April 29, 2016--Apple of Discord

Apple, Inc. by capitalization is the world's largest corporation valued at more than $700 billion.

Earlier this week they reported second quarter earnings.

For the first time in 13 years they not only failed to meet earnings projections but saw revenue fall in comparison to last year's Q2 income by nearly $7.5 billion. Down to $50.6 billion from $58.0.

Third quarter projections are looking even bleaker.

What's going on?

Mainly problems with iPhones, the company's cashest cow since it was first released in 2007.

This past quarter iPhone sales were down by 10 million units--51.2 compared to 61.2 in 2015.

This may be cyclical--people holding on to their current phones in anticipation of rushing to line up to buy the new model later this year. Or, it may be that the air is beginning to come out of Apple's balloon. I almost said bubble.

Since Steve Jobs died, new products have all been pretty much failures. The Apple watch, for example. Anyone know somebody who owns one? I don't.

The Apple we know is still Job's company. What has been and still is profitable are all things designed and marketed during his brilliant time heading the company--iPods, iPads, MacBooks, tablets, and of course iPhones. All the ongoing success derives from the momentum he imparted to the company.

Further, Apple has been the go-to place for consumer electronics in large part because its products have been aesthetically beautiful and, more important, "cool."

Thus Apple is vulnerable because so much of its success depends on its continuing to be convey status.

This could evanesce in a hurry if someone else's smart phone--the Samsung android, for example--is viewed to be cool.

Cool, by definition, doesn't last forever. In fact, iPhones have been most desirable for much longer than the past history of cool things might suggest.

As soon as the kids and hip-hoppers move on to whatever becomes the "latest," that will be when we really will see Apple's earnings and stock value fall off a cliff. This is apparently already happening in China.

If I had any Apple stock, I'd get out of it right now.

April 22, 2015--That's the Way It Was

Little remembered, Roone Arledge did more to shape contemporary TV network sports and news than anyone better known.

From 1968 through 1986 he was president of ABC Sports. In that role, to personalize coverage, especially for women, he was responsible for adding "up-close-and-personal" packages to ABC's airing of the Olympics games and, for an almost broader audience turned ABC's Wide World of Sports into a mega-hit that weekly featured everything even quasi-sports-like, including barrel jumping from various hotels' ice rinks in the Borscht Belt, cliff diving from Acapulco, and demolition derbies.

With all that success ABC executives in 1977 made him the network's president for news and the rest is history.

Up to that point on places such as the Tiffany Network (CBS) the news was presented as serious business--wars, famines, revolutions, presidential nominating conventions (wall-to-wall coverage was the norm), and the occasional natural disaster. With the understanding that to deserve air time the disasters had to measure at least 7.0 on the Richter Scale. No mudslides in Malibu could pass the Walter-Cronkite test.

So when Cronkite signed off each night with, "And that's the way it is," that was the way it was.

Cut to 2015.

We live in a very different news universe where what is "reported" weeknights on the three network news shows is no longer that much about news. And no longer appeals to a mass audience. Particularly does not appeal to young viewers. Thus all the Lavitra commercials.

Almost as many get their news from Jon Stewart on the Daily Show as from Scott Pelley on CBS. And many more than that get their news on line via so-called mobile devices.

Network news mavens have figured out that all day long people with smart phones check their favorite websites to see what's happening and when doing that tend to click on things that offer more visual than written content.

So, last week there was a lot of exciting footage, mainly shot by bystanders with iPhones, of out-of-control police that went viral. From video of a policeman in Arizona careening intentionally onto the sidewalk to run down someone fleeing from the police and other repeatable footage of a 73-year-old police volunteer in Oklahoma who shot and killed an alleged suspect with what he thought was his taser, mistaking his service revolver for it.

And just the other day there were vivid images of a young black man being subdued, shackled, and tossed into a police van by three white cops where he may or may not have had his spine snapped, which in turn led to his death.

Knowing all these images, and thus "stories," had been in wide circulation long before 6:30 P.M. and knowing that their residual Baby-Boomer audiences do not search the Web all day seeking the amusing and lurid, the networks began their broadcasts and filled half their time with these videos. In effect to help their aging, tech-phobe viewers catch up with what the more wired had been looking in on through the day.

So this is what network news has devolved to--showcases for viral videos for the unplugged.

On ABC, where news as entertainment was invented and reached its apotheosis, where no distinction is made between fun, the grotesque, or the urgent, David Muir is the least credentialed, most unabashedly hunky, blow-dried "anchor" of all time. On his show one day last week (and "show" it is), though Barack Obama was meeting in Panama City with other North and South American leaders, we saw the police videos over and over again--in slower-and-slower slow motion and closer-and-closer detail (including the pop shot--the police cruiser slamming into the fleeing suspect) there was literally no mention of the historic meeting between Obama and Cuban president Raul Castro.

