LA author, blogger, provocateur Andrew Breitbart died Thursday morning. He was 43.

He was what Carlos Castaneda’s Don Juan called a worthy opponent, the media landscape will be less interesting in his absence.

Kevin Roderick at LA Observed has a good gathering of tributes and obits—from both sides of the fence.

The photo of Breitbart is taken from the cover of his book, Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World!.

SHOOTOUT…AMONG FEDERAL AGENTS IN LONG BEACH?

At first I thought I read the LA Times headline wrong. I’d noticed hours earlier Thursday night on my breaking news twitter feed that there’d just been a shootout in Long Beach with two possibly dead. Then the news changed to this:

A confrontation between federal law enforcement agents erupted in gunfire Thursday evening in Long Beach, leaving one dead and another seriously injured, authorities said.

The incident was sparked by an unspecified dispute between Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the Glenn M. Anderson Federal Building near the city’s oceanfront, according to law enforcement authorities.

The agency said in a statement Thursday night that one of its agents died at the scene and the other was in stable condition after the shooting. But the statement did not provide details about the incident.

Multiple law enforcement authorities told The Times the shooting involved a dispute between an agent and his supervisor.

The agent opened fire repeatedly on the male supervisor shortly before 6 p.m. in the building, according to the sources, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the matter.

With the supervisor wounded, a third agent intervened and opened fire on the gunman, who was pronounced dead at the scene, according to law enforcement authorities. The male agent who killed the gunman was uninjured….

(NOTE: A scary and tragic story like this is exactly why, by the way, to most civilians, the idea of one law enforcement officer pointing a gun at the head of another law enforcement officer and mouthing threats, when it is widely acknowledged that the men are not friends but antagonists, does not seem like something that should be be flicked away as a “joke”—as was recently reported here and here.)

AND THEN THERE WAS THIS HORRIFIC STORY…

KIDNAPPED WOMAN DIES IN CRASH DURING POLICE PURSUIT

As the LA Times reported:

The victim of a reported kidnapping died Thursday after her alleged abductor crashed the sport utility vehicle he was driving head-on into another vehicle in Westlake as he was trying to flee police, authorities said.

Police were alerted to the kidnapping shortly after 8 a.m. when witnesses reported a woman inside a GMC Yukon frantically waving for help near the intersection of 6th Street and Westlake Avenue, said Cmdr. Andy Smith of the Los Angeles Police Department….blockquote>

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AND THIS…

SHERIFF’S DEPUTY ARRESTED FOR LEWD ACTS AGAINST A CHILD….

The Times story opens as follows:

A veteran Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department deputy has been arrested on suspicion of committing lewd acts with a child, police said Thursday night.

Oscar Rodriguez, who was assigned to the Marina del Rey station, allegedly committed the unspecified acts against the child while he was off duty, the Los Angeles Police Department said….

LA Times reporters Andrew Blankstein and Robert J. Lopez, among others, had a very busy night, Thursday night.

Or as Blankstein (@anblanx) tweeted around midnight:

This was the kind of news day in Los Angeles where every big story was so two hours ago #nightblog #sleepneeded

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OH, AND I NEARLY FORGOT THIS…

(NOTE TO SELF: when straying with the Cessna into the President of the United States’ temporary no-fly zone, best to leave the giant bags of reefer at home.)

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NOW IN THE NON-BREAKING NEWS, SLIGHTLY MORE WONKY REALM….

A NEW REPORT ON THE IRRATIONALITY OF “DIRECT FILING” PATTERNS ON JUVENILES IN VARIOUS CALIFORNIA COUNTIES

The power to direct file power, as it is called, was created in 2000 through Proposition 21, and allows prosecutors to circumvent the neutral decision-making authority of the juvenile court and unilaterally transfer certain kid offenders directly into adult jurisdiction. Now, prosecutors are threatening to direct file more if the state’s youth correctional facilities (DJF) are closed as the Governor proposes to do with his new budget.

Now a new study just released by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice reveals that a small number of California counties are responsible for the vast majority of adult court transfers and that the practice of funneling large numbers of kids into the adult system is unrelated to population or crime rates. ..

