The Way the World Works

Grab Me a Gondola

Twelve years ago, I stood on the steps of the church of the Gesuati with a ceremonial handkerchief in my suit pocket, and watched my soon-to-be wife set out with her father from the far side of Venice’s widest and deepest-dredged waterway, the Giudecca Canal. The sky was the color of Istrian stone — i.e., white — and the water looked choppy. Their boat leaned to one side (all gondolas lean, but I didn’t know that then): sunk low among the silk-tufted cushions of their Byzantine conveyance, the passengers seemed to have their heads almost at water level. I worried that a large swell might slosh in unexpectedly from the side and capsize them.

The oarsman at the stern, Bruno Palmarin, had been endorsed by the local grocer. His grandfathers, his father, his older brother, and various uncles and cousins were gondoliers before him; members of the Palmarin family have rowed continuously since at least 1740. Nowadays, when Bruno does weddings, his nineteen-year-old son, Giacomo, is usually the second rower. Their boat is black, of course, in compliance with ancient decree (there is in fact a paint color called nero gondola), the oar blades are red-and-white-striped, matching the rowers’ wedding shirts, and over the sleeves of their white jackets they wear red armbands bearing the Palmarin family emblem (lion and palm tree) in four-inch lozenges of brass. Embellishing the gunwales are gilded cherubs that tug at bridles of black spiraling silk — these replicate the fittings of the state gondola owned by King Victor Emmanuel III. Most gondolas have a proverb cast in a decorative ribbon of brass just in front of the passenger well. Bruno’s was written for his grandfather, Ambrogio Palmarin, by Gabriele d’Annunzio, the poet: Ogni alba ha il suo tramonto (“Every dawn has its dusk”).

Bruno doesn’t row out onto the Giudecca Canal anymore unless a job like our wedding specifically requires it. When he was a boy, traffic on the canal was light enough that he could swim all the way across, returning on the traghetto, or two-oared gondola shuttle, that operated into the 1960s; but in recent years it has become a major thoroughfare, a sort of truck route, and its water is abob with the cross-purposed wakes of a vast range of boats: mid-sized motor-launches, ramp-prowed car ferries, crane barges, tugboats, tiny fiberglass speed-wedges banging from one swell to the next with a sound of lawn mowers, eight-story Greek cruise vessels thrumming past like insurance companies that have come laterally adrift, and oval, flat-roofed vaporetti swerving in loose S-shapes from shore to shore. Each spreading wave-system is reflected from the quaysides back into the central confusion. You may see ten boats, but you know that the water is mumblingly remembering the previous twenty-five. Only very late at night does the surface revert to its pre-propellerine calm.

This abundance of manufactured chop — known to Venetians by the ominous name of moto ondoso—accelerates the decay of the city’s foundational stonework. And it makes life difficult for the venturesome gondolier, who stands upright on a bit of carpet high on the upcurving tailpiece of a half-ton craft without a keel, trying, as he and his counterweighted, steel-pronged prow seesaw unrestrainedly, to propel it forward with one oar levered against a gnarl of polished walnut. His boat, with its sinuous, side-rocking way of proceeding by self-correctingly veering off course, is a curiosity, maybe even a marvel, of evolved hydrodynamics, but its peculiar nautical graces and efficiencies only assert themselves when it moves over relatively smooth water. A number of gondoliers say that the Giudecca Canal is dangerous. Bruno Palmarin avoids it not because it frightens him but because he thinks he looks out of place there. “In the choppy water, when you are struggling, when you are distrait, you feel ridiculous,” he said to me. “You feel like a clown.”

But on our wedding day, my veiled fidanzata—a gutsier import-word perhaps than the prissy-sounding fiancée—had a good time going across. “Out in the middle of the canal it was perfect,” she says now. “Everything looked silver, or lead-colored, and misty. I don’t remember its being choppy at all.” We got married, walked out the front door through a spray of rice, and stepped into life’s long boat together. It was dark by then; the red carpet in the passenger well glowed. The backboard behind our two seats was carved with some gold-leaf mermaids; its peaked shape, and the tapering form of the bow reaching ahead of us into the shadows, made me think of the Batmobile. There were two small gilded chairs for the best man (my father) and the maid of honor, Minette, with her beautiful smile. We began to move. We surged in the dark up a narrow canal, the San Vio, going surprisingly fast. At the Grand Canal, my father said, “If you’re going to go, this is definitely the way to go.” As a partial wedding present he gave us a plastic model of a gondola with a little red lightbulb in its gold cabin. We proudly displayed it on a side table in our first apartment, and then, when we moved, it got packed away in a box marked “Toys,” and I didn’t give gondolas another thought for a long time.

A year ago, we returned to Venice for the summer, to stay in my wife’s parents’ apartment on the island of the Giudecca. The first week, we did a lot of walking in the crowded trinket-lanes near the Rialto and San Marco, which are difficult to maneuver in with a three-year-old. A man walked into me, holding me momentarily by both arms, and immediately afterward my wife discovered that her wallet had been stolen; later I scolded a teenager on the piazza for luring a pigeon close to him with a handful of corn and then kicking it like a soccer ball. (The pigeon seemed all right afterward.) The second week, my wife had a dream in which her tongue was a large black dog that she had to take out for a walk. It was a sign. We were doing too much walking. The next day, we went on our first family gondola ride. The experience was startlingly pleasant — like sinking down in a warm bathtub, except drier, and with more interesting scenery. In aquatic shade, we turned tight corners in our long manual limousine, clearing edges of powdery brick by a quarter of an inch, admiring an occasional commemorative plaque (Byron is still big), with sunlight and strangely inverted conical chimneys and life-evincing laundry high overhead. There was no bad smell. My three-year-old son put his head in my lap and went to sleep; my nine-year-old daughter pointed out that the disintegrating doorways and passing tableaux were like Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean. Some French women on a bridge flirtatiously chided the gondolier, who had a fluffy ponytail and wraparound sunglasses, about his lack of a hat. Occasionally a thirties-looking wood-paneled water taxi disturbed our Edwardian trance as it dieseled by with the ruminative sound of toilets flushing. The people on it detached their faces from the rubber flanges of their video cameras for an instant and looked at us wistfully. They had thought they were being very clever by hiring a water taxi, since you can go so much farther in one; but now, seeing our silent, artful, blissful progress, our movement at the ideal speed of architectural self-disclosure, they were less sure: maybe they, too, should have gone for the gondola.

Without warning, I felt the sob-of-family-happiness-welling-up-during-an-expensive-vacation feeling. We had gone for the gondola. It wasn’t a tritely touristic boat, though its steel spaghetti-fork of a ferro intrudes in every etching; it was an ancient and noble boat, which summed up many lost beautiful things, and Venice itself seemed worth all the guidebooked fuss. Any means of transportation that could produce that much joy in fifty minutes, for a cost of a little over a hundred dollars, including tip, deserved further study.

In the Palladian library at San Giorgio Maggiore I read “The Evolution of the Venetian Gondola,” by G. B. Rubin de Cervin, which attributes the boat’s un-Palladian asymmetry — its “deviation from the curvature of the central line”—to the increasing use of one rower, rather than two, in the poorer times that followed Napoleon’s subjugation of the Venetian Republic. And I read “The Energy Cost of the Venetian Rowing Stroke,” in Carlo Donatelli’s personable and quaintly translated book The Gondola: An Extraordinary Naval Architecture: Donatelli’s dynamometer readings and measurements of oxygen consumption seem to suggest, remarkably, that you expend the same amount of energy rowing a loaded gondola at a speed of two miles an hour as you would walking empty-handed on flat ground at the same speed. (Which explains how gondoliers can work fifteen-hour days during the busy season.) I read also Goethe’s description of his father’s toy gondola, which first made him want to visit Venice and record his adventures there, thus luring south a poetical crowd of Romantic and Victorian followers. And I learned that plastic model gondolas, probably identical to the one my father gave us, had a vogue in Germany in the fifties, where they went on top of television sets and were called rauchverzehren, which means “smoke-eaters,” because their lights supposedly neutralized the effects of cigarette smoke.

We went on several more gondola rides. On a very windy morning, we got on a boat manned by a square-jawed regatta champion named Franco Grossi, a seventh-generation oarsman and a practitioner of Eastern medicine, to whom colleagues went for help with the sort of ailments (e.g., tennis elbow and back pain) that afflict rowers. I told him I wanted to use the gondola the way people would have used it in the ninteenth century, simply as a means of getting somewhere. Could he take us to the Ponte dei Pugni, or Bridge of Fists, where according to the Blue Guide there was an English-language bookstore? Grossi said nobody did that sort of thing anymore in a gondola — went from Ponte A to Ponte B. Everyone went in loops and ended up where they started. “But I like doing crazy things,” he said. He untied the ropes and we pushed back, as a passenger plane does, from his mooring near the Doge’s Palace. The gondola slots are defined by many thin twiglike sticks projecting vertically from the water; they give the hotel-crowded shoreline the appearance of fronting on a reedy marsh. We bobbed along for a while, and then, as we got closer to the mouth of the Grand Canal, there was a major gust of wind that made fine crinkles on the top of all the swells. The gust, combined with some large heaves from a ferry, made us suddenly slide around sideways, facing the Church of the Salute. I heard a “Wow!” behind me and thought Grossi had fallen off. But he hadn’t. “There was a little problem back there,” he conceded a few minutes later. The gondola is flat-bottomed, he said, and the wind, under certain rare conditions, can get under it and flip it over.

Things were quieter once we entered the San Trovaso canal and slid past a boatyard, or squero, where there are often three or four gondolas turned on their sides like dozing dugongs, having their hulls sanded down and repainted. Then we turned right on All-Saint’s Canal, and right again on the Canal of Lawyers, and Grossi pointed out the center of gondola history — the shop of the Brothers Tramontin. Domenico (El Grando) Tramontin perfected the modern gondola’s asymmetries in the 1880s, and Grossi was of the opinion that the Brothers Tramontin continue to make the best and longest-lived gondolas. But they cost ten million lire more than anyone else’s, Grossi said. His own boat is the work of “Nino” Giuponi, another squerarolo of legend, now retired. Giuponi was more of an experimenter than the later Tramontins; he introduced the use of plywood in some of his boats, which some disparage, although it can help the hull keep its shape in the presence of constant motorwaves.

Finally we reached the Bridge of Fists. The bookstore was gone. Its old shelves were holding lettuces and radishes, overflow from the highly successful produce barge that moors there. But it didn’t matter. We bought some spinach and went home — altogether a delightful trip.

Then, in my son’s sleepy company, I took a ride with a pilot named Marco, who worked at the gondola station at the Church of the Salute and looked like Billy Crystal. When I asked Marco what the most difficult thing was about being a gondolier, he thought for a moment. “The other gondoliers,” he said. “Mostly the old gondoliers. They have small brains, believe me.” As we passed the Church of San Trovaso, where there is an altar for boatbuilders with a gondola carved into it, Marco got a call on his portable phone. He set up a rendezvous while ducking under a bridge. We went by Tramontin’s boatyard, deserted now except for a small brown dog sniffing some new sawdust. We got onto the subject of boat maintenance. It’s important, Marco said, to wash your boat for half an hour every day. “It’s what my father teach to me, when I was young. Every day. With new water, not salt water. New water the gondola, then you dry the gondola.”

“Some gondoliers seem very good—” I began to say.

Marco misheard the word “seem” and cut in. “Believe me, sir,” Marco said with a self-deprecating laugh, “but I have a horrible voice. Better not to sing, just enjoy the nice weather.” In his father’s time, twenty or thirty years ago, a family would hire a gondola for the whole day, he said. I asked how much it would cost to do that now. “I think eight hundred thousand lire.”

That’s a pretty steep day rate, but (I said to myself) one total-immersion gondolar day — with a micro-cruise budget of 450 dollars — would give a visitor new to Venice a comprehensive oar’s-eye notion of the several neighborhoods and many churches. And each bought ride would have a political component: it would be an act of defiance against the water taxis and other arriviste wave-generators, a vote for a quieter city, something more than mere tourism. Why not skip the twelfth or fifteenth absurdly expensive meal in which three kinds of pale shellfish are mingled with a noodle of little distinction and instead buy eight dollars’ worth of cheese and olives and whatnot at the local salumeria and eat out at twilight in the very kind of boat that kings and popes and moody poets would have ridden in?

Next door to the Tramontin brothers’ squero is a gondola shop run by Daniele Bonaldo. A twenty-four-year-old American anthropology student named Thomas Price recently built a life-size gondola there with the help of a Watson Fellowship. Bonaldo is childless and says he’s tired of building boats, so he agreed to teach the art to Price. On the tenth of May I went to a party at Bonaldo’s place to celebrate “The Launching of the First American Gondola.” Price’s boat looked authentic — black, with a dark-red hull and a small, tasteful, delicately rendered American flag, breeze-ruffled, carved into one of the decorative elements by an itinerant artisan. Price has built sailboats and rowboats in Maine, but he was attracted to the gondola, he told me, because there are many unusual things about it. Not only is it asymmetrical and rowed in a standing position — but also its components are bent into shape by brushing them with water over a fire of marsh reeds (a blowtorch will also work and is handier in the winter), and they are assembled without paper plans, by cutting the pieces in accordance with a wooden template, the cantier. The prosecco that Price poured on the prow to christen the boat mixed with the sun-warmed and not-completely-cured black lacquer to produce an inspiring Saturday-morning smell. Price told me that he would like his gondola to be rowed on the canals of Venice, but it may be that a couple of entrepreneurs in Maine buy it for a novelty riverboat service there: it’s Bonaldo’s boat to sell.

