Administrative Note

My gracious host is making some server changes, so this site will be offline for about a week starting sometime this week and Monday at the latest. Not that it matters too much, given how infrequently I update, but just warning you so no one thinks I've been hacked or forgot to renew my domain name (both of which are totally plausible scenarios that have happened before).

We'll return to our regularly scheduled one-post-a-month shortly thereafter.

Gold Rush

"As far as I can tell, there are only three constituencies outside the mining or commodities-trading industries who have historically demonstrated consistent enthusiasm for acquiring gold: street pavers in heaven, leprechauns, and survivalists." Thus begins my most recent Fortune column.

We did a series about where to put your money in a recession and I took the a look one of the more popular options for the truly paranoid: gold investments. Something must be in the air because I pitched it several weeks ago with the notion that I wanted to talk a bit about survivalists and why they love gold, and the next weekend I amused to see a piece in the New York Times about the popularity of survivalism--in the Styles section, no less. It's an interesting piece written by my talented former colleague, Alex Williams, and you can read it here.

Alex's piece notes that interest in survivalism is the highest it's been since the late 1970s. As it happens, gold is also the highest it's been (price-wise) since the late 1970s. From my column:

...for those who remember the late 1970s, survivalism wasn't the only thing going up at the time. If you have any interest in precious metals, you may recall that period as the last time gold went up precipitously, setting a record high of $850 an ounce in January 1980. The intersection of the two is not a coincidence.

Both were in part triggered by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and concerns about the economy. In 1979 inflation was high, energy prices were high, unemployment was high, and global political instability was an ongoing source of anxiety.

Now it's 2008. Inflation is on the rise (unless you're averting your eyes and focusing only on "core inflation," as the Fed would have you do), energy prices are high, unemployment is going up, and political instability is an ongoing source of anxiety. Concurrently, survivalism is enjoying a revival, and after a horrendous performance during most of the '80s and '90s (dropping to around $264 an ounce in 2000), gold has once again shot up, reaching a record high of $1,030.80 on March 17.

You can read the full article here.

Should You Rush to Gold? [Fortune]

Ch-Ch-Changes : Housekeeping issues

As announced in the NY Post yesterday, I just signed on as a contributing writer at Fortune. Which, as Alex Pareene at Gawker notes, means I'm doing the same thing I was already doing, but with a different title. My contract calls for 10 columns and 2 features over the print mag over the next 12 months and Fortune is published twice a month, so on average I'll have something in every other issue.

However, the contract is exclusive for business writing, which means I can't write the back-page column for Fast Company anymore. This is unfortunate because I really enjoyed writing the column and my editors there, David Lidsky and Bob Safian, have been incredibly supportive. My last column will be in the June issue.

Lastly, I've never emailed my articles upon publication because it feels like spamming people, but a lot of people have requested that I do that, as they don't always check this site and want to know. So I'm going to do a monthly (or maybe quarterly) newsletter, for people who have indicated that they want that. But it's opt-in, so if you want to be on it, email me at spierslist AT gmail.

Boskinomics: The Great Inflation Cover-up

I have a doom-and-gloom inflation column is this week's issue of Fortune. Summary: We're All Screwed!

So how do we account for the discrepancy between the Federal Reserve's recent assurances that inflation is under control and the 91% of the population that's worried it isn't? There are several possibilities: The first is that we're all paranoid. We simply need reassurance from the authorities: Inflation rates are fine, nothing to see here, move along quietly. The second is that the Fed's insistence on focusing on "core" inflation - a measure that strips energy and food from the consumer price index (CPI) because they're theoretically subject to short-term volatility - makes inflation seem smaller than it is, or than we feel it to be when our gallon of milk that was 12% cheaper last year gets swiped across the grocery store scanner, beeping ominously like a tiny alarm bell. (While core inflation was just 2.3% in February, the CPI was 4%.) The third and most disconcerting possibility is that the CPI systemically understates inflation, in which case we're paying for it taxwise, and the government is underpaying Social Security recipients. In the words of many a UFO spotter, it isn't paranoia if they're really out to get you.

The Great Inflation Cover-up

April Fast Company: Library of the Living Dead

My April Fast Company column is up now. It's about the self-help-ification of the business book genre and, well, its general cliches:

...There are the tortured metaphors (usually involving cute animals with simple, vaguely ambulatory problems -- mice chasing moving cheese, penguins realizing their iceberg is melting and having nowhere to go) and the slightly less persecuted similes (business is like The Art of War, business is like Winnie the Pooh, business is like having your pinkie finger pulled backward until the pain is intolerable). There is the gratuitous manufacture of new jargon that sounds like English but is in fact spoken only in hotel conference rooms near the airport...

