Why can’t little Tiffany learn to program? What happened to American genius for math? I’ve been wondering about this for a long time, but suddenly I saw the cause during the World Series last night.

Imagine a computer that runs on chewing tobacco. Shouldn’t be that hard — just picture your basic Major League Baseball manager, leaning on the dugout rail. He looks worried. Then he spits. That one.

Now, if you could look inside the heads of the two guys running the contenders in the World Series this week, you’d see a 3D array of numbers flying by. With every pitch, with every attempted steal, with every out, an entire universe of numbers inside the manager’s head is re-computed.

I had taken a hiatus from baseball for quite a while, but with two California teams in the playoffs my wife and I decided to get into the spirit. Although the Dodgers and the Angels have gone by the wayside, we’re completely hooked.

And having not watched television coverage of baseball for quite awhile, I suddenly realized why American’s math scores have gone in the toilet for the last ten years. Baseball is a game of numbers, of billions of statistics of the most arcane kinds which record everything that’s ever happened in professional baseball going back more than 100 years. The statistical history of baseball may be the single greatest resource of meaningful numbers on the planet, including the human genome. And probably a lot more important.

When I was a kid, and when Nate Silver (statistics genius) and Michael Lewis (Moneyball—basically about how understanding the numbers in baseball is more important than wads of cash for name players) were kids, everyone knew the batting averages of every player on the home team. We knew slugging percentages, on base percentages. We understood the implications of having a switch hitter deep in the lineup.

We knew that the catcher ran the defense — that only he knew what pitch he was signaling the pitcher to throw next, and that the catcher knew what the odds were a particular batter was going to pull or flare that pitch. We understood that the catcher’s job included subtle shifts of the outfield and infield almost all the time.

Raising my kids under the kind tutelage of Vin Scully, the dean of all baseball announcers, they learned that baseball was a deep game of complex strategies. The battle between pitcher and batter was just the simplest surface of what was actually going on. When Scully was calling a game, the video director would follow Scully’s cues. So if the real duel was about the shortstop sneaking up behind the runner at second for a pickoff play, the camera would constantly check back at second, because that’s where, according to Scully, that particular runner, point two six five percent of the time against lefties, could be picked off. Now, none of my guys has yet won a Nobel for science, but with that kind of rich, hands-on training, they could have easily won it if they had really wanted it.

Now to the current absolutely barren “coverage” of the playoffs and World Series. The video direction, and the announcers, cover the pitcher, pitch placement, and almost nothing else. We almost never see where the infield is set, and never where the outfielders are playing. What we do get is lots of shots of players spitting — the result of a long lens raking through the dugout, magnifying the effect, so half the time us TV viewers can’t tell if it’s raining or just a vast downpour of spit.

And what about that rich field of high definition screen real estate? So much space, so little information. We get a little box that shows the runners on base and the count on the batter, but nowhere do we get the batter’s NAME (unbelievable, actually) their average during the season, their average during the playoffs, or any of the dozens of bits and pieces that are running through the manager’s mind as he decides what to do next, pitch by pitch, out by out.

Baseball strategy really is something of a computer that runs on a chaw of tobacco. But with the current coverage that has dumbed the game down to only its most surface components, all little Tiffany gets to see, is the spit. Meanwhile, her innate genius for numbers is being cruelly starved.

“Hope for me is I’ll finally get a good job.”

“I’ll be able to get my teeth fixed.”

“I’ll be able to pay for my wife’s cancer therapy.”

Hope was intrinsically too big a promise to run on. Hope unleashes dreams of the beautiful, while politics by its nature can only deliver the truly ugly and barely functioning compromise. For anyone who dared, even for a moment, to let go of a sceptical frame of mind and give flight to hope, disappointment is inevitable. Reality can never catch up with all the dreams that hope unleashes. If any of those things that were once imagined arrive, they will certainly be bent out of shape, maybe beyond recognition.

How do you like your end of war, high speed rail, Wall Street reform so far?

That’s why hope is going to be replaced by a hope gap. Every time.

The nastiest of these hope gaps is coming early next year with the successful passage of health care legislation. Public option or not, Obama has given hundreds of millions of Americans reason to hope that the health care system will finally start working. The uninsured will be covered. Your doctor’s bedside manner will warm up. You’ll be able to get your teeth fixed. Chemo will be paid for. No more bankruptcies for medical bills. No more pre-existing conditions. No more turndowns from the insurance companies.