Before I left the party I talked to Price’s sister, Anne. She was living in Mestre, making a living playing North Carolina fiddle music on the steps of Venetian churches, which is forbidden without a busker’s license. I asked her if she had ever ridden in a gondola. One time she was walking across a bridge, she said, and a young, handsome gondolier with long blond hair offered her a free ride. She said okay. They went down a sludgy canal by a conservatory, where she could hear pianos and clarinets, and then out onto the Grand Canal. The whole time the gondolier was saying how sorry he was that she had no one to be kissing while she was riding the gondola. I asked her if the two of them had hit it off. “We hit it off,” she said, “but I maintained my distance. I see him from time to time. It’s like a musical skill to be able to row a gondola. When I see gondoliers just standing all day on bridges, saying Gondola, gondola, waiting, it’s like they’re begging. It’s so similar to me when I play violin on the street, waiting for somebody to stop and listen.” Her gondolier’s name was Eros.

Eros the Oarboy is as familiar today as he was in Lady Chatterley’s Lover, where Giovanni the gondolier is “devoted to his ladies, as he had been devoted to cargoes of ladies in the past.” At night there is, I have noticed, a considerable amount of giggly public gondolier-kissing in the city by groups of foreign women carrying bottles of wine. My wife made up a song: Come into my gondola, I’m going to fondle ya. Once, in the middle of the Grand Canal at ten o’clock in the evening, we passed a gondola that was sitting motionless on the water with two women and two stripe-shirted men in close converse within; one of the men greeted our rower and called out (my wife translated for me), “How do you say ‘double bed’ in Spanish?”

All this is as it should be. My minor complaint is just that there is no privacy available to the passengers of these boats — privacy not to go hog wild, necessarily, but simply to talk without constraint. You are compelled to take the waters in a convertible. The felze (wooden winter cabin) and tendalin (canvas summer hood) were renounced forty or fifty years ago — too time-consuming to set up, and unnecessary, it was thought, for the demands of tourism. Unless these traditional enclosures are revived, the conventional tender moment on the water will be forever inhibited by the steady oar-plying and tour-guiding going on abaft. You tentatively take the spousal hand, and then hear, from behind, “This is Goethe house. Goethe lived in this house.” All potential romance has been realigned in favor of the presiding gondolier himself. Male passengers are adjuncts, balding lumps of flesh with wallets.

The one real love story I know between a gondolier and a straniéra is the one between Bruno Palmarin, the profusely mustached hereditary gondolier who rowed at our wedding, and Susan Nickerson, an American mosaicist. Susie grew up in Long Island, the daughter of two judges. She came to Venice in 1972 after art school to study mosaic-making. Late in December, on her birthday, she went alone to Torcello. The sacristan unlocked the church for her; she was the only person there. Then she got a boat back to Venice and went to an antique store where she knew some people. She told them it was her birthday, and they bought a bottle of spumanti to celebrate. Just then Bruno Palmarin came by — a big, polite man carrying two baby rabbits in a cage. (They were a Christmas present for his niece and nephew.) Bruno looked a little like the bust of the Emperor Constantine, Susie thought: the same large, spiritual eyes. Later she found out he was a gondolier.

When Bruno finished work for the day, he would hitch his gondola like a horse not far from Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo (Bruno’s father was Peggy Guggenheim’s gondolier for a time), in the little canal where Susie shared a mosaic studio with a Russian woman. He would peek in the little window that was in the door and greet her; she would scoop away the wet cement from her work-in-progress (she was using pieces of old mirror-glass a lot then) and come out with him. In time Susie learned to row herself, and they rowed a lot — to the Rialto to shop, to entertain dinner guests, to carry Susie’s heavy mosaics to her show. They, together with an American man and Bruno’s brother Ambrogio (who was a gondolier until elbow problems forced him to become a businessman), competed in the first Vogalonga in 1975—the Vogalonga being a noncompetitive marathon open to any kind of international oar-powered craft. “She should be home washing the dishes!” some people called from the shore (in Italian). Others called out, “Viva la donna!”

They got married in Venice’s City Hall in 1978; their first child, Giacomo, learned the basics of rowing when he was two, by holding a broom and standing in a wooden cradle that Bruno had built for him. Giacomo is now eighteen; he is not sure whether he wants to be a trumpet player, or a gondolier, or both. Last year he won the youth-division Regata Storica and every other race he entered. I asked him if he had any rowing tips. “You have to make the boat always go forwards and not go back,” he said. “The oar has to come in strong to come out sweetly and then go back fast.” Bruno is not a regatta-racer himself, but Giacomo admires his father’s virtuosity. “Everybody can go fast, if you train,” he said, “but not everybody can go fast in the canals.”

Bruno has the ferri, the prow and stern ornaments, of various relatives mounted on the walls and ceilings of their house. He recently spent three winters renovating an ornately filigreed felze made around the turn of the century, the sort of thing that Henry James or William Dean Howells would have cruised around in. (“I don’t know where, on the lagoon, my gondolier took me,” James wrote; “we floated aimlessly and with slow rare strokes.”) Bruno has a collection of old gondola components he keeps in a low-ceilinged storage room near where he grew up, in the Dorsoduro. (His family moved to the Giudecca in 1960, after canal water began flooding into Bruno’s room.) On the wall are portraits of gondolier relatives, old paintings of regatta champions, and a photograph of Susie and him leaving City Hall on their wedding day. The radio is always softly playing. “I like old things, anyway,” he said as he uncovered more and more of his collection of cloth-shrouded gondoliana. He owns two gondolas — the one that he rowed for our wedding (which seemed plenty fancy to us at the time), and a budget-busting wedding sloop that he commissioned Tramontin to make for him in 1990. Its stern-piece is an elegant twist of steel curving around a fernlike decorative whorl incised with the Palmarin coat of arms and the initials “PB.” (“Handmade by a friend of mine,” Bruno said.) The chairs are the ones his uncle used on his wedding gondola, re-gilded; Susie made the embroidered pillows and found the putti-and-flower pattern that the wood-carver chipped into the top panels. On the prow there is a small gold man holding a bottle of wine that Bruno had cast from a statue on an old clock he owns — the figure serves, as Bruno sees it, as the hostly Bacchus, saluting all passenger-guests and wishing them a good journey in his boat. Bruno hesitates to say how much it all cost: “Thirty thousand dollars would not be enough,” he says. The boat’s name is Aurelia Stephanie, after his daughter.

I walked with Bruno one morning to pick up the sealed results of a heart test from the Ospedale Civile. He tore open the white envelope on the front steps of the building, in front of a fifteenth-century trompe l’oeil stone facade, but the results were numerical and abbreviated and impossible to interpret. Not long ago he experienced what he calls “an episode of fast heartbeating” during an argument over the phone with Giacomo. He hasn’t felt any flutters while he is rowing, though. Inactivity is his enemy. “The more I work hard, the better I feel. If I fatigue, if I feel nice and tired, I feel much better.” One of the difficult things about his job is the waiting — standing in the heat in front of the Doge’s Palace. Passersby ask him the same questions hundreds of times a day, and have their pictures taken next to him as if he’s a monument. The sunlight reflects off the walls of the palace and off the water; it is like standing in a toaster.

We stopped at the Rialto at a small clothing store; I stood outside guarding a wicker basket that Bruno had found in a pile of trash by a canal while Bruno went inside and bought two pairs of black gondolier’s pants. Then he told me another story about his grandfather Ambrogio. “In the winter, there was very little to support the family, but he was a grand man,” he said. Ambrogio had a big red handkerchief, in which he put three cabbages. “Then he bought three necks of turkey — only the necks. He pinned the necks of turkey outside the handkerchief, and the cabbages were inside. Passing by San Vio like that — he wanted everybody to think he had three turkeys inside.”

Bruno’s childhood was not prosperous, either. He is self-educated; he left school after fifth grade and got a job carrying boxes of tripe across town on his shoulder. Later he worked for an old gondolier, cleaning out his boat and doing substitute work. Eventually he inherited his father and grandfather’s gondolier’s license. The licenses are valuable nowadays, like cab medallions. Recently someone introduced a measure that would prohibit the transfer of a license to one’s offspring. “Someone would make me not be able to give it to my son, eventually?” Bruno asks, incredulously. “No, no, ridiculous.” It was voted down. On the other hand, Bruno half hopes that he is the last Palmarin gondolier — that Giacomo will choose a different profession. “Not that I don’t like this job, but I think sometimes it is restricted, if you know what I mean, limited.”

He thinks of owning a place in the mountains, far from boats, and raising land creatures — horses, pigs, chickens. Venice can seem paved-over and confining. English and French he learned by spending winters abroad when he was in his twenties. “It didn’t mean when I went to Paris I did the grand life, or to London. But—ah! — I breathe more. The life here was to be a gondolier, to get fiancé with some nice young Venetian and then eventually get married, and then, that is life.” When he met Susie it was different. “Modestly, I had some opportunities here,” he said. “But she was not suffocating. A Venetian woman would be suffocating, you see. And so something grew in between us. She very often says to me, ‘You should have married a Venetian woman, cooking well, and so on.’ But she doesn’t know how much happy she made me, anyway.”

If Giacomo does decide in time to be a gondolier, he can expect to make a comfortable, if seasonal, living. Tariffs have risen steadily, and each gondolier is a member of a cooperative that pools income and pays a percentage of health insurance and pension expenses. “The gondola is alive because of money,” Bruno reminded me. “I am no angel myself.” But Bruno is troubled by how narrowly income-obsessed some of his colleagues are now. They are relinquishing their traditional roles as ambassadors and civic proxies. “There used to be a gondolier who was called Zar delle Russie, ‘Russian Czar,’ because he was a very pompous guy,” Bruno told me. “When somebody came to Venice, he used to go to Piazza San Marco and say, ‘The gondoliers welcome you, sir.’ And shake the hand. It was a bit of pathos, if you like. But it was done in an elegant way. Now gondoliers, what are they? We have no identity anymore. We have no past. We have put everything in money.”

Relations with City Hall are not good these days, either. When some kooks recently hijacked a ferryboat and occupied Saint Mark’s with the help of a cardboard tank, a famous Italian television commentator announced that he would be spending the next day in the square. The gondoliers, through their official representatives, lodged a protest with the city, saying that the TV equipment would interfere with their business and they wanted due compensation. Bruno thinks that was a mistake. “Our image is more important than immediate money, you see. The image pays in the long term.” Formerly gondoliers rowed political dignitaries and racing champions during annual celebrations like the Regata Storica or the Sensa (the day in which the mayor of Venice celebrates the city’s marriage to the sea by tossing a ring into the water out by the Lido, while a man with a microphone adds booming color commentary); now the four-oared boats of honor are manned by volunteer members of the city’s rowing clubs. “It is true that the city spares money by giving these services to the rowing clubs,” Bruno says. “But I was one of those on the table who said, ‘No, no, no, we must do that. Who if not the gondoliers? We should do that for free. One day a year, we should pay our people, in order to take a place there.”

Much of the ill-feeling between the city and the gondoliers is a result of the rampancy of moto ondoso. Speed limits are posted on the Giudecca and the Grand Canal—11 kilometers per hour for vaporetti-buses, 7 for water trucks, and 5 for water taxis — but they are seldom enforced. The gondoliers want “strict repression,” by which they mean traffic cops who will stop motormen — especially water-taxi drivers — from speeding and behaving recklessly. But the motormen evidently have powerful friends. At a big moto ondoso conference in June that I went to, under the eighteenth-century painted ceiling of the Venice Atheneum, a group of tough-looking water-taxi drivers with gold jewelry stood along the wall, arms crossed, and jeered audibly throughout a slide presentation of decaying stonework and leaping dual-engine boats. “They are brutes,” says Bruno. “They are savages. They should be thrown out the window.”

In principle, gondoliers have nothing against engines. Bruno’s gondola cooperative (the Ducale) owns ten big excursion launches, each carrying from thirty to fifty passengers; it also maintains the only reduced-wave water taxi in the city, the Eco, which has a lower-horsepower engine and a hull that does a better job of healing its transient water wound. In 1988, Bruno put his gondola in dry dock and drove a water taxi for a year. He returned to the oar, though, because, he said, “I wasn’t sweating enough.” Sweating rowers created the Venetian Republic, one recalls; the gondola is a direct link back to the glory days, when fifty-oared, ocean-roaming triremes earned or stole for the city its Renaissance fortune. The gondola’s prow, not the Evinrude’s screw, is Venice’s omnipresent postcard symbol for good reason, and it would be sad if unregulated motor traffic succeeded in sweeping the chaotic waters in front of St. Mark’s as free of black boats as the Giudecca Canal is now.

Bruno’s idea these days is for the creation of an elite corps of rowing police. Each would patrol a section of the city, standing up, using a smaller type of boat called a s’ciopon. Such floating mounties used to exist; because their boats were smaller and nimbler than the existing police motorboats, they could keep an eye on the narrow canals, too, which are now sometimes completely blocked by scofflaws. Oar-cops would be able to feel for themselves the destabilizing effect of waves in a way that existing Polizia and Caribinieri can’t; they would know better what gondoliers contend with every day. “But if I talk like that with someone, they think I come from Mars,” Bruno told me.

