Songkick Review: Find Your Music in Your City

Living in a big city for the last two years, I have more than once had the misfortune of missing a show by one of my favorite bands just minutes from my apartment because I didn't know it was happening. This week it occurred to me that surely someone out there is running a free online service that will email me whenever my favorite artists are playing in my city, in a noble effort to spare concert-lovers like me this crushing disappointment.

Sure enough there are a bunch of sites like this, the most popular of which are Songkick and Bandsintown. I read some reviews and decided to hop on Songkick, since it boasted a cleaner interface and a mobile app. Once I signed up I learned that Songkick provides a small program which will scan your iTunes library and upload all the artists therein, saving you the tedious task of selecting them one-by-one online. In minutes I had a list of upcoming concerts in DC (as well as Baltimore and Charlottesville, which are easily drivable) by my favorite bands. There were at least five coming up in the next month that I had no idea about!

At this point, Songkick was more than worth the time it took to sign up and set up, but if you want to go further Songkick also integrates with Facebook, allowing you to announce to your Facebook friends when you're attending a concert and see if any of your friends are planning to go as well. Even if you're one of those folks (like me) who are looking for less Facebook in your life rather than more, you have to admit that's pretty cool.

So if you want a simple, easy way to to never miss another concert, go for it!

The Great American Ponzi Scheme?

My Social Security statement came in the mail a little while ago. It always says pretty much the same thing: "Social Security is this really great program the helps when you retire, and, uh, see the thing is it's kinda not doing so hot, so you might wanna save some extra money just in case, I mean we're not sayin' we're just sayin'." It goes on to explain that people are living longer and the birthrate is declining, thus the ratio of workers to beneficiaries is falling, and by the time I'm 54 a quarter of the money I've put into the system will have been given to someone else.

As widely understood and accepted as the impending doom of this program is (my dad has been telling me since I was a teenager to plan on getting zip from it in benefits), every time I read my statement this sentence grabs me:

The Social Security taxes you now pay go into the Social Security Trust Funds and are used to pay benefits to current beneficiaries. The Social Security Board of Trustees now estimates that based on current law, in 2037, the Trust Funds will be depleted.

Funds from new entrants into the system are used to pay current beneficiaries. Thanks to a certain high-profile criminal and a certain Texas governor, we all know what this sounds like: a Ponzi scheme.

Is this a fair characterization? Social Security defenders argue that unlike a Ponzi scheme, no one is being misled, the system is transparent and run by the government, funds are invested, you can never run out of "investors" (taxpayers), and there's no fraud being perpetrated.

So which is it? Flagship government retirement program or evil Ponzi scheme? My answer: who cares? You can make the argument on both sides but at the end of the day, the majority of the American people show no interest in chucking the program, and fixing it to provide funds for retirees for decades to come is not all that difficult. A modest reduction in benefits and increase in revenues, the kind of thing Reagan accomplished in the 80's, would fix the system long term. Allowing young folks like me to place a portion of their benefits in private accounts, as past Conservatives such as Bush and McCain have proposed (with much slander from the left), would be a great idea too but it's not required.

Of course it will take some political courage (the kind Congress seldom shows), but the way forward is clear and achievable. Last year the economic crisis caused Social Security's payouts to exceed its revenue four years earlier than expected. We need to tone down the rhetoric and get the job done because ultimately, Social Security could almost be considered a distraction compared to our much bigger problems: Medicare and Medicaid.

When the baby boomers retire in twenty years or so, the number of seniors drawing Medicare benefits will be double what is now. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2082, Medicare spending will roughly equal the amount spent by the entire federal government today (as a percentage of GDP). Medicare beneficiaries today get out of the system approximately three times what they pay into it (by comparison, Social Security beneficiaries today get out roughly 10% less than what they pay in). The primary reason for this is skyrocketing health care costs. Obama's Affordable Care Act did a little to curb these costs for Medicare in the future, but not nearly enough. If we have any hope of avoiding an enormous budget crisis in our lifetimes, we are going to have to go further to find a way to fix our health care system and fundamentally reform Medicare (by both raising taxes and cutting benefits)—and if 2010's health care fiasco is any indication, it won't be easy.