More on the report on next week.

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AND FINALLY…

….ANTHONY SHAHID IN JAN 26, 2012 MOTHER JONES INTERVIEW…

“….it’s important as a reporter, a writer, a journalist, to try to restore humanity.”

Rest in peace. We are heartbroken.

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Photo by Bob Chamberlain for the Los Angeles Times

At 8:24 p.m. Thursday night, after hearing about the death of two-time Pulitzer winning New York times reporter, Anthony Shadid, famed journalism/digital media professor Jay Rosen tweeted the heart of the matter:

“Typically, great journalists are great stylists or great reporters. How many are great at both and at courage? Almost none. @anthonyshadid.”

Here are the basics of what happened, from the NY Times.

Anthony Shadid, a gifted foreign correspondent whose graceful dispatches for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Associated Press covered nearly two decades of Middle East conflict and turmoil, died, apparently of an asthma attack, on Thursday while on a reporting assignment in Syria. Tyler Hicks, a Times photographer who was with Mr. Shadid, carried his body across the border to Turkey.

Mr. Shadid, 43, had been reporting inside Syria for a week, gathering information on the Free Syrian Army and other armed elements of the resistance to the government of President Bashar al-Assad, whose military forces have been engaged in a harsh repression of the political opposition in a conflict that is now nearly a year old.

The Syrian government, which tightly controls foreign journalists’ activities in the country, had not been informed of his assignment by The Times.

The exact circumstances of Mr. Shadid’s death and his precise location inside Syria when it happened were not immediately clear.

But Mr. Hicks said that Mr. Shadid, who had asthma and had carried medication with him, began to show symptoms as both of them were preparing to leave Syria on Thursday, and the symptoms escalated into what became a fatal attack. Mr. Hicks telephoned his editors at The Times, and a few hours later he was able to take Mr. Shadid’s body into Turkey.

Jill Abramson, the executive editor, informed the newspaper’s staff Thursday evening in an e-mail. “Anthony died as he lived — determined to bear witness to the transformation sweeping the Middle East and to testify to the suffering of people caught between government oppression and opposition forces,” she wrote.

Listen to the interview with Shadid on Fresh Air with Terry Gross. It took place around seven weeks ago, this past December.

In the world of journalism, the loss of Anthony Shadid is a very big one.

Most Americans honestly don’t want to spend much time, energy or emotion thinking about people in jail or prison—unless, by chance they have a family member who is locked up.

We harp on the issue here at WitnessLA since criminal justice is, after all, central to the mission of the site. But if the topic comes up in a social setting, I see eyes starting to glaze over, even among friends who try to be interested.

That’s why the article by Adam Gopnick in the current New Yorker, The Caging of America, is so heartening.

Gopnick is a critic and commentator with no particular expertise in criminal justice matters. But he’s also a very smart guy and clear headed thinker. Somehow the topic grabbed his interest, and he dove deeply.

The result is part think piece, part book review. (He examines the new book by Berkeley criminologist, Frank Zimring, The City that Became Safe: New York’s Lessons for Urban Crime and Its Control.)

In any case, it shouldn’t be missed.

I won’t try to summarize Gopnick’s work here. The essay is carefully crafted, thought by thought, and should be read in it’s totality. But some clips will give you an idea of what he’s on about.

To wit:

The accelerating rate of incarceration over the past few decades is just as startling as the number of people jailed: in 1980, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one. No other country even approaches that. In the past two decades, the money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education.

Conservatives and other law and order types insist that the nationwide 40 percent drop in crime we’ve seen in the past few years can be laid at the feet of all this incarcerating. But, as Gopnick, channeling Zimring, points out, that assumption falls apart when one looks at New York’s crime stats, which happen to be another 40 percent lower still than the rest of the nation—the lowest since 1900—while its incarceration rate, rather than rising, has also dropped precipitously.