Shouldn’t it be possible to institute an ora-remi—an oar hour, or two, in the middle of the afternoon (when business slows down anyway) during which only human-powered vehicles would be allowed on all the canals of Venice? Several big four- or six-oared barges, like the baroque burchielli that once plied the river Brenta to and from Padua, could then peaceably proceed, stuffed with happy map-flapping tourists, from San Marco up the Grand Canal, in place of the ubiquitously groaning No. 1 vaporetto. Imagine daylit water that had calmed down enough to reflect, as it once did, the Redentore or the porphyritic palazzi disappearing around the curve of the Grand Canal. Imagine the water-taxi men chewing at their toothpicks from the sidelines. Imagine the history-sheltering silence. Gondolas would pour from their moorings to celebrate, wedding bells would swing in their leaning towers, women would kiss their husbands or their gondoliers, and everyone would weep and spend lots of money.

(1998)

The Charms of Wikipedia

Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It’s fact-encirclingly huge, and it’s idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies — and it’s free, and it’s fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, “Diogenes of Sinope,” or “turnip,” or “Crazy Eddie,” or “Bagoas,” or “quadratic formula,” or “Bristol Beaufighter,” or “squeegee,” or “Sanford B. Dole,” and you’ll have knowledge you didn’t have before. It’s like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.

More people use Wikipedia than Amazon or eBay — in fact, it’s up there in the top-ten Alexa rankings with those moneyed funhouses MySpace, Facebook, and YouTube. Why? Because it has 2.2 million articles, and because it’s very often the first hit in a Google search, and because it just feels good to find something there — even, or especially, when the article you find is maybe a little clumsily written. Any inelegance, or typo, or relic of vandalism reminds you that this gigantic encyclopedia isn’t a commercial product. There are no banners for ETrade or Classmates.com, no side sprinklings of AdSense.

It was constructed, in less than eight years, by strangers who disagreed about all kinds of things but who were drawn to a shared, not-for-profit purpose. They were drawn because for a work of reference Wikipedia seemed unusually humble. It asked for help, and when it did, it used a particularly affecting word: “stub.” At the bottom of a short article about something, it would say, “This article about X is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.” And you’d think, That poor sad stub: I will help. Not right now, because I’m writing a book, but someday, yes, I will try to help.

And when people did help they were given a flattering name. They weren’t called “Wikipedia’s little helpers,” they were called “editors.” It was like a giant community leaf-raking project in which everyone was called a groundskeeper. Some brought very fancy professional metal rakes, or even back-mounted leaf-blowing systems, and some were just kids thrashing away with the sides of their feet or stuffing handfuls in the pockets of their sweatshirts, but all the leaves they brought to the pile were appreciated. And the pile grew and everyone jumped up and down in it having a wonderful time. And it grew some more, and it became the biggest leaf pile anyone had ever seen anywhere, a world wonder. And then self-promoted leaf-pile guards appeared, doubters and deprecators who would look askance at your proffered handful and shake their heads, saying that your leaves were too crumpled or too slimy or too common, throwing them to the side. And that was too bad. The people who guarded the leaf pile this way were called “deletionists.”

But that came later. First it was just fun. One anonymous contributor wrote, of that early time:

I adored the Wikipedia when it was first launched and I contributed to a number of articles, some extensively, and always anonymously. The Wikipedia then was a riot of contributors, each adding bits and pieces to the articles they were familiar with, with nary an admin or editor in sight.

It worked and grew because it tapped into the heretofore unmarshaled energies of the uncredentialed. The thesis procrastinators, the history buffs, the passionate fans of the alternate universes of Garth Nix, Robotech, Half-Life, P. G. Wodehouse, Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Charles Dickens, or Ultraman — all those people who hoped that their years of collecting comics or reading novels or staring at TV screens hadn’t been a waste of time — would pour the fruits of their brains into Wikipedia, because Wikipedia added up to something. This wasn’t like writing reviews on Amazon, where you were just one of a million people urging a tiny opinion and a Listmania list onto the world — this was an effort to build something that made sense apart from one’s own opinion, something that helped the whole human cause roll forward.

Wikipedia was the point of convergence for the self-taught and the expensively educated. The cranks had to consort with the mainstreamers and hash it all out — and nobody knew who really knew what he or she was talking about, because everyone’s identity was hidden behind a jokey username. All everyone knew was that the end product had to make legible sense and sound encyclopedic. It had to be a little flat — a little generic — fair-minded — compressed — unpromotional — neutral. The need for the outcome of all edits to fit together as readable, unemotional sentences muted — to some extent — natural antagonisms. So there was this exhilarating sense of mission — of proving the greatness of the Internet through an unheard-of collaboration. Very smart people dropped other pursuits and spent days and weeks and sometimes years of their lives doing “stub dumps,” writing ancillary software, categorizing and linking topics, making and remaking and smoothing out articles — without getting any recognition except for the occasional congratulatory barnstar on their user page and the satisfaction of secret fame. Wikipedia flourished partly because it was a shrine to altruism — a place for shy, learned people to deposit their trawls.

But it also became great because it had a head start: from the beginning the project absorbed articles from the celebrated 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, which is in the public domain. And not only the 1911 Britannica. Also absorbed were Smith’s Dictionary of Greek and Roman Biography, Nuttall’s 1906 Encyclopedia, Chambers’s Cyclopedia, Aiken’s General Biography, Rose’s Biographical Dictionary, Easton’s Bible Dictionary, and many others. In August 2001, a group of articles from W. W. Rouse Ball’s Short Account of the History of Mathematics—posted on the Net by a professor from Trinity College, Dublin — was noticed by an early Wikipedian, who wrote to his co-volunteers: “Are they fair game to grab as source material for our wikipedia? I know we are scarfing stuff from the 1911 encyclopedia, this is from 1908, so it should be under the same lack of restrictions. . ” It was. Rouse Ball wrote that Pierre Varignon was an intimate friend of Newton, Leibniz, and the Bernoullis and, after l’Hopital, was the earliest and most powerful advocate in France of the use of differential calculus. In January 2006, Wikipedia imported this 1908 article, with an insertion and a few modernizing rewordings, and it now reads:

Varignon was a friend of Newton, Leibniz, and the Bernoulli family. Varignon’s principal contributions were to graphic statics and mechanics. Except for l’Hôpital, Varignon was the earliest and strongest French advocate of differential calculus.

But the article is now three times longer, barnacled with interesting additions, and includes a link to another article discussing Varignon’s mechanical theory of gravitation.

The steady influx of top-hat-and-spatted sources elevated Wikipedia’s tone. This wasn’t just a school encyclopedia, a back-yard Encarta—this was drinks at the faculty club. You looked up Diogenes, and bang, you got something wondrously finished-sounding from the 1911 Britannica. That became Diogenes’ point of departure. And then all kinds of changes happened to the Greek philosopher, over many months and hundreds of revisions — odd theories, prose about the habits of dogs, rewordings, corrections of corrections. Now in Wikipedia there is this summary of Diogenes’ provocations:

Diogenes is said to have eaten (and, once, masturbated) in the marketplace, urinated on some people who insulted him, defecated in the theatre, and pointed at people with his middle finger.

And yet amid the modern aggregate, some curvy prose from the 1911 Britannica still survives verbatim:

Both in ancient and in modern times, his personality has appealed strongly to sculptors and to painters.

The fragments from original sources persist like those stony bits of classical buildings incorporated in a medieval wall.

But the sources and the altruism don’t fully explain why Wikipedia became such a boomtown. The real reason it grew so fast was noticed by cofounder Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales in its first year of life. “The main thing about Wikipedia is that it is fun and addictive,” Wales wrote. Addictive, yes. All big Internet successes — e-mail, AOL chat, Facebook, Gawker, Second Life, YouTube, Daily Kos, World of Warcraft—have a more or less addictive component — they hook you because they are solitary ways to be social: you keep checking in, peeking in, as you would to some noisy party going on downstairs in a house while you’re trying to sleep.

Brion Vibber, who was for a while Wikipedia’s only full-time employee, explained the attraction of the encyclopedia at a talk he gave to Google employees in 2006. For researchers it’s a place to look stuff up, Vibber said, but for editors “it’s almost more like an online game, in that it’s a community where you hang out a bit, and do something that’s a little bit of fun: you whack some trolls, you build some material, et cetera.” Whacking trolls is, for some Wikipedia editors, a big part of why they keep coming back.

Say you’re working away on the Wikipedia article on aging. You’ve got some nice scientific language in there and it’s really starting to shape up:

After a period of near perfect renewal (in Humans, between 20 and 50 years of age), organismal senescence is characterized by the declining ability to respond to stress, increasing homeostatic imbalance and increased risk of disease. This irreversible series of changes inevitably ends in Death.

Not bad!

And then somebody — a user with an address of 206.82.17.190, a “vandal”—replaces the entire article with a single sentence: “Aging is what you get when you get freakin old old old.” That happened on December 20, 2007. A minute later, you “revert” that anonymous editor’s edit, with a few clicks; you go back in history to the article as it stood before. You’ve just kept the aging article safe, for the moment. But you have to stay vigilant, because somebody might swoop in again at any time, and you’ll have to undo their harm with your power reverter ray. Now you’re addicted. You’ve become a force for good just by standing guard and looking out for juvenile delinquents.

Some articles are so out of the way that they get very little vandalism. (Although I once fixed a tiny page about a plant fungus, Colletotrichum trichellum, that infects English ivy; somebody before me had claimed that 40 percent of the humans who got it died.) Some articles are vandalized a lot. On January 11, 2008, the entire fascinating entry on the aardvark was replaced with “one ugly animal”; in February the aardvark was briefly described as a “medium-sized inflatable banana.” On December 7, 2007, somebody altered the long article on bedbugs so that it read like a horror movie:

Bedbugs are generally active only at dawn, with a peak attack period about an hour before dawn, though given the opportunity, they may attempt to feed at your brain at other times.

A few weeks later, somebody replaced everything with:

BED BUGS MOTHER FUCKER THEY GON GET YO MOTHAFUCKING ASS BRAAAAAAAT FOOL BRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAP.

A piece of antivandalism software, VoABot II, reverted that edit, with a little sigh, less than a minute after it was made.

Vandalism spiked in August 2006 after comedian Stephen Colbert — in the wake of Stacy Schiff’s excellent but slightly frosty New Yorker article about Wikipedia — invited viewers of his show to post made-up facts about the increase in the population of African elephants, as proof of the existence of something that was not reality but “wikiality”—a cheap shot, but mildly funny. People repeatedly went after the elephant page, and it was locked for a while. But not for very long. The party moved on.

The Pop-Tarts page is often aflutter. Pop-Tarts, it says as of today (February 8, 2008), were discontinued in Australia in 2005. Maybe that’s true. Before that it said that Pop-Tarts were discontinued in Korea. Before that Australia. Several days ago it said: “Pop-Tarts is german for Little Iced Pastry O’ Germany.” Other things I learned from earlier versions: More than two trillion Pop-Tarts are sold each year. George Washington invented them. They were developed in the early 1960s in China. Popular flavors are “frosted strawberry, frosted brown sugar cinnamon, and semen.” Pop-Tarts are a “flat Cookie.” No: “Pop-Tarts are a flat Pastry, KEVIN MCCORMICK is a FRIGGIN LOSER not to mention a queer inch.” No: “A Pop-Tart is a flat condom.” Once last fall the whole page was replaced with “NIPPLES AND BROCCOLI!!!!!”

This sounds chaotic, but even the Pop-Tarts page is under control most of the time. The “unhelpful” or “inappropriate”—sometimes stoned, racist, violent, metal-headed — changes are quickly fixed by human stompers and algorithmicized helper bots. It’s a game. Wikipedians see vandalism as a problem, and it certainly can be, but a Diogenes-minded observer would submit that Wikipedia would never have been the prodigious success it has been without its demons.

This is a reference book that can suddenly go nasty on you. Who knows whether, when you look up Harvard’s one-time warrior-president, James Bryant Conant, you’re going to get a bland, evenhanded article about him, or whether the whole page will read (as it did for seventeen minutes on April 26, 2006): “HES A BIGSTUPID HEAD.” James Conant was, after all, in some important ways, a big stupid head. He was studiously anti-Semitic, a strong believer in wonder-weapons — a man who was quite as happy figuring out new ways to kill people as he was administering a great university. Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead it’s a fast-paced game of paintball.

Not only does Wikipedia need its vandals — up to a point — the vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context. If Wikipedia were rendered entirely chaotic and obscene, there would be no joy in, for example, replacing some of the article on Archimedes with this:

Archimedes is dead.

He died.

Other people will also die.

All hail chickens.

The Power Rangers say “Hi”

The End.

Even the interesting article on culture jamming has been hit a few times: “Culture jamming,” it said in May 2007, “is the act of jamming tons of cultures into 1 extremely hot room.”

When, last year, some computer scientists at the University of Minnesota studied millions of Wikipedia edits, they found that most of the good ones — those whose words persisted intact through many later viewings — were made by a tiny percentage of contributors. Enormous numbers of users have added the occasional enriching morsel to Wikipedia — and without this bystander’s knowledge the encyclopedia would have gone nowhere — but relatively few users know how to frame their contribution in a form that lasts.

So how do you become one of Wikipedia’s upper crust — one of the several thousand whose words will live on for a little while, before later verbal fumarolings erode what you wrote? It’s not easy. You have to have a cool head, so that you don’t get drawn into soul-destroying disputes, and you need some practical writing ability, and a quick eye, and a knack for synthesis. And you need lots of free time — time to master the odd conventions and the unfamiliar vocabulary (words like smerge, POV warrior, forum shopping, hatnote, meat puppet, fancruft, and transclusion), and time to read through guidelines and policy pages and essays and the endless records of old skirmishes — and time to have been gently but firmly, or perhaps rather sharply, reminded by other editors how you should behave. There’s a long apprenticeship of trial and error.

