at least.

The mark of a real writer is that she cares deeply about literary joinery, about keeping the lines of her prose plumb. That’s what makes writers writers: to them, prose isn’t just some Platonic vessel for serving up content; they care about words. Any chief product officer who says “quality online does not equal craftsmanship” is channeling the utilitarian gospel of the managerial class, an instrumentalist vision of journalism that presumes writing, online, is just a turkey baster for injecting content into the user’s brain. Undeniably, that sort of writing is everywhere, online, from here to eHow.com, an algal bloom of brain-cloggingly awful prose. It results in reader die-off, in the long run, because bloggers posting in a workplace culture that dismisses the importance of craft will tend, unsurprisingly, to turn out stories that aren’t well-crafted, and what isn’t well-crafted isn’t well-read.

At True/Slant, D’Vorkin told Observer reporter Zeke Turner, “We let the reporter self-publish—boom! We’re working through that at Forbes: How do you create a less layered process at the magazine?” From a managerial perspective, lowering overhead by doing away with the Middlemen Formerly Known as Editors makes spreadsheet sense. But who minds the store? Self-editing and self-publishing are fine if you’re Matt Taibbi or Susannah Breslin, reporters who roll over in their sleep and snore out perfectly parsed sentences and triple-sourced statements of fact. But what about the guy in the next cubicle, quietly sculpting the equivalent, in obsessive prose, of Richard Dreyfuss’s scale model of Devils Tower National Monument in Wyoming? Who’s watching him?

It gets worse. The Observer reporter quotes D’Vorkin’s observation that “the most efficient way to churn [stories] out and make money from this product is to create a more efficient editing process with fewer layers.” Translated from the original managerial-ese, this means: very little editorial oversight, if any. In the Observer article, there’s talk of “screening” the “hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands” (D’Vorkin’s words) of what the reporter says will be Forbes/Slant’s “amateur ‘topic-specific credible’ journalists,” but that phrasing suggests that the vetting will be limited to the hiring process, not daily editing, a concession to the Darwinian realities of the recession-hammered news business that a Forbes staffer quoted in the Observer article seems to concede when s/he acknowledges that some Forbes/Slant bloggers “will be stock-touts, and we know that, and Lewis knows that, but he says that’s a cost of the model.”

Ain’t no facepalm big enough to convey the brain-hurting wrongheadedness of this strategy. Any of my journalism students at NYU would have spotted this, from a mile off, as an ethical fail. The FDA may have made its troubled peace, in regulatory terms, with the number of fly eggs and rodent excreta it permits in the mass-produced Frankenfood brought to you by agribusiness, but journalism doesn’t work that way: turning a blind eye on one “stock-tout,” if you’re a business site, tells consumers whose market decisions depend on the impartial truth of your data that some of it may be rotten with bias. And if any of it is, the consumer has to operate as if all of it is, which sort of gives your credibility the Mussolini headkick.

I could be wrong. D’Vorkin may cherry-pick a staff of lungingly aggressive reporters whose prose swings harder than Thompson or Talese, and Bateman and Roston may keep a close watch on their journalistic ethics and factual accuracy. I’ll happily eat crow on that count, because journalism could use a few more success stories right about now, and any market model that lifts off the launchpad is a victory for all of us, even Your Author.

But one thing is certain, and sad: the grim insistence that writers of every genre prioritize, above all else, the demands of chief product officers with one eye on the balance sheet and the other on the stock ticker guarantees that beguiling “pieces you might curl into, of an evening, having no prior notion that you could even become remotely interested in their subject” will be fewer and further between, and wonder in shorter supply. Just when we need it most, the act of thinking aloud in public will fall victim to cost-benefit analyses, condemned for the sublime uselessness that makes it so useful.

My time here has come to an end. Actually, it did so two days ago, but I didn’t have the time at the moment to put up a proper farewell post. I wanted to say something fitting, not rush out a jumble of words in the spaces between fleeting moments of time — between re-wiring the lights in my garage, eating breakfast with my four-year-old son, or in the midst of an increasingly rare lazy afternoon with my wife.

To see True/Slant vanish into the ether of the Internet is a shame. And I would be fooling myself if I said that I won’t miss the thriving and intelligent online destination it had become. The people that I met here — both contributors and commentors — reminded me, on a regular basis, that people are surprising and insightful. These are details I often overlook given my rather cynical worldview. But sadly, all things end, especially in publishing.

For those interested in keeping up with me, please visit my website over at Annals of Americus. I welcome your comments and continued discussion. Annals has been up and running since January, and is filled with a catalog of writings — from personal essays and daily notes, to commentary and reporting. The site is updated daily. Last week I launched an email newsletter through the site (view it here). Please feel free to sign up if you’d like to receive updates. Also, you can follow me on Twitter or add me as a friend on Facebook. And starting this week, I begin my tenure at Thought Catalog. So please stay tuned.

