Seth’s blog

New York magazine’s Approval Matrix is my favorite magazine feature. I asked Emily Nussbaum, an editor at New York, how it came to be.

ROBERTS When did you come up with this? What happened in the beginning?

NUSSBAUM I’d been hired soon after Adam Moss came on board as Editor-in-Chief and my job was essentially to oversee the redesign of the culture section. It was a collaborative process with editors like Chris Bonanos and writers including Boris Kachka and Logan Hill. I wanted to open with something more substantive — an essay on a cultural matter or a profile — follow with reviews and fun devices. and then close with something really visual, ideally that combined different genres. We rejected a variety of things before we managed to come up with something. Actually, the idea [for The Approval Matrix] came off a piece I saw in Wired magazine. Which was a kind of Matrix-y sort of chart, a one-off thing. The two directions, one of them went geek to cool, the other went nerd to wonk. It didn’t have any visuals and it didn’t have any jokes. It was all of these different people. It had Joss Whedon and Joss Whedon was nerd/cool. Names of different technology people, a little bit of pop culture. It was funny, it was hard to understand in its own way, which I think is true of The Approval Matrix as well — but that was part of the appeal. So I brought it in and showed it to Adam. We were talking about it and I suggested we use it as a back-page round-up, a visual catch-all for stuff from theatre to television to books . . . Commentary on little news items in culture, events, people, a whole range of things. That was the basic concept. Then I had suggested that it go highbrow/lowbrow and something like good/bad or great/terrible. Adam said we should make the extent of the continuum longer than that. So I said “brilliant” and he said “despicable” — which in the long run was one of the more controversial aspects of The Matrix! Every once in a while, I’ll come across someone who says, “How can you call something despicable?” The larger philosophy of the section was to combine access — talking to creators — with judgment and authority. So the Matrix was about making judgments but also being playful and random, by comparing totally different things to each other. The extremeness of brilliant/despicable was supposed to be part of that. And then there’s the highbrow/lowbrow thing, which can also be controversial. It’s both something that we’re literally doing and something we’re being satirical about. For me personally, one of things that I thought was appealing about it — not to be, as I’m already being, incredibly overanalytical — but one of the things that I wanted for the section as a whole, was to say the obvious but true thing that you can have something that’s lowbrow that’s absolutely fantastic or something that people think of as mass-y, like comics books or whatever, that’s incredible, and some opera that’s actually incredibly dull; it’s just that they operate on different parts of the spectrum. So the idea was that putting those things together was essentially saying what really matters is the quality of them, not whether people consider them an elite taste or whether people consider them a mass taste. But obviously it’s also supposed to be something fun, geeky and mathematical. There was an initial concern that it might be hard to understand. Just because it’s a graph, and people found it a little confusing. So, anyway, we drew up a prototype of the Matrix. The designers did a great job. Then there was a gradual move toward launching the Culture section. And we launched The Matrix. It didn’t change that much from the time that we put it out. What changed was the developmental process of figuring out which jokes work and what works best in terms of combining visuals and text.

Interview directory. Behind The Approval Matrix. The Greatness of Behind the Approval Matrix.

Waiting for a BART train I met Krishna Kashyap, a San Diego businessman, who teaches classes on Indian philosophy by conference call. He was born in India and studied philosophy there before he came to America.

There are many such classes. About 15 years ago, a Berkeley student named Mani Varadarajan started a listserv called bhaktilist, which allowed people who were interested in Vaishnava Vedanta to contact each other and exchange ideas. This is how the conference-call classes began. Bhaktilist no longer exists, but many lists came from it, including srirangasri@yahoogroups.com and oppiliappan@yahoogroups.com. There are several thousand people on these lists.

Kashyap himself recently stopped teaching classes so that he would have more time to learn. He is now taking classes with a teacher named K. S. Varadachar. He dials his number in India at a particular time. Other people can dial in as well. They listen and ask questions. “I got isolated from my community when I came to this country 20 years ago,” Kashya said. “Reading books is not enough. There wasn’t any other way to communicate [besides the conference calls]. When I wanted to learn I had to get teachers from India.”