At least, that’s how it used to be. Now there’s a quicker path to proficiency: John Broughton’s Wikipedia: The Missing Manual, part of the Missing Manual series, overseen by the New York Times’s cheery electronics expert, David Pogue. “This Missing Manual helps you avoid beginners’ blunders and gets you sounding like a pro from your first edit,” the book says on the back. In his introduction, Broughton, who has himself made more than 15,000 Wikipedia edits, putting him in the elite top 1,200 of all editors — promises “the information you absolutely need to avoid running afoul of the rules.” And it’s true: this manual is enlightening, well organized, and full of good sense. Its arrival may mark a new, middle-aged phase in Wikipedia’s history; some who read it will probably have wistful longings for the crazy do-it-yourself days when the whole project was just getting going. In October 2001, the first Wikipedian rule appeared. It was:

Ignore all rules: If rules make you nervous and depressed, and not desirous of participating in the wiki, then ignore them entirely and go about your business.

The “ignore all rules” rule was written by cofounder Larry Sanger and signed by cofounder Jimbo Wales, along with WojPob, AyeSpy, OprgaG, Invictus, Koyaanis Qatsi, Pinkunicorn, sjc, mike dill, Taw, GWO, and Enchanter. There were two dissenters listed, tbc and AxelBoldt.

Nowadays there are rules and policy banners at every turn — there are strongly urged warnings and required tasks and normal procedures and notability guidelines and complex criteria for various decisions — a symptom of something called instruction creep: defined in Wikipedia as something that happens “when instructions increase in number and size over time until they are unmanageable.” John Broughton’s book, at a mere 477 pages, cuts through the creep. He’s got a whole chapter on how to make better articles (“Don’t Suppress or Separate Controversy”) and one on “Handling Incivility and Personal Attacks.” Broughton advises that you shouldn’t write a Wikipedia article about some idea or invention that you’ve personally come up with; that you should stay away from articles about things or people you really love or really hate; and that you shouldn’t use the encyclopedia as a PR vehicle — for a new rock band, say, or an aspiring actress. Sometimes Broughton sounds like a freshman English comp teacher, a little too sure that there is one right and wrong way to do things: Strunk without White. But honestly, Wikipedia can be confusing, and you need that kind of confidence coming from a user’s guide.

The first thing I did on Wikipedia (under the username Wageless) was to make some not-very-good edits to the page on bovine somatotropin. I clicked the “edit this page” tab, and immediately had an odd, almost light-headed feeling, as if I had passed through the looking glass and was being allowed to fiddle with some huge engine or delicate piece of biomedical equipment. It seemed much too easy to do damage; you ask, Why don’t the words resist me more? Soon, though, you get used to it. You recall the central Wikipedian directive: “Be Bold.” You start to like life on the inside.

After bovine hormones, I tinkered a little with the plot summary of the article on Sleepless in Seattle, while watching the movie. A little later I made some adjustments to the intro in the article on hydraulic fluid — later still someone pleasingly improved my fixes. After dessert one night my wife and I looked up recipes for cobbler, and then I worked for a while on the cobbler article, though it still wasn’t right. I did a few things to the article on periodization. About this time I began standing with my computer open on the kitchen counter, staring at my growing watchlist, checking, peeking. I was, after about a week, well on my way to a first-stage Wikipedia dependency.

But the work that really drew me in was trying to save articles from deletion. This became my chosen mission. Here’s how it happened: I read a short article on a post-Beat poet and small-press editor named Richard Denner, who had been a student in Berkeley in the sixties and then, after some lost years, had published many chapbooks on a hand press in the Pacific Northwest. The article was proposed for deletion by a user named PirateMink, who claimed that Denner wasn’t a notable figure, whatever that means. (There are quires, reams, bales of controversy over what constitutes notability in Wikipedia: nobody will ever sort it out.) Another user, Stormbay, agreed with PirateMink: no third-party sources, ergo not notable.

Denner was in serious trouble. I tried to make the article less deletable by incorporating a quote from an interview in the Berkeley Daily Planet—Denner told the reporter that in the sixties he’d tried to be a street poet, “using magic markers to write on napkins at Cafe Med for espressos, on girls’ arms and feet.” (If an article bristles with some quotes from external sources these may, like the bushy hairs on a caterpillar, make it harder to kill.) And I voted “keep” on the deletion-discussion page, pointing out that many poets publish only chapbooks: “What harm does it do to anyone or anything to keep this entry?” An administrator named Nakon — one of about a thousand peer-nominated volunteer administrators — took a minute to survey the two “delete” votes and my “keep” vote and then killed the article. Denner was gone. Startled, I began sampling the “AfDs” (the Articles for Deletion debate pages) and the even more urgent “speedy deletes” and “PRODs” (proposed deletes) for other items that seemed unjustifiably at risk; when they were, I tried to save them. Taekwang Industry — a South Korean textile company — was one. A user named Kusunose had “prodded” it — that is, put a red-edged banner at the top of the article proposing it for deletion within five days. I removed the banner, signaling that I disagreed, and I hastily spruced up the text, noting that the company made “Acelan” brand spandex, raincoats, umbrellas, sodium cyanide, and black abaya fabric. The article didn’t disappear: wow, did that feel good.

So I kept on going. I found press citations and argued for keeping the Jitterbug telephone, a large-keyed cell phone with a soft earpiece for elder callers; and Vladimir Narbut, a minor Russian Acmeist poet whose second book, Halleluia, was confiscated by the police; and Sara Mednick, a San Diego neuroscientist and author of Take a Nap! Change Your Life; and Pyro Boy, a minor celebrity who turns himself into a human firecracker onstage. I took up the cause of the Arifs, a Cyprio-Turkish crime family based in London (on LexisNexis I found that the Irish Daily Mirror called them “Britain’s No. 1 Crime Family”); and Card Football, a pokerlike football simulation game; and Paul Karason, a suspender-wearing guy whose face turned blue from drinking colloidal silver; and Jim Cara, a guitar restorer and modem-using music collaborationist who badly injured his head in a ski-flying competition; and writer Owen King, son of Stephen King; and Whitley Neill Gin, flavored with South African botanicals; and Whirled News Tonight, a Chicago improv troupe; and Michelle Leonard, a European songwriter, cowriter of a recent glam hit called “Love Songs (They Kill Me).”

All of these people and things had been deemed nonnotable by other editors, sometimes with unthinking harshness — the article on Michelle Leonard was said to contain “total lies.” (Wrongly — as another editor, Bondegezou, more familiar with European pop charts, pointed out.) When I managed to help save something I was quietly thrilled — I walked tall, like Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men.

At the same time as I engaged in these tiny, fascinating (to me) “keep” tussles, hundreds of others were going on, all over Wikipedia. I signed up for the Article Rescue Squadron, having seen it mentioned in Broughton’s manual: the ARS is a small group that opposes “extremist deletion.” And I found out about a project called WPPDP (for “WikiProject Proposed Deletion Patrolling”) in which people look over the PROD lists for articles that shouldn’t be made to vanish. Since about 1,500 articles are deleted a day, this kind of work can easily become life-consuming, but some editors (for instance, a patient librarian whose username is DGG) seem to be able to do it steadily week in and week out and stay sane. I, on the other hand, was swept right out to the Isles of Shoals. I stopped hearing what my family was saying to me — for about two weeks I all but disappeared into my screen, trying to salvage brief, sometimes overly promotional, but nevertheless worthy biographies by recasting them in neutral language, and by hastily scouring newspaper databases and Google Books for references that would bulk up their notability quotient. I had become an “inclusionist.”

That’s not to say that I thought every article should be fought for. Someone created an article called Plamen Ognianov Kamenov. In its entirety, the article read: “Hi my name is Plamen Ognianov Kamenov. I am Bulgarian. I am smart.” The article is gone — understandably. Someone else, evidently a child, made up a lovely short tale about a fictional woman named Empress Alamonda, who hated her husband’s chambermaids. “She would get so jealous she would faint,” said the article. “Alamonda died at 6:00 pm in her room. On august 4 1896.” Alamonda is gone, too.

Still, a lot of good work — verifiable, informative, brain-leapingly strange — is being cast out of this paperless, infinitely expandable accordion folder by people who have a narrow, almost grade-schoolish notion of what sort of curiosity an online encyclopedia will be able to satisfy in the years to come.

Anybody can “pull the trigger” on an article (as Broughton phrases it) — you just insert a double-bracketed software template. It’s harder to improve something that’s already written, or to write something altogether new, especially now that so many of the World Book—sanctioned encyclopedic fruits are long plucked. There are some people on Wikipedia now who are just bullies, who take pleasure in wrecking and mocking people’s work — even to the point of laughing at nonstandard “Engrish.” They poke articles full of warnings and citation-needed notes and deletion prods till the topics go away.

In the fall of 2006, groups of editors went around getting rid of articles on webcomic artists — some of the most original and articulate people on the Net. They would tag an article as nonnotable and then crowd in to vote it down. One openly called it the “web-comic articles purge of 2006.” A victim, Trev-Mun, author of a comic called Ragnarok Wisdom, wrote: “I got the impression that they enjoyed this kind of thing as a kid enjoys kicking down others’ sand castles.” Another artist, Howard Tayler, said: “‘Notability purges’ are being executed throughout Wikipedia by empire-building, wannabe tin-pot dictators masquerading as humble editors.” Rob Balder, author of a webcomic called PartiallyClips, likened the organized deleters to book burners, and he said: “Your words are polite, yeah, but your actions are obscene. Every word in every valid article you’ve destroyed should be converted to profanity and screamed in your face.”

As the deletions and ill will spread in 2007—deletions not just of webcomics but of companies, urban places, websites, lists, people, categories, and ideas — all deemed to be trivial, “NN” (nonnotable), “stubby,” undersourced, or otherwise unencyclopedic — Andrew Lih, one of the most thoughtful observers of Wikipedia’s history, told a Canadian reporter: “The preference now is for excising, deleting, restricting information rather than letting it sit there and grow.” In September 2007, Jimbo Wales, Wikipedia’s panjandrum — himself an inclusionist who believes that if people want an article about every Pokemon character, then hey, let it happen — posted a one-sentence stub about Mzoli’s, a restaurant on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa. It was quickly put up for deletion. Others saved it, and after a thunderstorm of vandalism (e.g., the page was replaced with “I hate Wikipedia, its a far-left propaganda instrument, some far-left gangs control it”), “Mzoli’s” is now a model piece, spiky with press citations. There’s even, as of January, an article about “Deletionism and inclusionism in Wikipedia”—it, too, survived an early attempt to purge it.

My advice to anyone who is curious about becoming a contributor — and who is better than I am at keeping his or her contributional compulsions under control — is to get Broughton’s Missing Manual and start adding, creating, rescuing. I think I’m done for the time being. But I have a secret hope. A librarian, K. G. Schneider, recently proposed a Wikimorgue — a bin of broken dreams where all rejects could still be read, as long as they weren’t libelous or otherwise illegal. Like other middens, it would have much to tell us over time. We could call it the Deletopedia.

(2008)

Kindle 2

I ordered a Kindle 2 from Amazon. How could I not? There were banner ads for it all over the Web. Whenever I went to the Amazon website, I was urged to buy one. “Say Hello to Kindle 2,” it said, in tall letters on the main page. If I looked up a particular writer on Amazon — Mary Higgins Clark, say — and then reached the page for her knuckle-gnawer of a novel Moonlight Becomes You, the top line on the page said, “Moonlight Becomes You and over 270,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle — Amazon’s new wireless reading device. Learn more.” Below the picture of Clark’s physical paperback ($7.99) was another teaser: “Start reading Moonlight Becomes You on your Kindle in under a minute. Don’t have a Kindle? Get yours here.” If I went to the Kindle page for the digital download of Moonlight Becomes You ($6.39), it wouldn’t offer me a link back to the print version. I was being steered.

Everybody was saying that the new Kindle was terribly important — that it was an alpenhorn blast of post-Gutenbergian revalorization. In the Wall Street Journal, the cultural critic Steven Johnson wrote that he’d been alone one day in a restaurant in Austin, Texas, when he was seized by the urge to read a novel. Within minutes, thanks to Kindle’s free 3G hookup with Sprint wireless — they call it Whispernet — he was well into Chapter 1 of Zadie Smith’s On Beauty ($9.99 for the e-book, $10.20 for the paperback). Writing and publishing, he believed, would never be the same. In Newsweek, Jacob Weisberg, the editor in chief of the Slate Group, confided that for weeks he’d been doing all his recreational reading on the Kindle 2, and he claimed that it offered a “fundamentally better experience” than inked paper did. “Jeff Bezos”—Amazon’s founder and CEO—“has built a machine that marks a cultural revolution,” Weisberg said. “Printed books, the most important artifacts of human civilization, are going to join newspapers and magazines on the road to obsolescence.”

Lots of ordinary people were excited about the Kindle 2, too — there were then about fifteen hundred five-star customer reviews at the Kindle Store, saying “I love my Kindle” over and over, and only a few hundred bitter one-stars. Kindle books were clean. “I’ve always been creeped out by library books and used books,” one visitor, Christine Ring, wrote on the Amazon website. “You never know where they’ve been!” “It has reinvigorated my interest in reading,” another reviewer said. “I’m hooked,” another said. “If I dropped my kindle down a sewer, I would buy another one immediately.”

