“Designing a presentation without an audience in mind is like writing a love letter and addressing it ‘to whom it may concern.’”

Think about that the next time you’re in front of other people. Or the next time you’re writing or doing anything for other people.

You helped me once before. Back in late 2008, I wrote Ida Maria and how the Internet might be able to help me make a 12-year-old girl happy, in which I begged for ideas on how to help my daughter Lydia get in to see an artist we love, Ida Maria, even though Lydia was nine years too young to get into a 21-and-over gig. We got some advice from friends and from kind strangers at Idolator, and eventually a high-level meeting of two wonderful singers took place.

Four-and-one-half years later, Lydia wants to see Solange Knowles at the Paradise next week. Alas, she is 11 months too young to get into the show, which is 18+. I had heard of a state law asserting that those under 18 can get into 18+ shows as long as they’re accompanied by a legal guardian. I asked a manager at the ‘dise about this and she said no way. I’ve asked some friends and friends of friends who work or worked at various clubs around town; some say they vaguely remember the rule but can’t cite it definitively. Google, for once, has not been helpful.

In some ways, it’s easier to get a club to let a 12-year-old into a show she’s much too young for than to let in a 17-year-old who’s only a bit too young. The various attempts to get her in — not all of which I’ve listed here — have not worked. If anyone has any ideas — and if anyone is owed a solid from someone at the ‘dise or Live Nation — please get in touch with me. It would keep my daughter’s faith in me and my faith in the Internet. So, Internet friends, any ideas?

I will post major progress here and minor progress on the Twitter. As my buddy John Lennon used to shout, Help!

UPDATE: We got in!

Question Jimmy gets asked regularly after he explains to people what he does for a living: So that means you do editorial strategy?

Answer: No. I don’t work on editorial strategy so much as I work on editorial as strategy.

Follow-up question: What?

And then a conversation begins. The difference in wording is subtle, but I think the difference in approach is a big deal. Here’s an attempt at a longer (but still brief) answer to the “what do you do for a living” question.

When you’re developing and executing an editorial strategy, your job is to solve problems. Maybe it’s a media or publishing company and the projects you’re working on are core to the business. Maybe it’s not and your focus is on some internal or external communication effort that supports the core business. Either way, your day-to-day work is centered around short-term questions: Are the topics I’m covering relevant? Am I presenting them in a way that my audience can understand and act on? Do the author/presenter and audience have conflicting needs? Is what I’m publishing or presenting helping my audience get great at something they need to be great at? On good days, you come up with good answers to those questions. But they’re short-term answers that change as conditions change.

When you think of editorial as strategy, you’re considering a company’s business through an editorial lens. That means using tools commonly associated with the editorial process to build a more coherent and precise strategy and make better decisions to support it. It means, for example, being brutal to every idea, while being kind to the people expressing those ideas. It means creating a series of rules that an organization will live by no matter what, while marking off the areas in which it’s good to get weird. Style guides don’t say to use a serial comma unless it’s difficult to use one; they say to use a serial comma. Similarly, while there are areas in which businesses can and should improvise, explore, and experiment, there are also areas in which there must be agreement to move forward. It’s much easier to advise people to stick to the plan if there’s a well-vetted plan. I suppose it’s similar what Clay Christensen said in a different context in How to Measure Your Life: it’s easier to stick to well-thought-out rules 100% of the time than it is 98% of the time. And it’s especially easy to do so if you’re clear on where you have to drive straight and where it might be fun to swerve and see what happens. By viewing a business’s strategy through an editorial lens, with all the editorial tools for structure and iteration at your disposal, you can see things that both traditional strategy consultants and meme-of-the-moment consultants miss.

Editorial strategy is, of course, part of editorial as strategy, and I don’t want to suggest that getting a corporation’s editorial strategy together is anything but a good thing. But if all you’re offering is what you’re packaging as “editorial strategy,” chances are that your work is tactical and will have only a limited impact on the organization you’re trying to influence. You can best help a client think big by thinking big yourself.

I tend not to trust ideas when they come too easily. While I sort-of buy the Allen Ginsberg notion of “first thought best thought,” I believe that getting where you want creatively takes practice. John Coltrane’s off-the-top-of-his-head improvisations were masterly precisely because he’d been testing such ideas for years. His “first thought” in a solo was built on millions of thoughts before it. (This was the way Ginsberg created, too, if you get past his famed aphorism.) But one offhand term I blurted out at a meeting last summer has turned out to help some of my clients develop their editorial and strategy, so I’m sharing it here.

I get nervous when nonwriters talk about “voice” and “tone,” in part because it turns out oftentimes that they mean something different from what my editorial colleagues mean when they use those words. But there I was, in a meeting with people who hadn’t taken an English course since they got freshman comp out of the way (yes, I checked), talking about the best way to describe something to the employees of a large firm.

The existing document and presentation described a coming change in a manner that was off-putting, because it was stuffy, and I said so. I went from “stuffy” to saying “you sound like a stuffy butler in a tight tuxedo” to “what you need to do is communicate this in a way that’s less stuffed shirt and more business casual.” I hadn’t intended to use the term “business casual” before I opened my mouth, but the people around the table acted as if I was dispensing some well-worn wisdom so I decided not to challenge that reaction. I’ve thought more about applying the term “business casual” to editorial and strategy and I’ve heard clients start using the term, so I’ve accepted, reluctantly, that there’s something there and I’ve developed the idea far beyond what I can convey in a brief blog post. But here are some quick notes about viewing editorial and strategy through a “business casual” lens.

The notion of business casual in the American workplace annoys me. It merely replaces one uniform with another, identical suits replaces by identical khakis, and I’ve worked or consulted at places where a “business casual” or “casual Friday” policy was enforced pitilessly.

Yet the metaphor works. Everyone knows what business casual means, which is a key to quick understanding. A business casual voice is serious but light, focused on ease, deliberately avoiding the stuffy. Business casual is more interested in what it is doing for the audience than the writer or performer. Business casual is about communication, not obfuscation. Some may find this approach as limiting as being forced to wear well-pressed jeans on Friday, but it’s the sort of limitation that will result in more effective communicating. I’ll leave it to you whether you want a business casual clothing policy at your business, but I’ve seen that a business casual editorial approach can reshape the way people in many different kinds of businesses tell true stories with impact. When it comes to communicating, khakis are the way to go.

Much of the consulting work I did over the past year was more about strategy than pure editorial, helping companies with processes as well as product. But I was able to do a lot of editing in 2012, nearly all of it with people whose job was never to be a writer or journalist. I had the opportunity to help nonwriters get better at the writing craft, with the understanding that I was there to help them create effective documents and presentations that satisfied their current business demands, not to help them get their petrarchans into The Paris Review.

Since I was dealing with people who were more familiar with Samuelson than Strunk and White, I expected different issues would come up while I was helping them find and tell their stories. I was wrong. It turns out that editing these people is not all that different from helping fellow pros or aspiring pros improve their work. Here are three guidelines I’m trying to follow. They may help you manage the needs of nonprofessional writers — or nonprofessionals in any areas when you are the only pro in the room.

Meet them where they are. Terms like “lede,” “nut graf,” and “TK” don’t mean much to people outside the editorial world. Just as jargon is bad in the documents and presentations you’re helping people present, it’s bad in your interactions with these people. Talk their language; help them understand the tips you’re giving them in the language most familiar to them.