Sources not yet linked: U.S. Budget and Economy
Image: Social Security Online

Republican Rival Roundup

I'm back. The last eight weeks were a welcome break from politics, and the Republican primary gearing up is a welcome distraction from the country's frustrating, polarized debt crisis. I watched my first GOP debate last week, and I wanted to share a few thoughts on the current lineup (which I think is who we're stuck with, unless Palin plunges in before the end of the month).

Newt Gingrich – For some reason, probably having to do with meeting him in the 8th grade when he was my congressman, I appreciate Newt. He brings an intellectual perspective to the conversation, drawing on his keen understanding of American government. But his high-toned Conservative rhetoric about American political history so seldom gives way to his actual aspirations that in the debate I found myself forgetting he is actually in the race for president, rather than just commenting on it. It doesn't matter though. Even if he could make his case he wouldn't be able to leave behind his terribly-run campaign, his flip-flops on Libya and the Ryan budget plan, his statements about homosexuality and Obama's supposed anti-Colonial ideology, or even his bill at Tiffany's. And that's just the last year. With statements like, "I am convinced that if we do not decisively win the struggle over the nature of America, by the time they're my age they will be in a secular atheist country, potentially one dominated by radical Islamists and with no understanding of what it once meant to be an American."—this guy is just unelectable.

Ron Paul – My feelings haven't changed; I could never vote for Ronnie P, but gosh I love the guy. He's honest, principled, and dependable (or should I say 'predictable'). I even found myself nodding my head when he argued we should eliminate the liberty-killing TSA and let airlines handle their own security. But the next minute he's talking about how a fence on the Mexican border could be used not to keep illegal immigrants out, but Americans in, in the coming apocalypse. Good grief.

Michelle Bachman – I can't decide who is crazier, Michelle Bachman, or people who think Michelle Bachman has a shot at becoming president. The latter definitely annoy me more (although I suppose the group includes Michelle Bachman). Seriously, promising $2 a gallon gasoline if she is elected president? What's next, chocolate milk in the water fountains and all-day recess? If I have to hear one more time about how she wasted our time and money sponsoring a hopeless bill to repeal the recent health care legislation, I'm gonna look crazier then she did on the cover of Newsweek. Thank heavens Rick Perry has decimated what little following she had. Moving on...

Rick Perry – My initial reaction to Perry's candidacy was that he couldn't win because he was too similar to George W. Bush in the public consciousness. Now I think it's more his ideas. Sticking to your claim that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme is no way to win general elections. But I think the media is right, it's down to Perry or Romney at this point, and my guess is the Obama campaign is crossing their fingers hoping for Perry. The man is high on charisma and Tea Party cred, low on substance. But sometimes that's what it takes to win the GOP nomination. (By the way, the applause when Brian Williams mentioned that Perry had signed the order to execute 234 death row inmates was the most harrowing moment of the debate for me. How awful to applaud such things.)

Rick Santorum – Cricket... cricket...

Herman Cain – Herman Cain is the token crazy guy in a race that's already overflowing with crazies. Normally he would just provide comic relief, but as it is I wonder if the country really is going insane.

John Huntsman – Ever since I read "Running for Grownup," a New York Magazine profile about the only two rational, qualified, pragmatic, mature, and measured candidates in the race (Huntsman and Romney), I have wondered why his poll numbers are so low. Now I know. He is a terrible communicator. His answers floated all over the map, half-hitting five talking points in answer to one question. If he has a message, beats me what it is. But this probably won't matter at the end of the day. Though I love him for it, Huntsman simply isn't Conservative enough for a party nomination that has been hijacked by the Tea Party. His stance against meaningless tax pledges, his belief in evolution and man-made climate change, his former job as Obama's (gasp!) ambassador to China, his support for increased legal immigration and civil unions and the EPA and... well, you get the picture.