And the unit was selling: in April, tech blogs had rumors that three hundred thousand Kindle 2s had shipped since the release date of February 24. Bezos wrote a letter to shareholders: “Kindle sales have exceeded our most optimistic expectations.” He went on The Daily Show and laughed. (See the YouTube video called “Jeff Bezos Laughing Freakishly Hard on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”)

Amazon’s page showed a woman in sunglasses sitting on a beach with a Kindle over her knee. Below that were video testimonials from big-name writers like Michael Lewis and Toni Morrison, recycled from the launch of the original Kindle, in the fall of 2007. James Patterson, the force behind a stream of No. 1 Times best-sellers, said that he enjoyed reading outdoors, where he had, he confided, a “wonderful back yard, nice pool, and all that.” Patterson was pleased to discover, while Kindling poolside, that the wind didn’t make the book’s pages flutter. “There’s just the one page,” he explained. Neil Gaiman had moved from skeptic to “absolute believer.”

Well, well! I began to have the mildly euphoric feeling that you get ten minutes into an infomercial. Sure, the Kindle is expensive, but the expense is a way of buying into the total commitment. This could forever change the way I read. I’ve never been a fast reader. I’m fickle; I don’t finish books I start; I put a book aside for five, ten years and then take it up again. Maybe, I thought, if I ordered this wireless Kindle 2 I would be pulled into a world of compulsive, demonic book consumption, like Pippin staring at the stone of Orthanc. Maybe I would gorge myself on Rebecca West, or Jack Vance, or Dawn Powell. Maybe the Kindle was the Bowflex of bookishness: something expensive that, when you commit to it, forces you to do more of whatever it is you think you should be doing more of.

True, the name of the product wasn’t so great. Kindle? It was cute and sinister at the same time — worse than Edsel, or Probe, or Microsoft’s Bob. But one forgives a bad name. One even comes to be fond of a bad name, if the product itself is delightful.

It came, via UPS, in a big cardboard box. Inside the box were some puffy clear bladders of plastic, a packing slip with “$359” on it, and another cardboard box. This one said, in spare, lowercase type, “kindle.” On the side of the box was a plastic strip inlaid into the cardboard, which you were meant to pull to tear the package cleanly open. On it were the words “Once upon a time.” I pulled and opened.

Inside was another box, fancier than the first. Black cardboard was printed with a swarm of glossy black letters, and in the middle was, again, the word “kindle.” There was another pull strip on the side, which again said, “Once upon a time.” I’d entered some nesting Italo Calvino folktale world of packaging. (Calvino’s Italian folktales aren’t yet available at the Kindle Store, by the way.) I pulled again and opened.

Within, lying faceup in a white-lined casket, was the device itself. It was pale, about the size of a hardcover novel, but much thinner, and it had a smallish screen and a QWERTY keyboard at the bottom made of tiny round pleasure-dot keys that resisted pressing. I gazed at the keys for a moment and thought of a restaurant accordion.

The plug, which was combined with the USB connector, was extremely well designed, in the best post-Apple style. It was a very, very good plug. I turned the Kindle on and pressed the Home key. Home gives you the list of what you’ve got in your Kindle. There were some books that I’d already ordered waiting for me — that was nice — and there was also a letter of greeting from Jeff Bezos. “Kindle is an entirely new type of device, and we’re excited to have you as an early customer!” Bezos wrote. I read the letter and some of His Majesty’s Dragon (a dragon fantasy by Naomi Novick set during the Napoleonic Wars, given away free), Gulliver’s Travels, and Slow Hands, a freebie Harlequin Blaze novel by Leslie Kelly. I changed the type size. I searched for a text string. I tussled with a sense of anticlimax.

The problem was not that the screen was in black-and-white; if it had really been black-and-white, that would have been fine. The problem was that the screen was gray. And it wasn’t just gray; it was a greenish, sickly gray. A postmortem gray. The resizable typeface, Monotype Caecilia, appeared as a darker gray. Dark gray on paler greenish gray was the palette of the Amazon Kindle.

This was what they were calling e-paper? This four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon? Where was paper white, or paper cream? Forget RGB or CMYK. Where were sharp black letters laid out like lacquered chopsticks on a clean tablecloth?

I showed it to my wife. “Too bad it doesn’t have a little kickstand,” she said. “You could prop it up like a dresser mirror and read while you eat.” My son clicked around in the Kindle edition of a Bernard Cornwell novel about ancient Britain. “It’s not that bad,” he said. “The map looks pretty good. Some of the littler names aren’t readable. I’d rather be reading that”—pointing to his Cornwell paperback, which was lying facedown nearby—“but I can definitely read this.”

Yes, you can definitely read things on the Kindle. And I did. Bits of things at first. I read some of De Quincey’s Confessions, some of Robert Benchley’s Love Conquers All, and some of several versions of Kipling’s The Jungle Book. I squeezed no new joy from these great books, though. The Gluyas Williams drawings were gone from the Benchley, and even the wasp passage in Do Insects Think? just wasn’t the same in Kindle gray. I did an experiment. I found the Common Reader reprint edition of Love Conquers All and read the very same wasp passage. I laughed: ha-ha. Then I went back to the Kindle 2 and read the wasp passage again. No laugh. Of course, by then I’d read the passage three times, and it wasn’t that funny anymore. But the point is that it wasn’t funny the first time I came to it, when it was enscreened on the Kindle. Monotype Caecilia was grim and Calvinist; it had a way of reducing everything to arbitrary heaps of words.

Reading some of Max, a James Patterson novel, I experimented with the text-to-speech feature. The robo-reader had a polite, halting, Middle European intonation, like Tom Hanks in The Terminal, and it was sometimes confused by periods. Once it thought miss. was the abbreviation of a state name: “He loved the chase, the hunt, the split-second intersection of luck and skill that allowed him to exercise his perfection, his inability to Mississippi.” I turned the machine off.

And yet, you know, many people loved it. To be fair to the Kindle, I had to make it through at least one whole book. Jeff Bezos calls this “long form” reading. I had some success one morning when I Kindled my way deep into The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Writing Erotic Romance, by Alison Kent. There are, I learned, four distinct levels of intensity in the erotic-romance industry: sweet, steamy, sizzling, and scorching. This seemed like pertinent information, since romance readers are major Kindlers. “The success of the ebook is being fueled by the romance and erotic romance market,” Peter Smith, of ITworld, reports. Smith cites the actress and Kindle enthusiast Felicia Day, of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, who has been bingeing on paranormals like Dark Needs at Night’s Edge. “I’ve read like, 6 books this week and ordered about 10 more,” Day blogged. “It’s stuff I never would have checked out at the Barnes and Noble, because the gleaming and oily man chests would have made me blush too much.”

But e-romances don’t fully explain the Kindle’s success — and the kind of devotion that it inspires. To find out more, I went to Freeport, Maine, to talk to Eileen Messina, the manager of the British-imports store just across from L.L. Bean. Messina, a thoughtful, intelligent woman in her thirties, has all kinds of things on her Kindle, including Anna Karenina, Murakami’s Kafka on the Shore, books by Dan Simmons and Abraham Verghese, and the comic novel Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. She is so happy with it that she has volunteered, along with about a hundred others, to show it off to prospective purchasers, as part of Amazon’s “See a Kindle in Your City” promotion. Her Kindle was in her purse; she’d crocheted a cover for it out of green yarn. In the past, she said, she’d taken books out of the library, but some of them smelled of smoke — a Kindle book is a smoke-free environment. I thanked her and bought some digestive biscuits and a teapot, and then I went next door to Sherman’s Books and Stationery. I asked Josh Christie, who worked there, to recommend a truly gut-churningly suspenseful novel. I was going to do a comparison between the paperback and the Kindle 2 version. Christie suggested The Bourne Identity and a book by Michael Connelly, The Lincoln Lawyer—one of his colleagues at the shop swore by it. I bought them both.

Outside, I sat on a bench near L.L. Bean, eating an ice cream, and tried to order The Bourne Identity wirelessly from the Kindle Store. But no — there is no Kindle version of The Bourne Identity. What?

What else was missing? Back home, I spent an hour standing in front of some fiction bookcases, checking on titles. There is no Amazon Kindle version of The Jewel in the Crown. There’s no Kindle of Jean Stafford, no Vladimir Nabokov, no Flaubert’s Parrot, no Remains of the Day, no Perfume by Patrick Suskind, no Bharati Mukherjee, no Margaret Drabble, no Graham Greene except a radio script, no David Leavitt, no Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country, no Pynchon, no Tim O’Brien, no Swimming-Pool Library, no Barbara Pym, no Saul Bellow, no Frederick Exley, no World According to Garp, no Catch-22, no Breakfast at Tiffany’s, no Portnoy’s Complaint, no Henry and Clara, no Lorrie Moore, no Edwin Mullhouse, no Clockwork Orange.

Of course, the title count will grow. It will grow because not-so-subtle forces will be exerted on publishers and writers. Below the descriptions of all non-Kindle books for sale on Amazon, there’s a box that says, “Tell the Publisher! I’d like to read this book on Kindle.” If you click it, Amazon displays a thank-you page: “We will pass your specific request on to the publisher.”

But say you’ve actually found the book you’re seeking at the Kindle Store. You buy it. Do you get what’s described in the catalog copy? Yes and no. You get the words, yes, and sometimes pictures, after a fashion. Photographs, charts, diagrams, foreign characters, and tables don’t fare so well on the little gray screen. Page numbers are gone, so indexes sometimes don’t work. Trailing endnotes are difficult to manage. If you want to quote from a book you’ve bought, you have to quote by location range — e.g., the phrase “She was on the verge of the mother of all orgasms” is to be found at location range 1596–1605 in Mari Carr’s erotic romance novel Tequila Truth.

When you buy the Kindle edition of Konrad Lorenz’s King Solomon’s Ring, rather than the paperback version, you save three dollars and fifty-eight cents, but the fetching illustrations by Lorenz of a greylag goose and its goslings walking out from the middle of a paragraph and down the right margin are separated from the text — the marginalia has been demarginalized. The Kindle Store offers The Cheese Lover’s Cookbook & Guide, from Simon & Schuster. “The picture of the Ricotta Pancakes with Banana-Pecan Syrup may just inspire you enough to make it the first recipe you want to try,” one happy Amazon reviewer writes. She’s referring to the recipe in the print edition, the description of which is reused in the Kindle Store — there’s no pancake picture in the Kindle version.

Yes, you can save nine dollars if you buy the Kindle edition of The Algorithmic Beauty of Seaweeds, Sponges, and Corals, by Jaap A. Kaandorp and Janet E. Kübler — it’ll cost you $85.40 delivered wirelessly, versus $94.89 in print. New Scientist says that the book is “beautifully, if sometimes eccentrically, illustrated with photographs, drawings and computer simulations.” The illustrations are there in the Kindle version, but they’re exceedingly hard to make out, even if you zoom in on them using the five-way clicker switch, or “control nipple,” as one Kindler called it. An award-winning medical textbook titled Imaging in Oncology (second edition) is for sale in the Kindle Store for $287.96. Tables are garbled. The color coding — yellow for malignancy, blue for healthy tissue — has been lost. Arrows pointing to shadowy tumors become invisible in the gray. Indeed, the tumors themselves disappear.

One more expensive example. The Kindle edition of Selected Nuclear Materials and Engineering Systems, an e-book for people who design nuclear power plants, sells for more than eight thousand dollars. Figure 2 is an elaborate chart of a reaction scheme, with many callouts and chemical equations. It’s totally illegible. “You Save: $1,607.80 (20 %),” the Kindle page says. “I’m not going to buy this book until the price comes down,” one stern Amazoner wrote.

Here’s what you buy when you buy a Kindle book. You buy the right to display a grouping of words in front of your eyes for your private use with the aid of an electronic display device approved by Amazon. The company uses an encoding format called Topaz. (Topaz is also the name of a novel by Leon Uris, not available at the Kindle Store.) There are other e-book software formats — Adobe Acrobat, for instance, and Microsoft Reader, and an open format called ePub — but Amazon went its own way. Nobody else’s hardware can handle Topaz without Amazon’s permission. That means you can’t read your Kindle books on your computer, or on an e-book reader that competes with the Kindle. (You can, however, read Kindle books on the iPod Touch and the iPhone — more about that later — because Amazon has decided that it’s in its interest to let you.) Maybe you’ve heard of the Sony Reader? The Sony Reader’s page-turning controls are better designed than the Kindle’s controls, and the Reader came out more than a year before the Kindle did; also, its screen is slightly less gray, and its typeface is better, and it can handle ePub and PDF documents without conversion, but forget it. You can’t read a Kindle book on a Sony machine, or on the Ectaco jetBook, the BeBook, the iRex iLiad, the Cybook, the Hanlin V2, or the Foxit eSlick. Kindle books aren’t transferable. You can’t give them away or lend them or sell them. You can’t print them. They are closed clumps of digital code that only one purchaser can own. A copy of a Kindle book dies with its possessor.

