You can’t sled on slush

February 13, 2014 in Life, Past, Personal, Places, weather | Permalink

I grew up on Woodland Avenue in Maywood, New Jersey, a few miles west of where I am now in New York City. Flexible flyerThe street was unremarkable, except when it snowed. Then the town would often block it off, so kids could sled on it. It wasn’t a big hill — just an ideal one for sledding: steep at the top, with a long glide path. With a good start you could ride your Flexible Flyer down past Garden, Cole and Elm Streets, all the way to Cole’s Brook. On the other side of that was Borg’s Woods, which was then owned by the Borg Family, which owned The Record, Bergen County’s afternoon paper. The Borgs had a steep back yard behind their house on Summit Avenue in Hackensack, and kindly encouraged neighborhood kids to sled there too.

So snow was a big deal for us, and still is for me. I love it. Alas, too often Winter forecasts in New York go like this: “Snow, changing to rain.”

Well, that’s what happened today in New York. We had a beautiful snowy day before it turned into rain and worse. For the last hour or so we’ve also had lightning, thunder and hail. The result is thick white slop, atop the frozen and half-thawed mess left over from the last storm. Here is how it looks right now at Weather.com:

I am sure there are kids in Maywood (and all over the East Coast) who wish the snow didn’t turn to slush today. My inner kid knows how they feel. (I’m also hoping my grandkids in Baltimore fared better. They got a bunch of snow today too — I think with less rain.

(By the way, my sled, an old school Flexible Flyer, looked just like the one above, only a bit longer. It could seat three or four kids. And nobody ever wore helmets.)

A call for personal tool making at the Legal Hackathon

February 7, 2014 in Business, Harvard, Internet, Law, Technology, VRM | 2 comments

— is happening this weekend in New York, San Francisco and elsewhere. Read all about it here, here and here.

I’ll be there to help start things off, at 10am tomorrow. (Registration starts at 9am.) My job on the opening panel is to make a 2-3 minute statement of what I’d like to see in the form of legal hackery. Here goes:

  1. Restore freedom of contract and obsolete contracts of adhesion by creating standardized terms individuals can assert. I have two chapters in The Intention Economy devoted to this. (The Cyberlaw Clinic at the Berkman Center is also working on these — and corresponding terms on the business side — for Customer Commons. What gets hacked this weekend can feed into that work.)
  2. Create better means for expressing personal policies and preferences (such as Do Not Track) than are currently available — and putting these in the individual’s own tool box, rather than appearing only as choices presented by others, such as browser makers.
  3. Create graphical elements (e.g. the r-button) for both the above.

On the panel I will advocate for individuals as independent entities with full agency, rather than merely “users” of others’ systems, or victims of privacy abuse awaiting policy relief. This means I will argue for thinking and hacking toward building and filing the individual’s own tool box, rather than just tweaking the broken technical and legal systems we already have. (Though doing that is good too. Others will be there to advocate and hack on that.)

It is essential that we think outside the browser for this. While the browser began as something like your car on the information superhighway, it has since become a shopping cart that gets re-skinned with every commercial site you visit, and infested at each with tracking beacons so you can be a subject of constant surveillance. This is even true of Firefox, which I love (and within which I am writing this), and which (through Mozilla) is providing space for the San Francisco hackathon.

Let me go a little deeper on this. An example of what’s right and wrong in the browser space right now can be found Christian Heilmann‘s post, Why “Just Use Adblock” Should Never Be a Professional Answer. In it he says many good things that I agree with, enthusiastically. But he also gets one big thing wrong:

Whether we like it or not, ads are what makes the current internet work. They are what ensures the “free” we crave and benefit from, and if you dig deep enough you will find that nobody working in web development or design is not in one way or another paid by income stemming from ad sales on the web.

Saying ads are what make the Internet work is like like saying cities are what make geology work. Yes, the Internet supports commercial activity, but it is not reducible to it. For each of us to enjoy full agency on the Web, this distinction needs to be clear from the start.

