Every day, reading a little less of the Boston Globe

I've been trying a cheap trial digital subscription to the Boston Globe. So far, it's not working for me. True, the site is updated constantly, so I see the latest news headlines, there are videos to go with the news stories, I can search the news for a particular item, and I can read it on any of my machines, including my iPad mini. But the screen display is of a bunch of headlines with various font weights, some with the first line or two of the story. What I see is a random display of headings -- I don't know what's important at a glance. With a paper newspaper, the locations and layout of the pieces help me create a quick strategy for how I'm going to spend the next twenty minutes reading the paper. I can see how long the articles are at a glance -- I don't have to waste time and click on each headline link to get the gist of the story.

Worse, there are ads on the display, whereas there are no ads on the front page of a paper. It's not always immediately clear on the screen when you're looking at an ad -- "Shocking prediction by CIA insider" (an ad) looks like it's an actual news story when it is next to "US, allies, launch more air strikes in Syria, Iraq" (a news headline). I have tried the e-paper version, which shows the actual paper version of the pages, but I found it cumbersome to keep enlarging the screen and scrolling.

The overall result is that by the end of the day, I'm simply reading less of the Boston Globe.

Why Socrates Died, by Robin Waterfield -- a very readable book about the workings of Athenian democracy

"Why Socrates Died: Dispelling the Myths" by Robin Waterfield (Norton 2009)

This was a fun read. A well-written, engaging book. Waterfield goes to great lengths to describe the context and background of Socrates's execution in 399 BC. We learn a great deal about Athenian political and cultural life, the Peloponnesian War, and the habits of Socrates and his friends. Waterfield made me feel as if I personally knew Alcibiades and Socrates and the many other characters. There is plenty of historical detail, without being too heavy.

Waterfield elucidates the case against Socrates over many pages. He sums it up on page 191, quoting from the book: "He was a clever arguer and taught young men to be clever arguers; he usurped their fathers' roles in education and in general was perceived to be subversive of inherited values..." In a time of unrest, of conflict between democracy and oligarchy, and the war with Sparta, Athenians were fed up with Socrates's undermining of the traditional faith and conventions. That was enough in the Athenian democratic system, to be a crime.

There was more, of course. He was young Alcibiades's teacher, the most prominent young Athenian if his time. Alcibiades was brilliant and handsome, an oligarch, and went on to play a traitorous role in the war with Sparta. Socrates also seemed allied with Critias, a member the The Thirty tyrants, who briefly took power in Athens in a coup that led to civil war, although Socrates himself played no role in the tyranny. Socrates was not a friend of Athenian democracy, as it was structured.


It reads to me as if there are parallels in the struggle between democrats and oligarchs and today's progressive liberals and small-government conservatives. The democrats constantly worked to hedge and contain the power of the few wealthy oligarchs, and believed in collective decision-making and the betterment of "the many" at the expense of the oligarchs. The oligarchs believed in reducing the role of democracy and its conventions and bureaucracy, of promoting the progress of the state by promoting the progress of "the best", of the brightest and most capable men (who were of course oligarchs).

Hemlock could not have been an easy way to die. You didn't simply go to sleep painlessly. You apparently are asphyxiated as your diaphragm stops working. Socrates is said to have willingly taken hemlock rather than escape at the urging of his friends. As Waterfield presents him, he is filled with what we would regard as faults, but not what we could call crimes. And certainly not faults worthy of execution.

The movie, "A Most Wanted Man" -- how plausible is the ending?

We enjoyed seeing A Most Wanted Man, the last movie that Phillip Seymour Hoffman starred in. It's fairly well directed (director Anton Corbijn), with lots of detail piled up on the workings of German anti-terrorist intelligence spies. The story (a very complicated one), involves a Chechen-Russian guy who washes up in Hamburg, is somehow immediately latched onto by Intelligence, is taken up by a (naturally) beautiful young immigrant rights lawyer, and gets unwittingly involved in a scheme concocted by Hoffman and his spies to catch a Moslem professor terrorist-financier (or at least he's suspected to be a terrorist-financier by Hoffman's band). Hoffman is really good in a limited role. He's sort of a caricature of a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, hard-boiled disillusioned spy master.

Hamburg is filmed as a claustrophobic, bleak warren of tenement streets coated with graffiti, and with an occasional high-rise office tower looking down on the poor, hard-scrabble immigrants and their families.

Many spy films are something of a stretch, with the plots asking us to ignore some implausible connections. This one has its share. The Hoffman character uses the Chechen-Russian guy, Issa, as bait to catch the larger fish, the professor, even though they have no connection to each other. The professor is being spied on by his son, who ostensibly loves his father. And in the end, the Intelligence higher ups betray Hoffman's band and their schemes by nearly killing them all and arresting everybody in sight. I know that spies and their agencies have their rivalries and mistrust. Things go bad, as they do in all parts of life. But this ending strikes me as implausible. We're being asked to believe that German higher ups are willing to perhaps kill their own operatives and sabotage their  work on the streets of Hamburg simply in order to assert their authority. Perhaps it could happen. But if that's true, then we're all in even bigger trouble than I thought.

And what's with the cellphone Hoffman is using? In most scenes, it's a smallish Android type phone, but in one scene close to the end, the Apple logo reflects in the light, as if it were an iPhone. An obvious placement, and it looks like an out-of-context mistake by the film crew.