On the other hand, there’s no clutter, no pile of paperbacks next to the couch. A Kindle book arrives wirelessly: it’s untouchable; it exists on a higher, purer plane. It’s earth-friendly, too, supposedly. Yes, it’s made of exotic materials that are shipped all over the world’s oceans; yes, it requires electricity to operate and air-conditioned server farms to feed it; yes, it’s fragile and it duplicates what other machines do; yes, it’s difficult to recycle; yes, it will probably take a last boat ride to a Nigerian landfill in five years. But no tree farms are harvested to make a Kindle book; no ten-ton presses turn, no ink is spilled.

Instead of ink on paper, there’s something called Vizplex. Vizplex is the trade name of the layered substance that makes up the Kindle’s display — i.e., the six-inch-diagonal rectangle that you read from. It’s a marvel of bi-stable microspheres, and it took lots of work and more than 150 million dollars to develop, but it’s really still in the prototype phase. Vizplex, in slurry form, is made in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by a company called E Ink. E Ink layers it onto a film, or “frontplane laminate,” at a plant in western Massachusetts, and then sends the laminate to Taiwan, where its parent company, P.V.I. (which stands for Prime View International, itself a subsidiary of a large paper company), marries it to an electronic grid, or backplane. The backplane tells the frontplane what to do.

The prospect of Vizplex first arose in the mind of a scientist, Joseph Jacobson, who now works at M.I.T.’s Media Lab and avoids interviews on the subject of e-paper. Sometime in the mid-nineties, according to a colleague, Jacobson was sitting on a beach reading. He finished his book. What next? He didn’t want to walk off the beach to get another book, and he didn’t want to lie on the beach and dig moist holes with his feet, thinking about the algorithmic beauty of seaweeds. What he wanted was to push a little button that would swap the words in the book he held for the words in some other book somewhere else. He wanted the book he held to be infinitely rewriteable — to be, in fact, the very last book he would ever have to own. He called it “The Last Book.” To make the Last Book, he would have to invent a new kind of paper: RadioPaper.

At M.I.T., Jacobson and a group of undergraduates made lists of requirements, methods, and materials. One of their tenets was: RadioPaper must reflect, like real paper. It must not emit. It couldn’t be based on some improved type of liquid-crystal screen, no matter how high its resolution, no matter how perfectly jewel-like its colors, no matter how imperceptibly quick its flicker, because liquid crystals are backlit, and backlighting, they believed, is intrinsically bad because it’s hard on the eyes. RadioPaper also had to be flexible, they thought, and it had to persist until recycled in situ. It should hold its image even when it drew no current, just as paper could. How to do that? One student came up with the idea of a quilt of tiny white balls in colored dye. To make the letter A, say, microsquirts of electricity would grab some of the microballs and pull them down in their capsule, drowning them in the dye and making that capsule and neighboring capsules go dark and stay dark until some more electricity flowed through in a second or a day or a week. This was the magic of electrophoresis.

In 1997, Jacobson and his partners joined with Russ Wilcox, an entrepreneur from Harvard Business School, to form E Ink. “When we first got involved with this, people were, like, ‘Oh, you’re trying to kill the book,’” Wilcox said recently, by telephone. “And we’re, like, ‘No, we love the book.’ Unfortunately, we fear for its future, because people just expect digital media these days. The economic pressures are immense.”

The newspaper industry, Wilcox figured, was a 180-billion-dollar-a-year business, and book publishing was an additional 80 billion. Half of that was papermaking, ink mixing, printing, transport, inventory, and the warehousing of physical goods. “So you can save a hundred and thirty billion dollars a year if you move the information digitally,” he told me. “There’s a lot of hidden forces at work that are all combining to make this sort of a big tidal wave that’s coming.”

E Ink ran into some trouble after 2000, when there was less venture capital to go around. The company’s direction changed slightly. It wouldn’t make the Last Book, but it would sell other manufacturers the means to do so. The company’s models were Coca-Cola — which grew great by selling the syrup and letting others do the bottling — and NutraSweet. “Imagine you’re NutraSweet,” Wilcox said. “The cola industry is already up and running. There’s no way you’re going to make your own diet cola and compete head to head. So what do you do? You sell the ingredient.”

E Ink’s first big, visible customer was Sony. Sony bought a lot of Vizplex display screens for its Reader, the PRS-500, which Howard Stringer, Sony’s C.E.O., introduced at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas in January 2006, standing in front of a photograph of the electrophoretic version of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Sony set up an online bookstore, and sold its machines at Borders Books and the Sony Store, and, later, at Target, Costco, Staples, and Walmart. Sony is, of course, a deft hand at handheld design. Its Reader was very good, given the Etch-A-Sketch limitations of the Vizplex medium, but it lacked wirelessness — you had to USB-cable it to a computer in order to load a book onto it — and Sony had no gift for retail bookselling. Hundreds of thousands of Sony Readers have sold — and you can now read five hundred thousand public-domain Google Books on it in ePub format — but, oddly, people ignore it.

Along with Sony, several other companies rushed to develop Vizplex-based devices. Amazon was one of them. Since 2000, Amazon had been offering various kinds of e-books (to be read on a computer screen), without success. “Nobody’s been buying e-books,” Jeff Bezos told Charlie Rose in November 2007, at the time of the Kindle 1 launch. The shift to digital page-turning hadn’t happened. Why was that? “It’s because books are so good,” according to Bezos. And they’re good, he explained, because they disappear when you read them: “You go into this flow state.” Bezos wanted to design a machine that helped a reader achieve that same flow — and also (although he didn’t say this) sold for a premium, fended off Sony’s trespass into the book business, and tied buyers to Amazon forever.

Thus Bezos’s engineers — including Gregg Zehr, who had previously worked for Palm and Apple — ventured to design a piece of hardware. “This is the most important thing we’ve ever done,” Bezos said in Newsweek at the time. “It’s so ambitious to take something as highly evolved as the book and improve on it.”

But the Kindle 1 wasn’t an improvement. Page-turning was slow and was accompanied by a distracting flash of black as the microspheres dived down into their oil-filled nodules before forming new text. “The first thing to note is that the screen isn’t like reading actual paper,” Joseph Weisenthal wrote on paidContent.org. “It’s not as bright and there is glare if the light is too direct.”

The problem wasn’t just the Vizplex screen. The Kindle 1’s design was a retro piece of bizarrery — an unhandy, asymmetrical Fontina wedge of plastic. It had a keyboard composed of many rectangular keys that were angled like cars in a parking lot, and a long Next Page button that, as hundreds of users complained, made you turn pages by accident when you carried it around. “Honestly, the device is fugly,” a commentator named KenC said on the Silicon Alley Insider: “The early 90s called and they want their device back.” The comments on Engadget.com were especially pointed. “It looks like a Timex Sinclair glued to the bottom of an oversized 1st gen Palm device,” Marcus wrote. “That’s some ugly shit,” Johan agreed. “Was this damned thing designed by a band of drunken elves?” Jerome asked. CB summed it up: “It is truly butt ugly. wow. ugly.”

Undeterred, the folks at Amazon gave the Kindle 1 a hose blast of marketing late in 2007. To counter the threat, Sony boosted its advertising for the PRS-500, but it couldn’t compete. Amazon sold out of Kindles before Christmas of 2007. Then came another lucky break: Oprah announced on TV that she was obsessed with the Kindle. “It’s absolutely my new favorite, favorite thing in the world,” she said. “It’s life-changing for me.”

Reading the one-star reviews for this device, which accumulated throughout 2008, must have been a painful experience for Amazon’s product engineers. Yet they soldiered on, readying the revised version — smoothing the edges and fixing the most obvious physical flaws. They made page-turning faster, so that the black flash was less distracting, and they got the screen to display sixteen shades of gray, not four, a refinement that helped somewhat with photographs.

Despite its smoother design, the Kindle 2 is, some say, harder to read than the Kindle 1. “I immediately noticed that the contrast was worse on the K2 than on my K1,” a reviewer named T. Ford wrote. One Kindler, Elizabeth Glass, began an online petition, asking Amazon to fix the contrast. “Like reading a wet newspaper,” according to petition-signer Louise Potter.

There was another problem with the revised Kindle — fading. Some owners (not me, though) found that when they read in the sun the letters began to disappear. Readers had to press Alt-G repeatedly to bring them back. “Today is the first day when we have had bright sunshine, so I took the Kindle out in the sun and was dismayed to see that the text (particularly near the center of the screen) faded within seconds,” one owner, Woody, wrote. Another owner, Mark, said, “I went through 4 kindles til I found a good one that doesn’t fade in the sun. It was a hassle but Amazon has a great CS.” (CS is customer service.)

Amazon remains fully committed to electrophoresis. “We think reading is an important enough activity that it deserves a purpose-built device,” Bezos told stock analysts in April. Heartened by the Kindle 2’s press, Amazon introduced, in mid-June, a bigger machine — the thumb-cramping, TV-dinner-size Kindle DX. The DX can auto-flip its image when you turn it sideways, like the iPod Touch (although its tetchy inertial guidance system sometimes sends the page twirling when you don’t want it to), and on it you can view — but not zoom on or pan across — unconverted PDF files. Some engineer, tasked with keyboard design, has again been struck by a divine retro-futurist fire: the result is a squashed array of pill-shaped keys that combine the number row with the top QWERTY row in a peculiar tea party of un-ergonomicism. Pilot programs have arisen at several universities, including Princeton, which will test the Kindle DX’s potential as a replacement for textbooks and paper printouts of courseware. The Princeton program is partly funded by the High Meadows Foundation, in the name of environmental sustainability; for Amazon, it’s also a way to get into the rich coursepack market, alongside Barnes & Noble, Kinko’s, and a company called XanEdu.

The real flurry over the new DX, though, has to do with the fate of newspapers. The DX offers more than twice as much Vizplex as the Kindle 2—about half the area of a piece of letter-size paper — enough, some assert, to reaccustom Web readers to paying for the digital version of, say, the Times, thereby rescuing daily print journalism from financial ruin. “With Kindle DX’s large display, reading newspapers is more enjoyable than ever,” according to Amazon’s website.

It’s enjoyable if you like reading Nexis printouts. The Kindle Times ($13.99 per month) lacks most of the print edition’s superb photography — and its subheads and callouts and teasers, its spinnakered typographical elegance and variety, its browsableness, its website links, its listed names of contributing reporters, and almost all captioned pie charts, diagrams, weather maps, crossword puzzles, summary sports scores, financial data, and, of course, ads, for jewels, for swimsuits, for vacationlands, and for recently bailed-out investment firms. A century and a half of evolved beauty and informational expressiveness is all but entirely rinsed away in this digital reductio.

Sometimes whole articles and op-ed contributions aren’t there. Three pieces from the July 8, 2009, print edition of the Times—Adam Nagourney on Sarah Palin’s resignation, Alessandra Stanley on Michael Jackson’s funeral, and David Johnston on the civil rights of detainees — were missing from the Kindle edition, or at least I haven’t managed to find them (they’re available free on the Times website); the July 9 Kindle issue lacked the print edition’s reporting on interracial college roommates and the infectivity rates of abortion pills. I checked again on July 20 and 21: Verlyn Klinkenborg’s appreciation of Walter Cronkite was absent, as was a long piece on Mongolian shamanism.

The Kindle DX ($489) doesn’t save newspapers; it diminishes and undercuts them — it kills their joy. It turns them into earnest but dispensable blogs.

Amazon, with its Listmania Lists and its sometimes inspired recommendations and its innumerable fascinating reviews, is very good at selling things. It isn’t so good, to date anyway, at making things. But, fortunately, if you want to read electronic books there’s another way to go. Here’s what you do. Buy an iPod Touch (it costs seventy dollars less than the Kindle 2, even after the Kindle’s price was recently cut), or buy an iPhone, and load the free “Kindle for iPod” application onto it. Then, when you wake up at 3 a.m. and you need big, sad, well-placed words to tumble slowly into the basin of your mind, and you don’t want to disturb the person who’s in bed with you, you can reach under the pillow and find Apple’s smooth machine and click it on. It’s completely silent. Hold it a few inches from your face, with the words enlarged and the screen’s brightness slider bar slid to its lowest setting, and read for ten or fifteen minutes. Each time you need to turn the page, just move your thumb over it, as if you were getting ready to deal a card; when you do, the page will slide out of the way, and a new one will appear. After a while, your thoughts will drift off to the unused siding where the old tall weeds are, and the string of curving words will toot a mournful toot and pull ahead. You will roll to a stop. A moment later, you’ll wake and discover that you’re still holding the machine but it has turned itself off. Slide it back under the pillow. Sleep.

I’ve done this with Joseph Mitchell’s The Bottom of the Harbor ($13.80 Kindle, $17.25 paperback) and with Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. The iPod screen’s resolution, at 163 pixels per inch, is fairly high. (It could be much higher, though. High pixel density, not a reflective surface, is, I’ve come to believe, what people need when they read electronic prose.) There are other ways to read books on the iPod, too. My favorite is the Eucalyptus application, by a Scottish software developer named James Montgomerie: for $9.99, you get more than twenty thousand public-domain books whose pages turn with a voluptuous grace. There’s also the Iceberg Reader, by ScrollMotion, with fixed page numbers, and a very popular app called Stanza. In Stanza, you can choose the colors of the words and of the page, and you can adjust the brightness with a vertical thumb swipe as you read. Stanza takes you to Harlequin Imprints, the Fictionwise Book Store, O’Reilly Ebooks, Feedbooks, and a number of other catalogs. A million people have downloaded Stanza. (In fact, Stanza is so good that Amazon has just bought Lexcycle, which makes the software; meanwhile, Fictionwise has been bought by a worried Barnes & Noble.)