One fact stands out. While the rest of the country, over the same twenty-year period, saw the growth in incarceration that led to our current astonishing numbers, New York, despite the Rockefeller drug laws, saw a marked decrease in its number of inmates. “New York City, in the midst of a dramatic reduction in crime, is locking up a much smaller number of people, and particularly of young people, than it was at the height of the crime wave,” Zimring observes. Whatever happened to make street crime fall, it had nothing to do with putting more men in prison. The logic is self-evident if we just transfer it to the realm of white-collar crime: we easily accept that there is no net sum of white-collar crime waiting to happen, no inscrutable generation of super-predators produced by Dewar’s-guzzling dads and scaly M.B.A. profs; if you stop an embezzlement scheme here on Third Avenue, another doesn’t naturally start in the next office building. White-collar crime happens through an intersection of pathology and opportunity; getting the S.E.C. busy ending the opportunity is a good way to limit the range of the pathology.

And still we go on locking people up at a ferocious clip—even though, in terms of our incarceration rates, we increasingly stand alone in the world.

To catch sharks and not dolphins, Zimring’s work suggests, we need to adjust the size of the holes in the nets—to make crimes that are the occasion for stop-and-frisks real crimes, not crimes like marijuana possession. When the New York City police stopped and frisked kids, the main goal was not to jail them for having pot but to get their fingerprints, so that they could be identified if they committed a more serious crime. But all over America the opposite happens: marijuana possession becomes the serious crime. The cost is so enormous, though, in lives ruined and money spent….

So how do we go about ending this plague of imprisoning? Gopnick suggests that we must start thinking and acting sanely—in a thousand small ways.

Epidemics seldom end with miracle cures. Most of the time in the history of medicine, the best way to end disease was to build a better sewer and get people to wash their hands. “Merely chipping away at the problem around the edges” is usually the very best thing to do with a problem; keep chipping away patiently and, eventually, you get to its heart. To read the literature on crime before it dropped is to see the same kind of dystopian despair we find in the new literature of punishment: we’d have to end poverty, or eradicate the ghettos, or declare war on the broken family, or the like, in order to end the crime wave. The truth is, a series of small actions and events ended up eliminating a problem that seemed to hang over everything. There was no miracle cure, just the intercession of a thousand smaller sanities. Ending sentencing for drug misdemeanors, decriminalizing marijuana, leaving judges free to use common sense (and, where possible, getting judges who are judges rather than politicians)—many small acts are possible that will help end the epidemic of imprisonment as they helped end the plague of crime….

Anyway, read the thing. It’s worth it.

HOUSE PANEL QUESTIONS US ATTORNEY GENERAL ABOUT PARDONS OFFICE AFTER PROPUBLICA INVESTIGATION ON RACIAL DISPARITIES IN PRESIDENTIAL PARDONS

In December of this past year, in an investigation co-published by the Washington Post, ProPublica reporters Dafna Linzer and Jennifer LaFleur found that, in the past ten years of presidential pardons, white criminals seeking pardons were nearly four times as likely to succeed as minorities pardon seekers. Black pardon seekers had the lowest chance of all.

Here’s a clip:

Current and former officials at the White House and Justice Department said they were surprised and dismayed by the racial disparities, which persist even when factors such as the type of crime and sentence are considered.

“I’m just astounded by those numbers,” said Roger Adams, who served as head of the Justice Department’s pardons office from 1998 to 2008. He said he could think of nothing in the office’s practices that would have skewed the recommendations. “I can recall several African Americans getting pardons.’’

The review of applications for pardons is conducted almost entirely in secret, with the government releasing scant information about those it rejects.

The facts uncovered by the reporters’ investigation caused the House Judiciary Committee to pose a series of probing questions to Attorney General Eric Holder about what he was doing to look into this issue.

A WOMAN RELIVES THE TRAUMA OF FORCED STERILIZATION AND THE NIGHTMARE OF EUGENICS

This LA Times Column One story story by David Zucchino is dizzyingly painful to read, but also essential.

Here’s how it opens:

Elaine Riddick was a confused and frightened 14-year-old. She was poor and black, the daughter of alcoholic parents in a segregated North Carolina town. And she was pregnant after being raped by a man from her neighborhood.

