Thank you thank you thank you Ben Miller at the “Internet Food Association”:http://internetfoodassociation.wordpress.com for writing a “post”:http://internetfoodassociation.wordpress.com/2008/12/17/bring-me-a-beefsteak/ about the _awesome_ local tradition of “beefsteaks” that mentions this marvelous _New York Times_ “article”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/dining/30beef.html by Paul Lukas from nearly a year ago, which cites “All You Can Hold for Five Bucks,” by Joseph Mitchell, which appeared in _The New Yorker_ in 1939. If you have a “subscription”:http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=1939-04-15#folio=040 or access to _The Complete New Yorker,_ I highly recommend that you go check it out. It just oozes awesomeness.
The heyday of the beefsteak tradition stretched from about the Civil War until Prohibition. The idea was that men (and only men) would gather in a saloon or a hall and consume meat (specifically, slices of grilled steak) and beer until the act of ingestion was no longer conceivable. They would sit on crates, with sawdust on the floor, and silverware was prohibited.
I think that covers the essentials. Needless to say, Mitchell was able to paint quite a picture on that subject. (I’d love to see Trillin or McPhee try to improve on it.)
I’ll end this with three awesome quotations from the article; the first two are spoken by people who appear in the story:

“The foundation of a good beefsteak is an overflowing amount of meat and beer.”
“When you go to a beefsteak, you got to figure on eating until it comes out of your ears. Otherwise it would be bad manners.”
“Women do not esteem a glutton.”

And there’s a lot more where that came from.
The best part? The tradition “still survives,”:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/30/dining/30beef.html in New Jersey.
_Update:_ The article is also available in Mitchell’s renowned collection _Up in the Old Hotel._
_Second Update:_ Not surprisingly, Emily was “on this whole thing”:http://emdashes.com/2008/01/people-like-winners.php when the Lukas article first appeared last year.

If you’ve been reading Emdashes the last few weeks, then you’re probably “aware”:http://emdashes.com/2008/11/gladwell-weathers-gauntlet-of.php that the “centerpiece”:http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/outliers_excerpt1.html of Malcolm Gladwell’s new book is the “10,000-Hour Rule,” which is Gladwell’s way of highlighting the importance of dedicated practice, or more properly the capacity for dedicated practice, in permitting a person to become one of the dominant figures in a chosen field. Gladwell has stated that ten thousand hours is about the equivalent of ten years of dedicated practice.
My favorite standup comedian is “Patton Oswalt,”:http://www.pattonoswalt.com/ and I’ve had this “mp3 file”:http://www.podcastdirectory.com/podshows/697440 kicking around my hard drive for a couple years now. It’s a “Hammer conversation” between Oswalt and Jeff Garlin, who plays Larry David’s manager on _Curb Your Enthusiasm._ It was held in Los Angeles at the Redcat Theater and hosted by KCET (I know nothing about Los Angeles, so I don’t know anything about that venue or KCET or much else). The date is listed as August 2006.
I played it recently and—lo and behold!—they start talking about the need for ten years of practice in order to become really good at something. That part is around the 50-minute mark. Here’s a rough transcript of that part:
Patton Oswalt: This is what’s always painful, when I go to like, Montreal, and they have like a sitcom actor or a film actor who they have host stuff, and they’re thinking, “I’ve succeeded as an actor, how hard can it be to be a standup, these guys are clowns.” and they go up and they suck so bad, it’s so painful, and then they look at you, if you get any kind of laughter, they look at you like, “Did you pay the audience off? … What the hell is going on?”
Jeff Garlin: A lot of the young comedians, they want to be famous like that. [snaps fingers] But to me it was never about being famous, it was about being good. If I’m good, everything else will take care of itself, hopefully.
Oswalt: All the great comedians, too, if they go up, and no-one knows who they are, in five minutes they can win a crowd of strangers over, that’s the power of a good standup, is, you go up and they don’t know who you are, and when you’re done they’re like, “Wow, that was funny,” rather than [infantile voice] “That’s the guy from the movie! With the thing on his head!”
Garlin: But most young comedians, when I tell them that it takes a minimum of ten years before you’re decent, they don’t want to hear that.
Oswalt: Because they don’t want to be “decent.”
Garlin: Because they’ve been doing it two years, and they’re sort of like, “No, I want to have a show!” and it’s all about everything but being good, being a good comedian… I always even jump into, like, a violinist, telling a young violinist, “Well you’re twelve years old, you’ve been playing for a couple years, it’s going to take you about ten, twelve years before you get decent.” They’re probably going to be disappointed, but that sounds realistic, doesn’t it?
Oswalt: Right, exactly.
Garlin: And I’m sorry, but doing standup the right way is as hard as playing the violin, if not harder, because you can play the violin to silence, and nobody knows if you suck…except on the inside.
Oswalt: And at the same time, you can do standup for twenty years the wrong way, and just … I remember all these guys, these headliners that I worked with, and they would go, “I’ve been doing this for twenty years, so by default I’m great,” and then you go, “Well, you’ve actually, you’ve done it a year, and you’ve repeated that year nineteen times,” and that’s the twenty years you have under your belt.
Here’s another thing: I remember after Rob Corddry became a regular on _The Daily Show,_ I read an interview with him in which he said something like, “They say that as a young out-of-work actor, you have to keep at it for ten years, before it starts paying off, and I got the gig on _The Daily Show_ after I’d been at it for ten years.” Does anyone remember this? I thought it was in the A/V Club section of _The Onion,_ but I checked “that one”:http://www.avclub.com/content/node/47243 and it wasn’t in there. Is this a showbiz saying, “ten years before you start getting traction”? Anyone know?
By the way, I don’t regard any of this as “catching Gladwell out”; if anything, it’s corroboration.
The rest of that mp3 file is very good too; you’ll hear about the most disastrous Hollywood pitch meeting ever and the time that Patton Oswalt started a modest riot in Pittsburgh in 2003, for criticizing George W. Bush at the start of a war. It’s really funny to hear them talk about how amazing the movie _Borat_ is but not be able to mention any of the details about it because it’s a few months away from coming out.