Library of the Living Dead [Fast Company]

Bear Quick Take

I wrote a short piece for Slate yesterday on why the Fed had to bail out Bear Stearns. It's a bit simplified if you've been digesting every piece of news that comes down the pipe about the story, but if not, and you want to know why your taxpayer money should be going to Bear (or JPMorgan, as it were), take a look for a quick explanation. (The short answer: when choosing between catastrophe and apocalypse, one generally picks catastrophe.)

Bear Run [Slate]

Upcoming events

Assuming LaGuardia isn't buried under several inches of plane-immobilizing snow, I'm speaking tomorrow at Georgia Tech's "Journalism 3G" symposium. Details here.

And next weekend I'll be at Mount Holyoke College for their Future in Communications conference. (Also keynoting the conference is the lovely and intelligent Priscilla Painton, who I had the good fortune to meet when she was still at Time. Even Gawker likes her!)

Edward St. Aubyn. Again!

As previously mentioned, I foisted Edward St. Aubyn's last book (Mother's Milk) upon nearly everyone I know after reading it in 2005. It was published here by Open City and enjoyed a bit of extra publicity in when it was shortlisted for the Booker in 2006. Nonetheless, St. Aubyn doesn't seem to be as well known in the U.S. as in his native U.K., so I still recommend it constantly, along with his previously published trilogy, Some Hope.

So I was happy to see that Mother's Milk just won the Prix Femina Etranger. The Times on Sunday has an interview on the subject here. It talks a bit about St. Aubyn's two earlier novels, On The Edge and A Clue to the Exit, both of which I was desperate to read after finishing the trilogy and finally found via Amazon UK used books, although it made me $100 poorer because those books were apparently out of print at the time. Fortunately, recent accolades seem to have convinced Picador to republish them with a Feb 1 '08 pub date, so you can get them now via Amazon UK for the (relatively) low, low price of £ 4.75. (On the Edge takes place at Esalen, by the way--a detail of which should make it of interest to at least half of yuppie Brooklyn.)

Fast Company, February: This Column Contains No Transfats

My Fast Company column for February is up now. You can read it here. It's about the health-ification of junk food brands. In the interest of research, various "healthy" junk foods were consumed in the making of said column:

I bought something at Whole Foods last week called Laura's Wholesome Junk Food Chocolate X-Treme Fudge Bite-lettes. I was willing to forgive the spelling of "extreme" here as if it preceded a dirt-bike competition, but the "bite-lettes" tasted so bad that I had to chase them with a Dove Organic chocolate bar, the medicinal aftertaste of which only disappeared after the consumption of a handful of Ferrara Pan Red Hots, which are, according to the packaging, a "fat-free food." ... Certainly, it's possible to find and highlight the healthy aspects of nearly anything (arsenic: cholesterol and fat free!).

Devil's Food [Fast Company]

PC Mag's 25th Anniversary

PC Mag, which celebrates its 25th Anniversary this month, asked me to write a short essay on the future of media and how current trends will shape what happens in the next few years. It's hard to write short on that one, but I gave it a shot. The six-word summary: continued fragmentation and more consumer choice.

Also included in the issue are essays from Bill Gates, Michael Dell, Vint Cerf, John McCain and Boston Red Sox pitcher Curt Shilling. (See here.)

The Media Company of the Future [PC Mag]

Pseudo-Monthly Update

· Belatedly, my December Fast Company column: The Idiot Box, or "Why Broadcast Business News Is So Abysmal."

· Random: A couple of months ago I was in Port Antonio, Jamaica, where Errol Flynn, Ian Fleming, and Noel Coward (among others) lived, partially because of something to do with Flynn. But that and a recently acquired set of the entire James Bond series has resulted in more interest in Fleming as of late, and in the course of that, a 2002 article by John Lanchester from the London Review of Books, was passed on to me. Titled "Bond in Torment," it's mostly about Ian Fleming's masochistic tendencies but initially points to boredom as a root cause of Fleming's dyspepsia and has an ostensibly throwaway line about another English writer who had the same problem: "Waugh feared boredom so much he used to have nightmares about it..." While I generally think the sort of people who keep dream journals are invariably small, horrible individuals whose children hate them, I would love to read about Waugh's boredom nightmares.

Bubbles, Blogging, Business Sites, etc.