Focus on audience. I once attended a launch party for a magazine, back when there used to be launch parties for magazines. I remember the founding editor at the microphone telling the publication’s origin story. “I woke up one morning,” he said, “and I realized there wasn’t a magzine for me.” Of course that magazine didn’t last; it was an overfunded vanity publication. Any editor or writer needs to have a firm idea of who she is publishing for. Asking nonpro writers who a document or presentation is for makes it much easier to tell the story that matters the most to that audience. The work is for the audience, not the author.

Focus on focus. In business, documents and presentations are designed to have impact. They’re supposed to lead to better decisions and outcomes. The best way to do that is to tell the most relevant story for a particular as clearly and concisely as possible. The job is to persuade, but that doesn’t mean making things up. There’s nothing more messy than the truth, but there’s also nothing more persuasive than the truth. One of the great pleasures of this work is helping someone develop an idea until it’s bulletproof and than help someone present that idea in a way that the audience can’t help but nod along to. Keep the focus on what you want your document or presentation to accomplish; anything that doesn’t serve that goal directly should get cut.

This is, with few significant alterations, the same advice you’d give “real” writers. The incentives are different, but the goal is the same: clear, precise, authoritative communication. So, editors, don’t treat your nonwriters differently. Why shouldn’t an editor’s nonprofessional writing clients get the same quality of advice we give self-identified writers and journalists?

Editors frequently hear from writers that an assigned topic isn’t a good one because it’s been done already. On a surface level, that might make some sense. No one wants to read another article about Taylor Swift’s love life or the death of print or the popularity of the baby name “Nevaeh.”

Or do they? The problem isn’t that Swift’s amorous adventures, a dynastic shift in media, and that damn name are played-out; it’s that they are uninteresting topics. Chances are the first story about them wasn’t particularly interesting, either.

Yet some writers (you know who you are, or, to be more accurate, I know who you are) claim that we should declare a moratorium even on topics of considerable weight. Over the past year I’ve heard people complain that everything from global warming to the failure of U.S. financial regulators to do their jobs for 30 years or so was “over” or “done to death” and please would I not make them write about it.

What they meant, I have come to realize, is not that the topics had gone dry. It’s that their imaginations had. If the topic is worthy, it might also be worthy of another angle.

Here’s an example, drawn from what turned out to be the two books I read in 2012 that satisfied me the most: Stephen King’s 11-22-63 and Robert Caro’s The Passage of Power. The central event in King’s novel and Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson is the same: the assassination of President Kennedy. Over the past 50 years, there may have been no single event in American history argued about or covered more than the JFK murder. As we move toward the 50th anniversary later this year, I suspect we’ll be confronted with more evidence that the story is far from over and far from settled.

There has been plenty of crap written about the assassination, yet half a century on King and Caro had plenty new to say about it. Why? Because they looked at it in ways their predecessors hadn’t thought to. King’s 11-22-63 follows a time traveler as he seeks to prevent Oswald from pulling the trigger (the time traveler also discovers that messing with the space-time continuum is a very bad idea). Caro’s The Passage of Power (you can read a relevant except here) considers the day, in unprecedented detail, from the point of view of Vice President Johnson, pinned under a Secret Service agent on the floor of his car while the bullets flew, gathering himself in a hospital cubicle and on a grounded Air Force One. We see a fuller picture now, because we see it from someplace we never stood before.

Many (most?) of us think we know what happened that day in Dallas, but both King and Caro make us consider 11-22-63 in different ways. They take perhaps one of the most-overcovered topics in our nation’s history, look at it differently from all before them, and make it new again. If the topic is interesting, chances are there’s a new way to look at it. There’s also an excellent chance that whatever topic you’re wrestling with hasn’t been covered as much as JFK’s death. Keep moving until you find the new vantage point. It’s a sure way to deliver something people feel they have to read, no matter how much about the topic they’ve read before.

January 4, Make it new again

January 9, On providing editorial services to noneditorial professionals

January 14, Business casual: an editorial manifesto

January 23, Editing as strategy (and why it’s not the same thing as editorial strategy)

Coming soon: Against content strategy

Happy new year.

Follow the tweets. Patrick Alexander, who wrote the useful companion Marcel Proust’s Search for Lost Time, recently completed tweeting the whole damn Search. Took him two years and 3,000 tweets. They’re very good and very funny. He’ll be starting another cycle on November 1.

Follow the master. William C. Carter’s Marcel Proust: A Life is the pick of the doorstop Proust bios; he offers a self-paced online course covering the novel and its creation. Carter knows pretty much everything there is to know about Proust and the Search, but he doesn’t let that knowledge prevent him from having fun with the work.

“The program costs about half as much per inmate as a regular jail. This may be in part because the prisoners keep escaping.” — Political Private Practice

In so many great pieces of writing, each sentence moves off the previous one, sometimes revealing a new truth behind the previous sentence, moving the whole damn thing forward. Bang two sentences against one another and you’d better get far more than each one could deliver separately.

Tardiness, informal footwear, or talking out of turn will earn students a punishment that they call an “A.P. Style,” which means writing out a section of The Associated Press stylebook by hand. It takes, they say, four hours.

 

It was thrilling, of course, a brief chance to leap onto a stage where I’ve seen so many great talks. It was a chance to embed myself deeper into a community I’m grateful to be part of. (I am doing more with TED now, as I’ll report in upcoming posts.) I was part of a session that included three giants — Andrew Stanton, Billy Collins, and Michael Tilson Thomas — so I was comfortable delivering a brief palette cleanser between the bigger, weightier, presentations.

That doesn’t mean I treated the advice in my talk as a joke. I hope it came across with humor — using Tina Turner as an example for business comebacks was supposed to be funny — but the comeback advice was meant sincerely. Tina really does have four very useful lessons for people and companies pulling themselves back up. The TED Talks that have moved me the most have had a combination of authority and vulnerability and I tried hard to capture that. My job was to show what Tina’s lessons taught me, but without the talk turning out to be about me.

Some advice I got before I went onstage from two pals who nailed it in their previous short talks turned out to be prescient: Paul Kedrosky said “it would be over before you know it” and Jim Daly said I’d feel like I was “shot out of a cannon.” Right and right. And after the talk, all I got was positive feedback; anyone who thought I wasn’t any good wasn’t going to come over to me and tell me that. A week later, I have a more balanced view of how I did (especially after seeing some warts-and-all video). Which brings me to the venerated TED Commandments.

The Eleventh Commandment

There is some excellent advice TED gives potential speakers on this page supporting TEDx speaker prep, but the physical “TED Commandments” it sends to event speakers (on a heavy plaque that’s somewhere between a tablet and a large tile) was a particularly helpful collection. There’s an older version of the “physical commandments” floating around the web. Here are the current 10 (I’ll leave out the descriptive text and just list the commandments):

I. Thou shalt not steal time.
II. Thou shalt not sell from the stage.
III. Thou shalt not flaunt thine ego.
IV. Thou shalt not commit obfuscation.
V. Thou shalt not murder PowerPoint.
VI. Thou shalt shine a light.
VII. Thou shalt tell a story.
VIII. Thou shalt honor emotion.
IX. Thou shalt bravely bare thy soul.
X. Thou shalt prepare for impact.