Our spirits will be lifted and hope will swell for many of us at that thrilling moment only a few months from now when President Obama gathers that huge crowd around him for the historic signing of the new Health Care For All legislation. Maybe it’ll be a few weeks after Thanksgiving, with the White House Christmas tree as a backdrop. Maybe Obama will be wearing a tasseled red cap. I can see Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi and maybe even Olympia Snowe crowded around the same desk that F.D.R. once used to sign Social Security. Obama signs the documents and hands out the historic pens. The crowd cheers. A star rises in the East.

But it’s not going to happen that way. The real phase-in of health care change will take four years. Sure - the politicos are jockeying to move up some cosmetic talking points, but in cold (and it will certainly be cruel) reality the deaths from neglect, the bankruptcies, the denials of care will continue over the many years of phase-in. And if the media front-pages the continued horror stories while the uninsured and under-insured continue their suffering, hope will not only vanish, but health care reform will seem like a cruel hoax to those who will have been betrayed.

Obama, of course, will continue to be cool. Yes, the man is generally cool for all the right reasons. Unfortunately, we’re learning he can also be cool for some wrong ones.

Cool can be read as grace under pressure. Cool can be seen as smart, the calm of someone playing a deep game. But there is another side of cool, and when hope runs out for some, Obama’s cool will be read as condescension:

“I’m cool because I know things that are just too complicated to explain to everyone at this moment. I can make deals with big pharma - and I when I want you to know all the details, you’ll see how smart I was. In the meantime, be cool.”

What hope did Obama elicit in your heart during the campaign? Which of the many small and great wrongs of the Bush administration did you let yourself hope that Obama would somehow right? Big for me was torture. I believed we would shed a bright light on the evil perpetrated in our good name, and justice would be done. I’m sorry to report that I have entered my own little hope gap on torture.

And as far as your toothache that’s getting worse every day? Try not to lose hope.

Actually, the opposite is true. Amazon is buying Kindle rights from publishers at the same price they’re paying for physical books. And Amazon is sticking with its policy to sell Kindle books at no more than $9.99. So take your average $20 list price hardcover book (if I were a shameless self-promoter, I would use my book The Genius Machine as an example, since it also has a list price of $20. But I will resist the temptation.) The publisher sells it to Amazon for 50% off, or $10. Amazon could sell my the book for $20, but they discount it down to $13.57, and make a profit of $3.57, or maybe a little less if Amazon is paying for shipping.

Now take the same book sold as a Kindle. Amazon pays $10 for those rights, too. And Amazon sells the download for $9.99, thereby earning a gross profit of 1¢ on each copy. On books that wholesale for more than $9.99, Amazon seems to be locked into a loss with every sale.

And what about the publisher? On a $20 retail book they get the same $10 for the Kindle edition as they did for the actual hardcover that cost them some $2.00 to manufacture, ship, and even keep a reserve for returns of unsold books. So who is making a killing on the Kindle? The publishers. And Publishers, please, if I’m wrong about these numbers, share the facts with us in the comments below.

Publishers are worried that Amazon will choose to stop losing money on Kindle sales at some point. They are just waiting for that shoe to drop. Hence the cheering for Barnes & Noble’s new reader, Nook. (Nook. Interesting name. Just asking, but what would you call a diminuitive version of the Nook?) Publishers are beyond eager for someone, anyone, to stop Amazon from completely owning ebooks!

Now let’s talk about those ten books that Wal-Mart and Target are offering for pre-orders at $8.99 and Amazon at $9.00. These are for hardcover books ranging in list price from Linda Howard’s Ice at $22 all the way up to Stephen King’s 1088 page monster Under the Dome that lists for a mighty $35. What is the meaning, if any, in these door-busting discounts?

Comes now (”Comes now” is a locution reserved for columnists who can’t find a better way to introduce a new character into a story. But I digress.) Motoko “Cassandra” Rich of the N.Y. Times in her “Price War” story in last Saturday’s paper, wherein she worries that Wal-Mart selling some pro-orders for books as a loss-leader will somehow “fundamentally damage the industry and the ability of future authors to write or publish books.” And, once more, end publishing as we know it.