Riddick’s miserable circumstances attracted the attention of social workers, who referred her case to the state’s Eugenics Board. In an office building in Raleigh, five men met to consider her fate — among them the state health director and a lawyer from the attorney general’s office.

Board members concluded that the girl was “feebleminded” and doomed to “promiscuity.” They recommended sterilization. Riddick’s illiterate grandmother, Maggie Woodard, known as “Miss Peaches,” marked an “X” on a consent form.

Hours after Riddick gave birth to a son in Edenton, N.C., on March 5, 1968, a doctor sliced through her fallopian tubes and cauterized them.

“They butchered me like a hog,” recalls Riddick, now a poised and determined woman of 57.

Between the years of 1929 and 1974, reports Zuccinno, close to 7,600 people were sterilized under orders from North Carolina’s Eugenics Board. Nearly 85% were women or girls, some as young as 10…

Read on.

Photo by Steve Liss for the New Yorker

There isn’t a song she sang, that she didn’t own.

But it was when she recorded this one in 1960, that she became immortal.

It wasn’t your usual book party.

For one thing, Monday night’s book launching event for civil rights lawyer Connie Rice’s new memoir, Power Concedes Nothing, was held at the LAPD’s headquarters, in the over-lit Compstat room, no less—i.e. the room where the cops go to hear a rundown on the latest crime statistics and ‘crime mapping.”

Moreover, the party was hosted by LAPD Chief Charlie Beck—who seemed mildly surprised to find himself in the book party hosting business. (Can you think of another instance where LA’s Chief of Police threw a book party? I can’t either. Go, Chief Charlie! Perhaps this could be the start of a new LA event trend: Law enforcement and literature.)

And then, of course, there’s the fact that the book details, among other things, the years that Rice spent suing the Los Angeles Police Department on a regular basis—and usually winning.

Still, Connie’s suing-the-LAPD days are now mostly in the past, and the mood in the Compstat room on Monday night was so upbeat it sometimes bordered on love fest-y. (As you’ll see from the rough snippets of iPhone videos above.)

Those in attendance were a mix of law enforcement and city government types, plus a smattering of criminal justice-leaning authors and journalists—nearly all of whom passed up the red and white wine for glasses of fizzy water. (Helpful party tip: Always drink less than the cops in the room.) U.S. Attorney Andre Birotte, showed up, as did City Controller Wendy Greuel, and LAPD command staff types like Deputy Chief Pat Gannon of South Bureau, and department spokesperson, Commander Andrew Smith (who was the LAPD guy you saw most often on TV throughout the whole LAPD/Occupy thingy.)

Journalist/authors Joe Domanick, Jesse Katz, and Jon Weiner, made appearances, as did Christine Pelisek from the Daily Beast, KPCC’s Frank Stoltz, KCET’s Judy Muller, the LA Times’ Pat Morrison, Sue Horton, Susan Brenneman and Deborah Vankin.

Among the others who stood around book-buying, appetizer-munching and gossiping were Police Commission head, John Mack, LA Gang Czar Guillermo Cespedes, Gerry Chaleff, who used to administer the federal consent decree for the LAPD but now has been appointed by Chief Beck as the Special Assistant for Constitutional Policing—meaning he’s supposed to be the guy tasked with making sure that LAPD officers don’t go around violating anybody’s Constitutional rights, and community activists, like Alfred Lomas, of LA Gang Tours.

City Councilman Tom LaBonge offered the night’s weirdest compliment to Rice, when in a moment of unchecked effusiveness after presenting her with an honorific city proclamation, he leaned into a microphone and told her, “You remind me of William Mulholland!”

(In case you’ve forgotten, Mulholland was the ultra powerful 1920’s era head of the Department of Water and Power on whom the John Huston-played villain of the movie Chinatown, Noah Cross Hollis Mulwray, was supposed to have been, in part, based.*) After Police Commission head John Mack began looking meaningfully at the City Councilman, and making subtle “cut it” motions, LaBonge tried to clarify things by shouting, “Forget Chinatown! Everybody drinks water.” Or something to that effect. Then he wisely divested himself of the microphone.

Still, everyone seemed to take LaBonge’s outburst as a quirky representation of the pleasant ebullience that characterized the night.