Pretty great advice, no? I followed it as best as I could, but I want to offer up an 11th commandment:

XI. Trust thyself.

In the days before the event, I must have practiced the talk 100 times, to everyone from friends I spotted in various Long Beach lobbies to my own reflection in the hotel bathroom mirror. I had the talk well-memorized and my presentation was adequate for someone who makes his living as a writer and an editor rather than as a performer. But, the afternoon before the talk, I wanted to be certain that all would go well if I had a brain freeze on the red circle, so I added presenter notes to my few slides. If there was a problem, the answer would be on the “confidence monitors” at my feet. Seemed like sensible backup for all but the most unexpected catastrophe.

But a funny thing happened to me when I had my chance on the stage: those monitors distracted me, like TVs in a bar when I’m trying to have a real conversation with a fellow human. As you can see from this cameraphone shot my fellow TEDxBoston curator Danielle Duplin took of the big screen at the TEDActive simulcast, I didn’t look down at the monitors all the time, but I surely looked down at them too much. What I thought would save me if I had trouble actually caused trouble. I should have trusted myself more.

Most of the time I was up there, though, I followed the advice my host June Cohen gave before the talk: enjoy yourself. I had a story I wanted to tell and I had a chance to tell it to an audience that could do something with it. I feel very, very lucky.

Everyone of a certain age has felt washed up. Your old tricks … are old tricks. Whether in your business or personal life, whether you’re talking about a country, the environment, a world economic system, there comes a time when all you want is a big, dramatic comeback.

Not too long ago I found myself without my job, a job with a lot of meaning, working alongside people I loved. I was uncertain what to do next, some days not so sure I had much to offer anyone.

Turns out there’s plenty of comeback advice out there, a small subset of it based on empirical evidence. As I took responsibility for my own comeback, I found the conventional models unsatisfactory. I needed a sustainable model. What I needed, I realized, was Tina Turner.

Now you might think that the woman who wrote “Nutbush City Limits,” the woman who double-timed “Proud Mary” into the Top Five, the woman who taunted Mel Gibson in the thunderdome, might not be a model for businesspeople. Well, I studied plenty of business comebacks while I was sweating out my own and I’m here to share four lessons from Tina Turner that can help any individual or organization.

1. Comebacks take a long time.
When Tina hit with her version of “Let’s Stay Together,” it was the first time she’d entered the Billboard pop charts in nine years. Nine years. That’s about three lifetimes in pop music. During that decade, she’d done everything she could to keep going: Vegas gigs, Hollywood Squares. But even when she was doing corporate events to pay the rent, she was doing her job. She kept going.

2. Comebacks don’t come all at once.
Private Dancer, her comeback album, was her fifth solo record after she left Ike. She tried different approaches until a younger generation of British producers caught up with her. She experimented and refined, experimented and refined, until she got it right.

3. You can’t do it all yourself.
On Private Dancer, Tina Turner was able to surround herself with top collaborators because her previous work earned her so much goodwill. People who need comebacks had something good going before they needed to come back. The people who’ll accompany you on your comeback? Chances are they know about you already.

4. Be yourself, but be current.
Private Dancer worked because the voice sounded like Tina Turner, but the music didn’t sound like the Tina Turner you remembered. Everything you loved about her was still there, but this wasn’t nostalgia. She was making up-to-date hits, with way more gravity than the kids on the charts. Stick to your strengths, show ‘em off even, but employ them in a modern context.

I’m not Tina Turner. No matter how well your legs have held up, you aren’t either. But the steps Tina took to not merely come back but surpass her impact the first time around — they’re steps any person, any business, can use right now. It wasn’t until her comeback, after all, that Turner had her first Number One record.

And, best of all, after you mount a successful comeback, you can get away with looking like this:

Thank you so much.

As it did with all of its female singers, Chess Records had much trouble placing James. They tried her out on big-band ballads, straight blues, and the uptempo rhythm-and-blues hits with which she had scored in the fifties, like “Dance with Me Henry.” But no matter what the style, she wasn’t generating any hits, though many individual tracks were sinewy and harrowing.

Producer Rick Hall believed in James enough to fly her down to Fame Studios, in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, a place where soul smashes were being cut every day, it seemed. The idea was to get a rough, smoldering album out of her—very much in the mode of Aretha Franklin, who had recently broken out of a similar rut with churchy soul. The result, Tell Mama, is the only soul-bandwagon record that can stand with Lady Soul’s classics from the period.

The big rhythm-and-blues hit on Tell Mama was the Clarence Carter title track, a compressed explosion of affirmation and generosity. The acknowledged standard is “I’d Rather Go Blind,” in which James takes standard better-dead-than-unloved banalities and exposes them as true. Turn the volume as low as you like; she’ll still overtake everyone in a loud, crowded room. Even the album’s giving songs sound generated by hurt; James sings as if she knows that alleviating someone else’s sorrow won’t lessen her load one bit. R.I.P.

I was in the living room, listening to Lydia’s computer in the dining room. She was listening to “Hammond Song,” my favorite performance by the Roches, and I was lost in Robert Fripp’s guitar solo. After that, I was hungry to hear some more Fripp (the only other Roches song I felt like listening to was “Losing True,” which moves me but is damn near the same song as “Hammond Song” so I passed). I’ve enjoyed Fripp’s work with other people (Bowie, Blondie, Talking Heads) although I’ve never owned a King Crimson record. I saw Fripp live twice in the early ’80s, once at Irving Plaza leading his sharp, funky League of Gentlemen, once six months later at a WXPN benefit in Penn’s Houston Hall, when he was in Frippertronics mode. And that joint interview he did with Joe Strummer around the same time had an enormous influence on me as a beginning interviewer of rock stars.

I looked up Fripp on Spotify and was greeted not by music, but a recording of a keynote address he gave to a conference of motivational speakers, among them his sister. I found the talk engaging, adventurous, and practical; if you have Spotify, check it out.

Among many other gifts, the talk offered a great contradictory lesson. Several times during it, Fripp talked about how important it is to work with people who are better than you. True, and I try to do that whenever I can, but Fripp delivered insight after insight during the talk; he wasn’t learning from anyone else there, he was helping everyone else there. It’s a lovely, humble talk about mastery.

As I continue to get not younger, I understand more and more the value of surrounding myself, both in my work life and in my life life, with people who are better than me. But every now and then I get the chance to help someone else — I have learned a few things — and this blog gives me a chance to pass on what I’ve learned publicly. Here’s a question I get asked at least weekly, both by fellow veterans and newcomers to my profession: I’m a journalist and I’d like to continue being employed as a journalist. Everywhere I read that an employable journalist is as competent with 0s and 1s as I am with nouns and verbs. Does that mean I need to become a computer programmer?

Back when I helped out at GNN, O’Reilly’s early online service, and Delphi, the first of many online services that Rupert Murdoch’s ownership ruined, I thought there might be a brief opening for an editorial person who “got” the web. (Fortunately, almost two decades later, that window hasn’t closed yet.) One of the ways I’ve been able to make a go of it has been to learn how to program.

The idea is to make computer programming one of the tools in your journalistic kit, something that makes it easier for employers or clients to work with you. I once pitched a project conducting an online survey for a syndicated research firm and one of the reasons I got the gig was that I was able to do the whole project myself, not just designing the survey and interpreting the results, but also getting a working survey onto the web. These were in the pre-SurveyMonkey days when you needed to be able to do some grunt-level coding (in that case, in Perl) to create an online survey. I did plenty more work with that company in the years that followed; most of it was straight editorial, but knowing I could solve a technology problem independently made my client more comfortable keeping me around.

Although there are particular skills a programming journalist needs, what the ability to code offers a writer more than anything else is a way, an approach, even more than specific, problem-solving skills. To be a competent computer programmer, even for relatively simple web-based programs, you have to be able to break down a complex problem into small, manageable pieces. That’s a career skill, a life skill, and it’s something that programming forces you to do if you want to get any good at it. I’ve never been able to code for hours as if under a spell, which professional programmers can do easily. I can get into that zone as a writer, but not as a programmer. As someone who’s more journalist than programmer, that will likely be the case for you, too, so you will not spend hours under headphones, able to keep disparate parts of a large coding matter in your mind at the same time. You’ll break your pseudocode into small, manageable chunks, and then go from pseudocode to real code.

And chances are you’re not just writing code, you’re editing code someone else has written. Whatever problem you’re trying to solve as a programmer/journalist, there’s a very good chance that you are not the first person who’s had to solve this problem. Any popular language you are working with will have repositories all over the web of publicly available code that can solve at least part of your problem with only minimal customization, and, more important to your development, show you how other people approached the same issues. Curious journalist/programmers don’t just paste in code; they read it over — just like a beginning journalist reads John McPhee or Robert Caro — to learn how the pros do it. Then they make their own way.

That’s how you might want to proceed conceptually. Here are some admittedly idiosyncratic recommendations regarding what particular skills a journalist/programmer could use. (And I mean use practically. My favorite language to work in, the Lisp dialect Scheme, as taught in the beloved wizard book, is a learning language only. I’m more likely to get paid as a theremin roadie than as a Scheme programmer.)

The foundation: HTML/CSS/HTML5. Thanks to visual tools, journalists can work in web publishing with minimal exposure to HTML (Hypertext Markup Language). That’s not a good thing; it prevents journalists from knowing even the rudiments of the platform they’re working on. It’s hard to produce a vivid sound recording without knowing how to work a physical or virtual mixing board; similarly, how can you make your story work best on the web, tablets, and mobile devices if you don’t have a basic understanding of what the formats can do? HTML isn’t even full-fledged coding. It’s more page layout. Understanding HTML is not much harder than understanding how to use early DOS word processors like WordStar and XyWrite, programs that made you explicitly underline, etc.

The two steps after HTML are CSS and HTML5. CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) gives more precise layout tools and makes it easier to separate content from layout. HTML5, the latest version of the HTML standard, is still under development, but it’s already being used on many websites and in many web applications, particularly those aiming for tablets and mobile devices. There are an avalanche of useful new commands in HTML5 that make it much easier to integrate multimedia (HTML5′s ability to do this is one of the reasons Adobe’s more cumbersome Flash format is going away).

You don’t have to memorize too much HTML(5)/CSS syntax; there are plenty of online and offline resources. And don’t worry about learning explicitly what every last command parameter can do. The key is to know what tools are available and have a general sense of which one will get you out of which types of problems. You don’t have to know everything; you’ll know when you know enough.

You also need to know how to manage a database. In the late ’90s, when I got serious about educating myself as a journalist who could program, I became a great fan of Philip Greenspun, particularly his book Philip and Alex’s Guide to Web Publishing. In addition to being a physically beautiful object (Greenspun is an accomplished and very opinionated photographer), the Guide spelled out what anyone who had aspirations of becoming a web programmer had to know. Greenspun’s knowledge and style placed his book high above the “Teach Yourself TK in 21 Days” books that were popular at the time. He was rigorous, he was funny, and his approach made you want to learn. In particular, he showed why being able to manage a database was the key to building and maintaining any real website. That’s still the case: the fancy content management systems journalists use today, from bare-bones blog-building systems like WordPress to the more bloated “enterprise” systems, are customized databases. Many database systems are built around SQL; Greenspun has a guide to SQL, too, but don’t attempt that before you’ve got a good grounding in web technologies.

Finally, learn one language, any language (parenthetical removed; see why in the comments). There are plenty of arguments for learning plenty of different languages, but I think journalists entering the word of programming are best-served by learning Python. The tools you pick up are reasonably transferable to other languages, Python is built into OS X so you don’t have to install it, and how can you dislike a language with metasyntactic variables (spam and eggs) that clearly came from Monty Python?

Best of all, Python is a strong learning language. MIT uses it to teach people how to think like programmers. You can download the course text, How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning With Python, to get a sense of how Python is a useful vehicle for starting programming. Python is also used as the entry language for my alma mater O’Reilly’s useful and entertaining Head First series for new programmers. Python is a powerful scripting language for web apps, but for someone who intends to be a journalist first and a programmer second (or tenth), it’s just a smart way in.

I am far from a professional programmer. Folks hire me because of my editorial and consulting skills, not because I can code kickass regular expressions (I can’t). But learning how to program lets me understand a problem from more sides and makes it more likely that I can help a company figure out how to solve it. Learning how to program has helped me and I hope it helps you too. I also hope this answers the question of how to become a journalist/programmer adequately; I’m going to point people who ask me that here from now on.

Even if you’re a journalist who never wants to write a line of code professionally, you can become a better digital journalist if you understand the technologies without which no one could ever experience your journalism. And the best way to understand is to do. One of the aspects I enjoyed most of the Robert Fripp talk I wrote about at the top of the post is that it captures the joy of learning something, getting better at it, and mastering it. While I was finishing this post, I heard the Roches’ “Hammond Song” coming from another room once again. But my daughter wasn’t listening to the Roches anymore. She had mastered the song and now she was singing it herself.

I don’t want to have any print newspapers dropped onto the sidewalk in front of our house, but I have two of ‘em now waiting for me on Sundays. Turns out it’s less expensive to have Sunday print + digital subscriptions to The New York Times and The Boston Globe than to get digital-only subscriptions, so to save a few bucks I’m doing the ecologically wrong thing by having someone drop yesterday’s news onto the sidewalk.

But I’m not here to complain. I’m here to wonder: Is there an opportunity here for newspapers to use their Sunday papers as something other than necessary add-ons during this transition period when print readers are worth so much more to publishers and advertisers than digital readers? Let’s pay a visit to our most ridiculous 2012 presidential candidate for a hint.

Saturday afternoon I was doing some laundry in the basement and wanted some news to keep me company during the mundane task. It was the hour that the Herman Cain am-I-done-yet? announcement was expected, so I tuned into a livestream and started sorting the clothes. Cain wasn’t onstage yet, but a series of supporters, probably not knowing that he was about to desert them as they dedicated his new campaign headquarters, made the case for him.

One of those speakers got my attention more than I’d expected. He spoke of going on a recent Sunday to a store to pick up a copy of his local paper, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. There was a sign noting that copies of the AJC were available only behind the counter, which he hadn’t seen before, so he got in line to buy the paper. The woman in front of him in line needed some extra money to complete her transaction, so she went to her car to get more cash and he stepped up to the register. He asked why the newspapers were behind the counter, and the cashier told him that people were stealing the coupons inside the paper and leaving the rest of it. Then the woman who needed extra money returned and completed her transaction: she was buying six copies of the day’s Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

The speaker used this story as a way into an indictment of Obama’s economic policies (it was a reach), but I heard something different: a chance for print newspapers to grab relevance at a time when the few bucks it costs to buy a Sunday paper is a purchase millions of Americans have to think over. I know it’s stupid to suggest action based on a sample size of one, especially if that sample thought Herman Cain was a genuine candidate for president, but think about it. As my pal Scott Kirsner pointed out to me last week, the best newspapers create value for their readers: they uncover corruption, they keep people informed, they save readers from bad restaurants. And in these tough, tough times, newspapers can save readers money. Embrace that! Who in this age wouldn’t spend $3 to save $30? Newspapers could promote the quantity of the savings along with the quality of the coverage. And that gives newspapers more readers to give to more advertisers, who would buy more ads with rmore discounts. Everyone wins, in the short term. It’s no solution to the big issues newspapers have to face, but it’s a short-term fix that does no harm and may bring in new readers. Come for the discounts and we’ll give you the news, too!