To tell her story, Ms. Rich interviews bestselling author James Patterson, who she was apparently grateful to reach before her deadline, since she quotes him at length no matter how little light he has to shed upon the subject. Frankly, interviewing an author about retail price discounting is akin to interviewing a tuna about the price of a Salade Niçoise.

The fact is, publishers don’t really care what a retailer sells a book for. Retailers want to take a loss? No problem. What everyone needs to be concerned about, though, is when a Wal-Mart or Amazon pressures a publisher to sell at what is known as a “deep-discount.” That should set off alarms for authors and agents, since most author agreements call for author royalties to take a severe hit when the publisher sells at a deep discount.

Authors: Read your contracts! Find that “Deep Discount” clause. Does it say something to the effect that when the publisher sells your book for more than a 50% discount, the author royalty suddenly gets cut in half? Think about that. The publisher gives Barnes & Noble an extra 1% discount and you lose half your royalties on every book sold.

The big take-away here is that nine of the ten books being hacked down in price by Amazon, Target and Wal-Mart are fiction titles. Only one calls itself non-fiction. And this is the clue to smart book pricing. Fiction is generally sold as entertainment. Entertainment tends to be more fungible. Non-fiction is generally sold on the value of the information it contains. So pricing the two in the same way seems crazy.

How much would you pay for information that can change your life? Heal a child? Save your business? Is that information worth only $20? Is that all you’d pay for it?

We haven’t begun to touch value pricing for non-fiction. That is the real gold mine just waiting for publishers. We’ll write more about the potential and the theory of value pricing soon.

In the meantime, you have to wonder about the one non-fiction title that’s being treated just like all those other nine fiction titles being deep discounted. Yes, it’s Sarah Palin’s memoir. Now, if what she were about to disclose had great value, say information that could, in some way, save the Union, it certainly would be worth a lot. Some of us would pay real money for that kind of knowledge.

But Wal-Mart, Target, and Amazon say we can have it all for just $8.99. Maybe they know something.

Search and advertising giant Google and Ohio Art, maker of the children’s classic drawing toy announced a joint venture today to produce the first e-book reader for pre-schoolers. Named the Etch a Book, the new reader will capitalize on the highly refined Etch a Sketch two knob interface which is already familiar to millions of parents and children all over the globe.

In making the announcement, Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, revealed that Google has been scanning children’s literature of all kinds for several years now, accumulating a library of more than 2,000,000 children’s titles, many of which have been out of print for decades.

One of the big challenges in developing the Etch a Book has been the fact that young children don’t yet read. “The answer we found was to read the books to the children,” says Brin. The Etch will offer several voices, including those described as ‘friendly mom’ and ‘funny dad.’

Since the Etch a Book screen is closely derived from the classic Etch a Sketch, the reader will not be able to display text or pictures. “This was a big challenge for the books that are all illustration and no text,” says Larry Killgallon, CEO of Ohio Art. “We wanted to keep the child involved and the screen interactive, as with all our products.” The answer is to have the friendly mom reader or the funny dad reader describe the art that Google has scanned. For Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel — “There’s a big steam tractor digging a hole,” says the voice. In presenting what had been a cloth book, The Big Farm, in the demonstration we saw, the ‘friendly mom’ is heard to say, “And here’s a big white sheep.”

To complete the reading experience for the very young, the Etch a Book comes with an available Bouncy Lap, which vibrates the child up and down gently while the child is being read to by the Etch a Book. Also available is a ventilator, which simulates the soft breath of a reading parent on the child’s cheek. Available Christmas.

When my youngest, Max, was 8, he could run off a string of complicated jokes like an old pro in the Catskills. Really, he could have become a regular on the Tonight Show. That good.

We loved to talk about what was funny. I asked him what a really, really great joke would do.

“People would laugh until they cried.”

Exactly. It was then that I came up with an idea that almost drove Max crazy. That wasn’t the purpose, of course, but that’s the way it worked out for awhile. I told Max there was such a thing as The Perfect Joke. It was so funny people would not be able to stop laughing, and therefor they would die. The perfect joke, in the wrong hands, could wipe out the planet.

And the thing was — I knew The Joke. But, of course, I couldn’t tell it to him because I loved him.

“I can take it. I promise I’ll be able to stop laughing.”