Forty million iPod Touches and iPhones are in circulation, and most people aren’t reading books on them. But some are. The nice thing about this machine is (a) it’s beautiful, and (b) it’s not imitating anything. It’s not trying to be ink on paper. It serves a night-reading need, which the lightless Kindle doesn’t. And the wasp passage in Do Insects Think? is funny again on the iPod.

The paperback edition of The Lincoln Lawyer ($7.99 at Sherman’s in Freeport) has a bright-green cover with a blurry photograph of a car on the front. It says “Michael Connelly” in huge metallic purple letters, and it has a purple band on the spine: “#1 New York Times Bestseller.” On the back, it says, “A plot that moves like a shot of Red Bull.” It’s shiny and new and the type is right, and it has the potent pheromonal funk of pulp and glue. When you read the book, its gutter gapes before your eyes, and you feel you’re in it. In print, The Lincoln Lawyer swept me up. At night, I switched over to the e-book version on the iPod ($7.99 from the Kindle Store), so that I could carry on in the dark. I began swiping the tiny iPod pages faster and faster.

Then, out of a sense of duty, I forced myself to read the book on the physical Kindle 2. It was like going from a Mini Cooper to a white 1982 Impala with blown shocks. But never mind: at that point, I was locked into the plot and it didn’t matter. Poof, the Kindle disappeared, just as Jeff Bezos had promised it would. I began walking up and down the driveway, reading in the sun. Three distant lawn mowers were going. Someone wearing a salmon-colored shirt was spraying a hose across the street. But I was in the courtroom, listening to the murderer testify. I felt the primitive clawing pressure of wanting to know how things turned out.

I began pressing the Next Page clicker more and more eagerly, so eagerly that my habit of page-turning, learned from years of reading — which is to reach for the page corner a little early, to prepare for the movement — kicked in unconsciously. I clicked Next Page as I reached the beginning of the last line, and the page flashed to black and changed before I’d read it all. I was trying to hurry the Kindle. You mustn’t hurry the Kindle. But, hell, I didn’t care. The progress bar at the bottom said I was 91 percent done. I was at location 7547. I was flying along. Gray is a good color, I thought. Finally, I was on the last bit. It was called “A Postcard from Cuba.” I breathed an immense ragged sigh. I read the acknowledgments and the about-the-author paragraph — Michael Connelly lives in Florida. Good man. The little progress indicator said 99 percent. I clicked the Next Page button. It showed the cover of the book again. I clicked Next Page again, but there was no next page. My first Kindle-delivered novel was at its end.

(2009)

Papermakers

There are two paper mills in the town of Jay, in Maine, on the Androscoggin River. One mill, now owned by Verso Paper Corp., makes the paper for Martha Stewart Living, National Geographic, Cosmopolitan, and other magazines. It’s a big plant, built by International Paper in the sixties. The other mill is older and made of brick and stone. It’s called the Otis Mill, and it was built by Hugh Chisholm, the founder of International Paper, in 1896. Back then it was a prodigy — THE LARGEST PAPER MILL PLANT IN THE WORLD, according to a headline in the Lewiston Weekly Journal, which was exaggerating, but only a little.

The Otis Mill has produced all sorts of paper over the years — paper for postcards, ornate playing cards, wallpaper, copier paper, inkjet paper, and the shiny, peel-off paper backing for sticky labels. Now, though, the Otis Mill doesn’t make anything. The paper industry is in a slump. The new owner, Wausau Paper, shut down one of Otis’s two paper machines in August 2008. The number of employees dropped from about 250 to 96. Then, this spring, Wausau’s CEO, Thomas J. Howatt, closed the plant altogether. The closure was a difficult decision, he said in a press release, but it was necessary in order to “preserve liquidity and match capacity with demand during a period of severe economic difficulty.” The final reel of paper came off the mill at 6:50 a.m. on June 1, 2009. It was parchment paper, the kind bakers use to bake cookies.

I drove up to Jay on a fine day in mid-October, thinking as I drove about forests with logging trails, and about 400,000-square-foot Internet data centers going up around the country with cooling towers and 28,000-gallon backup tanks of diesel fuel, and about mountaintop coal removal, and about relative carbon footprints. I’d been talking on the phone to Don Carli, a research fellow at the Institute for Sustainable Communication. Carli said that the risk to Maine’s forests — and to forests in Washington and Wisconsin and elsewhere — was not from logging, but from what happens if the logging stops. A thinned or even a completely felled woodland grows back, but when a landowner loses his income from cutting down trees, he has to find another way to make money. Low-density development, with all of its irrevocabilities — paved roads, parking lots, power lines, propane depots, sewage plants, and mini-malls — is one way of getting a return. “Hamburgers and condos kill more trees than printed objects ever will,” Carli told me. “If the marketplace for timber, harvested sustainably from Maine’s forests, collapses because of the propagation of a myth — which some might say is a fraud — that says that using the newspaper is killing trees, then what happens is the landholder can no longer generate the revenue to pay a master logger for sustainable timber harvesting, and can’t pay the taxes. Then a developer offers to buy the land at a steep premium over what it was worth as a forest, and the developer clear cuts the land and turns it into a low-density development. Then it really is deforested.”

I drove through Auburn and Turner, north on Route 4, past many FOR-LEASE signs, past the Softie Delight (closed), past the White Fawn Trading Post, which once sold deerskin gloves (closed), past the Antique Snowmobile Museum (open) and the apple-processing factory (closed) and Moose Creek log cabin homes (open). The road curves as you come into Jay, and you drive along the railroad track toward the Otis Mill. The tower is made of brick and, oddly, looks a little like the Campanile in Venice. It still says, at the top: INTERNATIONAL PAPER CO. / 1906.

At a little variety and pizza shop I bought a Coke and three newspapers. The headline on one of the papers, the Franklin Journal, was WAUSAU MILL SOLD, CLOSING. The Lewiston Sun Journal had a big front-page article: OTIS MILL SOLD. A couple from Jay, owners of Howie’s Welding & Fabrication, had bought the mill from Wausau, with financing from a consortium of local towns. They were just figuring out what to do with it, according to the Sun Journal. They wanted to save the building and get some people back to work. As for the machinery, “We’ll be doing a lot of liquidating.”

I drove through Otis’s plant gate and into one of the parking spaces near the railroad tracks. When I got out, a man was standing near a shiny red pickup truck. I told him I was writing about the paper industry for a newspaper in San Francisco and he said I should talk to Larry, because Larry had been there over thirty years. He himself had only been there for ten, he said. He asked me inside.

We walked into a low white room with blue trim. Fabric banners announcing yearly corporate safety awards hung from the ceiling. So did the American flag. There were several corkboards for union announcements, but the announcements had all been taken down and the colored pushpins neatly clustered in the cork. There was a bench strewn with flyers for employment retraining and adult-education flyers — also brochures from church groups, job-loss support groups, and workshops on starting a new business. Something from the United Way said: “YOU CAN SURVIVE UNEMPLOYMENT!”

Larry, a man in his sixties, gestured me upstairs to the darkened, unkempt office suite. Larry’s own office was still well organized, though. It was officially his last day as an employee of Wausau — October 15, 2009. He’d worked at the plant for thirty-three years, first in maintenance and then in engineering. Schematics and electrical diagrams of the mill that he knew better than almost anyone else were neatly ranked in a file caddy, and pictures of his grandchildren were angled on the bookcase behind him. “When I first started here,” he said, “they were making copier-type paper. Then those markets grew so big that we couldn’t compete with bigger mills. We started getting into specialty grades, like release base paper — the paper that you throw away behind a self-sticking stamp or a bumper sticker. We did a lot of that. We did some inkjet early in the inkjet era. Again we got competed out of that. Our niche was specialty grades, small orders.”

Larry didn’t smile much, except when he talked about taking care of his grandchildren. Everyone knew everyone in the plant, he said, and the closing of the second paper machine came as a shock to the town. “It’s not good news, for sure,” Larry said. “The expectation was that we had a few years left to run the one machine.”

Could the plant be brought back online by another owner, I asked, if paper markets picked up? No, said Larry: Wausau had sold the plant to the proprieters of Howie’s Welding & Fabrication under the condition that its machines never again be used to make paper in North or South America. “It was sold with a non-compete clause,” he explained. Wausau had not only closed the plant down, it had effectively ended any possibility of its resurrection as a paper mill.

As he was shaking my hand, Larry told me I should get in touch with Sherry Judd, who was in charge of Maine’s Paper & Heritage Museum.

I got in the car, sighed, and drove on down the road, trying to figure out where to go next. Passing the Otis Federal Credit Union, I saw an electric sign, which said: “Benefit Spaghetti Supper for PAPER & HERITAGE MUSEUM Saturday October 17th 4:30 to 7PM St. Rose Parish Hall Jay.” I stopped and took a picture of the sign. Then I drove a few miles upriver to the big Verso Paper mill—“Andro,” as the locals call it — where they make the paper for Cosmo and Martha Stewart Living. More than nine hundred employees work there. I parked near a vintage green Jaguar in the parking lot.

I stood for a while, looking at the sun as it sank behind the two digester towers, with their manelike plumes of steam. Not smoke — steam. The plant was enormous and boxy and clean and, I thought, elegant in its own way. It was heavy industry, but it carried its weight well. There was no sulphurous paper-mill stench. I felt a surge of pride that the paper for many magazines — filled with photographs of food and jungles and expensive New York City interiors and classy brassieres — was being made right here, in Jay, Maine. The biggest building said VERSO in big letters on the side.

We may not make steel anymore, in our hollowed-out husk of a country, I thought, and we may not make shoes or socks or shirts or china or TVs or telephones or much of anything else except pills and pilotless drones — but we do make very heavy, twenty-four-foot rolls of clean-smelling, smooth-surfaced paper.

I took some pictures of trucks filled with cut logs queued up in one of the feeder roads. Then I went to the security desk and announced myself and drove home. A few days later I got a call from Sondra Dowdell, one of Verso’s corporate spokespersons. She explained how efficient the Verso plant was — that it used river power, tree bark, and “black liquor,” the lignin-rich waste product of papermaking, as sources of energy. She forwarded me Verso’s sustainability report, “A Climate of Change.” A chart diagrammed the sources of Verso’s energy: more than 50 percent came from recycled biomass — i.e., bark and black liquor — another 1.2 percent came from hydroelectric power. Dowdell had visited one of Verso’s customers, Quad/Graphics, in Wisconsin, which prints many magazine titles. “It is amazing,” she said, “the talent of the graphic artists and the technical savvy of the people who can lay lovely ink on paper. It is just beautiful to watch.”

That Saturday, my wife and I drove back to Jay to go to the spaghetti fund-raiser. We got there early, so that we could have a tour of Maine’s Paper & Heritage Museum, which is in a mansion on Church Street in Livermore Falls, where mill managers and their families once lived. The front walk is dug up now, because they’re installing a new community walkway and wheelchair ramp.

Walter Ellingwood and Norman Paradis, whose father and grandfather worked at the Otis Mill, and whose son now works at Andro, gave us the museum tour. Walter showed us the burst tester, and the opacity and absorption tester, and a piece of wood that helped you compute the speed of the paper machine — and the two of them pointed out the old steam whistle from the Otis Mill. Walter said that one night long ago he got lost in the swamp in Chesterville and they blew the steam whistle for him so that he could find his way home. Norm showed us a diagram of Andro, with light-up buttons, and he pointed out the medal that his father had gotten for working for International Paper for forty years. It had four diamonds, one for each decade. “He thought that was really really something from International Paper company. It didn’t take much to make these people say, ‘Jeez, look how nice that is.’” Norm himself also worked for forty years for International Paper, first as a kid in school, and eventually as a supervisor at Andro, with four hundred people under him. “These are some of my buckles that I won,” he said, showing us some metal pieces in a glass case. His grandfather, who came from Quebec, had worked in the Otis Mill barefoot, he said, because the chemicals ruined any shoes you wore.

We paused in front of an aerial photograph of the Otis Mill in winter. Norm pointed out the town’s skiing hill, just on the other side of the river. The old mill’s hydro plant had always powered the ski lifts; now, Norm said, he didn’t know what would happen. Then he and Walter had to hurry on over to work at the spaghetti event. We went there, too, to the Rose Church Parish Hall.

There were two other public fund-raisers happening in town that night, but even so, a good crowd came out to have the seven-dollar dinner. Mostly they were retired mill workers, but there were some who had just lost their jobs. Norm greeted everyone — he knew everyone. We sat next to two women who had, long ago, cleaned the offices at the mill. “You can’t be delicate eating spaghetti,” said one of the women — she was about seventy — when I wiped my mouth. There were two sculptures of saints on the walls, each nearly life-size.

Sherry Judd, the founder of the museum, a smiley woman with short curly hair who wore a western-style blue shirt, was serving spaghetti. Sherry worked at both Otis and Andro, and also at a paper mill in California, and her father was a mason at Otis Mill. She started raising money for the museum several years ago, she said. “I had a vision that someday there was not going to be papermaking in these towns,” she told me. “Somebody needs to tell the children about what their ancestors did, how hard they worked to develop this community and the communities around it.” For two years she raised money for the museum by towing around a caboose replica filled with papermaking artifacts and giving talks on the need to preserve the past. She had a video made, “Along the Androscoggin,” about the history of papermaking in the area, with good clips from mill workers, including Norm Paradis and his son. She wants people to walk into the museum and hear the sound of the papermaking machinery, and see how it worked. “I have a lot of ideas up here,” she said, tapping her head, “but we need a curator. And a grant writer.”

