Yesterday I posted a number of interesting business articles that I had saved away for a rainy day. Today I give you a backlog of “weekend reads” to peruse.

• The Day My Grandfather Groucho and I Saved ‘You Bet Your Life’ by Andy Marx: Fascinating story about one of the first and great all-time quiz shows.
  
• The Innocent Man (Part 1, Part 2) by Pamela Colloff: The story of a Texas man who spent 25 years in jail for not killing his wife. Couldn’t stop reading this one.
• We Are Alive by David Remnick: Bruce Springsteen grapples with the differences between the realities of his song material and his life at age 62.
• A Life Worth Ending by Michael Wolff: Grappling with end-of-life issues and the nasty trade-offs in US medical care. My grandmother is at this stage so the article really hit home.
• The Once and Future Liberalism by Walter Russell Mead: Thought-provoking piece on US history. We are a nation built on liberal ideas, he argues, whether Democrat or Republican.
• Not Fade Away by Robert Kagan: Interesting argument on why the economic death of the US is greatly exaggerated.

Hope you’ve got some time to read this weekend. Some are really long but all of them were fascinating, sometimes thought-provoking articles. If you have time for only one, make it The Innocent Man. Unbelievable article. I guarantee you won’t be able to put it down.

Twenty years ago the papers were hawking a phone number shortage scare. Actually, this went on for most of the 1990s. The first part of the problem was resolved, if I remember correctly, by allowing more than 1s and 0s as the center number in the area code. Suddenly we could have more numbers because 305 area (Miami/Ft Lauderdale) could now split to include 954. Even 800 numbers could also be 888.

But even with this change the numbers were disappearing faster then they could be created. Phone numbers were becoming cheaper so families were adding more lines. Then faxing became popular so lines were dedicated to fax machines. Then the Internet came about and people wanted dedicated phone lines for accessing the web. And finally cell phones required another new number.

Then sometime in the early 2000s the trend reversed and the papers stopped talking about it. [1]

Cell phones first replaced multi-landline households and then started eliminating landlines all-together. [2] Fax machines, too, started to go away as scanners became cheap and built into every printer. No need to fax when scanning and emailing was just as easy. Finally DSL, cable modems and FiOS replaced dial-up modems and those already had dedicated “lines” so the extra Internet line could be eliminated. So we are back where we started — or at least close to it — with people having a single phone number aimed at their cell phones. [3]

I’m going to think about this example every time the TV or news calls for something being a total catastrophe if we don’t do something. Yes, sometimes intervention is required. GM needed government help in 2008 or millions of jobs were going to go away, making a tough economic climate even more so. Yes, if we don’t do something about Medicare it will bankrupt my generation. But many of the small issues, the ones the papers and newscasters love to crow about as if it is the edge of the world, are resolved “on their own,” whether because the problem ceases to be a problem or whether innovation resolves the issue.

The trick, of course, is recognizing the difference and acting (or not acting) accordingly.

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[1] The only reason I even thought about this is because I am re-reading Microserfs by Douglas Coupland, my all-time favorite book as a 20 year old.

[2] If I built a house today I’m not certain I’d even string phone line through the house. Why bother? I’d rather have terabit ethernet lines.

[3] Yes, I’m ignoring stuff like Google Voice that technically is an extra phone number per person but let’s face it, that’s pretty niche stuff right now. And yes the original way was one line per household but expanding to more than 1s and 0s as the center area code number solved that problem, which in and of itself was a relic of the rotary dial system that was fixed with technology in the 1960s.

Great read from The New York Times for this weekend about Gérard de Villiers, a pulp-fiction spy novelist in France who has an uncanny knack of writing about world events before they happen.

Last June, a pulp-fiction thriller was published in Paris under the title “Le Chemin de Damas.” Its lurid green-and-black cover featured a busty woman clutching a pistol, and its plot included the requisite car chases, explosions and sexual conquests. Unlike most paperbacks, though, this one attracted the attention of intelligence officers and diplomats on three continents. Set in the midst of Syria’s civil war, the book offered vivid character sketches of that country’s embattled ruler, Bashar al-Assad, and his brother Maher, along with several little-known lieutenants and allies. It detailed a botched coup attempt secretly supported by the American and Israeli intelligence agencies. And most striking of all, it described an attack on one of the Syrian regime’s command centers, near the presidential palace in Damascus, a month before an attack in the same place killed several of the regime’s top figures. “It was prophetic,” I was told by one veteran Middle East analyst who knows Syria well and preferred to remain nameless. “It really gave you a sense of the atmosphere inside the regime, of the way these people operate, in a way I hadn’t seen before.”

Great read for the weekend. The article, I mean. Something tells me Mr. de Villiers collection would take longer. Oh, and I’d have to learn French.

This is an amazing story from the Smithsonian Magazine on a Russian family that was cut off from civilization for almost 40 years:

Siberian summers do not last long. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves; steep-sided mountains; white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys; a hundred thousand icy bogs. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth’s wildernesses. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia’s arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people.

When the warm days do arrive, though, the taiga blooms, and for a few short months it can seem almost welcoming. It is then that man can see most clearly into this hidden world—not on land, for the taiga can swallow whole armies of explorers, but from the air. Siberia is the source of most of Russia’s oil and mineral resources, and, over the years, even its most distant parts have been overflown by oil prospectors and surveyors on their way to backwoods camps where the work of extracting wealth is carried on.

Karp Lykov and his daughter Agafia, wearing clothes donated by Soviet geologists not long after their family was  rediscovered.

Thus it was in the remote south of the forest in the summer of 1978. A helicopter sent to find a safe spot to land a party of geologists was skimming the treeline a hundred or so miles from the Mongolian border when it dropped into the thickly wooded valley of an unnamed tributary of the Abakan, a seething ribbon of water rushing through dangerous terrain. The valley walls were narrow, with sides that were close to vertical in places, and the skinny pine and birch trees swaying in the rotors’ downdraft were so thickly clustered that there was no chance of finding a spot to set the aircraft down. But, peering intently through his windscreen in search of a landing place, the pilot saw something that should not have been there. It was a clearing, 6,000 feet up a mountainside, wedged between the pine and larch and scored with what looked like long, dark furrows. The baffled helicopter crew made several passes before reluctantly concluding that this was evidence of human habitation—a garden that, from the size and shape of the clearing, must have been there for a long time.

It was an astounding discovery. The mountain was more than 150 miles from the nearest settlement, in a spot that had never been explored. The Soviet authorities had no records of anyone living in the district.

Great read for this weekend!

I love Daylight Savings Time. I hate that day. It always screws me up. But I love DST. It feels like renewal to me, a change over from the cold damp winter to spring and summer weather I love so much. Dr. Drang has an article outlining the benefits and problems, headlined by how nasty the summer sun at 4am would be in most of the country if we didn’t observe it:

If we stayed on Standard Time throughout the year, sunrise here in the Chicago area would be between 4:15 and 4:30 am from the middle of May through the middle of July. And if you check the times for civil twilight, which is when it’s bright enough to see without artificial light, you’ll find that that starts half an hour earlier.

This is insane and a complete waste of sunlight. Good for a nation of farmers, I suppose, but of no value to anyone in our current urban/suburban society except those people who get up and go running before work. And I see no reason to encourage them.

So yes it screws me up for a day or two twice a year. But I’ll take the 9pm sunsets here in the summer over that minor disruption any day.