Browser makers are stuck right now between many rocks (their users) and a hard place (advertising-supported websites). On the one hand they want to do right for users, and on the other they want to do right for what the ad industry now calls “publishers”. Since surveillance-fed “personalization” is big with those publishers, and lots of users don’t like it (AdBlock Plus is the top browser extention, by far), the browser makers are caught in the middle. You can see the trouble they have with this conflict in A User Personalization Proposal for Firefox, which was floated by Justin Fox of Mozilla last July. In it he writes,

We want to see even more personalization across the Web from large and small sites, but in a transparent way that retains user control. The team at Mozilla Labs is focused on exploring ways to move the Web forward, and has thought a lot about how the browser could play a role in making useful content personalization a reality.

The blowback in the comments was harsh and huge. One sample:

The last thing the internet needs is more “personalization” (read: “invasion of my privacy”). All your marketing jargon does nothing to hide the fact that this is just another tool to allow advertisers, website owners, the NSA, and others to track users online habits and, despite any good intentions you might have, it’s rife with the potential for abuse.

I’m not bringing this up to give Mozilla or the other browser makers a hard time, but to suggest that the solutions we need start outside the browser. (And seeing them that way may also be good for the browser folks.)

Simply put, what we need most are tools for ourselves, that help in our dealings with all other parties. Not just protections from bad actors, or ways to make bad practices less bad.

See ya there.

Linkies

February 6, 2014 in Links | Permalink

Funny:

Audio +/vs. Video

Privacy vs. Surveillance

The Internet

Business

 

Searls Glasses vs. Google Glass

January 29, 2014 in Ideas, Technology | 8 comments

For many years I’ve wanted glasses that would help me observe and record what I see and hear in the world — but in a polite way that would respect the privacy of others. Since nobody has made anything like that (that I know of) I decided to publish my idea. I immodestly call it Searls Glasses, because the first four letters of my surname, as luck has it, combines “see” and “hear” (or “ear”) — and because they’re still glasses as well.

And, since Google Glass is all the rage (in more than one meaning of the word), I decided to have some fun comparing my fantasy with Google’s reality. And hey, if somebody wants to make what I’m wire-framing here (pun intended), let me know. I’d like to see these things made, no matter who makes them. (And, if somebody is already making them, that’s cool too.)

I’ll run down the features first:

  1. First-person rindicator (a light indicating a state of willingness to relate, or presence of a relationship)
  2. Second/third person rindicator (a light indicating a state of relationship with a nearby second or third party).
  3. Binocular (3D) cameras.
  4. Off/on light. Green means it’s not recording. Red means it is recording.
  5. Binaural microphones (one in each tyne) and electronics section, plus all the other required circuitry (recording, bluetooth, battery).
  6. Earphones.

Rindicators (#s 1 and 2) are what we’ve been calling “r-buttons” in the VRM development community. I just re-named them, here on the plane where I just cooked up this whole idea and am writing it down. How they work and what they symbolize are still up in the air. UI elements that indicate actions and/or states of relating are essential, I believe — not just here, but in countless other kinds of hardware and software.

Binocular cameras (#3) are way cooler than the usual monocular ones (such as Google Glass’s). Hey, our eyes and glasses are already 3-D. Why not the cameras we wear on our heads? These, however, have an additional feature: they look for second-party signals of privacy policies. So, for example, if Searls Glasses see somebody wearing one of these Customer Commons buttons —

— with a QR code in the middle, and the scanned QR code  says “don’t take my picture or video-record me,” that wish will be respected. Same goes for a button like that containing a near-field transmitter that says the same thing. This is an example of something Google Glass apparently lacks at this stage: Privacy By Design. (For more context, see Big Privacy, a paper highly influenced by work many of us have been doing with VRM.)

The on-off light (#4) tells others whether the cameras are on and recording what they see.

I am amazed, now that headphones are at high fashion ebb, that we don’t hear much about binaural sound, and no smartphones or tablets feature them yet. Maybe Searls Glasses can change that. In the meantime, find some binaural sound recordings and listen to them. They are much different than conventional stereo recordings, because only two microphones are used, and they are located on a bust — a mannequin head — in the positions of human ears. That way they record what a person hears, rather than what a sound engineer puts together with a mixer. The effect is the aural equivalent of 3-D images: the whole “sound stage” is very much a you-are-there experience. With Searls Glasses, you can make your own binaural recordings, thanks to binaural microphones over the ears (#5). Lights on the tynes will also tell others whether or not you are recording: another example of privacy by design.

I think the best way to record, and to manage everything Searls Glasses make possible, is with a smartphone or tablet app, connected by bluetooth.