I explained that even if he could achieve that, which I seriously doubted, it would be too great a burden to put on him to give him that kind of power. If someone made him angry, he would be sorely tempted to tell The Joke. We went around on this for a few weeks until he reluctantly came to the realization that I, in fact, didn’t know the perfect joke. Sure, if you sensed he might have been a little relieved, you’d be right. But on another level, he was profoundly disappointed.

Which brings me to blogging. For anyone who writes regularly in the strange medium of the Web, you never know to what strange corners of the earth your thoughts are travelling, who is reading you, who gets what you’re trying to say, who hears you above the din. Except there’s a little feedback here and there when other websites pick you up, or someone makes a comment, or when you’re talking with someone about a completely isolated topic and out of the blue they mention they read something you wrote.

So what if someone writes the perfect blog post someday? What would happen if I, for instance, were to write a blog that was so edgy, so interesting, so stimulating, that the first person who stumbled across it was compelled to immediately retweet it to their 73 followers? And what if every single one of them also wanted to share it with everyone they knew? Would it be as dangerous as the perfect joke, with the potential to destroy the planet?

Could the Web take the stress? One, two, three billion repeats of the same post, rolling out in just a few days time. At first there might be attacks of server reflux. Sitting there in their black little racks, lights blinking away, a server might tremble, bravely attempt to catch up with the traffic, and then just be overwhelmed. Click! The server takes itself offline. At first it happens in isolated locations, but then before long there would be cascading failures at some of the massive solar-powered Google farms. (There would be a heightened danger if the really excellent blog was roaring through a Google farm in southern Oregon on a cloudy day, for instance.)

Then, servers all over the globe would switch in to pick up the load, and soon they, too, would be quickly overwhelmed as the charming, almost innocent little blog post was translated into more and more languages and dialects and its infectious blend of comedy, imagination, and piquancy turned out to work in virtually all cultures and all languages. It was not just a good little post, but verging on the perfect.

And even when the servers of entire nations collapsed in paroxysms of server reflux, brave individuals, unable to control their desire to share the post, would be compelled to copy it by hand, mount their camels, and race it across borders, driven to share their discovery.

Fortunately for me and Max and the world, I never came up with the perfect joke, and Max was spared that terrible burden. I have noticed, though, that a heavy overcast is forecast for southern Oregon this week. Probably nothing to worry about.

“No, really, I’m feeling fine. Just a little touch of the flu.”

“Not at your age. You know, if you were a new publication, you might pull through. But Harold started you back in 1925. That’s a long, long haul for a weekly. But look on the bright side: it’s been a good run.”

When Si Newhouse decided that Gourmet was wearing a Do Not Resuscitate bracelet this week, a great many people were stunned. My wife even called Condé Nast to leave a message for Mr. Newhouse, but the switchboard said there was no way to leave a message for the boss. Maybe that’s the way it is when you’re the emperor. You can begin to feel as if you don’t need to listen to anyone, even your customers. And I guess that’s true.

That’s what bothers me. In the equation that McKinsey puts forth, if a magazine loses money for X period of time, no matter how brutal the overall business climate, you kill it. It’s just a product that failed. The stakeholders are the shareholders of the corporation, aren’t they?

I don’t think so. Enlightened business thinking holds that the stakeholders in a business actually form a broader constituency. For one, the customers have a stake in the organization. You invited them, encouraged them, brought them into a relationship. The employees are stakeholders, too, planning their lives and careers around the enterprise. There is the community that supported you, as well. That’s the food community, the New York publishing community, and the magazine distribution communit

We learn from Stephanie Clifford in the New York Times how Charles H. Townsend CEO of Condé Nast sees things. And just between us, if I was Elizabeth Hughes or whoever has P&L responsibility at the New Yorker, I would examine these quotes carefully, since someone might be saying them about me before too long. And then I might take a few moments to make sure I could find the exits in an emergency. You can’t be too careful.

So, New Yorker, ask yourself, could this be you? “In the economics of the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s, this would be a business decision balanced by the cultural reticence to part with iconic brands,” Charles H. Townsend, Condé Nast’s chief executive, said in an interview. “This economy is a completely different bag.” Feedbag? Trashbag? Bodybag? Just wondering.

Then there’s this thought from Suzanne M. Grimes, who oversees Every Day With Rachael Ray, among other brands, for the Reader’s Digest Association. (Ah, excuse me! EXCUSE ME! Didn’t Reader’s Digest go bankrupt last month? This is The N.Y. Times’s expert on where Gourmet went wrong?)