Now there are 4 or 5 classes simultaneously; they meet by phone once/week, using freeconferencecall.com. The Indian lecturers don’t get paid or at least such is the convention. They are given an end-of-term “gift,” called sambhavana, that is $200-$1000.

A vast amount about Indian philosophies is here.

How different from American higher education! People learn easily, without coercion, without threats, without punishments, without external rewards, if they see their teacher as a guru. The American term for guru, of course, is motivational speaker.

Maybe this post should be titled How Books Get Written. A curious feature of the book industry is that it gets almost all of its key ingredient — book manuscripts — from amateurs. No other big industry is like this. If our economy is a giant experiment, this point is an outlier. A huge outlier. What does it mean?

To find out, it would help to look at specific cases. I asked Ammon Shea, author of Reading the OED (forthcoming), how he managed to write it. He replied:

The advance was plenty for me to live on for a year, which is approximately how long the book took. However, I live cheap. I moved in with my girlfriend, who owns her own apartment, and so the rent, or maintenance costs, are low. We cook at home, tend to not buy things that we don’t need, and our idea of excitement is to go to a new library.

I had wanted to read the OED for quite some time, but knew that I didn’t have the leisure to spend ten hours a day doing so. I wrote the book proposal to see if I could convince some publisher to, in effect, subsidize my hobby.

I’ve worked as either a musician or a furniture mover for most of the past twenty years - both are occupations which allow a certain freedom; freedom from both responsibility and security. Taking off time was not so much of a problem. In terms of circulating the proposal I had my agent send it out. He’s the same one that I had when I wrote several other books, some eight or ten years ago.

Ammon’s editor is the same as mine (Marian Lizzi), which is why I knew about his book. Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21730 Pages (= 60 pages/day) will be published in August.

Mohamed Ibrahim, the New York schoolteacher who does Behind The Approval Matrix (which I have blogged about) also has a blog called I Got UGGs!. I asked him how the Ugg blog began. Here’s what he said:

I have a fetish about Uggs. Whenever I see a girl wearing Uggs, it’s the sexiest thing in the world to me. It drives me crazy. You know how they say “do what you love and the money will come later”? I read an article in Time about bloggers and blogging. One of the blogs they profiled was by two ladies who post pictures of kittens and cats and write little blurbs about them. This gave me an idea: I’ll do the same thing about girls in Ugg boots. They got $5-6000/month from ads and all they do is post pics and write blurbs about them. I’ll take pics of girls wearing Uggs. Not only will I enjoy it but maybe I can also make some money. I went to Best Buy, got the cheapest digital camera, and hit the streets. The first place I went was Times Square. Initially I would approach people and ask them if I could take their pic for the blog. I discovered later it’s better to just take the pic and put it up. That’s what I do now. Now I get people sending me pics — they take a picture of their friends or they send me pics of celebrities. We’re getting over 500 page views/day. It’s only been about 4 months.

The Gawker link Mohamed got by telling them some crazy guy was taking Ugg pics and blogging about it.

In The Innovator’s Dilemma, Clayton Christensen gives many examples of how industry-leading companies lost their lead, often so badly they went out of business. As I’ve said before, this is something I’ve studied in rats writ large. In a great talk about the beginnings of the PC industry, Mitch Kapor describes meeting Ken Olsen, the CEO of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), a $15-billion-sales-per-year company destroyed by the PC.

“Meeting the needs of people who had never previously used computers was the foundation of this entire [PC] industry,” says Kapor. “Even after we [Lotus] had started to become successful, this was still not clear to some people.” This is what Christensen says, too: Disruptive innovations begin downmarket, among users not previously thought worthy of notice. For example, hydraulic-powered shovels started in sizes appropriate for digging ditches. The pattern Christensen saw was that the industry-leading companies ignored this market until it was too late. DEC was no exception. Olsen wanted to meet Kapor, who was flown by DEC helicopter to DEC headquarters. When they met, Olsen complained for 15 minutes about the flimsiness of the PC case.

“The stuff that made him smart was the stuff that was now making him incredibly dumb,” says Kapor. “They didn’t understand that they needed to stop doing all the things that had made them successful in order to have a chance to succeed.” I would put it differently. Our experiments with rats made one thing clear: The more successful you are — and DEC was very successful — the harder it is to try new ways of doing things.

Comment on another Kapor talk.