The cheery mood may have, in some ways, had to do with the fact that, unlike many book parties, where the point is to support (or meet) the writer, on Monday night, in addition to coming to support Connie, most everyone seemed to be really anxious to read Rice’s book—if they hadn’t already.

It is, as the subtitle says, “one woman’s quest for social justice in America….”—meaning it is a personal account, told through the lens of Rice’s specific experience and perceptions. Yet, much of it is also a book about certain events in Los Angeles in the last few years that many of those in the room felt they had, in some way had a part, or at the very least lived through and cared very much about—things like the battle to transform the LAPD and the struggle to get a handle on the gang violence that was corroding the emotional health of many LA neighborhoods.

In other words, they—we—think and hope that Connie’s book will add a new valuable puzzle piece to the communal puzzle that is the unfolding history of Los Angeles—a history that all of us get to claim.

PS: I’ve not yet read Connie’s book (as I just got it Monday night) but, like the rest, I’m looking forward to doing so. I’ll report back to you here when I do.

NOTE: I’LL HAVE MUCH NEWSIER NEWS TOMORROW, AND THEN A NEW JAILS/LASD STORY LATE IN THE WEEK.

NOTE 2: I hopelessly bollixed up the Chinatown characters when I first posted this. According to the zillion essays analyzing Robert Towne’s amazing script, Huston’s character Noah Cross plus Cross’s business partner in the film, Hollis Mulwray, collectively represented William Mulholland. (And many of us have eyed the DWP with suspicion ever since.)

Former LA Times theater critic, Laurie Winer, has ostensibly written a review of James O’Shea’s book, The Deal From Hell: How Moguls and Wall Street Plundered Great American Newspapers, in which he chronicles real estate tycoon Sam Zell’s raping and pillaging of the Tribune Corp. in general and of the Los Angeles Times in specific.

But really, Winer has done something that is far better and more informative than a mere review: She has recapitulated for us—in a releavingly graspable way— the catastrophe for newspapers that was/is Sam Zell, and the events leading up to his wrecking ball tenure that made Zell’s takeover possible. Into all of this, Winer has interwoven her own front row remembrances and observations. We get to feel what it was like to watch the madness close up.

Winer’s essay/review appears in the Los Angeles Review of Books. For any of us who care about journalism, it’s a BIG must read.

Here’s an emblematic clip:

…Zell addressed the staff of the Orlando Sentinel, one of the Tribune newspapers, on January 31, 2008, which was the first time most of the journalists in the Tribune family got to see the man himself. As part of a whistle-stop tour of his new properties, Zell took visible delight in showing off his iconoclastic style to a new industry that, before now, had not had the pleasure. He was primed and ready for his close-up. He took the stage and stood at a lectern, a leprechaun-sized, wizened, bald man with a white goatee and gravelly voice.

According to Zell, “the eleventh commandment is Thou shalt not take oneself seriously.” His public posture was combative but laced with impish mischief; the gleam in his eye suggested he enjoyed being challenged. This may have misled Orlando Sentinel photographer Sara Fajardo, or perhaps she had seen the new employee handbook rewritten on orders of Zell. One of its entries read: “Question authority and push back if you do not like the answer. You will earn respect, and not get into trouble for asking tough questions.”

In any event, there Zell is in Orlando, telling his staff about the necessity of making money, how that would be our top priority going forward. Fajardo did what none of us attempted with Mark Willes; she stood up and asked her new boss about his view on “the role journalism plays in the community, because we’re not the Pennysaver, we’re a newspaper.” Zell placed both hands on the podium and bent his elbows, as if he wanted to push it forward. “I want to make enough money so that I can afford you,” he said, his irritation mounting. “It’s really that simple. You need to in effect help me by being a journalist that focuses on what our readers want and that therefore generates more revenue.” Fajardo immediately broke in, “But what readers want are puppy dogs,” she said, as the courage drains from her voice. “We also need to inform the community.” Zell cut her off, his right hand gesticulating forcefully. “I’m sorry but you’re giving me the classic, what I would call, journalistic arrogance, by deciding that puppies don’t count. … What I’m interested in is how can we generate additional interest in our products and additional revenue so we can make our product better and better and hopefully we get to the point where our revenue is so significant that we can do puppies and Iraq. Okay?”