P.S. Just as science fiction beats real science to the punch, the newspaper satirists got here before real newspapers: The Chicago Tribune moves to an all-Beyonce-and-coupons format in one of the greatest-ever Onion videos.

It’s taken as self-evident that working on a Mac is superior to working on a PC. We’ve personalized that, in everything ranging from the “I’m a Mac” commercials to the relative merits of Microsoft founder Bill Gates and Apple founder Steve Jobs. (Some of the comparisons are absurd.) I’m partway through Walter Isaacson’s authorized biography of Jobs, in which nearly every quote from Jobs about Gates exudes condescension and envy. Everything from the experience of using Gates’s Microsoft products to the business tactics Microsoft deployed to maintain its monopoly offended Jobs’s inextricable design and moral sensibilities.

But what is Gates’s mission on the planet? For decades, he must have thought it was a computer on every desk, and he made great progress in that endeavor, even if in both his DOS and Windows products he delivered experiences that only software architects who aspire to the complicated, idiosyncratic, and confusing could admire. But I suspect that over the long-term, the value for society created by The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will more than compensate for any first-world unhappiness we feel in having to click a “Start” button to make something stop. Bad memory management is no match for working to eradicate malaria.

Jobs was a firm believer in his own immortality; the authorized Isaacson biography and the publication of his sister Mona Simpson’s eulogy for him are merely opening salvos in that campaign. Jobs still competed with Gates even after Gates went on to other endeavors (you could see it in their last joint public appearance, as I reported here). I am willing to bet the value of the MacBook I will soon order that Jobs has some sort of insanely elegant posthumous philanthropic venture that we’ll hear about shortly. It will be beautiful, no doubt. It may even be effective.

I know Jobs was a genius. I know his contributions to technology outstrip Gates’s. We know what Jobs will be remembered for hundreds of years on. I suspect our great-grandchildren will remember Bill Gates as an inspired philanthropist who brought tremendous resources and imagination to a handful of the 21st century’s most apparently intractable problems. How did he make his fortune in the first place? I suspect our great-grandchildren won’t know. That won’t be the thing about him that will be worth remembering.

It seems like every media outlet on the planet is considering Jobs and his legacy. There is overload already, but that’s because there are almost as many ways to look at Steve Jobs as there are apps for his devices. There’s the entrepreneur, the visionary, the Bob Dylan fan, the competitor, the Microsoft taunter, the Disney tamer, the control freak, the presenter, the user advocate, the cranky communicator, the media tycoon, the media manipulator, the difficult negotiator, the design obsessive, the executive, the aphorist, the … well, you get the idea. We’ll read all these stories because there are so many different ways of considering this complex, damn-near-iconic character.

I don’t get to the west coast much these days and Jobs hasn’t appeared on the east coast in many years, so the last time I saw him in person was at a joint appearance with Bill Gates at the D Conference in Carlsbad in May 2007. The Microsoft-taunting Steve was on display during that exclusive meeting of technology and media bigwigs — the night before the joint appearance he likened iTunes software on the Windows platform to “a drink of ice water in Hell.” (Which makes Gates the Devil?) During the session with Gates, Jobs spoke of what happened at Apple while he was exiled at NeXT. When he said in-between CEO Gil Amelio thought Apple was a ship with a hole in the bottom and sought to fix it by turning the ship in a different direction, the unhappiness of decades ago seemed raw and very present. Unlike his many perfected product presentations, Jobs came across like a real, unmediated, complicated human being. As we consider the lessons we can derive from his work, let’s not lose that human being.

One of the few good things about death is that it shuts you up. Death is both incomprehensible and inevitable; it’s hard to capture that terrible combination in words. So last night, when the first reports arrived that Clarence Clemons is dead, I did what I often do when I’m trying to figure out what I’m thinking: I tried to write. I thought about his great early triumphs like “Kitty’s Back,” his defining numbers like “Jungleland,” his move to a new sound starting with “Bobby Jean” and climaxing in “Land of Hope and Dreams,” the roles he played onstage. But nothing came out of my fingers. It was time to think and listen, which I’ll do today as well. Today I’ll keep my mouth shut, I’ll be grateful for his work, I’ll celebrate Father’s Day, and I’ll live.

(What are these sentences?)

Recently on his wall he turned to a regular topic for him: his assertion that it was he, and not Keith, who wrote the glorious riff of “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” He mentioned that the inspiration was “an obscure Chuck Berry single I had called ‘Club Nitty Gritty.’” (He may have mentioned this in Stone Alone, the only one of his books I read, but it was really long and it was only a seven-day-limit library book so I probably read it too quickly and I don’t remember.)

I won’t wade into Wyman’s claim about authorship, but I do want to go on a bit about Chuck Berry’s “Club Nitty Gritty.” There are two reasons it’s obscure (Wyman is surely right about that). One: it’s not very good, a lazy list of dances that could turn Alvin Ailey into a wallflower. Two: it appeared as the last track on what may be Chuck’s worst-ever record without a song about his ding-a-ling on it: Golden Hits, a 1967 collection of mediocre rerecordings of his early hits, plus “Club Nitty Gritty” buried at the end as a booby prize. So the song’s not very good and it deserves its rarity status. Only deeply committed Chuck Berry fans (like these guys) would have heard it. And it does boast a riff that could be an antecedent of the brutal “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” theme. Whoever pulled that riff out of the air took something shapeless and built a universe out of it.

The lessons here? You can find inspiration anywhere, not only in canonical classics but in trash. And pay attention. The next piece of crap you hear may make your career.

There are 64 links on the front page of NYTimes.com right now, not counting navigational tools or administrivia. None of them lead to stories about the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Girl Walk // All Day from jacob krupnick on Vimeo.

Yeah, I know. But, as Clay Shirky would tell you, some of our cognitive surplus has to be directed to pure, life-affirming fun. Onward!

Consulting for the Evil Empire (blog)
Enticing the Next Generation of African Leaders (blog)
Why Do We Need Leaders? (blog)
Sharing Links and Hors d’Oeuvres (about TED; published in the January-February issue; forgot to note it here)

It was fun trying to think of music that could appeal to different groups of people. The Beastie Boys might please the kids, Robert Plant and Alison Krauss might delight the olds, and, really, who doesn’t love The Sandinista Project? I had doubles of some solid recent records that I included as well; I expect they’ll all find good homes.

As I was assembling the discs late Friday afternoon, it hit me that, with one exception — a piece about the return of Moktada al-Sadr to Iraqi politics that floated across my news feed that morning — I hadn’t thought about Iraq or Afghanistan, where hundreds of thousands of American troops are at risk, all day. I pride myself on being “informed,” but it was another day in America when there was a war going on (hello, two wars going on) and, except for the sliver of people in this country whose lives are directly affected because they have friends and family in the game, we don’t have to confront evidence of what is happening in our name around the world. I hate these wars, and I will be happy when the day comes when the reason we’re not thinking of the wars is because everyone we’ve sent to them, like Scott, is home and safe. Sending excess CDs and sparing a thought for them feels insufficient, but complaining about the wars a few times a year on one’s blog is insufficient, too.

The high point of the party (aside from seeing Scott back and not having to make dinner) was dancing. We couldn’t get Grace interested, but Jane and I danced for a while, something we don’t do enough. I am not a particularly good dancer but no matter how self-conscious you are (and by “you are,” I mean “I am”), you’ve got to drop it and give in to the music if you’re going to be a good partner. Dancing, especially to a song you’ve moved to for decades (“Love Shack,” some Motown stand-bys), can trick you into thinking that everything is OK for a while. But here’s the thing: it’s not a trick. While the music is on, everything is good. Maybe if we keep dancing, everything will stay OK.

When the kids were younger and more easily refocused when they were unhappy, I used to call everyone into the same room for a dance party that would, in short time, cheer them up, turn them around. I would look ridiculous when I started, but eventually the others would join in. DJ, heal thyself. Turn it up! Don’t stop! Where’s the iPod?

Stephen Wolfram and the Science of Business (Harvard Business Review)

Inbox Infinity (BoingBoing)

Gingerbread House Fenway Park (BoingBoing)

Coming next week: my essay about TED that’ll be in the upcoming HBR and … something else

Why does this song have such a hold? I don’t cherish most Joy Division songs the way I do much of the 1980s work of New Order, the smart, austere band that emerged out of Joy Division after Curtis hung himself. Although drenched in punk, much of Joy Division’s work was grandly overdramatic (think Jim Morrison with a better rhythm section), but on “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” the band transcends pretty much every limitation. Sure, it picks up added weight when we learn what Curtis did to himself while love was tearing him apart, but the song doesn’t need any rock’n'roll myth to burn into your memory. The lyrics are pretty clear: routines bite hard, ambitions are low, resentment rides high, emotions won’t grow, and all that happens before the first verse is over. By the time the song reaches its peak — Curtis singing “Desperation takes hold” with corrosive resignation — you’re so far into the song that you don’t even notice its grip tightening around you.

Musically, the record is that rare of-the-moment British pop song from 1980 that doesn’t sound dated. The song breaks open with a jagged bass line, an ethereal synthesizer both soars over Curtis’s singing and mocks it, and drummer Steve Morris introduces that astounding snare-shot overdrive move that every ’80s band, from the Pretenders to Modern English, U2 to the 10,000 bands that tried to be U2, picked up on, eventually turning it into a cliche, almost as bad as Auto-Tune is nowadays. But on “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” the innovation is fresh. The whole damn song is. It’s a tale of romantic disintegration put across with an energy that makes something new out of the singer’s hopelessness. Thirty years later, there’s still nothing like it.

I hope to write more, everywhere, including here (thanks, Shayne, for the nudge to come back). Why? For a selfish reason, I think. As with exercise, another habit I haven’t developed as much as I should, I feel better on the days that I write than on the days that I don’t. So I’ll keep writing.

“Tenses and cases rarely agreed when he spoke in public: not because he was illiterate, but because he was trying so hard not to swear.”

Read it.

Then I began reading and realized this was No Joke. As a longtime Stones devotee (read Late night thoughts about the greatest rock’n'roll band in the world for one recent example), I’ve often wondered what the surviving original members really think about each other, how they work together, what their work means to them as they’re aging. Wyman has clearly spent way too much time pondering this, too. I’ve never talked to Mick, but Wyman’s faux-Mick response feels true to my imagined Jagger. The tone of the essay veers from hurt to self-righteous, apologetic to withering, the voice always taut. Fake Mick hates Keith as much as Real Keith hates Mick; this essay shoots down RIchards’s book Life but doesn’t forget to point the gun inward from time to time.

Yet, more than anything else, Wyman’s version of Jagger is full of love for Richards, regretful that money, drugs, and narcissism tore them apart, grateful for what they had together before they devolved into mere business partners. He knows how much he owes Keith (“Without him, what would I have been? Peter Noone?”) and how Keith’s work can still touch him, no matter how far they’ve both fallen (“When a song is beautiful–those spare guitars rumbling and chiming, by turns–the words mean so much more, and there, for a moment, I believe him, and feel for him.”) This is idealized stuff. It’s unlikely that Real Mick’s response to Keith’s book, if there ever is one, will be as tough-minded and vulnerable. Wyman conjures up the Stones as we want them to be at this late age, but even we diehards know that’s just our imagination running away with us.

UPDATE: Wyman has written a postscript to his terrific piece.

UPDATE 2: BoingBoing has reprinted this post.

(What are these sentences?)

A sign even Ian Curtis would find funny

Machiavelli is Everywhere

The last mystery of the blues: were Robert Johnson’s recordings sped up?

Amy Rigby on Ari Up

More to come …

“When it comes to the point where you occasionally look forward to being in prison on the basis that you might be able to spend a day reading a book, the realization dawns that perhaps the situation has become a little more stressful than you would like.”

It’s a bit of welcome gallows humor in the midst of a story of two stupid wars that should be making us all angrier by the day.

Skit Ideas Not Even Good Enough for Saturday Night Live

Greatest Song of All Time of the Day: “Blue Monday,” New Order

Curating a TEDx (or, From Arrogance to Humility)

Too Much Darkness?

Mr. T: Gold Salesman. Supposedly Legitimate Financial TV Network

Yeah, I know, not a lot compared to last time. But I’ll have plenty more next week. In particular, I’m curious what BoingBoing readers will make of my day job.

Been has fascinated me for years: for the quality of his work, for his ability to continue doing engaging work even after it was clear that he was not going to be the rock star he deserved to be, for his kindness and openness when we worked together, and for his ability to unite, in a fashion, his personal and professional worlds by working with Black Rebel Motorcycle Club. He seemed, from a distance (we spoke maybe three times in the past decade), a full man despite his being a credible rock’n'roller, something none of us see all that often.

“The Walls Came Down”

“Let the Day Begin”

Hello, I must be going

Chuck Berry, “Tulane” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day

Hanging Out with Kim Jong-il

Son House, “Death Letter” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Richard Thompson, “For Shame of Doing Wrong” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Striking new Edgar Allan Poe collection

Free ebook download: Scott Kirsner’s “Fans, Friends & Followers”

Boyoyo Boys, “Back in Town” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Did Charley Patton play that way? (this one in particular had great comments)

Sex, technology, and diabetes

Amy Rigby, “Balls” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Nina Simone, “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Free download returns: Tribute to The Clash’s Sandinista!

Design thinking tips from the masters

Ida Maria, “Oh My God” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Lawrence Lessig scares a room of liberals

Magazine marketers give up on marketing magazines

A few years ago, I produced The Sandinista Project, in which 36 performers each covered one song from The Clash’s Sandinista! It was a fun and crazy project. Last summer, on Joe Strummer’s birthday, I made the record free for a day. The free download was a great success although what I learned from the experiment was more mixed.

I’ve been having a wonderful time on Boing Boing during my guestblogging residency and I’d like to say “thank you” by making the record free again, for a limited time. Instead of making it free for one day, which slowed the hamsters running the guterman.com servers to a crawl because everyone downloaded at once, I’m going to make the record, along with digital images of the packaging, available until midnight U.S. eastern time on Sunday night, so you’ll have plenty of time to download this before it goes away.

Junior Senior, “Can I Get Get Get” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day: Special Saturday Night Dance Party Edition)

Sam the Sham and the Pharoahs, “Wooly Bully” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Ennio Morricone, “Once Upon a Time in the West” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

Thomas Dolby and ETHEL: Music for the morning after

Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, “The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

The physics behind flying sharks who can destroy airplanes

Jorge Ben, “Ponta de Lança Africano (Umbabarauma)” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day)

“Ten Dollar Cover,” an excerpt from a novel-in-progress/disarray

Meat: The Magazine

Lagos Disco Inferno!

How did Garth Hudson defeat gravity?

Mekons, “Memphis, Egypt” (Greatest Song of All Time of the Day

How to write about self-washing, self-flushing cat boxes? With passion!

Rod Stewart doesn’t play good Rod Stewart music anymore, but these guys do

Guest blogger: Jimmy Guterman!

Of course, for people of a certain age, as Jane just pointed out, when you read the term “Whitesnake,” you think of only one thing: Tawny Kitaen on a car hood.

I’d like to take this opportunity to apologize to future generations for the ’80s.

“I don’t believe in showing off,” Patterson says of his writing. “Showing off can get in the way of a good story.”

Inarguable. Show a little less love for your sentences; show a little more love for your story. Story. Story. Story!

After we got the fanboy stuff out of the way, Ralph and I talked for a bit about string quartets and rock’n'roll. Conversation bended toward The Juliet Letters, the 1993 collaboration between Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet. Then and now (I listened to the set again after it was reissued in 2006), I find The Juliet Letters arch and overly polite: in a word, precious. Each part of that union has done remarkable work (here are some notes I took on Costello a while back), but the project remains too self-consciously inoffensive to take off, despite some soaring moments here and there (more from the Brodskys than E.C.).

I do enjoy, however, some of the other songs the unlikely quintet played to fill out their shows, particularly a brittle take on Costello’s “Pills and Soap” and, especially, their version of The Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” On that classic, Costello’s singing is, more or less, as mannered as it was in general for that project, but it finds a place in the strings, gliding between the instruments, eventually soaring above them with one facile but still perfect “you” at the end.

On the flight back to Boston on Sunday, I listened to Pet Sounds, a record that has kept me good company on long trips before; it’s one of those albums that doesn’t seem to have a physical place so it feels apt when I’m in some container above the world, nowhere near anyone I love, not really anywhere at all. I was half-asleep from my last night at TED and half-surprised when “God Only Knows” appeared midway through the set. I’ve never been a member of the Beach-Boys-were-as-great-as-the-Beatles cult, but what a record Pet Sounds is, even after you have heard it 500 times. On songs like “I Just Wasn’t Made for These Times,” lushly produced but still insular, and “Don’t Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder),” whose strings carry it between a Phil Spector teenage symphony and an almost unbearable expression of yearning, it feels like you’re listening not to the sound someone made in a studio but the sound inside someone’s head. There’s enough humor and drama and unexpected reversals in the two-minute song “Pet Sounds” to fill a pretty good novel, and it doesn’t have any words, just feeling. Pet Sounds is all emotion on the edge of repression, just barely expressed and the more powerful for it. It’s masterful pop music. I bet it made Costello and the Brodskys feel grounded after their more abstract journeys.

Listening to Pet Sounds got me thinking about another version of “God Only Knows” that I treasure:

Petra Haden is, wrongly I think, sometimes considered as a purveyor of novelty: her best-known recordings are a capella recordings of classic pop songs, among them Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” all of The Who Sell Out, and “God Only Knows.” They’re formidable technical achievements and enjoyable to listen to regardless of whether you know that every sound is generated by a soulful human voice. We hear the original the way she heard it and we hear parts of the original that we didn’t hear until she brought them to our attention. Something new in a faithful version of an overplayed classic: that’s a gift. And, if you buy my argument that Pet Sounds is a record happening inside someone’s head, what could be more right than a precise, robust version of “God Only Knows” in which one inspired person overdubs herself over and over and over and over and … ? She makes us hear familiar songs in new ways; she makes us feel one of the most familiar pop songs of the ’60s in a new way.

Yesterday I wrote about Bill Gates’ presentation. The video hasn’t been posted yet, but you can read an insightful slide-by-slide rundown by Nancy Duarte (who we’ve featured previously in MIT Sloan Management Review). And a few days back, I mentioned another Microsoft-related talk: Blaise Aguera y Arcas’ demo of a new mapping technology employing augmented reality. It really works and you can see it here:

And now, notes on the final day of TED 2010. By the last two sessions of the conference, after three days of one 18-minute marvel after another and three late nights of talking over those marvels with fellow attendees, you need something energetic to keep you sitting up straight and tall in your seat. And Saturday’s sessions offered some of that. Highlights included:

Sir Ken Robinson. His previous talk, from 2006, about rethinking education, was one of the first TED videos liberated for public viewing and remains the most-seen. This year’s talk went deeper in the same territory. If anything, it was even more iconoclastic, starting with the notion that reform of a broken model (what he considers the current public school situation in the U.S.) is insufficient and discussing how difficult it is to “disenthrall” ourselves from the “tyranny of common sense.” His talk will be up shortly and it’s worth seeing in its entirety; his notion of moving from the current approach to public education, which he terms industrial and linear, to a more “agricultural” and holistic (without the new age trappings) one is provocative and, after a while, inarguable.

Another superstar of the day was James Cameron, best known for films about 10-foot-tall blue people, big ships that sink, and what Arnold Schwarzenegger is really like. His autobiographical talk wasn’t short on self-regard, but it also wasn’t short on inspiration. Those looking for tips on how their movie might make a billion dollars got a few of them (he wanted a global audience, regardless of language, so he made the story of Avatar play primarily visually and emotionally), but he also celebrated what anyone can do: curiosity, imagination, respecting your team and being respected in turn. Cameron stuck close to his favorite subject — himself — and it would have been good if he had found some examples for his points that were not about him, but they were points worth hearing nonetheless.

Many of the talks in the first session were about simplicity — simplicity in design, thought, and how we live our lives — and they were all lively and engaging, but TED is really the wrong place to talk about simplicity. If anything, TED is a celebration of complexity, an exploration of what can be connected to something else in a new, delightful, and useful way. The stage was full of people who said they craved simplicity, but I’m pretty sure this audience could tolerate that only in small doses. In just the last session alone, emotion bounced from Cameron talking about Cameron to a young woman talking about the brain tumor that will kill her shortly to a satirist lampooning the past four days to a preternaturally mature child imploring the grownups to stop screwing up everything.

Again, these are highlights, only a taste of an experience hard to convey in the narrow confines of a blog. You don’t want to read about Thomas Dolby and the astonishing string quartet Ethel make a Sheryl Crow song sound more lively than Crow did herself two nights earlier; you want to hear it in person. You don’t want to read or hear about how someone’s life changed, for good or ill; you want to be in the room and share the moment. May you all get that opportunity.

The intricate stage is down, the final parties are over (well, it’s Sunday shortly after 6 a.m.; I think the final parties are over). It’s time to go home, once again, and see how I can apply what I’ve learned here to what I do every day. I’m glad I had the chance to share some of what I’ve picked up here, and I’ll let you know when talks I’ve cited are available for viewing.