December 2, 2014--Dumb Phone

I can finally come in from the cold thanks to Anna Wintour and Rihanna.

We sometimes go to places frequented by young people in part to get away from all the serious and tragic things that accrue to people our age. OK, my age. To soak up an alternate view of the world and my place in it. The existentials are working against me and I crave to know what the young people at The Smile are thinking and how they see the trajectory of their lives.

We are viable there, I think, in part because we're eager to listen and learn and because we represent an alternative view for them. They too are searching. So we have something to share.

Like so many of my generation I am fascinated and a little horrified by all the iPhoning. Feeling left out and even excluded, this is one of the things I've been eager to learn about. Why all the young people we know and see on the streets and in cafes are so relentlessly and ubiquitously tethered to their smart phone. What are they up to, sending back and forth, texting even as they step onto the elevator in our building early mornings, while walking up and down Broadway, while having coffee or meals with friends?

I admit to leaning in close on the elevator, looking over shoulders in an attempt to read what's going on on those luminescent screens. Glimpses suggest mindlessness, not anything personally or professional important or urgent.

Part of my alienation is self-imposed. I know my place, my generation.

And I know about the cell phone phone in my pocket.

It's a flip, dumb-phone with no Internet capacity and doesn't even allow me to send simple texts--assuming I ever wanted to. And so I keep it hidden in my pocket as out-of-sight as my young friends seem eager to have their smart-phones on display.

But then I learned from Michael Musto, self-described "night-life chronicler" for the New York Times that very with-it, very cool people such as Anna Wintour, Rihanna, and Scarlett Johansson have been spotted with old clamshell style phones like mine.

So the other day, after assurances by chronicler Musto, at The Smile, having breakfast with a couple of Millennium friends, without feeling dated and old, I put my flip-phone out on the table, side-by-side with their iPhones and, since they are more than with-it, they smiled in recognition of my new-found coolness. Or, more likely, maybe to humor me. They are that nice and compassionate.

I've been wondering about Scarlett and Anna and Rhianna. What's the story with them?

Maybe they don't want to be thought of as smart-phone zombies, the sort I see in my elevator or those in a hypnotic state as they navigate the cyber-Monday crowds on Broadway. Maybe they want to signal that they are too important to be all that accessible--or feel the need to be such--even to each other. To be tethered to a mobile device. Or, for that matter, to anything.

November 5, 2014--The New Mediocre

As if we didn't have enough to complain about. We need to make it worse?

That's just what Vanessa Friedman did in a column in last Sunday's New York Times Review, "Mired in Mediocrity."

The title of her piece says it all--things globally, but especially in the United States, are stalled out because we are accepting, even embracing what she calls "the new mediocre."

Her bonafides? She is the Times' chief fashion critic and fashion director. More about that in a moment.

Let me summarize her indictment--

The idea that mediocrity is "the new normal" originates, Friedman claims, with Christine Lagarde, director of the International Monetary Fund, who applied that term to the global economy. It could use a jolt, Lagarde correctly suggests, to get it going, mired as it is, "muddling along with subpar growth."

Fine. But to generalize this to just about everything else is questionable. I do not want to come a across as Pangloss, seeing everything to be the best in "this best of all possible worlds," but to see everything to be the worst in this worst of all possible worlds goes way beyond the defensible and slips more into whining than legitimate analysis.

When she sees the newly emboldened Republicans putting forth an economic agenda that is made up of "a compendium of modest expectations," Friedman sees this this to be a manifestation of "the new mediocre."

Ranging far afield, she sees Twitter losing participants and thus income not because as a fad it is fading but because it has become an example of "the new mediocre."

"Old-guy action films" and "comic-book-hero" flicks that are predominating at the box office, squeezing out higher-quality art-house Indies, is yet more evidence that the the movies that are thriving--what else is new--are yet more evidence that "the new mediocre" is all-pervasive.

And then there is clothing, fashion, Friedman's expertise. Here she sees the same thing--mediocrity.

Enduring the recent spate of fashion shows in New York and Europe, she sees little evidence of new ideas among designers. Rather, she unhappily reports, everything seems deja vu--1960s-style "rock chick dresses," 1970s "flared trousers," 1980s "power jackets," and even 1920s "flapper frocks."

It doesn't get any worse than this, in this worst of all possible worlds.

I've been hearing from disillusioned and generally despondent friends that the Friedman piece sums up what they have been thinking and feeling about the contemporary world. That we are in fact mired in mediocrity. That this not only explains what they are seeing but also helps reconcile themselves to their own unhappy and frustrating circumstances. "It's not my fault," they are in effect saying, "but the larger world's."

