Binding Innovation: Sewing Machines and Social Networking

The Americans: The Democratic Experience by Daniel Boorstin is full of compelling stories about the formation of America, and especially good in spotting unconventional entrepreneurs.

Boorstin, who died in 2004, was a lawyer, a professor at the University of Chicago for 25 years, the librarian of Congress, the senior historian of the Smithsonian—the list goes on.  But what is most impressive is that Boorstin never, ever stopped writing, including dozens of books and two major trilogies (of which The Democratic Experience is part, and the Pulitzer Prize-winning part at that).

When Boorstin went before the Senate to be confirmed as librarian of Congress, several senators demanded that he not write while serving in the post.  He refused, but promised to do it on his personal time: weekends, evenings, and from 4 a.m. to 9 a.m. every morning.

A Modern Fable: China is the Borg

In 1900, a new book by a fledgling children’s author reached stores in America.  The 44-year old writer had a checkered career that included acting, breeding chickens, selling fine china, serving as secretary for a baseball team, and founding the National Association of Window Trimmers of America.

Indeed, his new children’s book contained elements of many of these life experiences: a dismal trip through Kansas, a plank road built to facilitate transport of farm produce in Syracuse, yellow paving bricks at the Military Academy in Peekskill, and the launch of an industrial oil brand to keep machine parts from seizing up.  He lived at different times of the year with his formidable mother-in-law, one of the leaders of the women’s suffrage movement in America and a woman so controversial and scary as to be called “satanic,”—a wicked witch of sorts.  And, of course, the author's visit to the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893—a veritable Emerald City--had left a lasting impression.

His children's book went on to sell millions of copies and, after its translation to film in 1939, would become the single most-watched movie of all time.  (This material is summarized from Evan I. Schwartz’s fascinating Finding Oz.)

All well and good, until 1964, when a high school history teacher named Henry Littlefield, attempting to interest his students in the Gilded Age, likened Lyman Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz to the 1880s populist movement in America.

Fun with Numbers: The Last of the Baby Boomers

There are certain awards that would be a pleasure to win, like an Olympic medal, the Pulitzer Prize, or a Nobel Prize. 

Likewise, there are certain awards that a person of good sense might naturally shy away from, including Class Clown, a Darwin Award, and a “Pig Book” award.

And then there are some awards which one would accept with a degree of ambivalence, like “Miss Congeniality” at the Miss America pageant.

And the Oldest American.

Mary Josephine Ray, born on May 17, 1895, died on March 8, 2010 in New Hampshire at 114 years of age.  She held the distinction as the second oldest living human (about a week younger than a woman in Japan), and the oldest living person in the United States.  She survived her husband by 40 years and had five great-great grandchildren.

Upon Mary’s death, the mantle for oldest living American went to Neva Morris, also 114, of Ames, Iowa.   While the Gerontology Research Group says there are only 75 people over 110 (“supercentenarians”) alive worldwide, there happen to be 941 centenarians in Iowa alone.  Neva—and here’s where the ambivalent part of the award comes in—died on April 7, passing on the crown, and passing on gently herself, after only a month.  The oldest living American is now spry, 113-year-old Eunice Sanborn of Jacksonville, Texas.

If these three women had been born consecutively instead of contemporaneously, their combined lives would stretch back to 1669, over a century before America became a country.  That sort of math makes the country feel very, very young. 

One of my brothers was born in 1959.  Years ago he shook the hand of a man who said to him: “You have now shaken the hand of a man who has shaken the hand of a man who shook hands with Abraham Lincoln.”  That’s fewer degrees of separation than to Kevin Bacon. 

In demographic terms, Mary, Neva and Eunice are all members of (what Strauss and Howe call) the “Lost Generation,” born 1883-1900.  They had, generationally-speaking,  a rowdy childhood followed by a life cycle divided in thirds by two world wars.  Members of the Lost Generation included F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Marx Brothers, George Gershwin, Babe Ruth and Ernest Hemingway.  Their grandparents were from the Gilded Generation and their grandchildren were Boomers.  If the last of their generation lives 114 years, they’ll all be gone by 2015.

Now, let’s say a combination of better living and better medicine allow Baby Boomers to live a few more years than the 114 that seems to be the limit of modern longevity.  So, the last of the Baby Boomers lives to be, say, 118.  (It’s possible I’ve got this wrong, that medicine is a step-function that will push us from 114 to 150 and pass everything in between.)  But, if you accept the 118, and the last Baby Boomer was born in 1960, that means my generation is going to be around until 2078.

Think about that, Gen X and Gen Y and Gen Millennium and future Gen iPad and Gen Globally Warmed.  You’re going to have to put up with all our good advice about how to run the world for another 68 years.