I am disappointed to report that, unlike yesterday, no one on the stage destroyed any mosquitoes with a bright green laser. But, except for one very wrong move (inviting the far more unfunny than uncomfortable Sarah Silverman) and the occasional dud (people: don’t read papers and call them speeches!), the long day was full of delights both profound (George Church’s investigations into synthetic biology) and ridiculous (you have not lived a full life until you’ve seen a tattoo of Maury Povich and Bigfoot shaking hands).

One of the day’s strongest talks was by Bill Gates. He’s spoken at TED previously on a variety of topics, among them education and malaria (last year he set free some mosquitoes from the stage to make a point about the latter). Today he directed his mind toward energy and climate; in particular how to get CO₂ levels to zero. He builds that on what has become conventional wisdom among sustainability scientists: that the temperature will keep going up until we cut CO₂ almost down to nothing. He presented an equation in which

Total CO₂ = People x Services Per Person x Energy Per Service x CO₂ per unit of energy.

So, if he’s right, one of the variables on the right of the equal sign has to go down to zero. He argued why it won’t be any of the first three and focused on the last one, CO₂ per unit of energy. I suspect TED will post Gates’ talk soon; we’ll point to it and let the man speak for himself. But he looked at what needed to be done — reducing and converting fossil fuels, managing nuclear energy in ways that are safe and don’t promote proliferation — and concluded we still need “an incredible miracle.” He’s investing in these areas and he was clear that he’s early on in thinking about his problem, but one hopes he uses the same precision of vision he used for everything from organizing his foundation to vanquishing the Netscape browser.

One last note on Gates’ talk: when he used the term “innovating to zero,” it reminded me of Valerie Plame Wilson’s talk yesterday about nuclear disarmament, in which she advocated getting nuclear weapons to zero, too. Those are laudable sentiments, of course, but especially in a room filled with technology executives, it’s hard to imagine a world in which an entire technology stops being used. The world only spins forward, of course. The challenge may be one of managing what exists, rather than eliminating what won’t go away.

Provocative in another way was Temple Grandin, whose known for being an expert in animal behavior, a designer in more humane storage and slaughter facilities, an advocate for the autistic, and an autistic person herself. She had a big point she wanted to make — “The world needs different kinds of minds to work together” — but she also had precise, deeply considered stories about how to treat animals and autistic children in much more helpful ways. When this talk is posted, it might make the same sort of impact Jill Bolte Taylor’s talk in 2008 about experiencing her own stroke; Grandin’s talk brought the audience into an unfamiliar world and made it, for 18 minutes at least, coherent.

Quickly (because there’s another event about to begin): John Underkoffler, who invented the Minority Report screens that have led to such real-world gestural-interface systems as the Wii and the iPhone, showed some incremental advances in his work, often turning away from the audience like a conductor to summon images out of his giant screens; Wired‘s Chris Anderson showed a demo of his magazine in tablet form that (a) seems fluid and promising (b) crashed midway, which offers a neat metaphor for print publishing. Font designer Marian Bantjes delivered a very similar talk to the one she delivered at Pop!Tech in 2008, but once you got past the repetition you hear a fascinating message true for both artists and managers. When she does a work of art, she asks: Who is it for? What does it say? What does it do? She didn’t say this, but if you don’t have good answers to those three questions, you might want to ask a fourth: Why am I doing this?

As with yesterday, I wrote a longish post but left out most of the day’s entertainment. One of many highlights today: David Byrne joined Thomas Dolby and the string quartet Ethel for a run at Talking Heads’ “(Nothing But) Flowers.” More on that later, because it is time for the next event …

One of the best TED-U sessions was Derek Sivers on what it takes to be a leader, with a shirtless dancing guy as the news hook. Treat yourself to this three-minute talk.

I wrote about Jamie Oliver’s TED Prize talk on Wednesday night. See his talk (below) and read Garr Reynolds’ trenchant commentary.

And, finally, do you want to give a TED talk? The guy who decides whether you will has advice.

It wasn’t just ideas that were shooting out. One of the biggest crowd pleasers on Thursday (I’m writing this Friday before the first morning session) was former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. He’s the prototypical TED polymath — several years ago he talked about how waves off the coast of Hawaii could take out the state of California (alas, not posted on the TED site) — and he spoke this year on the work his firm is doing to battle malaria. He offered some possible solutions, and then he got to his big idea to battle the terrible disease: shoot mosquitos out of the sky with lasers. And, this being TED, we were treated to a demo of just such a malaria-eradication plan. Much of a TED audience grew up on Captain Kirk and Han Solo, so you don’t have to guess what the reaction was to scientific advance that involved a green laser and a very satisfying wisp of smoke after the laser hit its target.

There were other dramatic moments. Kevin Bales, director of Free the Slaves, spoke soberly about the state of slavery on the planet: slaves as destroyer of the environment, political corruption as the primary reason slavery persists, and the dark economics that show how some people have gotten so cheap. Stanford’s Mark Z. Jacobson and longtime environmentalist Stewart Brand tried something new for TED: a debate over whether nuclear power should have a role in America’s power mix. Brand, the mind behind The Whole Earth Catalog, has in recent years converted to a pro-nuclear position, and the crowd was with him at the beginning. Jacobson was no match for Brand’s presentation techniques, but he had pulled some more of the crowd his way by the end. Also on the nuclear tip, Valerie Plame Wilson spoke about nuclear disarmament. She’s best-known for having been outed as an undercover CIA agent, but even those of us who followed her story didn’t really know what she worked on for the CIA. Turns out it was nuclear disarmament; she was part of team that brought down Pakistani proliferation criminal A.Q. Khan. This being TED, Plame was also there to promote Countdown to Zero, a documentary film about the ongoing attempt to eliminate nuclear weapons.

There was more. Elizabeth Pisani, who several years ago wrote The Wisdom of Whores, spoke incisively about the ramifications of various AIDS policies, and Seth Berkeley showed how far we are — and how far we have to go — down the road to creating a AIDS vaccine. And Mark Roth earned a standing ovation when he detailed his work in suspended animation.

And there was an enormous amount of fun. League of Extraordinary Dancers lived up to their name, performing a daring aerial ballet with enough gravity-ignoring moves and seemingly impossible slow motion that it felt like watching a live-action version of The Matrix. Thomas Dolby’s stage-setting covers with the string quartet Ethel continued to marvel, and Microsoft unveiled a new version of bing maps that lets you explore a landscape with a historical overlay or a real-time overlay. One of the most intense responses was after a demo of the Google “Nexus One” phone, when TED curator Chris Anderson announced that all attendees would be getting a free one. Amazing: the vast majority of this audience has no problem either paying for (or getting their company to pay for) a very expensive conference, but they were screaming their happiness about getting a free phone.

This summaries leaves out more than half of the able presenters. Some that you must see when they go live on the TED site in the weeks ahead: Nicholas Christakis talked brilliantly about obesity clustering, David Byrne mused on whether artists create more based on context than passion, Jim Daly talked about man-eating plants, Jane McGonigal found what was good in video games, Sam Harris confused science for religion, Kirt Citron imagined the news thousands of years from now, and Michael Specter, celebrating the scientific method, trying things out, seeing what works, fixing what doesn’t, as the greatest achievement of humanity, nothing then when “people wrap themselves in their beliefs, they wrap them so tightly they can’t break themselves free.” Every few minutes, it’s another insight, another surprise, another jaw dropped. In some ways, it’s intellectual camp. Time for another day…