“Cooking is getting more democratic,” she said. “Food has become an emotional currency, not an aspiration.”

Now if you’re at the New Yorker and not hiding under your desk, just play along with me here. It might strengthen you for the future. Just substitute the word thinking for cooking and you get this: “Thinking is getting more democratic,” someone might be saying someday. “Thinking has become an emotional currency, not an aspiration.”

So if you’re in the thinking and not the cooking business, it could look bad for you, too.

Now try the same device with this farther down in the article:

It [food] has also become democratized via the chatty ubiquity of Ms. Ray and the Food Network stars. Ms. Reichl is a celebrity in the food world, but of an elite type. She ‘is one of those icons in chief,’ said George Janson [advertising guy] But what harried cooks want now, it seems, is less a distant idol and more a pal.

So the New York Times obit for the New Yorker in a few months might read:

Thinking has also become democratized via the chatty ubiquity of Twitter and Facebook. Those New Yorker writers like Malcolm Gladwell were celebrities in the thinking world, but of an elite type. Gladwell is one of those icons in chief. But what harried people want now, it seems, is a less distant idol and more a pal.

Hey Malcolm! How come you never call?

So if you ever have the chance to get Si Newhouse on the phone, or just happen to run into him at a party or at the opera or something, you might want to have a little chat about who you think are some of the stakeholders in the New Yorker. Just cause a racehorse tripped doesn’t mean you have to put it down.

My heartfelt condolences to Ruth Reichl and all the other employees and freelancers who made Gourmet Magazine the most-waited for package in our mailbox every month. We have been subscribers, with occasional time off, since the 60s, when few of us would venture to actually cook any of the insanely complex recipes.

Now, I wasn’t the actual subscriber to Gourmet. The person of record was my mate. At the time, I was very serious about being serious about everything and dwelling on food seemed to me to be about as distinctive an occupation for a serious person as thinking about sex. In my mind at the time, if everyone did it, i.e. eat food or have sex, then it was a lower activity compared to making movies and discussing Important Ideas.

In other words, Gourmet was pornography. Fortunately, over the years, it has remained pornography. What changed, I guess, was my feelings about food. I have always enjoyed good food, and now I can even talk about it for a few minutes without feeling guilty.

So now that S.I. Newhouse has protected his fragile billions by shutting down the principal source of pornography in our household, I am forced to ask myself, “What have we lost?”

For one thing, I will never undergo another challenge as I faced some years ago when I decided I would cook the Complete Gourmet Thanksgiving (We’ll call it CGT for short). That year was the year of the incredible boneless turkey. I needed to go to Chinatown in Los Angeles and buy a huge cleaver with which I would be able to decimate an uncooked turkey carcass, necessary for some brew that was part of the CGT. I also needed to buy the nastiest knife I have ever owned — a boning knife, necessary for removing the skeleton of the turkey before it was cooked and without its permission. The boning knife would turn on me several years later, inflicting the only major cut I have ever received cooking. Fortunately, I don’t cook that much. I still own the knife, but I keep my eye on it, of that you can be certain.

Now here’s the terrible part about that boned, stuffed, CGT turkey. Twenty guests. Out comes the turkey. Being sans bone, it cuts like a roast. Fast! Put said turkey on plates. Guests go silent in that creepy way they’ll do once in a while as they devour the main course. CGT turkey vanishes in 2 minutes flat. Two days work for two minutes of eating.

And worse, there were requests to make it again the next year, and the year after that. Not until I bought a smoker was I able to obliterate the CGT boneless turkey memory.

Yeah, yeah, yeah: I know I can go online and get recipes, and there are a lot of food blogs out there. But the fact is, I like my porn once a month and on shiny pages. I can’t believe a million subscribers wasn’t enough to keep Gourmet going. Is nothing sacred? And you Playboy readers: Lookout.

When I was involved with …and Ladies of the Club a few eons ago I received an offer for the audio rights for the book. This was to be a condensed version, since the book was more than 1000 pages long. I asked for a sample script from the audio producer, and it turned out to run some 75 pages. You had to laugh. Gone were the inner lives of the two principal characters. Gone was the story of the fifty years of the development of the U.S. from the Civil War to the Depression. Gone were the discussions of ideas. Left was the barest shell of the events of the novel. Anyone buying the tape would have been defrauded, believing they were about to hear anything that resembled this masterpiece. We declined the offer.