A while back I came across the “Extinction Timeline” which hypothesized the end of many things you and I might otherwise assume to be fixed.  (It comes with a caveat that it not be taken too seriously.)  For instance, petrol engines are gone around 2038 (makes sense), but a “good night’s sleep,” “wallets,” “peace and quiet” and the British royalty are also all gone by 2040.  The “family room” is extinct by 2045, Google by 2049 and “Physical Pain and Uglyness” by 2054.

It's nice to know the Boomers will at least be beautiful for their last 20 years on earth, even if they can’t Google anything.  I'm also sorry to say to the rest of you that "automobile turn signals" are not on the list of things that will be extinct; that means, by 2050, there are going to be millions of us Boomers driving with our right blinker on, intending to turn left. 

But wait: the timeline predicts that “Death” will be extinct by about 2060.  The youngest Boomers won’t even be 100 by then.  

Yahoo!  That means we’re not going anywhere.

Excuse me; I’ve gotta make some plans.

Jazz and Resiliency: A Lesson From Wynton Marsalis

For years business pundits have been telling us to improvise and innovate like jazz musicians.   This would be excellent advice except for the simple fact that few of us listen to jazz, and almost none of us know how to play it.

We might as well be encouraged to structure our competitive strategy around string theory, or our leadership styles around Descartes's Theory of the Mind.

So I was delighted to finally find a real life example of how jazz, as both a tool of communication and of improvisation, can  inform how we behave.  It's a story about Wynton Marsalis, set at the Village Vanguard in August 2002.  This was an especially difficult period for Marsalis, who had for two decades, according to author David Hajdu, “ruled the jazz universe, enjoying virtually unqualified admiration as a musician and unsurpassed influence as the music’s leading promoter and definer.”

But by 2002, some of the wheels had come loose on the wagon.  Marsalis had parted ways with Colombia.   His work running Jazz at Lincoln Center was coming under fire.  And he himself was being roundly and increasingly criticized for his seemingly narrow definition of jazz.  On the bandstand that evening he looked “older and heavier. . .[like] there was a weight upon him; he didn’t smile, and his eyes were small and affectless.”

Marsalis and his trumpet were being showcased with the ballad, “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You,” easily one of the most plaintiff, melancholic songs ever written.  Hajdu wrote, Marsalis “performed the song in murmurs and sighs, at points nearly talking the words in notes.  It was a wrenching act of creative expression.  When he reached the climax, Marsalis played the final phrase, the title statement, in declarative tones, allowing each successive note to linger in the air a bit longer.  “I don’t stand. . .a ghost. . .of. . .a. . .chance. . . .”

The room was silent until, at the most dramatic point, someone’s cell phone went off, blaring a rapid sing-song melody in electronic beeps.  People started giggling and picking up their drinks.  The moment—the whole performance—unraveled.”

At that point, Marsalis might simply have stormed off stage, raged at the audience, or disappeared into the night.

Instead, he "paused for a beat, motionless, and his eyebrows arched.  The cell-phone offender scooted into the hall as the chatter in the room grew louder.   Still frozen at the microphone, Marsalis replayed the silly cell-phone melody note for note. Then he repeated it, and began improvising variations on the tune. The audience slowly came back to him. In a few minutes he resolved the improvisation--which had changed keys once or twice and throttled down to a ballad tempo--and ended up exactly where he had left off: “with. . .you. . . .”

The ovation was tremendous.

That's all about seizing the darkest moment.  Improvisation as resiliency.  Innovation that turns disaster into triumph.  

At your worst moment, when the ringtone of disaster threatens the solo of your life, may you improvise the way Wynton Marsalis did that night.  

You Are Not a Gadget (But You Might Be a Tool)

The Web giveth and the Web taketh away.

I’d be the first to tell you that I love what the Web hath wrought--the ability to research, reach out, connect, create and learn in ways unthinkable just a few years ago.  But I’ve also been worried for a long time about whether the Web hath rot, ah, wrought—at least in the form of bright, seductive, ever-changing screens calling to me ceaselessly from my laptop and phone.  (See I’m Going Crazy, But So Are You, and Does Technology Shape Our Ethics? for just a few examples.)  The price of all this easy knowledge and endless pestering may, in fact, be stupidity and atrocious behavior.  

In the thoughtful if sometimes inscrutable You Are Not a Gadget, technologist and musician Jaron Lanier proposes that the losses from the Web may be more than we realize.  When our background, experience and personhood are all reduced to bits and bytes; when our creative product can be ripped out of context and used (free of charge) in a mash-up; when we engage in anonymous acts of digital violence; when we fall for the line that the Web itself is becoming some kind of superhuman creature. . .