Martin Schneider writes:
Ben Bernanke’s had a hard “time”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/an-obit-fit-to-blog-and-print.php of it “today”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/best-of-the-120108-issue-banan.php on our “site”:http://emdashes.com/2008/12/the-wavy-rule-a-daily-comic-by-96.php, but you know, the Dow’s lost a fifth of its value since he took over the Fed. I think he can take what Emdashes dishes out.
For me, the most stunning revelation of John Cassidy’s “article”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/12/01/081201fa_fact_cassidy?printable=true comes in the third paragraph, in which it is revealed that before the truly cataclysmic problems began in September, Bernanke and his crew had been merrily pursuing what they “referred to as the ‘finger-in-the-dike’ strategy.”
The mind reels. Now, Bernanke has been criticized for seeing too little danger on the horizon, and judging from Cassidy’s fine article, that criticism is merited. But shouldn’t _his own choice of metaphor_ have been a powerful signal _to him_ that he might be assessing the potential for crisis too lightly?
Even if the actual folk tale of the Little Dutch Boy has a “happy ending”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Brinker_or_the_Silver_Skates#Popular_culture:_the_legend_of_the_boy_and_the_dike, isn’t the image that the phrase evokes one of a crisis that mounts steadily, beyond the ability of even an infinite number of fingers to plug the bewildering profusion of holes? Isn’t the lesson that some problems demand _much more_ than a Little Dutch Boy?
That blind spot tells us much about the perils of ideological rigidity in an ideological time; if you believe that the market is self-correcting and that governmental intervention is pernicious, then you are liable to see even Armageddon Itself as a matter best handled by a few judicious tweaks to the interest rate. Bernanke’s not an ideological firebrand; yet even he believed these things. That’s telling.
Simply put: If Plan A is an overt advertisement that you intend to let the problem overwhelm your intentionally meager efforts, isn’t that a strong indication that you should start looking pretty carefully at Plan B?
It makes me think of John McCain. He never referred to the Sarah Palin pick, or anything else, as a “Hail Mary,” you know. That was a characterization made by observers. If he had done so, it would have been tantamount to conceding defeat; isn’t that exactly what Bernanke did? How is this not economic malpractice? Am I making too much of this?

Race is not the only story of Barack Obama’s election, but clearly, it is one of its very important stories indeed. The election of Obama has so many levels and angles that it would take, well, an entire issue of _The New Yorker_ even to begin to sort it all out.
But if you are of a mind to immerse yourself in the racial context of Obama’s election, the racial forces that enabled Obama’s election—a topic that almost always was expressed indirectly during 2008, and almost always by design, on the part of Obama and his foes alike—you really can’t do much better than David Remnick’s “article”:http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/17/081117fa_fact_remnick?currentPage=all this week.
I have only one thing to add:
O to be in the room when Remnick and “Bunk Moreland”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunk_Moreland share a beer in New Orleans.