Screenplays are similar. No matter how long the original novel, a screenplay is, with few exceptions, not going to be longer than 125 pages. A screenplay is double-spaced, descriptive paragraphs honed down to nothing, and lots of space taken up by the character’s names before their speeches. Bob. (line break) “You know what I’m thinking?” (line break) Jim. (line break) “No. What?” (line break) Bob stirs the campfire. (line break) Bob. (line break) “There’s something out there in the dark.” (line break) In a screenplay, you’ve just eaten up almost half a page.

Which brings me to the umpteenth zillion obituary for the book that has ocurred ever since the new media arrived. That would be movies. Then radio. Then television. Now it’s the Kindle and iPhone. Books are perpetually finished. Who would ever read a book again once they’ve seen that Charlie Chaplin? I can’t imagine.

This morning it was Motoko Rich on the front page of The New York Times, shovel in hand, digging in the deep rich soil. The new book killer-app appears to be the vook, which is basically a book with some video content. Your reading stops. You click on the media, and you watch some video in which something occurs that isn’t even going to be in the print part of your experience. You go back to a little reading, eager for the setup for the next video. Is this incredible, or what?

The best part of an obituary like this is the low hanging fruit of killer quotes that, it appears, a great many publishing experts are willing to give. We are gathered, once again, around the grave of The Book As We Know It. Let’s see whose shovel can hold the most compost. A “reading expert” at Tufts, Maryanne Wolf, goes first. “Can you any longer read Henry James or George Eliot? Do you have the patience?” Thwump! Dust to dust.

Next up is the novelist Jude Deveraux, who imagines going beyond video, all the way to smell. “I’d like to use all the senses.” If you liked Smellovision under your theater seat  in 1960, you’ll love Stinkoread. Thwump!

The book is almost gone from sight, but another publisher comes to the edge of the grave, shovel quivering unsteadily with its heavy load. Judith Curr has seen the future, and Everything You Have Ever Known Will Be Different. “You can’t just be linear anymore with your text,” she warns. Authors, everywhere: take note. It’s Naked Lunch all over again. Talk about your non-linear text!

Thwump! The book is finally buried.

But I’m not so sure. This thing about the end of the book reminds me a little of the theory of Peak Oil, which makes a powerful case that some time soon, maybe even this year, the discovery of new oil fields will decline, production will inexorably decrease, and by 2050 oil will finally be more expensive than Evian and Everything Will Be Different. Are we at Peak Book? Are we at the apex of that bell curve that started with Gutenberg 500 years ago, so that books might completely vanish in another 500 years? Maybe. But I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that the last perfume of Stinkoread will be a distant whiff long before then.

Tags? How about: death, death of books, death of books prematurely declared, death of publishing, death of thinking, kooks, schnooks and vooks

Book reviewers were prime entertainment at women’s organizations until somewhere around the late 1960s, possibly replaced by book clubs where everyone was supposed to actually read the book for themselves. Until then, the job of the book reviewer was to bring the ideas in important books to life for a whole community, to put it into context, to enrich the listener. The expectation that most of the audience would rush out and purchase the book, as Oprah’s audience does today, was not there. With a good book reviewer, you didn’t need to do any stinking page turning yourself.

Oprah was broadcasting from Cleveland in those days. I wonder if she and my mom crossed paths.

Live book reviewers like my mom addressed one of the great challenges to living well - having that feeling that you’re living authentically and thoroughly in your times. To me, it would have been a terrible thing to have been living down the street from the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées in Paris in May, 1913 when Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps had its premiere, and not been part of the commotion. Or to have been on earth in the early 1960s and not heard I Want to Hold Your Hand on the radio. Or lived in Elizabethan England and never been to the Globe and seen a play by that Shakespeare fellow.

Knowing what’s going on, what new ideas are shaping the culture, in the arts, in technology, in ideas in general seems to me to be an essential part of really being alive, of getting all that life has to offer. The great challenge for me is in finding out how to ferret out what’s new and valuable.

In the early days of the Web, the rage was all about filters. The idea of filters dangled in front of us the promise that we would be able to customize our news sources, so we could “get the news we wanted.” And we could even join groups where everyone in the world interested in a topic could be a member. I, for one, joined a harpsichord builders listserv, and wore out my life-long passion for the harpsichord in a little under two months. Those were dark times. I even began to agree with George Bernard Shaw’s remark that a harpsichord sounded like two skeletons copulating on a tin roof. But I digress.