The audience, some of whom applauded, might have been momentarily perplexed by Zell’s concept: That, like a kid who must endure being “grounded” before he can go to parties again, a newspaper would have to sell its very soul so that, at some undetermined point in the future, it might be allowed to go back to being a newspaper again. If anyone was busy contemplating the conundrum of Zell’s argument, he might have missed the day’s dramatic high point, which occurred when Fajardo turned around to sit back down. Zell had two more words for her. They were: “Fuck you.”

Fortunately, it lives on YouTube.

I watched the video of this event over and over. What mesmerized me was the sight of a man so unprepared for his come-to-Jesus moment that he had no idea it had arrived. Where Murdoch had his ducks in place in a formation that any dictator might envy, Zell had only his anger at everyone who had ever criticized him, who had ever doubted that accumulating wealth, by itself, was proof of ethics, intelligence, or general marvelousness.

Now read the rest. Immediately, if possible.

A pile of journalist and editor types plus a gaggle of politicos gathered late Sunday afternoon to hear LA Times’ columnist/editor-at-large Jim Newton talk about his new biography, Eisenhower: The White House Years. The lit party was thrown by longtime Newton friends, former LA Times reporter (now UC Irvine law and literary journalism prof) Henry Weinstein and his wife, author and former Times staffer, Laurie Becklund.

There was a big LA Times crowd—present and former—including Steve Lopez, Barry Sieigel and wife Marti Devore, Lorenza Munoz, Times legal counsel, Karlene Goller, and more (plus a few non-LA Times journos like….well…me).

The politicos who chatted and sipped wine in the name of literature included Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky,, along with former LA Mayor Richard Riordan and right-now LA mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Antonio came late and had another event scheduled afterward so couldn’t stay too long, said his young and smart-seeming aide. But the rest of the political types were there early, and showed no signs of restlessness by the time I left.

Newton is a very good writer in general and is deeply enamored with the process of—as Weinstein put it when he introduced him—”peeling the onion” whenever he focuses his attention on a problem, question or, as in this case, the life of a U.S. president.

I’m on a fiction kick and thus I can’t tell you how much I wasn’t interested in reading a book about a former president right now, but after Newton read from his book that was released at the beginning of this month, I suddenly became convinced that Eisenhower was precisely the guy whose life I wanted to examine, forthwith.

There are many connections that make his life relevant to the moment. For example, he was truly a consensus president, a goal which Obama repeatedly aspires to achieve, but rarely reaches, even briefly. As commander-in-chief, Ike faced a list of impressively huge temptations to take Americans into battle. But, unlike our last four presidents, he avoided all of them. (Newton noted that one single American service person was killed in Ike’s two terms as president.) And there’re lots more.

Bottom line…if you’re a biography fan, take a look at Jim Newton’s new Eisenhower book. See if it calls to you.

Surprisingly, I find it calls to me.

PS: Not surprisingly, the subject of Sheriff Baca and the jails scandal surfaced in several conversations during the afternoon. More on that tomorrow—plus news of another very different LA literary event.

PPS: APOLOGIES TO SEVERAL DEAR FRIENDS FOR THE TYPOS IN THE EARLIER VERSION OF THIS STORY.

My 25-year-old techie son said it well: It hits you hard when a genius dies.

Yep.

Like many, I’m still just sort of staring in shock at my computer screen-–my Apple Macbook computer screen. I made and received calls about Steve Jobs’s death on my iPhone. The iTunes downloaded music on my iPod, is playing as I try to gather my thoughts…..

There are statements, of course, from all the tech-ish sites, some of which are below:

Statements from: Boing-Boing …… Engadget……. Apple …..Wired…Mashable….TechCrunch…

But a particularly good column comes from NY Times’ tech columnist, David Pogue.

Here is the heart of it:

(Apologies to Mr. Pogue for the fact that I excerpted a far bigger chunk than I normally would ever do. I hope, this one time under these singular circumstances, you will forgive me.)