Thanks to Coates Bateman, Michael Roston, Andrea Spiegel, Kashmir Hill, and Chloe Angyal for all of their help this past year. I joined True/Slant in May of 2009 (brought on by Kash), and the experience has been, by far, one of the most positive I’ve had as a writer. Best wishes to all.

It’s no fresh news that True/Slant was bought by Forbes Media a few months ago. That purchase, though unclear at the beginning, pretty much intuitively meant the end of True/Slant. It meant the end of a great idea in independent journalism and the end of a community, which truly felt like a community of professional writers who had been invited to gather in one place to write about what they liked to write about most. It was a rare thing in today’s journalism world, total editorial freedom. And I think this freedom, when granted, births some of the best writing out there. The writers of True/Slant were able to use their minds, to investigate, to invest creativity into the blog posts we put up on our sites. It all worked, and under the thoughtful guidance of those running the start-up, we did pretty well, each month increasing our visits and garnering more and more comments from readers.

The best part for us writers of course is that True/Slant also paid us each month to write what we wanted to write. Financial responsibility in today’s writing world is virtually unheard of, but we were paid and paid on time. Though the amount was nothing  to write home about, and nothing to buy a home with for that matter, it did help. It was enough of a boost each month to remind me that writing as a craft, journalism as a craft, can be rewarded in the current marketplace. And it was a reminder that when writers are paid to do their work, the quality of the work survives as well.

But that seems like history now. It was an idea, a great one that worked for a time. As True/Slant transition/expires, I will not be one of the writers headed to Forbes. Forbes, alas, does not have much of a need to hire an arts and culture writer and, as an arts and culture writer, I am not sure Forbes would be the right kind of place for me either.  In signing off from The Culture Spoke I want to thank everyone who read this blog, those who stumbled upon it while Googling something they heard about, and those who read it with any kind of regularity.  All readers are welcome readers in this day and age. I am not sure where my digital writing career goes from here, but I will continue to pursue writing essays as a freelance journalist, and I will continue to write fiction. Thanks again, and thanks to everyone at True/Slant who made this happen. It was great while it lasted.

What's the deal with cured meat? It only seems to be available after dark. All these lovely plates of salumi and other delicacies, served with mustard and wine and tiny cornichons… But why can't I get any for breakfast?  When I travel it's always the same hotel room service for breakfast – bacon, sausage, and ham.  And not even fancy versions of these.  How about scambling me up some eggs with some of those delicacies you're saving for your evening customers? Sadly, I have to check out by 11am.   Well, I took this up with Chef Richard at Charlie Palmer in the very lovely Joule Hotel (Starwood Hotels) in Dallas, TX.  He cures the meats himself and takes great pride in it.  And they're good – I ate a whole plate. But why can't I have more tomorrow morning before I leave, I asked.  Chef Richard was inspired by our conversation – and did himself proud with a special Pastrami Benedict with savory corncake and red pepper hollandaise sauce.  Delicious (see photo, next to my copy of Dallas Modern Luxury magazine).   A couple lessons here.   One, business travelers often consider breakfast the most important meal of the day while traveling. Basic hotel chains have figured this out, offering free buffet breakfast with a room or different variations on that theme. But frankly, a lot of high end hotels have fairly boring breakfasts. Think about adding cured meats to the in room breakfast dining repertoire!   Two, this is just great customer service. Chef Richard didn't have to do this; he could have just had a nice conversation and went about his way that night. But instead he was back the next morning writing a personal note to send up with my food. This is the kind of thing travelers remember when visiting a big city with many "good" hotels to choose from. I know where I'm staying – and eating – next time I'm in Dallas: Charlie Palmer and The Joule Hotel.

Posted via email from Mark’s Cheeky Posterous

I only ask because, well, here I am, here it is. Here we all are. The curtains haven’t quite come down it would appear.

I’m a little late to the good-bye party. It’s been really great writing here these past months – nearly a year I think, but I’ve lost track. The whole crew here – staff, but also other writers – has been extremely kind, helpful, welcoming and it’s been a neat experience. It’s a shame the project has come to an end. I hope others like it spring up and flourish. I hope to work with Coates and the True/Slant staff on whatever future projects they pursue with Forbes, though – like everyone else around here – I really have no idea what the plan is. I remain hopeful that good things will grow from the seeds planted here.

If you’ve enjoyed reading me here, you can also read me and a number of other excellent writers at my primary digs, The League of Ordinary Gentlemen. I also write at the Washington Examiner’s Opinion Zone blog. Or you can follow me on Twitter. Meanwhile – and for now at least – I will have this blog archived here, and my continue it there as well. So lots of places to find me if that’s something you’re interested in doing.

Thanks to all the regular readers and commenters who make this all that much more fun. Your insights, scathing criticisms, and witty banter were all very much appreciated. Come comment and berate me at these other places as well. Keeps me honest.

Adieu, adieu. Parting is such sweet sorrow.

Today’s video break is an insanely cute (or maybe cutely insane) animated short by L’Orange Gutan.