Still looking for filters, I joined a Linkedin innovation community. Turns out it’s just a bunch of innovation consultants trying to sell their services to each other. Good luck. New content: 4%. Recycled ideas: 96%.

It turns out that I don’t want filters. I want scouts. I want to know who those people are, with taste and smarts and reasonable critical faculties, who can find the surprises. Books I never would have found on my own. New genius composers living in Serbia. An avant-garde filmmaker in Finland.

In 1951 Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and W.H. Auden decided to become scouts for important new books. They felt the existing book clubs, namely The Book-of-the-Month Club and the Literary Guild had lowered their original goals and now were pursuing the “safely popular.” Their new club, the Readers’ Subscription, had the goal of supplying readers with books of solid intellectual merit. Every four weeks their little flyer, The Griffin, offered their choices for main book and alternates, and before long they had some forty-thousand subscribers. The Club went through many changes, and I was a member until The Griffin suddenly started shrinking some five years ago. The Club was now a Doubleday Club, somewhere in the bowels of Random House, now a mere division of Bertelsmann Aktiengesellschaft, which had, ironically, grown from being primarily a printer of calendars to a book giant through the creation of their own book clubs in post war Germany.

The Readers’ Subscription was my favorite scout for important new books, and when it was put down, I thought I would be able to find a replacement for it on the Web, or somewhere. But that hasn’t happened. A group of really smart people need to do the work, and find a way to get paid for scouting, without creating a conflict of interest.

I’ll be scouting for better scouts, now that I know that’s what we need. Maybe it just comes down to more moms grabbing a paragraph of Tolstoy while waiting for that slow, slow, slow red light to turn green.

For the last few years I have ever-so-slowly come to realize that if someone at the Times thinks your book ought to enter the zeitgeist, you get a second review — like the one that ran this morning with even more pictures of the Collyers’ dump. Thank you Michiko. I wasn’t sure I wanted to read about the hoarding brothers with that first review, or even the up-close story about Doctorow, but with that third review, you’ve hammered it home. I give up. No more reviews! I’ll buy the book!

Like hell.

Depending on your sources, there are 50 to 100,000 new mainstream books published in the U.S. each year. And since books are and have been for the last five centuries or so the primary way important new ideas enter and enrich our civilization, newspaper book editors function as one of the most important filters in our world. The NY Times is the overwhelmingly dominant force for news and information in our culture. The Senior Book Reviewer at the Times, then, is one of the most important gatekeepers in American culture, if not the most important.

That most powerful person is Michiko Kakutani, Senior Book Reviewer, followed by Sam Tanenhouse, Editor of the Sunday Book Review. Weirdly, they apparently never compare notes to see who is reviewing what since they have a duplicate review almost every week. Now this would not be so terrible, but the NY Times weekday edition only publishes about 312 book reviews a year. The Sunday Book Review does some 800, so between them they have 1100 slots for new books each year. One would reasonably think that reviewing some 40 to 50 books twice each year is kind of an insane waste of precious ink, not to mention zeitgeist space.

I went looking for the important books of 2008 to see if any got overlooked by the NY Times and its bizarre approach to its responsibilities. Of the NY Times’s own list of the Best Books of 2008, it seems they managed to review all of them. Not surprising. But how about The Economist’s Most Important books in 2008? Ignoring the rare book that would be of interest to Brits only (actually, there was only one — Britain Since 1918 by Marquand and it looks to me to be even more interesting than needing to know how those Collyers brothers managed to cram so much crap into their apartment 50 years ago) easily one-half of The Economist’s picks never passed the sniff test over at the NY Times. Americans were denied reviews of many of the most important books of the year, including Joseph Stiglitz’s and Linda Bilmes’s The Three Trillion Dollar War, Lawrence Freedman’s A Choice of Enemies: America Confronts the Middle East, and even Henry Hitching’s delight about the development of English: The Secret Life of Words. That’s a serious loss to the culture. Does anybody else worry when the NY Times didn’t review at least half of the important books of 2008?