I don't really blog anymore, so when I update here, I tend to cram a bunch of little things into one post so that my mom and the two other people who check this site regularly can get everything in one go. So here's the (monthly? quarterly?) update:

* Important things first: I was out of the country last week in a tropical mosquito-infested climate and took with me a Roald Dahl short story collection, Switch Bitch, which was passed on to me by John Hiler (erstwhile chronicler of All Things Blog, who seems to have disappeared but still has a site and presumably still maintains Xanga, which he founded) a long time ago and which has been sitting on my shelf untouched for a couple of years. Dahl's Uncle Oswald stories are fantastic. (In my experience, they're best read aloud outdoors at dusk after several medicinal doses of aged Jamaican rum, while being bombarded by preternaturally large moths.) They're dark--and darkly funnily--yarns about the protagonist's bumbling but largely successful exploits as a self-absorbed plutocratic Casanova who cannot bear any relationship "lasting more than 12 hours". They're great examples of good, old-fashioned storytelling, the rarity of which you only realize when you see it. Tonally, they remind me of George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels, which I also like. Highly recommended, particularly when the air is sultry and the attention span short.

* I re-designed this site a couple of years ago, and you can tell that I did the work myself because the layout goes wonky in certain browsers. (I know next to nothing about CSS.) I'm looking for someone to redesign and clean it up for me (cheaply) as well as build another blog for actual albeit occasional blogging as opposed to just consolidating professional work, press, etc.

* My November Fast Company column is up now. I was going to write a piece about Why There Is No Hedge Fund Bubble, but I thought a piece about hedge funds would be a bit of a turn-off in a magazine for creatives. So I did a piece about teeny tiny bubbles in luxury markets that are heavily dependent on branding. You can read it here.

* About the Slate site: Just for the record, I thought it was a great idea, and I do think there's an audience. Contrary to Nick's assertion, Dealbreaker does exactly what it's supposed to do--capture a very small but very affluent audience. (Look at Dealbreaker's CPMs vs. Gawker's. I'm not saying it's a better model, but it certainly works. Advertisers will pay more for a better demographic, so you don't necessarily have to have large volume if you're well-targeted and your audience is attractive.) Dealbreaker is not a general interest biz publication like Portfolio. That said, the Slate site *would* be general interest. But I think there's a market for smart contrarian business commentary in that category.

Felix Salmon wisely points to Breaking Views as a comparable and suggests that if they made their commentary free, it would have interesting implications for that sort of content. But that said, Breaking Views has done incredibly well using a subscription model (as have many traditional publications, like Grant's Interest Rate Observer, which have a large following and could probably add to their top-line revenue with an online a la carte option, but don't.) Personally, I tend to eschew the subscription model because I have no experience with it and I don't know how to market subscription-only products, but if people are willing to pay for smart business commentary, they're certainly willing to get it for free. So I'm glad Slate is going into that space. My reservations about taking the job had nothing to do with what I think about the concept. I just don't want a 9-5 launching a website for a large media company. (Not right now, anyway.) If I'm going to launch a site, I'd rather do another startup. And I'm not saying I want to do another startup.

The Tao of Steve [Jobs]

My Fast Company column for October is out now. The subject: Apple and Steve Jobs--the latter of whom just got subpeonaed yesterday, but I didn't talk about backdating because I think Jobs is pretty much in the clear on that one. Instead I talked about why I keep buying Apple products even though they consistently fall apart on me well before their ostensible expiration dates:

And yet I keep buying Apple products. I could blame myself for continuing this sort of irrational behavior, which is particularly irresponsible when you consider that a computer is a professional necessity. I need it to do important things such as adding an aquarium with little pixelated fish to my Facebook profile and sending fake David Hasselhoff sightings to Gawker.com. But I don't blame myself, because that would be unpleasant. So I blame Steve Jobs, who has seduced me into buying his sleek machines, even if their delicate organs seem to fail with alarming regularity, like the beautiful consumptive heroines in Victorian novels. Steve...is the human incarnation of the average Apple product: He's good-looking, he overpromises, and he's notoriously temperamental.

The Tao of Steve [Fast Company]

Radio Redux

I'll be on Weekend America tomorrow with Simpsons writer Dana Gould and the indefatigable Christopher Hitchens, talking about Putin's new bomb, troop reductions, carbon emissions and naked carpentry.

Local listings here.

Greenspan Redux

My September Fast Company column, which I wrote in late July, blaming Alan Greenspan for the subprime meltdown is online now. (It has been for a couple of weeks.)

I mention because I just got an email indicating that a certain big-budget-business-mag-that-shall-not-be-named is doing their primary October feature on ... the same subject. The title: "HIS FAULT: Blame Greenspan for the Credit Bubble." I guess it's a validation of sorts. (Or maybe we're both horribly wrong! MUAhahahaha!)