Crazed wingnut blogger Pamela “Shrieking Harpy” Geller has a book out, which must have been a real chore for the unlucky editor who had to correct her misspellings and tortured grammar. Elon Green has a look at this work of fiction (co-written with her fellow anti-Muslim fascist sympathizer, Robert Spencer), and asks the relevant question: Why Is Simon & Schuster Spreading the Wild Conspiracy Theories of an Unhinged Islamophobic Blogger?

Threshold Editions, the imprint upon which megapublisher Simon & Schuster dumps books it’s too ashamed to release under its own name, made a ballsy bet: that Pamela Geller — a deeply unhinged blogger who famously claimed that Barack Obama is the bastard child of Malcolm X — has an audience sufficiently large and loyal to justify a six-figure advance. Makes sense! If MSNBC, Fox, NBC and CNN have Geller on, the pool of inbred, 50-something Tea Partiers desirous of an icky melange of silicone and Tom Tancredo talking points cannot possibly have gone dry. Right?

Mary Matalin, the head of the imprint, is making a play for a crowd that can’t spell “niggar” but won’t mind reading a book about a man they see as just that — so long as it confirms their half-baked theories. What better way to siphon off Tea Partiers than through a lady who cheerfully befouls the Upper West Side with a toxic brew of rotating hatreds? On days ending in Y this includes Muslims (“The motor of this presidency is submission to Islam”), transgenders (“Does [Obama] chill with anyone who is normal?”) and health care reform — or as she calls it, “rape.”

This is bull goose loony territory, but it happens to be the language of modern conservatism. William Buckley’s body had not been in the ground 10 minutes before the National Review embraced Geller, happily laundering stories they wouldn’t publicly touch with a 10-foot noose. Here’s how it works: A couple weeks prior to the last presidential election, a Review editor linked to Geller’s blog and asked, “What is the deal with Obama’s birth certificate and citizenship status?” (Sort of like Seinfeld, but Catholic!) This, in turn, gave the magazine license to spend 4,000 words answering the question.

In another era, Pam Geller would be rotting away on Blackwell’s Island, counting cockroaches. Instead, the former associate publisher of the New York Observer managed to parlay her ability to find common cause with fascists and mid-level neo-Nazis, and her overt hatred of Muslims and liberal Jews, into an asset instead of a disqualifier. For Geller, a Borscht Belt Ann Coulter shtick is profitable.

Read the whole thing…

Never think of a list post on the day you are out from the site you were writing. From day one, start mulling all story ideas as lists of three, seven,  ten, twelve,best, worst etc…

Are you an exotic writer? Non-American ‘isms’ that can grab eyeballs from your remote locations include Communism(Marxism), Buddhism, Talibanism etc…

If you are writing from queer corners of the third world pepper your posts with names that resemble The Dalai Lama or of any beard-donning-gun-totting Khan or Mohammed.

Even if you do not have any porn-related subject to write you can co(i)n new third-world themes as poverty porn, ethnic porn, religious porn etc…

Season your writing with outbursts like fuck and asshole: I assure, you won’t have to quit all fucked-up. (btw I am using the words for the first and the last time on T/S. But I have unsuccessfully attempted sex-related posts)

When you start writing for a site, confirm whether you would be paid or not. If you are complacent, you will end up not writing enough like me (and becoming lazy and not focusing on increasing  number of views or comments) or will remain unpaid till you are graciously kicked out.

The 1 H that follows the 5 Ws is hits not how.

You can follow me at:

Read my old T/S posts and upcoming pieces at http://grossblogalhappiness.wordpress.com/

I twitter regularly http://twitter.com/abytharakan

I am on facebook http://www.facebook.com/abytharakan

I am a consultant with http://www.businessbhutan.bt/:  the only financial newspaper from Himalayan Bhutan, the world’s youngest democracy.

Very soon I will start writing for http://futurechallenges.org/web/guest/about

Acknowledgments: For all wonderful friends in Bhutan and elsewhere who read my T/S page, for Coates who gave me a space here.

This could be my next gig, you never know. Image via Wikipedia

I’ve learned a great deal at my time here on True/Slant – mostly that blogging is damn hard work and you’ve got to be passionate about your subject or it’s not worth it for either the reader or the writer. That said, I will continue to write about the topics I am most passionate about – living well after 40, sex, relationships, parenting, and promoting a healthy self-image for women of all ages – all served up with a dash of humor and pinch of spice.

You can find me at my blog Forty Fabulous (www.fortyfabulous.blogspot.com) and at Makeitbetter.net where, among other things, I write the monthly “Sex and the Suburbs” column. If you’re interested, follow these links to my recent pieces on Staying Sexy at Every Age and how to deal with a Sexless Marriage. And feel free to follow me on twitter.

I still have high hopes for becoming the next Oprah, even though my audition video only gained a handful of votes. Perhaps I’m better suited to  The View.

Thanks to everyone at True/Slant for allowing me to be part of such a wonderful group of writers. It has been an honor. Good luck to all.