As a bonus, Searls Glasses should also pick up low-energy bluetooth signals, and radiate them as well. Much has been said and written lately about these. (By my friend Robert Scoble especially.) Instead of thinking about how marketers can use these beacons, however, think about what you can do with them. For example: sending signals of your own interest in some product or service — or your disinterest in being followed right now.

Since I’m writing all this on a plane, and want to get it up as soon as possible after I land,  it will be relatively link-less at first, and a lot more linky (and otherwise improved) once I’m settled somewhere.

Meanwhile, lemme know what you think.

Save

The hell of comments

January 28, 2014 in Blogging, problems | 5 comments

So I wanted to add a comment under essay “Lena Dunham Is The New John Updike — But Not In A Good Way“, in WBUR‘s Cognoscenti ‘zine (which I just discovered, and I like). So I wrote a caution about throwing out both Dunham’s and Updike’s babies in the bathwaters of their narcissm (as defined originally, for Updike, in this David Foster Wallace review of Updike’s late-in-life work). When I finished, I was presented with this:

First I picked Disqus (the one on the left), but it didn’t work. Then I picked Twitter. That didn’t work. (It flashed a small page that said “Redirecting you back to the application,” plus some other stuff that disappeared before I could read it.) Then I started writing in a name, and new fields opened up:

These were also unproductive, even when I used my known Disqus name, email and password. (The question mark with a circle produces a summary of Disqus’ policies, terms and conditions.) Then I made the mistake of clicking on a link somewhere and lost what I had written.

While it’s great, I suppose, that Disqus, Facebook, Twitter and Google provide handy shortcuts — “social” logins through their APIs — the whole non-system also fails so often that at best it comprises (entrepreneur alert:::) an opportunity for some new approach.

That’s why I keep going back to the oldest and perhaps the least complicated way to post a comment, which is on a publication of one’s own. So that’s what I’m doing here. (With a bonus complaint. 🙂 )

Tags: , ,

Weekend linkings

January 25, 2014 in Links | Permalink

Photography

The World

The Marketplace

Tech

  • Bruce Kushnick in HuffPo: 2014: The End Game in Telecommunications: The Perfect, Man-Made Storm. A pull-quote: This is a man-made storm to make more money and get rid of regulations. The major incumbent phone companies, which also own the largest wireless companies, and who also, with the cable companies, control most of broadband, Internet and cable services, are working together — a ‘cabal,’ a ‘trust,’ or some might call it — Mob Bell.  
  • Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing: Requirements for DRM in HTML 5 are a secret. It begins, The work at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) on adding DRM to HTML5 is one of the most disturbing developments in the recent history of technology. The W3C’s mailing lists have been full of controversy about this ever since the decision was announced. Most recently, a thread in the restricted media list asked about the requirements for DRM from the studios — who have pushed for DRM, largely through their partner Netflix — and discoverd that these requirements are secret. It’s hard to overstate how weird this is.  
  • Benoît Felten in Diffraction Analysis: White Paper: There’s no economic imperative to reconsider an open Internet. Here’s the SSRN page. Download it there. From the conclusion: …it seems important to stress that solutions to optimize traffic exist and are very affordable; despite what they may sometimes suggest, ISPs are trapped in neither unsolvable technical issues nor unbearable economic situations. The financial importance of traffic management is modest, the model has been working since day one of the Internet and allows all players in the ecosystem to operate at low costs. It would be counter-productive to challenge those mechanisms and therefore break the fragile balance that allows Internet users to access the content they seek in the best conditions without any player in the ecosystem being in a position to decide what they may or may not access. In other words, there is no need for ISPs to seek rents from heavy data traffic sources (e.g. Google, Netflix and Facebook), just because the traffic is heavy.
  • Sten Tamkivi in TechCrunch: Why Silicon Valley Can’t Find Europe. He begins, Go to Europe these days – to Berlin, London, Helsinki – drop in on any of the regional tech confabs and you will quickly see that the European startup scene is in the most bustling, vibrant shape it’s ever been. The potential is everywhere, and the energy is undeniable. Then you return Stateside, in my case to Palo Alto, and Europe isn’t just irrelevant among the tech industry power-set. It has virtually ceased to exist. That is a mistake. I agree, by the way. Most of the start-ups I’m following are in Europe, Australia, New Zealand in non-Valley parts of the U.S. and Canada, and elsewhere. As George Packer put it in The New Yorker recently, “It suddenly occurred to me that the hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up.”
  • Tom Henderson in Network World: My journey from Macs to Mint. Sez Tom, Apple did an amazing job of forcing simplicity and continuity among its community members. My first Mac had evolved into a sophisticated platform that allowed me to code, write work product, do virtual machines, even use Apple’s Xserve platform — and I still use that server platform today, despite Apple’s discontinuance of its server hardware/storage platform. The Mac, and Apple in general, is totally about the user. It’s about a personal, rather than a dictated platform or methodology. I felt primped, pampered, if at a price for the pampering. Virtual machines did well; Parallels or VMware knew what to do. This was a machine for the ages. Then one afternoon, I realized that Apple was comparatively proprietary in nature. Apple’s OS couldn’t be used on non-Apple hardware; Apple has sound reasons for this. The server line was discontinued. It was great, but like the Apple XSan, no one apparently bought the chrome look for an extra 70%. They were ahead of their time, but businesses snubbed them. I got off the Mac bandwagon.Today, I do 90% of my work on Linux Mint. There are no Mac VMs so I don’t run them. I like MacOS. I like integration. Autonomy requires using machines as tools. I fawn after Macbook Airs. But my budget and independence streak is still in the zone of commodity Lenovos, and Linux.

Surveillance vs. Privacy

  • Jim Edwards in Business Insider: Ford Exec: ‘We Know Everyone Who Breaks The Law’ Thanks To Our GPS In Your Car. It begins, Jim Farley, said something both sinister and obvious during a panel discussionabout data privacy today at CES, the big electronics trade show in Las Vegas. Because of the GPS units installed in Ford vehicles, Ford knows when its drivers are speeding, and where they are while they’re doing it. Farley was trying to describe how much data Ford has on its customers, and illustrate the fact that the company uses very little of it in order to avoid raising privacy concerns: “We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you’re doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you’re doing. By the way, we don’t supply that data to anyone,” he told attendees. Rather, he said, he imagined a day when the data might be used anonymously and in aggregate to help other marketers with traffic related problems…
  • Andy Oram in O’Reilly Radar: How did we end up with a centralized Internet for the NSA to mine? Subhead: The Internet is naturally decentralized, but it’s distorted by business considerations. He begins, I’m sure it was a Wired editor, and not the author Steven Levy, who assigned the title “How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet” to yesterday’s fine article about the pressures on large social networking sites. Whoever chose the title, it’s justifiably grandiose because to many people, yes, companies such as Facebook and Google constitute what they know as the Internet. (The article also discusses threats to divide the Internet infrastructure into national segments, which I’ll touch on later.) So my question today is: How did we get such industry concentration? Why is a network famously based on distributed processing, routing, and peer connections characterized now by a few choke points that the NSA can skim at its leisure? I commented as far back as 2006 that industry concentration makes surveillance easier.
  • Cory Doctorow in BoingBoing: European Court of Human Rights will hear case about GHCQ spying.
  • Stan Schroeder in Mashable: Blackphone Could Be the First NSA-Proof Phone. It begins, An upcoming smartphone called Blackphone aims to put privacy in your hands, protecting you from anyone wanting to snoop into your private data — even the NSA.A Switzerland-based join venture between Silent Circle and Geeksphone, the project is backed by several important figures in the fields of computer security, including Phil Zimmermann, creator of data encryption protocol PGP (Pretty Good Privacy). 

Journalism

Science

Almost daily link pile

January 23, 2014 in Links | Permalink

Thinkings

Nature

  • 418 of my photos are now on Wikimedia Commons, and most of those are also in Wikipedia. Most are of natural sights, or at least outdoors.
  • Stacy Finz in SFGate: California Drought: Farmers, Ranchers Face Uncertain Future. We’ve had no rain in Santa Barbara since November, I am told, and Winter is the rainy season. There is none in sight. The hills, normally green as Ireland by now, remain brown as July. Fire season is now year-round and the risk of fire is far worse. Falling reservoirs are exposing formerly drowned towns and other curiosities. Ski areas live on artificial snow alone. If this keeps up, water use for all but essentials will be outlawed. Formerly irrigated lawns and gardens will turn to kindling. Among industries, cattle ranching will collapse first, followed by other agricultural sectors.That’s just this year. If the drought persists for another year or two, the consequences for the rest of the economy, and the livings of many people, will be dire. Given the fact of global warming, expect a new normal, at the very least.
  • Patrick Minnis, Atmospheric Sciences, NASA Langley Research Center, Hampton, Virginia and J.Kirk Ayers, Rabindra Palikonda and Dung Phan, Analytical Services and Materials, Inc., Hampton, Virginia: Contrails, Cirrus Trends, Climate.

Surveillance vs. Privacy

Journalism

Developments

Getting into my header

January 20, 2014 in Art, Blogging, Personal | 9 comments

Since I’ve been maturing while my blog header has not, I’ve been thinking that soon is a good time to change it. The old headshot, or art-from-a-headshot, dates from the last Millennium, when I still wore granny glasses and had hair. And it never looked much like me in the first place. This was it:

So bear with me while I go about remodeling the 180 x 720 rectangle this WordPress theme provides for my headspace. (I’ll be playing with a number of different images, by the way; so don’t assume that any one of them is the only one, or “done.” Yet.)

Deep Winter Reading

January 18, 2014 in Links, Photography | 3 comments

Well, it’s not all reading, because I’m starting with photography, notably the latest from Stephen Lewis, whose prose runs as deep and broad as the soul in his work. — DS

Photography

Personal

Surveillance vs. Privacy

The Internet, Communications and Tech

Science, especially geology

Into the dark

January 18, 2014 in Art, Business, history, Ideas, infrastructure, Internet, Life, Links, News, Places, Politics, problems, Research, Science, Technology, weather | 3 comments

The power is out and won’t be back for awhile. That’s what the guys in the hard hats tell me, down where they’re working, at the intersection where our dead-end street is born. Many trucks are gathered there, with bright night-work lights illuminating whatever went wrong with the day’s power pole replacement job. The notices they left on our doors said they’d be done by five, but now it’s eight and I’m sitting in a house lit by candles, working on the nth draft of a writing assignment, in the absence of a steady flow of electrons off the power grid. Also in the absence of connection except to the physical world alone. Connectivity = 0. My laptop is good for another four hours or so, but without a connection I lack the building materials I need for constructing the piece. So I’m writing this instead.

Some other utilities are unaffected by the power outage, of course. I have matches, and can fire up the gas stove. Water runs, cold and cold. It also drips out of the little motel-grade refrigerator upstairs, defrosting itself into towels I’ve fed under it. The freezer in the kitchen remains closed, to keep whatever is in there from thawing and requiring use in the next couple days. What I’m witnessing is a gradual breakdown that is easy to imagine accelerating fast, especially if I was coping instead with a wildfire or an earthquake.

Three interesting facts about California and the people who — like me — choose to live here:

  1. The state tree is the California redwood. What made these things evolve into groves of spires with thick bark, standing at heights beyond three hundred feet, with branches in mature specimens that commence a hundred or more feet above the ground. I say they are adapted to fire. A cross section of a mature redwood will feature black edges to rings spaced thirty, fifty, two hundred apart, all marking survival of wildfire at a single location.
  2. The state flower is the California poppy. Here is what makes poppies thrive in dry rocky soils that are poor for agriculture but rich with  freshly exposed minerals: they are adapted to earthquakes. More than any other state, except maybe Alaska, California is a product of recent earth movement. Imagine looking at the southern Appalachians in the U.S. or the Blue Mountains of Australia, two million years ago. It’s not hard: they would pretty much like they do now. If you looked at the site of the future California from anywhere two million years ago, you would recognize nothing, unless you were a geologist who knew what to look for. All of California has been raised up or ferried in by tectonic forces that have been working at full throttle for a couple hundred million years, and aren’t moving any slower today.
  3. Neither of those facts teaches caution to human beings who choose to live here. For example, the home where I write this, in Santa Barbara, has been approached, unsuccessfully, by two wildfires in recent years. The Tea Fire in November 2008 burned 210 homes and the Jesusita Fire in May 2009 burned other 80 more. The Tea Fire came straight at us, incinerating everything but rocks and soil for a mile in its path before stopping a quarter mile and ten houses short of where I’m sitting right now. (Here is my report on the aftermath.) The Coyote Fire in September 1964 burned the same area, and much more. The Sycamore Fire in 1979 came even closer, burning houses just up the street from here.

“We live in the age of full convenience,” John Updike wrote, at a time when it made sense to think copiers and fax machines marked some kind of end state.* But the lessons that matter at the moment arise from the absence of the two most essential utilities in my life, and probably yours too: the electric grid and the data network. (Yes, I can get on the Net by tethering my laptop to my mobile phone, but both use batteries that will run out, and the phone is down below 20% already anyway.) So here are three lessons that come to me, here in the dark, all of which we are sure to continue ignoring::::

  1. Civilization is thin. A veneer. Under it nature remains vast, violent and provisional. In the long run, which may end at any time for any of us, nature will prove no easier to tame than the tides. For three great perspectives on this, I highly recommend John McPhee‘s The Control of Nature. The title is taken from a plea to students, carved into sandstone over the door of a building at the University of Wyoming in Laramie: STRIVE ON — THE CONTROL OF NATVRE IS WON, NOT GIVEN. (I also recommend this blog post, by Themon The Bard, who went to UW and provides a photo.) Its chapters are “Iceland versus the volcanoes,” “Los Angeles versus the San Gabriel Mountains” and “The Army Corps of Engineers versus the Mississippi River.” The New Yorker re-ran a set piece from the third of those, right after Hurricane Katrina, which produced what New Orleans natives call “The Flood.” In it McPhee describes what would happen to New Orleans when a levee is breached. Here is the original, published years before reality certified true McPhee’s prophesy.
  2. Humanity is insane. A good working definition of psychosis is disconnection of the mind from reality. As a species we have proven ourselves nuts for the duration, as the examples above attest. Present company included. (Further proof: war, genocide.) It should be clear by now that humanity is not merely at the top of the food chain around the world, but a pestilence to everything God (or whatever) put in position to be exploited in the short term, regardless of the obvious fact that it took approximately forever to put those resources in place, and how much of it cannot be replaced. While it’s true that in the very long run (a billion years or few), the aging Sun will cook the planet anyway, we are doing our best to get the job done in the geologic present. This is why many geologists propose renaming our current epoch “Anthropocene.” Bonus question: Why do political conservatives care so little about the long-term conservation of resources that are, undeniably, in limited supply and are clearly bound for exhaustion at any consumption rate? Before categorizing me, please note that I am a registered independent, and in sympathy with economic conservatives in a number of ways (for example, I do like, appreciate and understand how the market works, and in general I favor smaller government). But on environmental issues I’m with those who give a shit. Most of them happen to be liberals (or, in the current vernacular, progressives). George Lakoff provides some answers here (and in several books). But, while I love George, and while he has probably influenced my thinking more than any other human being, it still baffles that opposing conservation of resources fails to seem oxymoronic to most avowed conservatives.
  3. The end is in sight. Somewhere I’ve kept a newspaper story that did a great job of listing all the resources our species is bound to use up, at current rates of exploitation, and how long that will take. On the list were not only the obvious “reserves,” such like oil, gas, coal and uranium, but other stuff as well: helium, lithium, platinum, thorium, tungsten, neodymium, dysprosium, niobium… stuff we use to make stuff that ranges from balloons to hard drives to hybrid car engines. Many of the heavier elements appear to have been deposited here during bombardments by asteroids several billion years ago, when the Earth has hard enough not to absorb them. Helium, one of the most abundant elements in the universe, is produced on Earth mostly by decay of radioactive elements in certain kinds of natural gas. Much of the world’s helium comes from the ground here in the U.S., where our enlightened congresspeople decided a few decades back to hand the reserves over to private industry, where “the market” would decide best how it would be used. So, naturally, we are due to run out of it within maybe a couple dozen years, and have not yet found a way to replace it. Read on.

[Later…] I wrote this three nights ago, but didn’t put it up until now because I was already way overdue on the  writing assignment I mentioned up top, and I had to deal with other pressing obligations as well. So I just went through the post, copy-edited it a bit and added some links.

* Special thanks goes to anybody who can find the original quote. I’ve used it so often on the Web that I’ve effectively spammed search results with unintended SEO. The closest thing I can find is this from Google Books, which fails to contain the searched-for nugget, but still demonstrates why Updike’s criticism earns the same high rank as his fiction.

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