(One interesting note: Santorum was the only candidate in the Reagan Library debate to support interventionist foreign policy. Every other Republican candidate is in favor of drawing down our military efforts and not entering new ones—a stark contrast from the '04 and '08 elections. It's interesting how the economy shapes political ideology on both sides of the aisle.)

Mitt Romney – My money's on Romney as the GOP's last best hope of beating Obama. The experience of having been around the block in '08 is showing, in my opinion. He seems more focused, more substantive, more solid, and more wise than he did four years ago. He refuses to bow to the Tea Party's every whim. He has a message, "the economy needs help and I can fix it," and he has an actual plan (in writing, I might add) to do so. He is able to place himself above the fray. After each candidate had a chance to take a swing at Rick Perry over his executive order to inoculate young girls against cervical cancer in Texas, Romney showed mercy and grace, saying everyone has things they would do differently if they had a second chance. At the same time, he emerged victorious in a spat with Perry over the Texas and Massachusetts economies, which is not an easy thing to do against a charmer like Perry (just ask Jon Stewart). He's not perfect (why he's sticking to his "businesses are people" line in the most populist cultural climate in decades I'll never know), but if there is a GOP candidate who can beat Obama next November, it's Romney or nobody.

But my guess is still nobody. The reason the candidates are so cooky this time around is because this is simply a bad year for a Republican looking to become president. I will admit that as the economy has grown slower than anyone expected and fears of a double-dip recession have increased (especially with Europe teetering on the the brink of crisis), my confidence that Obama will win next November has lessened. Economic crisis is the kryptonite of incumbent presidents (see Carter and H.W.) and we've certainly mired in a terrible one. I do not think Obama's jobs plan is going to have a drastic effect and I'm losing confidence that we're going to see a significant recovery in jobs or housing in one year. A Republican winning Anthony Weiner's vacated seat yesterday didn't bode well either. Still, Obama has a trophy case of legislative accomplishments, a boat-load of money, a not-horrendous approval rating, and a cast of cuckoo Conservative candidates on his side. I'm not hedging my bets just yet.

But I am getting excited.

Image: DonkeyHotey

Well, So Much for Google+

It was fun while it lasted. In the last week, there were five posts in my Google+ stream. There were more posts in my Facebook news feed in the last hour.

There's no question in my mind, Google+ is better than Facebook in nearly every way. But the primary value of any social network is having people you know and love in it. And Google+ just did not provide enough incentive for my community of friends and family (and I expect most people's) to make the switch. In the two months since its launch, the Google+ team has made only minor changes to the service, besides adding a robust games section (which is an enticing carrot for some, but something I'd rather avoid).

I was going to wait until Google+ was no longer invitation-only to make a judgement, but I think it's clear now. Every day Google grows more and more like the Microsoft of old. Instead of creating innovative products (think search, Gmail, and Maps), they copy or buyout market leaders, slap on the Google brand, and expect people to flock to them (think Video, Offers, and now Google+). Unless they quickly infuse Google+ with some enticing innovation, it will remain a ghost town.

But Google+ will never be gone entirely, because Facebook is getting smart and adopting the truly innovative (but unfortunately inadequate) concept of Google+: circles. Facebook has already made it easier to control who sees your status updates, and Mashable reports that in near future they will finally be changing friends lists (the Facebook equivalent of circles) to make them usable.

So in a sense, Google has saved us from Facebook. By changing Facebook. I guess I'll take it.

Image: pascalbovet.com

Anna and I Make a Face

Last week I discovered an amazing project called Genetic Portraits on the fantastic art blog My Modern Met. Graphic designer Ulric Collette took portraits of two members of the same family, split them down the middle, and combined them. The results display the eerie genetic similarities and differences between family members. For example, here is a split portrait of a 56-year-old father and his 29-year-old-son:

Of course you know what I had to do. A few minutes after I sent a link to the project to my brilliant photographic artist wife, she had combined two photos of my sister Anna and me from my blog post showcasing our silly faces. Here is the creepy-cool result:

I don't think anything has ever simultaneously made me smile and given me the jibblies as much as this.

