Like Romans Applauding Lions

The Obama Memos: How Washington Remade the President

Ryan Lizza:

Each night, an Obama aide hands the President a binder of documents to review. After his wife goes to bed, at around ten, Obama works in his study, the Treaty Room, on the second floor of the White House residence. President Bush preferred oral briefings; Obama likes his advice in writing. He marks up the decision memos and briefing materials with notes and questions in his neat cursive handwriting. In the morning, each document is returned to his staff secretary. She dates and stamps it—“Back from the OVAL”—and often e-mails an index of the President’s handwritten notes to the relevant senior staff and their assistants. A single Presidential comment might change a legislative strategy, kill the proposal of a well-meaning adviser, or initiate a bureaucratic process to answer a Presidential question.

If the document is a decision memo, its author usually includes options for Obama to check at the end. The formatting is simple, but the decisions are not. As Obama told the Times, early in his first term, Presidents are rarely called on to make the easy choices. “Somebody noted to me that by the time something reaches my desk, that means it’s really hard,” he said. “Because if it were easy, somebody else would have made the decision and somebody else would have solved it.”

The Mercenary Techie Who Troubleshoots for Drug Dealers and Jealous Lovers

Adrian Chen:

With Martin’s system, each crewmember gets a cell phone that operates using a prepaid SIM card; they also get a two-week plastic pill organizer filled with 14 SIM cards where the pills should be. Each SIM card, loaded with $50 worth of airtime, is attached to a different phone number and stores all contacts, text messages and call histories associated with that number, like a removable hard drive. This makes a new SIM card effectively a new phone. Every morning, each crewmember swaps out his phone’s card for the card in next day’s compartment in the pill organizers. After all 14 cards are used, they start over at the first one.

Of course, it would be hugely annoying for a crewmember to have to remember the others’ constantly changing numbers. But he doesn’t have to, thanks to the pill organizers. Martin preprograms each day’s SIM card with the phone numbers the other members have that day. As long they all swap out their cards every day, the contacts in the phones stay in sync. (They never call anyone but each other on the phones.) Crewmembers will remind each other to “take their medicine,” Martin said.

The Smart Way to Play God with Earth's Limited Land

Mark Lynas:

People’s desire to eat more meat as they get more wealthy is so deeply embedded in most cultures (and getting lots of protein may even be a biological impulse inherent in all of us) that it is not something that is amenable to outside influence. As with climate change, the only pragmatic option is to concentrate efforts to fulfil people’s desires and demands in a way that protects natural ecosystems as far as possible – not to try to challenge patterns of consumption per se by insisting that they are unsustainable, even if this appears to be the case in the short term. Such an approach has failed in the past and will continue to fail in the future.

Public transit: Trolleying out the same old arguments

The figure of the passenger waiting for a bus that may or may not ever arrive is a visual cliche. Trolley tracks and electric lines running down the middle of the street, however, are a promise: a line runs here. It may be ten minutes between trolleys, it may be half an hour, but something is going to come down that line and take you where you’re going. The very expense of creating the line tells you: the government has invested too much in this infrastructure for there to be no service. The rails are, literally, an ironclad guarantee.

Let the Robot Drive: The Autonomous Car of the Future Is Here

Tom Vanderbilt:

Ensconced in the buttery leather driver’s seat, I am reminded of Emerson: “Things are in the saddle,” he wrote, “and ride mankind.” The truth is we have gradually been distancing our level of active engagement with the process of operating a car. We automated the shifting of gears. We went from manual steering to power steering and then finally to “drive-by-wire,” in which the mechanical connection between the steering wheel and the tires was replaced by a series of electrical impulses. We gave up paper maps for digital navigation systems. The hazards of parallel parking have been ironed out by ultrasonic sensors. This year, electronic stability control is standard on vehicles sold in the US for the same reason antilock brakes are standard in Europe: Its algorithms can perform better than humans in emergency maneuvering.

Each of these developments generated a brief period of resistance, which faded quickly as the new system began to seem natural. We do not feel as if we have lost something essential. On the contrary, in the same way that it would now feel strange to be in an elevator run by a human operator, it’s the absence of technology that begins to feel uncomfortable. Incrementally, more of the things that we think are innate to the driving experience—steering, braking, accelerating—will be out of our hands.

Apple, America and a Squeezed Middle Class

Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher:

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen, according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere else to go.