The Writer's Notebook

There’s really no time in the last century in which you’d expect that a candidate running for a major political office who’d been responsible for shutting down a lot of factories wouldn’t have that come up in a major way in a campaign. Simply no way. Agree or not, it would be entirely par for the course. And yet now it’s treated as a possibly unexpected or unacceptable development.

That’s weird.

The model for your standard TED talk is a late-period Malcolm Gladwell book chapter. Common tropes include:

Drastically oversimplified explanations of complex problems.

Technologically utopian solutions to said complex problems.

Unconventional (and unconvincing) explanations of the origins of said complex problems.

Staggeringly obvious observations presented as mind-blowing new insights.

What’s most important is a sort of genial feel-good sense that everything will be OK, thanks in large part to the brilliance and beneficence of TED conference attendees. (Well, that and a bit of Vegas magician-with-PowerPoint stagecraft.)

Barack Obama’s favorite banker faces losses of $2 billion and possibly more – all because of the complex, now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t trading in exotic financial instruments that he has so ardently lobbied Congress not to regulate.

Once again, doing God’s work — that is, betting huge sums of money with depositor funds knowing that you are too big to fail and can count on taxpayers riding to your rescue if your avarice threatens to take the country down — has lost some of its luster. The jewels in Dimon’s crown sparkle with a little less grandiosity than a few days ago, when he ridiculed Paul Volcker’s ideas for keeping Wall Street honest as “infantile.”

Why does anyone take Ayn Rand seriously? She was a mean-spirited crackpot who served as something close to a cult leader for her followers, and what little of her prose I’ve managed to force myself through is ludicrous potboiler stuff mixed with a juvenile worldview as shallow as it is endlessly verbose. She was a lousy writer and a lousy thinker. Even her fellow right-wing ideologues shunned her—Whittaker Chambers, writing for National Review, famously called Atlas Shrugged “remarkably silly” on its release in 1957. (He went on to accuse Rand of fascist tendencies: “From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: ‘To a gas chamber—go!’”)

But she sold, and still sells, a lot of books. That in itself is not hard to understand. Few writers have ever been more flattering of their readers. To embrace her Objectivist philosophy is to accept, with a weary sigh, that you are one of the Great People of the World, surrounded by lesser beings whose petty demands for your time, money, or affection can do nothing but interfere with your achievement of grand and lofty goals. And in Rand-world, those goals mostly amount to having as much wealth and power as possible—not so you can do anything in particular with it, just so you can have it. Charity, philanthropy, or in fact caring at all about other people, are all signs of sniveling weakness. Not for nothing did she title one book The Virtue of Selfishness.

Her way of thinking will sound familiar to anyone who was ever a teenager, or who happens to have one around the house. It boils down to a monotonous, non-stop shriek of “You’re not the boss of me!” The good thing about teenagers is that most of them grow out of it. The ones who don’t, I guess, become Ayn Rand fans.

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.

“Commonplace” is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós, see literary topos) which means “a theme or argument of general application”, such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton’s commonplace book. Scholars have expanded this usage to include any manuscript that collects material along a common theme by an individual.

Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas.

Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests.