A murder investigation disguised as a teacher-pleasing ‘oral history project.’

Sam Munson’s “The November Criminals” is either a very short novel or a very long college application essay. “You’ve asked me to explain what my best and worst qualities are,” Addison Schacht, the novel’s narrator and main attraction, writes in its opening sentence. His answer requires telling the full story of how he, a pot-dealing, Virgil-loving, SAT-acing high-school senior, attempted to solve the murder of Kevin Broadus, a fellow student at his Washington, D.C., school.

It all sounds like “Encyclopedia Brown: The Burn-Out Years,” but the plot of “The November Criminals” is never the point. Instead, it’s the vehicle, an obstacle course where Mr. Munson can show off Addison’s sharp and agile voice. That voice entails tons of tangents, italics and words you can’t print in a newspaper, all of which are unified by Addison’s industrial-strength cynicism. He spends a good portion of the novel judging other people, and they spend a good portion of the novel deserving it.

By far the worst offenders— worse than the minor drug players, worse than Addison’s bumbling father—are the teachers and students at Addison’s school. At a student assembly to honor the murdered Kevin, a girl named Alex Faustner starts “complaining about how ‘all this’—she meant singing ‘Mary Don’t You Weep’— violated her First Amendment rights. . . . In addition to being a huge [worse than you think], Alex is—I’m sure you’re astonished to hear this—one hundred percent, rest-of-society-agrees beautiful.”

But Addison criticizes the assembly along these same lines. And when he makes fliers for his murder investigation—disguised to his teachers as “an oral history project,” he says, because “I knew the phrase would turn their gazes glassy with delight”—Addison finds himself staring at a sign hanging over the copying machine that says: “Be Unselfish.” The sign, he muses, is “part of the larger official message hawked by our administration: selfishness is the highest evil. Which means, if you think about it, that all private desires participate in evil.” He adds: “The urge to deface that sign is the strongest feeling I have about my school.”

So which is it? Are selfishness and solipsism generally permissible or should they be restricted to our own frontal lobes? Can we mock the pretension of “exceptionless equality” while still struggling toward some kind of personal evaluative standard? “The November Criminals” comes at these questions from about 50 different angles. Addison never quite formulates a final answer—much less tries to live by it—and that’s one reason he’s so captivating. In his Latin class, Addison rails against a fellow student (Alex, again) for prattling on about how “The Aeneid” “glorified violence”: “No, man, you’re missing the whole point. You can’t apply our virtues here.” But Addison also realizes that nothing in this statement obviates the need to sort out what exactly our virtues are.

As with most first novels, “The November Criminals” contains some repurposing of life experience. Mr. Munson grew up in just the sort of place that his narrator describes as home: “a tree-heavy upper-middle-class neighborhood in Washington, D.C.” They both applied to the University of Chicago in 1999. (Mr. Munson graduated in 2003.) But the most interesting bit of Mr. Munson’s background is that the author worked as a researcher for CNBC host and devoted supply-sider Larry Kudlow and as an editor at Commentary magazine. Every so often, spurred by some kind of creative liberal guilt, someone will ask: Where are the conservative novelists? I can’t speak directly to Mr. Munson’s politics, but it’s pretty clear that “The November Criminals” takes aim at a lot of liberal pieties—everything from Diversity Outreach (“just as horrifyingly inept as its name suggests”) to a history teacher who worships Wilson, Kennedy and FDR (“that’s verbatim; she actually said holy trinity“).

More important than the author’s political leanings, though, is the fact that Mr. Munson does this as a novelist and not as a pundit—he dramatizes his debates, keeps them entertaining and leaves them unresolved.

“The November Criminals” tackles plenty of other important issues, including Jewishness (Addison loves Holocaust jokes) and race (Kevin is black). The book gets a little preachy toward the end—it does start to feel like an essay. But Mr. Munson packs in enough funny moments, enough surprises (notably a short and genuinely affective section on Addison’s mother), and enough satisfying resolutions to more than compensate. And then there’s the humor. After a disquisition on the male teenager’s sexual stamina, Addison explains: “I’m just trying to get everything down, so that you can form a clear picture. My best and worst qualities.”

Mr. Fehrman, a writer in Milford, Conn., is working on a book about presidents and their books.

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As Americans prepare to celebrate the nation’s birth, it’s safe to say that the most familiar figure connected with that birth is George Washington. Although he didn’t actually sign the Declaration of Independence—he had been in New York since March, commanding the Continental troops there—his image is more completely bound up with the revolution and its success than any of America’s other patriarchs.

Whether known as the “Father of his Country,” the “Atlas of America,” the “Sage of Mount Vernon” or just the “Old Fox,” Washington has always been a figure of mythic proportions, and during his lifetime he was venerated practically as a living saint by many citizens of the new republic.

One of the president’s most endearing and least familiar weakness was for music, theater and dancing.

True, at 6-foot-2 he really did stand taller than most men of his time, and his repeated escapes from death in battle contributed to his somewhat divine aura. But despite the sentimental hagiography of Parson Weems, whose best-seller “The Life of Washington” (1800) fairly reduced his subject’s career to a series of Aesop-like fables, Washington was a very human being, however formally he conducted himself in public. As his biographer Joseph Ellis notes, Washington cultivated his exceptional self-control to compensate for his weaknesses, among them a fiery temper and a passionate love for Sally Fairfax, the wife of a friend.

Perhaps Washington’s most endearing and least familiar weakness, however, was for music, theater and dancing. Unlike his secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, a talented amateur violinist, Washington wasn’t a musician himself. But he took great pleasure in musical and theatrical events—both of which were closely intertwined in 18th-century America—and from early adulthood eagerly attended performances at theaters in Fredericksburg and Williamsburg, Va.

Throughout his life, Washington attended concerts wherever he traveled. During the American Revolution, while spending a night in Bethlehem, Pa., he enjoyed a concert of chamber music, and on a subsequent visit there in 1782, we read of his being serenaded, to his great pleasure, by a Moravian trombone choir.

Meanwhile, Washington was always eager to pay ready money for good music. In 1757, Philadelphia enjoyed its first two public concerts. For the second of these, then-Lt. Col. Washington purchased a block of tickets costing 52 shillings and six pence, or £2 12s 6d, a considerable outlay at a time when a teacher might earn an annual salary of £60. On another occasion, in 1787, now-Gen. Washington gave a dinner in Philadelphia for which he engaged a nine-piece orchestra to perform, this time paying £7 10s for the pleasure—no mean sum either.

Among his friends was the Philadelphia lawyer Francis Hopkinson, a talented amateur poet and musician who also designed several issues of Continental currency and did sign the Declaration of Independence. Acknowledged as the first native-born American composer, Hopkinson dedicated a set of “Seven Songs for the Harpischord or Forte Piano” to Washington in 1788.

Not surprisingly, musical performances in the newborn nation were often connected with major current events. Thus shortly after America’s victory, in 1781, we find Washington in the audience at the “hotel of the Minister of France” (i.e., the French Embassy) in Philadelphia to enjoy the celebratory premiere of “The Temple of Minerva, America Independent, an oratorical entertainment,” another Hopkinson opus. Similarly, in May 1787, four days after the opening of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Washington notes in his diary that he “accompanied Mrs. Morris to the benefit concert of a Mr. Juhan.” The program, divided into three “acts,” included overtures by Pierre-Alexandre Monsigny, William Shield and Padre Giovanni Battista Martini (who had given lessons to the young Mozart in Bologna). There was also a “Sonato Piano Forte” [sic] by the English-born Alexander Reinagle, one of America’s leading musicians of the day.

Reinagle, who had been a close friend of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach in Europe, had settled in Philadelphia while it was the nation’s capital and was engaged by President Washington as music master to his step-granddaughter, Nelly Custis, providing a noteworthy, if indirect, connection between the Father of his Country and the son of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Apart from attending public performances, Washington also relished listening to music- making at home, and not only Nelly but Washington’s stepchildren and step-grandchildren were offered a musical education befitting the landed gentry. A small household collection of music books is still preserved at Washington’s beloved Mount Vernon, along with Nelly’s harpsichord, which Washington bought for her.

In addition, various eyewitness accounts of Washington on the dance floor reveal a side far removed from the starchy image on currency and canvas. Most notable is the account by his step-grandson George Washington Parke Custis of a ball held a few weeks after the conclusion of the American Revolution: “The minuet was much in vogue at that period,” writes Custis, “and was peculiarly calculated for the display of the splendid figure of the chief, and his natural grace and elegance of air and manners. . . . As the evening advanced, the commander-in-chief, yielding to the general gaiety of the scene, went down some dozen couples in the contre-dance with great spirit and satisfaction.”

Throughout his life, Washington enjoyed the balls and “assemblies” that were a popular entertainment in 18th-century America. One of his final letters in 1799 is a poignant response to an invitation to the managers of the Alexandria Assembly in Virginia: “Mrs. Washington and myself have been honored with your polite invitation to the assemblies of Alexandria this winter, and thank you for this mark of your attention. But, alas! our dancing days are no more.”

Though at age 67 Washington was still relatively vigorous, he caught a cold while riding five hours through a snowstorm on Dec. 12 of that year. Two days later the “American Cincinnatus” died, and to the raft of musical compositions already written saluting his military and presidential accomplishments was added another repertoire of dirges, elegies, odes and marches lamenting his passing. The first, Benjamin Carr’s dignified “Dead March and Monody for General Washington” was ready for performance in Philadelphia a mere 12 days later, with musical offerings continuing to appear up and down the Eastern seaboard throughout the winter of 1800.

The music-loving “Sword of the Revolution” probably would have enjoyed listening to them.

Mr. Scherer writes about music and the fine arts for the Journal.

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G-20 leaders don’t agree with the president that more spending will revive the economy. Nor do most Americans.

At last week’s G-20 meeting, President Barack Obama achieved a two-fer. He suffered a significant international defeat, and he increased the chances his party will suffer a major domestic one this fall.

Mr. Obama’s international defeat was self-inflicted. He went to Toronto to press other major nations to do as he has done: Expand government spending, or suffer, in the president’s words, “renewed economic hardship and recession.”

Canada, Germany, Great Britain and most other countries declined Mr. Obama’s invitation. The German economic minister “urgently” prodded America to cut spending at a press conference on June 21, prior to the G-20 meeting. The president of the European central bank took direct aim at Mr. Obama’s argument, telling the Italian newspaper La Repubblica on June 16 that “the idea that austerity measures could trigger stagnation is incorrect.”

The European Union president, Czech Prime Minister Mirek Topolanek, tore into Mr. Obama’s stimulus and other spending policies in a stunning address to the European Parliament in March 2009, calling them “the road to hell” and saying “the United States did not take the right path.”

If it sounds strange to have European leaders lecturing the U.S. about fiscal restraint, it should. But that is where America finds itself after Mr. Obama’s 17-month fiscal orgy.

The other flaw in his G-20 appearance is domestic. The president’s statements that more deficit spending was “necessary to keep economic growth strong” and his cautioning against “the consequential mistakes of the past” when stimulus spending “was too quickly withdrawn” puts his administration and party squarely in favor of policies unpopular with most Americans.

Since 2000, the Gallup organization has asked voters what they believe will be the most important problem for the U.S. in 25 years. This year Americans are saying the challenge will be the deficit. And last month, almost eight in 10 voters surveyed by the Associated Press called the federal budget deficit an “extremely” or “very important” issue.

There was more bad news Tuesday for Democrats from recent focus groups conducted in battleground congressional districts in Iowa, Ohio, New Jersey, Arkansas and Florida.

A report on these focus groups issued this week by Resurgent Republic (a group I helped found) showed that both political independents and tea party participants passionately denounced federal spending and deficits, using words like “reckless,” “out of control,” “unnecessary” and “unhelpful.” The evidence suggests that both groups remain deeply skeptical of Mr. Obama’s stimulus package and are unpersuaded by the administration’s arguments in its favor.

The authors of the Resurgent Republic study concluded that both independents and tea party voters believe “nearly unanimously” that reckless government spending, not lack of tax revenues, is responsible for the deficits. This goes to the very heart of the modern Democratic agenda with its guiding philosophy of bigger government and higher taxes.

All of this negative news is wearing on the president. At the G-20’s concluding news conference, Mr. Obama—brittle and petulant—attacked GOP critics “who are hollering about deficits,” saying he would be “calling their bluff” next year by “presenting some very difficult choices.” Then “we’ll see how much of . . . the political arguments they’re making right now are real, and how much of it was just politics.”

The president’s problem is largely a mess of his own making. Deficit spending did not begin when Mr. Obama took office. But he and his Democratic allies have supported, proposed, passed or signed and then spent every dime that’s gone out the door since Jan. 20, 2009.

Voters know it is Mr. Obama and Democratic leaders who approved a $410 billion supplemental (complete with 8,500 earmarks) in the middle of the last fiscal year, and then passed a record-spending budget for this one. Mr. Obama and Democrats approved an $862 billion stimulus and a $1 trillion health-care overhaul, and they now are trying to add $266 billion in “temporary” stimulus spending to permanently raise the budget baseline.

It is the president and Congressional allies who refuse to return the $447 billion unspent stimulus dollars and want to use repayments of TARP loans for more spending rather than reducing the deficit. It is the president who gave Fannie and Freddie carte blanche to draw hundreds of billions from the Treasury. It is the Democrats’ profligacy that raised the share of the GDP taken by the federal government to 24% this fiscal year.

This is indeed the road to fiscal hell, and it’s been paved by the president and his party. Voters will have their chance this November to render their verdict on the Obama years. No wonder Republicans feel confident these days.

Mr. Rove, the former senior adviser and deputy chief of staff to President George W. Bush, is the author of “Courage and Consequence” (Threshold Editions, 2010).

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Full article: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703426004575338832391393128.html

How about a void-for-vagueness doctrine for the U.S. Congress?

Just when you’re thinking all hope is lost, along comes the “void-for-vagueness doctrine,” invoked this past week by the Supreme Court to restrict a hopelessly vague law. If our era needs a bumper sticker, this is it: Void for Vagueness. Paste it on the 2,000-plus pages of the new ObamaCare law, paste it on the 2,000 pages of the floundering financial regulation bill. Hand it out in front of Elena Kagan’s confirmation hearings. Heck, chisel it on the facade of the U.S. Capitol. But my enthusiasm is racing ahead of the story.

In 2006, the most hated man in America was probably Jeff Skilling, who once sat atop Enron, perhaps the most hated corporate name in all American history. This heap of unpopularity notwithstanding, the Supreme Court said last week the government wrongly prosecuted the abominated Jeff Skilling under something called the “honest services fraud” law. The Court ruled—unanimously—that the law was, in a word, too “vague.”

Here is the classic description of the void-for-vagueness doctrine from Justice George Sutherland in 1926: “a statute which either forbids or requires the doing of an act in terms so vague that men of common intelligence must necessarily guess at its meaning . . . violates the first essential of due process of law.”

That any such common-sense rule still exists in law, politics or life is a wonder.

Strictly, the vagueness test applies only to penal law, but in a better world would it not also apply to much else in public life? The world was simpler in 1926.

Our Congress, the one with a current approval rating of 22%, is attempting to enact its hapless answer to the financial crisis—now called, with no hint of irony, the Dodd-Frank bill. It spent the previous 12 months concocting the Obama health-care law. The actual language of the several thousand-page financial regulation bill was made available to the American people for the first time one evening this week.

Texas Rep. Jeb Hensarling, in a comment on the legislation that should go straight into Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, said, “There are probably three unintended consequences on every single page of this bill.”

Justice Antonin Scalia wrote a separate concurrence on the Skilling decision. Consider his remarks in the context of Congress’s modern legislative enactments, such as Sarbanes-Oxley, which technically are beyond reach of the void-for-vagueness doctrine.

He referred to the honest-services law, enacted by Congress in 1988, as “this indeterminacy.” He calls the legal duties required of individuals under it “hopelessly undefined,” a “smorgasbord” written in “astoundingly broad language” and “to put it mildly, unclear.” His most stupendous example was a court ruling that one could be found in violation for a scheme “contrary to public policy.”

In too many areas where the daily life of commerce intersects with public policy, people feel they are flying blind, uncertain of what a law or regulation requires, uncertain of how the bureaucracies empowered to enforce this morass will interpret them.

One sensed it was heading this way when landowners were prosecuted under the Endangered Species Act for violating the “habitat” of odd creatures found on their property.

This derangement of the laws’ meaning is among the reasons the public is so out of sorts about politics and Congress. They think compliance with the rules is turning into a crap shoot. They are right. Here is Justice Scalia on what happened to the law’s meaning in the Skilling case: “The duty probably did not have to be rooted in state law, but maybe it did. It might have been more demanding in the case of public officials, but perhaps not.” Truly, we are in Wonder Land.

It is an irony, though, that the Supreme Court that can unanimously find in favor of a Jeff Skilling under the void-for-vagueness doctrine is the same court that shows nearly infinite deference to federal administrative bureaucracies that strain to interpret the sloppy legislative language Congress enacts into law.

We are there again. The Dodd-Frank bill, if enabled into law by several Republican Senators, lets the actual meaning of the “Volcker Rule” on banks’ trading practices and much else pass into the hands of the translators at the Federal Reserve, FDIC, other federal agencies and the lobbyists who swarm around them.

It is not an accident that American public policy and law have fallen so far into a condition of unfathomable murk. As with the prosecutors who abused the honest-services statute, opaqueness of the sort Messrs. Dodd, Frank and the president favor shifts the locus of power away from all citizens and toward an administrative minority that reduces the nation’s civil life to a costly game of Mother-may-I?

If only on principle, someone from the GOP in Congress should start demanding that all federal legislation pass through a void-for-vagueness test. This session, none would survive. If the Supreme Court can demand clarity on behalf of convicted felons, how about adopting it on behalf of everyone else, who until their luck runs out, remain innocent?

Daniel Henninger, Wall Street Journal

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The arrest of ‘sleeper agents’ on U.S. soil is the stuff of spy novels, not the Cold War.

The Justice Department’s arrest this week of 10 Russian spies posing as American citizens is not stranger than fiction; it mirrors fiction. Innumerable Cold War novels and films focused on “sleeper agents,” professional Soviet espionage officers superbly trained in language and culture who take on the identity of a native-born American to gain access to U.S. intelligence and policy making.

But in reality the most damaging Cold War spies were native-born Americans—Julius Rosenberg, Alger Hiss, Aldrich Ames, Richard Hansen—who for reasons of ideology, money or psychological perversity chose to betray their country.

Most Soviet espionage was supervised by “legal” KGB officers operating under official cover as diplomats who, when arrested, faced only expulsion, protected by their diplomatic status. Great Britain famously expelled 105 Soviet personnel linked to KGB intelligence in 1971. But none of them had been posing as a British citizen. The KGB also had “illegal” officers who had no diplomatic status, often used false identities and who usually functioned as covert liaisons with native-born traitors. Long-term sleeper agents, as these 10 appear to have been, are rare.

In the late-1950s, the U.S. government arrested, tried and convicted five Soviet illegals in connection with the Soble-Soblen spy ring: Jack Soble, his wife Myra, his brother Robert Soblen (the two brothers had anglicized their Lithuanian name, Sobolevicius, slightly differently), Jacob Albam and Mark Zborowski. None had diplomatic cover, but neither were they “deep penetration” agents. All used their true identities, simply pretending to be innocent immigrants.

Moreover, their espionage work was confined largely to “agent handling,” i.e., acting as liaison with native-born Americans, mostly Communists, who had been recruited as Soviet spies years earlier. Their major accomplishment was to infiltrate the American Trotskyist movement and the Russian emigré community, targets with no direct connection to the U.S. government. Soble and associates had no plans or prospects of entering American think tanks or other institutions with access to high-level American policy makers.

There were two Soviet illegals exposed in the late 1950s whose activities came a bit closer to the recently arrested 10. An illegal officer, KGB Col. Rudolf Abel (real name Vilyam Fisher), entered the U.S. in 1948 and operated under a variety of false identities. He was finally exposed when his assistant and fellow illegal, KGB Lt. Col. Reino Hayhanen, defected in 1957. (Hayhanen, of Finnish background, had been sent to the U.S. using false papers identifying him as an American of Finnish ancestry.) Abel, who never admitted his real name, was convicted and sentenced to 30 years in prison.

After only five years he was freed in exchange for Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 pilot shot down over the Soviet Union on a CIA reconnaissance mission. While Hayhanen and Abel assumed false identities as Americans, their function was to maintain contact and pick up information from native-born Americans who spied for the Soviets. Abel’s initial task, for example, was to re-establish KGB contact with Theodore Hall, an American physicist and secret Communist who had provided U.S. atomic secrets to the USSR while working at Los Alamos. Hayhanen and Abel were illegals but not deep-penetration sleeper agents.

Thus, the FBI’s arrest of 10 Russian sleeper agents on U.S. soil has no precedent in Cold War history, even if fans of Walter Wager’s novel “Telefon” (later a movie staring Charles Bronson) find it familiar. Also unprecedented, and reassuringly so, is that FBI counterintelligence had identified these Russian sleepers early on, had been monitoring them for years, and finally decided that it had gained what it could from such surveillance and rolled up the Russian networks.

Deep-penetration agents are a very, very expensive investment. Not only the training of the professional officers themselves, but covertly supporting them, communicating with them, and supervising their activities is a major bureaucratic expense for any intelligence agency. The loss of 10 such agents and the resulting collateral damage makes this a catastrophe for Russian foreign intelligence. The FBI also identified a number of Russian “legal” officers who made surreptitious contact with the sleepers and, thus exposed, these Russian officers are now useless for intelligence fieldwork.

The SVR—Russian Foreign Intelligence, successor to the KGB—also cannot be sure that the FBI has disclosed all that it knows of the 10 agents’ activities (11 with the arrest of a confederate in Cyprus). Prudence dictates that the SVR must assume that any other Russian officers who had covert contact with the 11 may have been identified by American security. Use of these potentially compromised officers in future espionage field-work would be risky and foolish.

We don’t know what additional shoes will drop in this case. Will any of the 10 talk to avoid a long prison term? Rudolf Abel was defiant and refused any cooperation. Jack Soble, however, dodged the death penalty by fully confessing, telling all he knew of KGB operations in the U.S. and Western Europe, and even testified against his brother. These 10 (or 11, if we count the agent arrested in Cyprus) don’t face the death penalty but do face potentially long terms in prison, and there aren’t any Francis Gary Powers available for exchanges.

Messrs. Klehr and Haynes are co-authors, along with Alexander Vassiliev, of “Spies: The Rise and Fall of the KGB in America” (Yale University Press, 2010).

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My political friendships and sympathies are increasingly determined not by ideology but by methodology. One of the most significant divisions in American public life is not between the Democrats and the Republicans; it is between the Ugly Party and the Grown-Up Party.

How weary, stale, flat and unprofitable—at times—seem all the digital distractions of this world.

A catastrophic event unfolds. A seemingly healthy professional embarks on his daily commute, only to come to the frightening realization that his battered and beloved BlackBerry lies vulnerable and unused in a distant corner of his home. An unwholesome panic descends. No matter how far away from home he is, and no matter how needless the device may be in a practical sense, he is impelled to hightail it back to his house and reconnect with the world.

William Powers offers this beleaguered man (me), and everyone else who has faced a similar ordeal, a roadmap to contentment in “Hamlet’s BlackBerry,” a rewarding guide to finding a “quiet” and “spacious” place “where the mind can wander free.”

Based on the author’s much-discussed 2006 National Journal essay, “Hamlet’s BlackBerry: Why Paper is Eternal” (and how I wish that were true), the former Washington Post staff writer argues that the distractions of manic connectivity often lead to a lack of productivity and, if allowed to permeate too deeply, to an assault on the beauty and meaning of everyday life.

Obviously this is not a unique grievance, or a fresh one: As Mr. Powers acknowledges, concerns about the deleterious effects of a new world supplanting the old go back to Plato. But there has been an awful lot of grousing about digital distraction lately—Nicholas Carr’s “The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains” came out just a few weeks ago—and it is easy to feel skeptical of worrywarts agonizing about Americans “wrestling” with too many choices and “coping” with the effects of too much Internet use.

There is simply too much good that comes of innovation for that sort of Luddite hand-wringing. The farmer a century ago who pulled himself off the straw mattress at 4 a.m. to till the earth so his family wouldn’t starve led a fairly straightforward, undistracted existence, but he was almost certainly miserable most of the time. And he probably regarded the arrival of radio as a sort of miracle. In discussions of this type I tend to rely on the wisdom of P.J. O’Rourke: “Civilization is an enormous improvement on the lack thereof.”

But even a jaded reader is likely to be won over by “Hamlet’s BlackBerry.” It convincingly argues that we’ve ceded too much of our existence to what he calls Digital Maximalism. Less scold and more philosopher, Mr. Powers certainly bemoans the spread of technology in our lives, but he also offers a compelling discussion of our dependence on contraptions and of the ways in which we might free ourselves from them. I buy it. I need quiet time.

To accept “Hamlet’s BlackBerry” is to accept that we are super busy. “It’s staggering,” writes Mr. Powers, “how many balls we keep in the air each day and how few we drop. We’re so busy, sometimes it seems as though busyness itself is the point.” Though I don’t find all that ball-juggling as staggering as the author, and I don’t know anyone who acts as if chaos is the point of it all, it would be foolish not to concede that our lives have become far more complex than ever before.

What can be done? What should be done? Mr. Powers’s answer is, in essence: Just say no. Try to cultivate a quieter or at least more focused life. The most persuasive and entertaining parts of “Hamlet’s BlackBerry” are found in Mr. Powers’s efforts to practice what he preaches. (Most of us, it should be noted, do not have the option of moving from a dense Washington, D.C., suburb to an idyllic Cape Cod town to grapple with the demons of gadgetry addiction.) His skeptical wife and kids agree that if they’re allowed to use their laptops during the week, they will turn the computers off on the weekend. Mr. Powers discovers that friends and relatives quickly adapt to the family’s digital disconnect (they call it the “Internet Sabbath”). The family spends more time face-to-face instead of Facebooking.

Mr. Powers proposes that we take into account the “need to connect outward, as well as the opposite need for time and space apart.” It is a powerful desire, the balanced life. Most of us yearn for it. Neither technology nor connectivity is injurious unless we allow them to consume us. Mr. Powers argues that letting life turn into a blizzard of snapshots—that’s what all those screenviews amount to, after all—isn’t enough. We would be happier freeing ourselves for genuine, unfiltered experience and then reflecting on it, not tweeting about it. The busy person will pause here to nod in sympathy.

I’m not sure that many of us have found that spacious place where our minds can wander free of technological intrusions, of beeps and buttons and emails and tweets, but “Hamlet’s BlackBerry” makes the case that we can—or should—find it. Recently, while watching some hypnotically dreadful movie, I instinctively reached for my BlackBerry to fetch some worthless biographical information about a third-rate actress that would do no more than clog my brain still further.

Then I remembered something in Mr. Powers’s book—which takes its title from a scene in “Hamlet” when the prince refers to an Elizabethan technical advance: specially coated paper or parchment that could be wiped clean. A book that included heavy, blank, erasable pages made from such paper—an almanac, for example—was called a table. “Yea, from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records,” Hamlet says. Or, as Mr. Powers paraphrases: ” ‘Don’t worry,’ Hamlet’s nifty device whispered, ‘you don’t have to know everything. Just the few things that matter.’ ”

Mr. Harsanyi is a nationally syndicated columnist for the Denver Post.

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Going up the garden path, again. Barack Obama accompanied by fellow ramblers Jose Manuel Barroso, Silvio Berlusconi, Angela Merkel at Nicolas Sarkozy during the G-8 summit in Canada on June 25.

Marked by the EU-US divide over the best way out of the crisis, the world leaders at the G-20 summit in Toronto spurned Europe’s proposals to tax banks and regulate markets. The only consensus reached was on deficit reduction, an objective championed by all 27 EU member states. European papers are scathing in their editorials on the G-20 gathering.

“A summit that could just as well not have been held,” writes Poland’s Dziennik Gazeta Prawna, offering its final verdict on last weekend’s G-20 summit. “In Toronto, the G-20 leaders didn’t solve a single economic problem,” the daily adds. “The world’s most influential politicians were unable to agree on anything tangible,” particularly “on the principle of a global bank levy or on the instruments to bolster bank capital.”

Likewise, France’s Libération pronounces “the ‘Gs’ at a standstill.” “The Huntsville G-8 and Toronto G-20 displayed more differences of opinion than progress in getting out of the crisis. The idea of a bank levy or international financial tax has been shelved indefinitely, and everyone pledged to cut deficits, to be sure, but on their own terms.”

Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which advocates liberalizing international trade as the crisis remedy, says the G-8 and last weekend’s G-20 once again proved how ineffectual summits are. “The fact that certain industrialized countries are incapable of listening to emerging countries’ wishes and opinions jeopardizes the future of the G-20,” writes the FAZ, particularly in view of the EU’s attempt to tax financial transactions in the face of opposition from emerging countries that were spared by the crisis.

“Their pique should induce Europeans to wonder whether such taxes make any sense and give up on them,” the German daily opines. “If the point of the G-20 is to sign off on European ideas, we might as well give it up. And if the G-20 is to become a serious international economic forum, it would be a pipedream to imagine that European notions are the measure of all things,” the FAZ editorial concludes.

Every Man for Himself

“The G-20 has ushered in the return of ‘every man for himself’,” bemoans France’s Le Figaro. “The attempt to define a consensus-based economic policy to get out of the crisis proved abortive. Between a Germany obsessed with cutting deficits … a United States that is fretful about hamstringing growth by excessive austerity and a France halfway between the two, a common guideline is nowhere in sight. The G-20, which was created at the peak of financial turmoil, has proved its utility in times of crisis. But the meeting in Toronto also bared its limitations. Global economic governance of one sort or another, which is already so hard to hammer out at the European level, is not about to be put in place overnight.”

In fact, explains Germany’s Die Tageszeitung, “The disagreements within the G-8 and G-20 now force (the conferees) to refocus on matters that can really be changed: For Europeans today, that means Europe.” So, concludes the TAZ, “The best news from this summit is that Merkel and Sarkozy seemed determined to tax financial transactions in Europe — or in the euro zone if London holds out.”

In spite of all, notes the EUobserver, “the statement on halving public deficits by 2013 was hailed as a victory for European politicians.” “By setting that target, the G-20 came to a close under the banner of German-brand rigour,” remarks La Repubblica. “The match played out” in Canada “was not Germany vs. the US,” even if “Angela Merkel might give the impression she won the day,” explains the Italian daily. “After having foisted its doctrine on Europe, Germany is now exporting it worldwide. Barack Obama, the last of the Keynesian leaders, seems to be beating a retreat. He did not convince Berlin of the benefits of states’ spending their way to growth. But appearances are deceiving, and Merkel’s triumph will soon prove a Pyrrhic victory. It serves to assuage the anxiety of the German public,” which favors fiscal rigour, and to “accelerate the marginalization of Europe” by shifting even faster “the geometries of power towards the new dynamics between America, China, India, Brazil and Russia.”

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Full article and photo: http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,703570,00.html

Copyrighting facts as well as words

FACTS, ruled America’s Supreme Court in 1918 in the “hot news doctrine”, cannot be copyrighted. But a news agency can retain exclusive use of its product so long as it has a commercial value. Now newspapers, fed up with stories being “scraped” by other websites, want that ruling made into law.

The idea is floated in a discussion document published by the Federal Trade Commission, which is holding hearings on the news industry’s future. Media organisations would have the exclusive right, for a predetermined period, to publish their material online. The draft also considers curtailing fair use, the legal principle that allows search engines to reproduce headlines and links, so long as the use is selective and transformative (as with a list of search results). Jeff Jarvis, who teaches journalism students to become entrepreneurs at New York’s City University, says this sounds like an attempt to protect newspapers more than journalism.

Germany is mulling something similar. A recent paper by two publishers’ associations proposed changing copyright law to protect not only articles but also headlines, sentences and even fragments of text.

Critics say that would extend copyright to facts. It would also be hard to make either regime work in practice. In America, a regulator would presumably need to determine the period of commercial value: perhaps two hours for news of an earthquake, 30 minutes for sports results. In Germany, publishers want a fee on commercial computer use. Germany’s justice minister last week hinted at support for the news industry, but also said that a new law would not stir young people to buy newspapers. New products, she says, would be a better response to flagging demand.

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Full article and photo: http://www.economist.com/node/16436345?story_id=16436345&source=hptextfeature

Some 1.2 million people belong to one of AA’s 55,000 meeting groups in the US.

The church will be closed tomorrow, and the drunks are freaking out. An elderly lady in a prim white blouse has just delivered the bad news, with deep apologies: A major blizzard is scheduled to wallop Manhattan tonight, and up to a foot of snow will cover the ground by dawn. The church, located on the Upper West Side, can’t ask its staff to risk a dangerous commute. Unfortunately, that means it must cancel the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting held daily in the basement.

A worried murmur ripples through the room. “Wha… what are we supposed to do?” asks a woman in her mid-twenties with smudged black eyeliner. She’s in rough shape, having emerged from a multiday alcohol-and-cocaine bender that morning. “The snow, it’s going to close everything,” she says, her cigarette-addled voice tinged with panic. “Everything!” She’s on the verge of tears.

A mustachioed man in skintight jeans stands and reads off the number for a hotline that provides up-to-the-minute meeting schedules. He assures his fellow alcoholics that some groups will still convene tomorrow despite the weather. Anyone who needs an AA fix will be able to get one, though it may require an icy trek across the city.

That won’t be a problem for a thickset man in a baggy beige sweat suit. “Doesn’t matter how much snow we get—a foot, 10 feet piled up in front of the door,” he says. “I will leave my apartment tomorrow and go find a meeting.”

He clasps his hands together and draws them to his heart: “You understand me? I need this.” Daily meetings, the man says, are all that prevent him from winding up dead in the gutter, shoes gone because he sold them for booze or crack. And he hasn’t had a drink in more than a decade.

The resolve is striking, though not entirely surprising. AA has been inspiring this sort of ardent devotion for 75 years. It was in June 1935, amid the gloom of the Great Depression, that a failed stockbroker and reformed lush named Bill Wilson founded the organization after meeting God in a hospital room. He codified his method in the 12 steps, the rules at the heart of AA. Entirely lacking in medical training, Wilson created the steps by cribbing ideas from religion and philosophy, then massaging them into a pithy list with a structure inspired by the Bible.

The 200-word instruction set has since become the cornerstone of addiction treatment in this country, where an estimated 23 million people grapple with severe alcohol or drug abuse—more than twice the number of Americans afflicted with cancer. Some 1.2 million people belong to one of AA’s 55,000 meeting groups in the US, while countless others embark on the steps at one of the nation’s 11,000 professional treatment centers. Anyone who seeks help in curbing a drug or alcohol problem is bound to encounter Wilson’s system on the road to recovery.

It’s all quite an achievement for a onetime broken-down drunk. And Wilson’s success is even more impressive when you consider that AA and its steps have become ubiquitous despite the fact that no one is quite sure how—or, for that matter, how well—they work. The organization is notoriously difficult to study, thanks to its insistence on anonymity and its fluid membership. And AA’s method, which requires “surrender” to a vaguely defined “higher power,” involves the kind of spiritual revelations that neuroscientists have only begun to explore.

What we do know, however, is that despite all we’ve learned over the past few decades about psychology, neurology, and human behavior, contemporary medicine has yet to devise anything that works markedly better. “In my 20 years of treating addicts, I’ve never seen anything else that comes close to the 12 steps,” says Drew Pinsky, the addiction-medicine specialist who hosts VH1’s Celebrity Rehab. “In my world, if someone says they don’t want to do the 12 steps, I know they aren’t going to get better.”

Wilson may have operated on intuition, but somehow he managed to tap into mechanisms that counter the complex psychological and neurological processes through which addiction wreaks havoc. And while AA’s ability to accomplish this remarkable feat is not yet understood, modern research into behavior dynamics and neuroscience is beginning to provide some tantalizing clues.

One thing is certain, though: AA doesn’t work for everybody. In fact, it doesn’t work for the vast majority of people who try it. And understanding more about who it does help, and why, is likely our best shot at finally developing a system that improves on Wilson’s amateur scheme for living without the bottle.

AA doesn’t work for everybody, but when it does, it can be transformative. Members receive tokens to mark periods of sobriety, from 24 hours to one month to 55 years.

AA originated on the worst night of Bill Wilson’s life. It was December 14, 1934, and Wilson was drying out at Towns Hospital, a ritzy Manhattan detox center. He’d been there three times before, but he’d always returned to drinking soon after he was released. The 39-year-old had spent his entire adult life chasing the ecstasy he had felt upon tasting his first cocktail some 17 years earlier. That quest destroyed his career, landed him deeply in debt, and convinced doctors that he was destined for institutionalization.

Wilson had been quite a mess when he checked in the day before, so the attending physician, William Silkworth, subjected him to a detox regimen known as the Belladonna Cure—hourly infusions of a hallucinogenic drug made from a poisonous plant. The drug was coursing through Wilson’s system when he received a visit from an old drinking buddy, Ebby Thacher, who had recently found religion and given up alcohol. Thacher pleaded with Wilson to do likewise. “Realize you are licked, admit it, and get willing to turn your life over to God,” Thacher counseled his desperate friend. Wilson, a confirmed agnostic, gagged at the thought of asking a supernatural being for help.

But later, as he writhed in his hospital bed, still heavily under the influence of belladonna, Wilson decided to give God a try. “If there is a God, let Him show Himself!” he cried out. “I am ready to do anything. Anything!”

What happened next is an essential piece of AA lore: A white light filled Wilson’s hospital room, and God revealed himself to the shattered stockbroker. “It seemed to me, in the mind’s eye, that I was on a mountain and that a wind not of air but of spirit was blowing,” he later said. “And then it burst upon me that I was a free man.” Wilson would never drink again.

At that time, the conventional wisdom was that alcoholics simply lacked moral fortitude. The best science could offer was detoxification with an array of purgatives, followed by earnest pleas for the drinker to think of his loved ones. When this approach failed, alcoholics were often consigned to bleak state hospitals. But having come back from the edge himself, Wilson refused to believe his fellow inebriates were hopeless. He resolved to save them by teaching them to surrender to God, exactly as Thacher had taught him.

Following Thacher’s lead, Wilson joined the Oxford Group, a Christian movement that was in vogue among wealthy mainstream Protestants. Headed by a an ex-YMCA missionary named Frank Buchman, who stirred controversy with his lavish lifestyle and attempts to convert Adolf Hitler, the Oxford Group combined religion with pop psychology, stressing that all people can achieve happiness through moral improvement. To help reach this goal, the organization’s members were encouraged to meet in private homes so they could study devotional literature together and share their inmost thoughts.

In May 1935, while on an extended business trip to Akron, Ohio, Wilson began attending Oxford Group meetings at the home of a local industrialist. It was through the group that he met a surgeon and closet alcoholic named Robert Smith. For weeks, Wilson urged the oft-soused doctor to admit that only God could eliminate his compulsion to drink. Finally, on June 10, 1935, Smith (known to millions today as Dr. Bob) gave in. The date of Dr. Bob’s surrender became the official founding date of Alcoholics Anonymous.

In its earliest days, AA existed within the confines of the Oxford Group, offering special meetings for members who wished to end their dependence on alcohol. But Wilson and his followers quickly broke away, in large part because Wilson dreamed of creating a truly mass movement, not one confined to the elites Buchman targeted. To spread his message of salvation, Wilson started writing what would become AA’s sacred text: Alcoholics Anonymous, now better known as the Big Book.

The core of AA is found in chapter five, entitled “How It Works.” It is here that Wilson lists the 12 steps, which he first scrawled out in pencil in 1939. Wilson settled on the number 12 because there were 12 apostles.

In writing the steps, Wilson drew on the Oxford Group’s precepts and borrowed heavily from William James’ classic The Varieties of Religious Experience, which Wilson read shortly after his belladonna-fueled revelation at Towns Hospital. He was deeply affected by an observation that James made regarding alcoholism: that the only cure for the affliction is “religiomania.” The steps were thus designed to induce an intense commitment, because Wilson wanted his system to be every bit as habit-forming as booze.

The first steps famously ask members to admit their powerlessness over alcohol and to appeal to a higher power for help. Members are then required to enumerate their faults, share them with their meeting group, apologize to those they’ve wronged, and engage in regular prayer or meditation. Finally, the last step makes AA a lifelong duty: “Having had a spiritual awakening as the result of these steps, we tried to carry this message to alcoholics and to practice these principles in all our affairs.” This requirement guarantees not only that current members will find new recruits but that they can never truly “graduate” from the program.

Aside from the steps, AA has one other cardinal rule: anonymity. Wilson was adamant that the anonymous component of AA be taken seriously, not because of the social stigma associated with alcoholism, but rather to protect the nascent organization from ridicule. He explained the logic in a letter to a friend:

[In the past], alcoholics who talked too much on public platforms were likely to become inflated and get drunk again. Our principle of anonymity, so far as the general public is concerned, partly corrects this difficulty by preventing any individual receiving a lot of newspaper or magazine publicity, then collapsing and discrediting AA.