A couple of days after the joy of Election Day, I suddenly thought of Samantha Power, and was cheered. You see, I was very fortunate to see Power speak about Darfur and activism at the New Yorker Festival in 2007, and her address made a tremendous impression on me, as you can “see for yourself”:http://emdashes.com/2007/10/festival-samantha-power-is-com.php. (That post makes for interesting reading at this late date, actually.)
The thing is, in October 2007 Power was already entirely on board with the Obama campaign, a fact to which I made reference. She made light of the fervency of her advocacy for Obama; on a couple of occasions at the end of the session, she actually edited a questioner mid-query, so for example, if the question contained the clause, “what can the next president do—” she would hurriedly interject, “President Obama, yes, right,” and continue listening. It was funny, how committed she was, how obviously settled in her mind this question was.
It hardly needs saying that in October 2007, “President Obama” was a longshot—but maybe it does need saying that it was the early endorsement of people like Power that made him less of one. Then during the primaries she got in trouble for calling Hillary Clinton a “monster” and had to distance herself from the campaign (when her very involvement was such a strong indicator of the sterling quality of an Obama administration), and that was upsetting. Fortunately, by that time Obama was far enough along that people said, “Well, Obama can always appoint her later….”
I hope that happens. Power is one of the most inspiring people I’ve ever seen speak, certainly one of the smartest, and I sincerely hope that she becomes one of the most visible members of Obama’s cabinet—if not in a few weeks, then perhaps after 2012 (!).
But while I did think these thoughts in the last week, that’s not the reason I chose to write this post. You see, the TED conference has just posted a 23-minute video of Power delivering a speech about “Sérgio Vieira de Mello”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S%C3%A9rgio_Vieira_de_Mello, and alas! there is no existing video of that talk at the New Yorker Festival last year, so I thought it was high time to show all of you what I found so compelling about her.
“Enjoy”:http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/samantha_power_on_a_complicated_hero.html.

Jason Zengerle has a substantial “article”:http://nymag.com/arts/books/features/52014/ in _New York_ magazine on Malcolm Gladwell that’s pretty much a must-read for Gladwell enthusiasts. I very much count myself among that group, and I learned plenty.
In retrospect, the appearance of Gladwell on the national stage, around 2000, when _The Tipping Point_ first came out, had some similarities to the splash occasioned by our new president-elect, back in 2004. Like Obama, Gladwell’s genius is rhetorical in nature, and _The Tipping Point_ got as much attention for what it promised as for what it actually was, I think, and Gladwell became a kind of receptacle for his readers’ hopes in a way that Obama has, albeit on a much larger scale.
I recall attending the Gladwell’s 2004 New Yorker Festival event, held at that Times Square building with the curvy ABC News feeds slithering around it in green and amber; this was a couple of months before _Blink_ came out. Gladwell spoke about the shooting of Diallo and was riveting, I thought. The Q&A portion of the event was dominated by people who had read a galley of _Blink,_ and each questioner started, it seemed, by stating how “beautiful” or “spiritual” or “inspiring” the experience of reading it had been—odd words for a decidedly intellectual book.
That was some serious adulation being expressed there, and it makes for a tough act to live up to. I don’t think I’m speaking out of school when I say that the intervening years have not been a bed of roses for Gladwell, even as his bank account swells (amusingly, he claims not to know much about that). Critics have popped up (maybe they were there all along but feeling outnumbered), and there’s been a feeling that the books were perhaps too slight to warrant all the hoopla—Zengerle and Gladwell seem to adopt this line. _Outliers_ seems to have been written in this spirit; it’s described as more “personal” and “serious.”
Myself, I see the flaws in the first two books, but I also never thought that Gladwell was really setting himself up as the grand theorist everyone took him to be (of course, I was also intoxicated by his narrative voice; still am, I suspect). Once I was able to classify him as a kind of popularizer, a mantle he willingly adopts, then a lot of the criticisms came to seem churlish. Plus I didn’t see anything wrong with his focus on “mere” trends and marketing, as if such phenomena could not be handled with brilliance or insight or ambition. If he seems glib in retrospect, if the days before Iraq and Guantanamo permitted that kind of playful tone, that isn’t really Gladwell’s fault, and judging from Zengerle’s article it sounds like he’s sobered a bit, is after bigger game. I’m glad to see him taking on systems instead of those “mere” trends (even if I don’t share the need to dismiss), and I’m looking forward to the new book.

Whether you’re looking at the “Digital Edition”:http://archives.newyorker.com/?i=2008-11-17 or the “dead tree” edition (the very phrase seems to plead for the invention of some sort of Virtual Interweb Way of reading _The New Yorker_), this week’s issue has a lovely cover, a Talk of the Town section crammed with items about Election Night and its aftermath, and four major features by David Remnick, Ryan Lizza, George Packer, and David Grann, about the campaign, the election, the president-elect, and what it all means. I’ll be taking some time out this week to comment on this or that aspect of the issue. It’s great to see _The New Yorker_ rise to the occasion.

