Dave Munger, while reviewing the audiobook version of The Outlaw Sea: A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime by William Langewiesche: “Audiobooks require an odd mix of close attention and preoccupation on the part of the listener. I found that if I turned my attention away from the narrative for even a moment I could easily miss an important point. Yet if I was able to be completely attentive to the book, I quickly became bored. Driving a car is almost the perfect distraction: the book offers just enough respite from the boredom of driving to keep me alert. When I arrived home with three hours of narrative remaining, I struggled for a while to find the perfect tasks to do while listening. I couldn't check e-mail: that diverted too much of my attention. Doing the dishes worked, but only took a few minutes, and the noise of the sink sometimes drowned out the audio. There was a point when I wished I had bought the physical book so I could just sit down and finish it.”
William Langewiesche
There's a good interview with William Langewiesche of The Atlantic Monthly by The Atlantic Monthly. Christopher Hitchens aside, Langewiesche is probably my favourite writer of short non-fiction at the moment. The interview is about the subject of his latest article for the magazine—unfortunately not a available online which is available online [via peterme.com]—about the breakup of the space shuttle Columbia, and article I can recommend. If NASA or even bureaucratic politics is your thing, then I can wholeheartedly recommend the article. (Your public library probably has a copy of the magazine. It's in the November issue.)
From the interview:
Q: What is it about NASA that discourages dissent?
A: That's a very complicated question. All large organizations do. NASA is astonishingly bureaucratic. I'm sure that people who are in the business of studying the sociology of large organizations would put it in a certain age group; it's sort of a young adult or an adolescent bureaucracy. It's at a certain stage in its development where the initial energies and camaraderie and ability to communicate and sense of mission—all that's disappeared. And it's not yet in the really mature stage, like the U.S. military is right now, where they've been able to work through a lot of these problems. I've been impressed by the Army, specifically, in my dealings with them in Bosnia and Kosovo, by the way communication does work within that organization. I mean, yeah, the Army is famously stupid, and there's the right way and the wrong way and the Army way and all this stuff… but in fact in the larger organization they've worked through a lot of problems. NASA hasn't done that.
MidasMulligan: “(We didn't know what had happened after the first one, but after the second I knew immediately is not accidental - you know that distinct noise jet engines make when they open the throttle? That motherfucker actually opened it wide - in essence, floored it - in the last couple of seconds before it hit. Sorry about my language - still hard to even think about this).”
Just a quote that I remembered about, earlier today, upon finishing William Langewiesche's part 1 on the collapse of the WTC towers in The Atlantic Monthly's July/August issue. Apparently all three parts (excerpt of part two) will be made into a book, and if the two remaining parts are even half as good as the first, Langewiesche deserves a Pulitzer.
Quote that made me remember the above link, from the Langewiesche piece (part one): “[The plane that struck the South Tower] was minimally loaded that morning for the Boston-To-Los Angeles run, with only sixty-five people aboard and about half of the maximum fuel, and as it approached the building it weighed about 137 tons. It was flying at about 586 mph, which was 150 mph above the airplane's designed limit at low altitude. In the cockpit the overspeed warning must have been warbling loudly.”
Not that the pilots were paying much attention.
Langewiesche has written a lot about airplane accidents, and his piece on the ValuJet crash is especially good, and argues that “"in complex systems some accidents may be 'normal' -- and trying to prevent them all could even make operations more dangerous”.
Maybe it's about time I start a "Favourite Authors List", complete with pronunciation guide for the hard-to-pronounce ones, like Langewiesche.