Quotes: Marilynne Robinson

The liberated Carolyn Tapie shared a Marilynne Robinson interview with me last week. It was so remarkably profound that I could not help posting my favorite parts here. Robinson is a Calvinist, and though I am not (ironically the words of John Ames in her wonderful novel Gilead influenced my rejection of Calvinism), I still have deep respect for the reformed tradition and many people who ascribe to it. Robinson's words drip with allusions to its ancient precepts that I love, like the depravity of man and a rejection of separation between the sacred and the secular. What a brilliant woman.

You would love the entire interview, of course, but if you don't have the time here are some moments that inspired me (I promise this is shorter than the interview).

I don't like categories like religious and not religious. As soon as religion draws a line around itself it becomes falsified. It seems to me that anything that is written compassionately and perceptively probably satisfies every definition of religious whether a writer intends it to be religious or not.

Calvin says that God takes an aesthetic pleasure in people. There's no reason to imagine that God would choose to surround himself into infinite time with people whose only distinction is that they fail to transgress. King David, for example, was up to a lot of no good. To think that only faultless people are worthwhile seems like an incredible exclusion of almost everything of deep value in the human saga. Sometimes I can't believe the narrowness that has been attributed to God in terms of what he would approve and disapprove.

I'm not terribly persuaded by the word supernatural. I don't like the idea of the world as an encapsulated reality with intrusions made upon it selectively. The reality that we experience is part of the whole fabric of reality. To pretend that the universe is somewhere else doing something is really not true. We're right in the middle of it. Utterly dependent on it, utterly defined by it.

People are frightened of themselves. It's like Freud saying that the best thing is to have no sensation at all, as if we're supposed to live painlessly and unconsciously in the world. I have a much different view. The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has come out of it. We should think of our humanity as a privilege.

You have to have a certain detachment in order to see beauty for yourself rather than something that has been put in quotation marks to be understood as "beauty." Think about Dutch painting, where sunlight is falling on a basin of water and a woman is standing there in the clothes that she would wear when she wakes up in the morning—that beauty is a casual glimpse of something very ordinary. Or a painting like Rembrandt's Carcass of Beef, where a simple piece of meat caught his eye because there was something mysterious about it. You also get that in Edward Hopper: Look at the sunlight! or Look at the human being! These are instances of genius. Cultures cherish artists because they are people who can say, Look at that. And it's not Versailles. It's a brick wall with a ray of sunlight falling on it.

The [religion vs. science] debate seems to be between a naive understanding of religion and a naive understanding of science. When people try to debunk religion, it seems to me they are referring to an eighteenth-century notion of what science is. I'm talking about Richard Dawkins here, who has a status that I can't quite understand. He acts as if the physical world that is manifest to us describes reality exhaustively. On the other side, many of the people who articulate and form religious expression have not acted in good faith. The us-versus-them mentality is a terrible corruption of the whole culture.

As an achievement, science is itself a spectacular argument for the singularity of human beings among all things that exist. It has a prestige that comes with unambiguous changes in people's experience—space travel, immunizations. It has an authority that's based on its demonstrable power. But in discussions of human beings it tends to compare downwards: we're intelligent because hyenas are intelligent and we just took a few more leaps. The first obligation of religion is to maintain the sense of the value of human beings. If you had to summarize the Old Testament, the summary would be: stop doing this to yourselves. But it is not in our nature to stop harming ourselves. We don't behave consistently with our own dignity or with the dignity of other people. The Bible reiterates this endlessly.

I worry that I'm not pessimistic enough. My own life is full of profound satisfactions, and I'm distracted from the fact that the world is not in good shape.

Marilynne Robinson, The Paris Review 

Emphasis added

Quotes: Attention, Listening, and the Events of the Day

"When information is cheap, attention becomes expensive." James Gleick

"Everything that needs to be said has already been said. But since no one was listening, everything must be said again." André Gide

"In modern America, anyone who attempts to write satirically about the events of the day finds it difficult to concoct a situation so bizarre that it may not actually come to pass while the article is still on the presses." Calvin Trillin