David Remnick, Hendrik Hertzberg, Ryan Lizza, and host Dorothy Wickenden appear on the very last “Campaign Trail” “podcast,”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/2008/11/10/081110on_audio_campaign which went up yesterday. We know that Remnick was “in Chicago”:http://emdashes.com/2008/11/remnick-the-conservative-era-i.php for the big rally at Grant Park, and in the podcast he describes watching Obama from up close. Wickenden, having injured her ankle, gamely conducted the podcast by phone from her home—we wish her a fast recovery!
But most important of all, we now know the fate of “The Campaign Trail”! It will cease, as the campaign has and all good things inevitably must. The good news is that _The New Yorker_ will continue to provide a political podcast, known as “The Transition” for the next few weeks, until they switch yet again to “Days of Our Obama” or the like after January 20. I’m relieved!

Oh, man. _The New Yorker_ put up William Finnegan’s 2004 “article”:http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/05/31/040531fa_fact1?currentPage=all about Barack Obama, and boy, is it an interesting read on this day of all days. It’s a kind of Rosetta Stone of Obama studies, so many telltale indicators of a personage we can now recognize as a future president. (One quick example: at that time they called succumbing to his charisma to work tirelessly for him “drinking the Obama juice.”)
There are tons of delicious morsels in this short article I could pass on, but I’ll just leave you with my favorite. (I remember it from when I read it at the time, too.)

Jan Schakowsky told me about a recent visit she had made to the White House with a congressional delegation. On her way out, she said, President Bush noticed her “obama” button. “He jumped back, almost literally,” she said. “And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, _I_ don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’ ”

That’s right, George. By now even you know that he’s your _successor_. He’s the fellow who disassembled that ornery coalition you and Karl Rove cobbled together. That’s who he is.
_Update_: Finnegan has “expanded”:http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/tny/2008/11/the-distance.html on the unmistakable subtext of the article, never enunciated explicitly, that Obama could someday be president. That claim seemed too bold to include in the pre–convention speech article, but reality has a way of confounding our opinions of what is and is not too bold.

I already “mentioned”:http://emdashes.com/2008/11/now-is-the-moment-to-recognize.php how stirring I found Super Tuesday, that chilly day when all of New York was debating the merits of these two superlative candidates. It snowed that day; I handed out Obama leaflets at my local train station in the morning and saw William T. Vollmann speak at the Chelsea Barnes and Noble in the evening (our campaigns are so long that that branch has since closed). As I got my book inscribed, I asked Vollmann if he was supporting a candidate this year (halfway expecting a loony answer like Ron Paul or something); he said he was for Obama.
My other favorite moment was hands down, Saturday, January 26, date of the South Carolina primary. I had spent the previous two months in Austria and I was traveling back home to the tri-state area. I had a two-night layover in Madrid, where I was going to meet up with a good friend flying in from London. I had experienced a trying few weeks and was relishing the rare opportunity for a little drunken revelry. My friend and I stumbled all over central Madrid that night, I think we hit 5 different places—if you don’t know me, it’s difficult to express how out of character this sort of evening is for me. We enjoyed ample beer and _tapas_ and engaged in conversation with each other about the primaries and the economy, and talked up a number of our fellow bar patrons (those who could speak English) about Spain and Europe. It was a grand night all around.
Between 2 and 3 am, we staggered into our hotel room and switched on the TV, which of course was showing CNN. We’d forgotten that all of South Carolina had voted that day, and the result—a mammoth Obama victory—was just breaking. We watched Obama give an utterly electric acceptance speech, and drifted off to sleep knowing that the race had just changed significantly.
A couple of days ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates “posted”:http://ta-nehisicoates.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/11/the_moment_i_went_all_in.php a YouTube clip of that speech, calling it “the moment [he] went all in.” I was already all in, but it’s really instructive to watch that speech again. We’ve all become accustomed to the power of Obama’s rhetoric, but repetition has rubbed the edges off it a bit. On this night, the difference was the audience, going completely bonkers at every pause or cue. They knew that they had upended the entire primaries. I’ll be honest, Obama’s loss in New Hampshire shook me (although it apparently “didn’t shake”:http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_stump/archive/2008/11/04/in-which-i-empty-out-my-obama-notebook.aspx Obama’s team much, as Ryan Lizza would discover), and I was getting dispirited by the rough tactics of the Clinton team. But to watch this speaker speak to this audience, you’d never know that there was anything to worry about.