As an ex-publisher and as someone who has helped a number of people get successfully published, I have often told a cautionary tale of my experience on the fourth floor of the NY Times some twenty years ago. I was being interviewed by Timesman Ed McDowell about a book that was about to become a huge bestseller. When the interview was done, I asked if I could get a tour of the place. Eventually we came to a ten by ten foot square space, bounded on all four sides by a counter. Dumped into that forbidden space were boxes and envelopes containing fresh review copies of thousands of books. I asked McDowell who decides which of these thousands of books would get reviewed. He gave me the look one saves for idiots and finally explained that rarely do any of these books get looked at. “Occasionally, a reviewer will come by and fish one out, and sometimes even review it.” I was and am nauseated at the thought.

Which brings me conveniently to the Full Bruni which occurred from July to September just past. Turns out if you really want to get reviewed by the Times, it really helps if you are also employed by the Times. It began quietly enough on July 19, when the Times’s Magazine ran a much-promoted 7500 word piece by Frank Bruni (who was shifting from Food Editor to Magazine Contributor), “I Was A Baby Bulimic.” Wow! A shocking personal disgusting confession. I’m glad that’s the last we’re going to hear about that. Not so fast. On August 19, entirely by coincidence, the Sunday Book Review accompanied my banana pancakes with a gushing review of Bruni’s book, Born Round.

Two hits so far. But there’s always more. On August 29, The News of the Week in Review (that’s the section that tells us the most important stories in the whole world, no kidding) offered a front page story by Bruni, Parenting and Food: Eat Your Peas. Or Don’t. Whatever. Golly, I didn’t realize at first how important Bruni’s book was. I guess I’d better give in and buy it. But just to be sure no one missed it, the Times gave Bruni’s incredibly important book just one more review in the daily paper on August 25th.

Fortunately, the book was on the Times’s Bestseller list by September 3. Or they’d still be running weekly reviews and stories by Bruni and his over-fed childhood until all of us can just gag, too.

Nothing compares with Tom Friedman, who plays the Times as his personal Wurlitzer. When Tom has an idea, a Big Idea, the Times shakes with excitement and the World listens. Here’s how it starts, quietly, innocently: In a column from Mexico on April 1, 2004, Friedman waits until paragraph #4 before he slips it in. Just look at this remarkable level of craft at work: “Mexico’s problem, in a nutshell, is this: The world is flat — or at least getting flatter.” Here indeed is the master at work. Nothing uppercased, nothing to get too suspicious about. The world just happens to be flat (not yet Flat) - have you noticed? Friedman is launching a new meme. Stand by.

A few months later, on June 27, he breaks our hearts by shocking us with the news: “This is my last column for three months. I’m taking a sabbatical to finish (please note that word, finish) a book about geopolitics, called “The World Is Flat.”" Ohmygod. Flat has gone uppercase, and publishing will never be the same again.

Friedman goes silent for a lengthy period, but now the book is ready. The Times is stirred to life with a massive 5165 word piece in the Sunday Magazine by Friedman: “It’s a Flat World After All.” Is that thrilling, or what? And then on April 24 you could turn to the publishing stock exchange, ah, Bestseller List, and see The World is Flat on the list on April 24.

By this time, Friedman needed a review or reviews like Reagan needed more jellybeans. But the wheels were already in motion and there’s nothing harder to stop than a juggernaut. The first Official New York Times Review came on April 30 written by Joseph Stiglitz, no less, and just to be sure you got how important this book was, Fareed Zakaria cleaned up after the elephants with his Sunday Book Review piece on May 1, 2005. The Full Friedman had taken just over a year. Was it over? Yes, except for the weekly columns for the next year or so that couldn’t resist the regular “flat” observation every sentence or two.

Full disclosure: My recent book The Genius Machine — 11 Steps That Turn Raw Ideas Into Brilliance was, sadly, passed over by the Times just like tens of thousands of others. But I have published and produced many other books that were reviewed by the Times or have made the bestseller lists, so I’ve had my fair share.

I do have a modest request for Ms. Kakutani and the Times. America’s in trouble. Newspaper book reviewers are getting fired left and right. Retail stores that give us the chance to browse the New Fiction and New Non-Fiction tables are disappearing. The marketplace for ideas is weak and getting weaker.

We need to know about the truly important books that get published every week that actually might inform us and help us understand the world better. How about just one review maximum per book and just one feature story. (Okay, maybe an exception for J.K. Rowlings.) That would make some precious room for additional new voices and ideas. We desperately need them.