I have been pushing back, claiming that though there is much to not feel good or optimistic about, to balance things, one could contemplate making a case in opposition to "the new mediocre" in support of "the new excellent."

A list of things to feel optimistic about would include--

All the advances in medicine and healthcare. Yes, the system for its delivery is deeply flawed, but if one has various types of cancer or needs life-saving, minimally-invasive surgery, with any good fortune, methods and tests and medications are now available that a scant few year ago were only dreams. "The new excellent."

If one is fortunate enough to be in the top 25 percent academically, public education capped by still the best higher-education system in the world could be considered an example of the new or continuing excellent.

Then there is Google, wirelessness, iGadgets, the Internet itself and all the possibilities that these enable--more "new excellent."

Evidence-based philanthropy, best exemplified by the Gates Foundation, which just last week announced it is stepping up its promising efforts to eradicate malaria, is, as part of "the new excellent," making progress on many fronts from environmental conservation to potable water to sustainable economic development. Yes, I know the counter list, but the picture is more balanced than the "new mediocre" people are claiming.

Even in regard to military hardware, while waiting for peace and sanity to break out in the world, drones, as one example of excellence of its own sort, enable battles to rage that inflict fewer civilian casualties than conventional methods. I know many of my anti-war friends (include me among them) will blanch at this, but in realpolitik terms this represents "progress."

At a different level of things to feel good about is the New Brooklyn, ATM machines, E-ZPasses, and the ubiquitousness of really wonderful coffee--my counter case to worrying too much about power jackets and flapper frocks.

One reason to consider the excellent to be at least as pervasive as the mediocre is that it can motivate one to shake the funk, get up off the couch, turn off the TV and iPhone (at least for a few hours a day), and look for ways to become engaged with making things a little better for yourself and the larger world. To take the opposite tack is to me to waste one's life.

August 4, 2014--The War Against Culture

This is not a culture war as we in the United States know it. It's not about matters such as same-sex marriage or if evolution should be taught in public schools. Our culture "wars" seem trivial in comparison to what is being fought over in the center of Iraq.

There, in Mosul, in the country's second-largest city, the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has seized control and is imposing strict Islamic law--sharia. ISIS is also waging war on culture itself, on history, and on people's identity.

The headlines have been about ISIS extracting vengeance against the Shiites who are their historic enemies. How they have been rounding up and summarily executing anyone with the taint of having served in or supported the Shiite-dominated government in Baghdad.

All of this is sadly familiar. What is different is that ISIS is deliberately and systematically obliterating everything that makes Mosul Mosul and everything that connects the people there to their 8,000-year history and culture.

Mosul is one of the most ancient of cities and was once the capital of the Assyrian Empire. For centuries, at the crossroads between East and West, it was fought over and conquered in turn by the Persians, Arabs, Turks, and others, all of whom left evidence of their occupation.

Now ISIS has seized control and rather than adding their imprint to this cultural mix they are doing all in their power to obliterate all evidence of the past, especially destroying any Assyrian, Jewish, Christian, and even every Islamic shrine, the presence of which, according to their beliefs, are heretical.

Thus far they have leveled statues of Abu Tammam, a revered Arab poet, and Mullah Othman, a famous and popular 19th century musician and poet. And they have driven all Christians from the city, obliterating their holy places or forcing their conversion to ISIS's form of Islam. A form so severe that even Al-Qaeda has denounced them.

They also destroyed the grave site and shrine to the prophet Jonah whose life story plays a prominent part in the traditions of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. Residents fear that ISIS is planning to tear down and reduce to rubble the city's ancient leaning minaret. It is older than the Leaning Tower of Pisa and its image is represented on Iraq's 10,000 dinar bank note.

    Wrecked grave site of the biblical prophet Jonah

When ISIS militants entered Mosul in June, government troops stripped off their uniforms, threw away their arms, and attempted to blend into the civilian population for at least two reasons--to save their lives and because they felt that ISIS rule would be less oppressive than that imposed by the Maliki regime.

But with their history and culture imperiled, according to the New York Times, resistance to ISIS has emerged and Mosul residents, taking up arms, are coming forward to resist further desecration of their historical and religious shrines.

This is a reminder that culture trumps politics and economics every time.

There is a lesson here for those of us who, above all else, believe in reason and are reluctant to see the geopolitical force of emotion and belief. And thus we frequently fail to understand the power of culture.

Belief systems, history, national narratives, language, customs, arts, collective memory are more powerful than flatscreen TVs, Nikes, or iPhones.

OK, maybe not iPhones.