We bought some tickets for the quilt raffle and a brick to go into the museum’s new front walkway, and then we drove home talking about Sherry, Norm, Walter, and the skiing hill next to the river.

Don Carli, of the Institute for Sustainable Communication, told me that this year eighteen paper mills have closed in the United States, and more than thirty-four papermaking machines have been permanently put out of commission. Meanwhile, the power demand from the Internet is growing hugely. “If you do a simple extrapolation of the consumption of energy by data centers, we have a crisis,” Carli said. In 2006, the Energy Information Administration estimated that data centers consumed about 60 billion kilowatt hours of electricity — just the centers themselves, not the wireless or fiber-optic networks that connect them or the end-user computers that they serve — while paper mills consumed 75 billion kilowatt hours of electricity, of which more than half was green power from renewable sources. “And that was in 2006,” Carli said, “when print wasn’t kicked to the curb and declared all but dead and buried. It was still fighting the good fight.” Not only is there now a roughly comparable carbon footprint between server farms and paper mills, but the rate of growth in server and data center energy consumption is “metastasizing,” he said. “It doubled between 2000 and 2005, and it’s due to double again at current rates by 2010.” That’s one reason why gigantic data centers are now going up far away from cities, Carli added. “You can’t go to ConEd and get another ten megawatts of power. You can buy the computers, you can buy the servers. You just can’t get juice for them, because the grid is tapped out.”

“That’s kind of amazing,” I said.

“So when we start thinking about transforming more and more of our communication to digital media,” Carli said, “we really do have to be asking, Where will the electrons come from?”

I nodded and looked out at the trees.

(2009)

Google’s Earth

I’m fond of Google, I have to say. I like Larry Page, who seems, at least in the YouTube videos I’ve watched, shy and smart, with salt-and-pepper bangs; and Sergey Brin, who seems less shy and jokier and also smart. Ken Auletta, the author of an absorbing, shaggy, name-droppy book called Googled: The End of the World As We Know It, doesn’t seem to like either of them much — he says that Page has a “Kermit the Frog” voice, which isn’t nice, while Brin comes off as a swaggering, efficiency-obsessed overachiever who, at Stanford, aced tests, picked locks, “borrowed” computer equipment from the loading dock, and once renumbered all the rooms in the computer science building. “Google’s leaders are not cold businessmen; they are cold engineers,” Auletta writes — but “cold” seems oddly wrong. Auletta’s own chilliness may be traceable in part to Brin’s and Page’s reluctance to be interviewed. “After months of my kicking at the door, they opened it,” he writes in the acknowledgments. “Google’s founders and many of its executives share a zeal to digitize books,” he observes, “but don’t have much interest in reading them.”

They’ll probably give more than a glance at Googled. I read the book in three huge gulps and learned a lot — about Google’s “cold war” with Facebook, about Google’s tussles with Viacom, about Google’s role in the “Yahoo-Microsoft melee,” and about Google’s gradual estrangement from its former ally Apple. Auletta is given to martial similes and parallels, from Prince Metternich in nineteenth-century Europe to Afghanistan now: “Privacy questions will continue to hover like a Predator drone,” he writes, “capable of firing a missile that can destroy the trust companies require to serve as trustees for personal data.” And he includes some revealing human moments: Larry Page, on the day of Google’s hugely successful stock offering, pulls out his cell phone and says, “I’m going to call my mom!”

But what Auletta mainly does is talk shop with CEOs, and that is the great strength of the book. Auletta seems to have interviewed every media chief in North America, and most of them are unhappy, one way or another, with what Google has become. Google is voracious, they say, it has gargantuan ambitions, it’s too rich, it’s too smug, it makes big money off of O.P.C. — other people’s content. One unnamed “prominent media executive” leaned toward Auletta at the 2007 Google Zeitgeist Conference and whispered a rhetorical question in his ear: What real value, he wanted to know, was Google producing for society?

Wait. What real value? Come now, my prominent executive friend. Have you not glanced at Street View in Google Maps? Have you not relied on the humble aid of the search-box calculator, or checked out Google’s movie showtimes, or marveled at the quick-and-dirtiness of Google Translate? Have you not made interesting recherché nineteenth-century discoveries in Google Books? Or played with the amazing expando-charts in Google Finance? Have you not designed a strange tall house in Google SketchUp, and did you not make a sudden cry of awed delight the first time you saw the planet begin to turn and loom closer in Google Earth? Are you not signed up for automatic Google News alerts on several topics? I would be very surprised if you are not signed up for a Google alert or two. Surely no other software company has built a cluster of products that are anywhere near as cleverly engineered, as quick-loading, and as fun to fiddle with as Google has, all for free. Have you not searched?

Because, let me tell you, I remember the old days, the antegoogluvian era. It was okay — it wasn’t horrible by any means. There were cordless telephones, and people wore comfortable sweaters. There was AltaVista, and Ask Jeeves, and HotBot, and Excite, and Infoseek, and Northern Light — with its deep results and its elegant floating schooner logo — and if you wanted to drag through several oceans at once, there was MetaCrawler. But the haul was haphazard, and it came in slow. You chewed your peanut-butter cracker, waiting for the screen to fill.

Then Google arrived in 1998, sponged clean, impossibly fast. Google was like a sunlit white Formica countertop with a single vine-ripened tomato on it. No ads in sight — Google was anti-ad back then. It was weirdly smart, too; you almost never had a false hit. You didn’t have to know anything about the two graduate students who had aligned and tuned their secret algorithms — the inseparable Page and Brin — to sense that they were brilliant young software dudes, with all the sneakered sure-footedness of innocence: the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button in that broad blank expanse of screen space made that clear. Google would make us all lucky; that was the promise. And, in fact, it did.

So why are the prominent media executives unhappy? Because Google is making lots of ad money, and there’s only so much ad money to go around. Last year almost all of Google’s revenue came from the one truly annoying thing that the company is responsible for: tiny, cheesy, three-line text advertisements. These AdWords or AdSense ads load fast, and they’re supposedly “polite,” in that they don’t flicker or have pop-ups, and they’re almost everywhere now — on high-traffic destinations like the Washington Post or MySpace or Discovery.com, and on hundreds of thousands of little websites and blogs as well. “It’s all of our revenue,” Larry Page said in a meeting that Auletta attended in 2007.

The headlines say things like “Laser Hair Removal,” “Christian Singles,” “Turn Traffic Into Money,” “Have You Been Injured?” “Belly Fat Diet Recipe,” “If U Can Blog U Can Earn,” “Are You Writing a Book?” and so on. Countless M.F.A., or Made for AdSense, websites have appeared; they use articles stolen or “scraped” or mashed together from sites like Wikipedia, and their edges are framed with Google’s text ads. The ads work on a cost-per-click scheme: the advertiser pays Google only if you actually click on the ad. If you do, he’s billed a quarter, or a dollar, or (for some sought-after keywords like “personal injury” or “mesothelioma lawyers”) ten dollars or more.

But think — when was the last time you clicked on a three-line text ad? Almost never? Me neither. And yet, in 2008, Google had $21.8 billion in revenue, about 95 percent of which flowed from AdWords/AdSense. (A trickle came from banner and video ads sold by Google’s new subsidiary DoubleClick, and from other products and services.) These unartful, hard-sell irritants — which have none of the beauty or the humor of TV, magazine, radio, or newspaper advertising — are the foundation of Google’s financial empire, if you can believe it. It’s an empire built on tiny grains of keyword-searchable sand.

The advertising revenue keeps Google’s stock high, and that allows the company to do whatever it feels like doing. In 2006, when Google’s stock was worth $132 billion, the company absorbed YouTube for $1.65 billion, almost with a shrug. “They can buy anything they want or lose money on anything they choose to,” Irwin Gotlieb, the chief of GroupM, one of Google’s biggest competitors in the media market, told Auletta. If Microsoft is courting DoubleClick, Google can swoop in and buy DoubleClick for $3.1 billion. If the business of cloud computing seems to hold great promise, Google can build twenty or fifty or seventy massive data centers in undisclosed locations around the world, each drawing enough power to light a small city. Earlier this month, Google announced it would pay $750 million in stock for a company called AdMob, to sell banner ads on cell phones. “Once you get to a certain size, you have to figure out new ways of growing,” Ivan Seidenberg, the chief executive of Verizon, said to Auletta. “And then you start leaking on everyone else’s industry.” That’s why Auletta’s CEOs are resentful.

True, the miracles keep coming: Google Voice, which can e-mail you a transcript of your voice mail messages; and Chrome, a quick, clever Web browser; and Android, the new operating system for mobile devices. One of the latest is an agreement to print books on an ATM-style on-demand printer, the Espresso Book Machine. But perhaps there are too many miracles emanating from one campus now; perhaps brand fatigue is setting in. Google’s famous slogan, “Don’t be evil,” now sounds a little bell-tollingly dystopian. When they were at Stanford, Page and Brin criticized search engines that had become too “advertising oriented.” “These guys were opposed to advertising,” Auletta quotes Ram Shriram, one of Google’s first investors, as saying. “They had a purist view of the world.” They aren’t opposed now. Now they must be forever finding forage for a hungry, $180 billion ad-maddened beast. Auletta describes an unusual job-interview test that Sergey Brin once gave to a prospective in-house lawyer: “I need you to draw me a contract,” Brin said to her. “I need the contract to be for me to sell my soul to the Devil.” That was in 2002, the year Google began work internally on what would become AdSense.

Now Page and Brin fly around in a customized Boeing 767 and talk sincerely about green computing, even as the free streamings of everyone’s home video clips on YouTube burn through mountaintops of coal. They haven’t figured out a way to “monetize”—that is, make a profit from — their money maelstrom YouTube, although I notice that Coffee-mate and Samsung banners appear nowadays in Philip DeFranco’s popular video monologues. “The benefit of free is that you get 100 percent of the market,” Eric Schmidt, Google’s chief executive, explained to Auletta. “Free is the right answer.” For a while, perhaps — but maybe free is unsustainable. For newspapers, Auletta writes, “free may be a death certificate.” Maybe in the end, even on the Internet, you get what you pay for.

(2009)

Steve Jobs

The other day, I ordered a new machine from Apple, and just before bed I went to the Apple website to check when it was going to ship. There, looking at me, instead of the normal welcome page announcing the latest mojo miracle of euphoric minimalism, was a man with round John Lennon glasses and an intense gaze and a close-cropped beard, photographed in black-and-white. It was Steve Jobs from some years ago, before he got sick. He looked like he wanted to tell me something, but I didn’t know what it was. To the left of the photograph, on this simple white screen — not an ounce of color on it anywhere — I saw his birth date: 1955. Then there was a hyphen, and then: 2011.

I was stricken. Everyone who cares about music and art and movies and heroic comebacks and rich rewards and being able to carry several kinds of infinity around in your shirt pocket is taken aback by this sudden huge vacuuming-out of a titanic presence from our lives. We’ve lost our techno-impresario and digital dream granter. Vladimir Nabokov once wrote, in a letter, that when he’d finished a novel he felt like a house after the movers had carried out the grand piano. That’s what it feels like to lose this world-historical personage. The grand piano is gone.

The next morning, I picked up my latecomer’s MacBook Pro — I’d bought it only this year, after more than two decades of struggling with and cursing at software from outside Apple’s fruitful orchard — and opened the aluminum top. I went to the website again, and there he was, still Steve, still looking at us. His fingers were in a sort of delicate pinch at his chin, in a pose that photographers like, because they want to see your hands. And the pose made sense, since one of the really noble things that Apple has done is to apply the ancient prehensile precision of pinching, sliding, or tapping fingers to screens and touch pads. Other companies had touch screens. Only Apple made them not seem ridiculous.

I saw Jobs just once, last year, at the first iPad unveiling, in San Francisco. A mass of tech journalists surged into the auditorium while, over the P.A. system, Bob Dylan sang “How does it feel?” The live-bloggers flipped open their laptops. Joshua Topolsky, who was then the head of Engadget, told me that this was bigger than the iPhone. “In a way, I would almost hate to be Apple right now,” he said.

Jobs was talking to Al Gore in the front row — Gore appeared to be, amazingly, chewing gum. Then the show began, and Steve went onstage, looking thin but fit, like some kind of aging vegan long-distance runner. He told us that so many millions of iPods had been sold and so many million people had visited the retail stores, with their blue-shirted Geniuses waiting to help you. He said it was kind of incredible, and it was — I found myself applauding joyfully and unjournalistically. And then came the announcement: “And we call it — the iPad.”

Immediately afterward, the carping began. Meh, the iPad wasn’t magical at all, it was just a big iPhone, the journalists said. One expert called it “D.O.A.”—disappointing on arrival. But it was a smash; people immediately began figuring out new ways to use this brilliant, slip-sliding rectangle of private joy.

When he was young, Jobs looked remarkably like James Taylor. When he was older and sick, his blue jeans hung off his body. Even so, I thought that he, like a true marathoner, was going to make it — make it to the iPhone 5, to the iPad 3. Instead, he died, too weak at the end, according to the Times, to walk up the stairs of his house.

But Jobs lived to see the Beatles on iTunes, to see Tim Cook, Apple’s new CEO, not muff the latest iPhone announcement, and then he left us on our own. He died absolutely the king of the world of talking to people who aren’t in the same room with you and of book reading when you don’t have a real book and of movie editing and of e-mail and of music distribution — the king of the world of making good things flow better. You have to love him.

(2011)