…..the story of Steve Jobs boils down to this: Don’t go with the flow.

Steve Jobs refused to go with the flow. If he saw something that could be made better, smarter or more beautiful, nothing else mattered. Not internal politics, not economic convention, not social graces.

Apple has attained its current astonishing levels of influence and success because it’s nimble. It’s incredibly focused. It’s had stunningly few flops.

And that’s because Mr. Jobs didn’t buy into focus groups, groupthink or decision by committee. At its core, Apple existed to execute the visions in his brain. He oversaw every button, every corner, every chime. He lost sleep over the fonts in the menus, the cardboard of the packaging, the color of the power cord.
That’s just not how things are done.

Often, his laser focus flew in the face of screamingly obvious common sense. He wanted to open a chain of retail stores—after the failure of Gateway’s chain had clearly demonstrated that the concept was doomed.

He wanted to sell a smartphone that had no keyboard, when physical keys were precisely had made the BlackBerry the most popular smartphone at the time.

Over and over again, he took away our comfy blankets. He took away our floppy drives, our dial-up modems, our camcorder jacks, our non-glossy screens, our Flash, our DVD drives, our removable laptop batteries.

How could he do that? You’re supposed to add features, not take them away, Steve! That’s just not done!

(Often, I was one of the bellyachers. And often, I’d hear from Mr. Jobs. He’d call me at home, or when I was out to dinner, or when I was vacationing with my family. And he’d berate me for not seeing his bigger picture. On the other hand, sometimes he’d call to praise me for appreciating what he was going for. A CEO calling a reviewer at home? That’s just not done.)

Eventually, of course, most people realized that he was just doing that Steve Jobs thing again: being ahead of his time.

Eventually, in fact, society adopted a cycle of reaction to Apple that became so predictable, it could have been a “Saturday Night Live” skit.

Phase 1: Steve Jobs takes the stage to introduce a new product.

Phase 2: The tech bloggers savage it. (“The iPad has no mouse, no keyboard, no GPS, no USB, no card slot, no camera, no Flash!? It’s dead on arrival!”)

Phase 3: The product comes out, the public goes nuts for it, the naysayers seem to disappear into the earth.

Phase 4: The rest of the industry leaps into high gear trying to do just what Apple did.

And so yes, there are other geniuses. There are other brilliant marketers, designers and businesspeople. Maybe, once or twice in a million, those skills even coincide in the same person.

But will that person also have the vision? The name “Steve Jobs” may appear on 300 patents, but his gift wasn’t invention. It was seeing the promise in some early, clunky technology—and polishing it, refining it and simplifying it until it becomes a standard component. Like the mouse, menus, windows, the CD-ROM or Wi-Fi.

Even at Apple, is there anyone with the imagination to pluck brilliant, previously unthinkable visions out of the air—and the conviction to see them through with monomaniacal attention to detail?

Suppose there were. Suppose, by some miracle, that some kid in a garage somewhere at this moment possesses the marketing, invention, business and design skills of a Steve Jobs. What are the odds that that same person will be comfortable enough—or maybe uncomfortable enough—to swim upstream, against the currents of social, economic and technological norms, all in pursuit of an unshakable vision?

Zero. The odds are zero.

Mr. Jobs is gone. Everyone who knew him feels that sorrow. But the ripples of that loss will widen in the days, weeks and years to come: to the people in the industries he changed. To his hundreds of millions of customers. And to the billions of people touched more indirectly by the greater changes that Steve Jobs brought about, even if they’re unaware of it.

In 2005, Steve Jobs gave the commencement address to the graduating students at Stanford. He told them the secret that defined him in every action, every decision, every creation of his tragically unfinished life:

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

NOTE: Normal posting resumes tomorrow.

Some things worth reading or listening to.

This American Life has six stories that provide six narrative perspectives of what that day wrought. Today you’ll have to find it on the radio. But tomorrow, Monday, a podcast will be available for download. Whatever the case, don’t miss listening.

TAL also has links to some of their other 9/11 stories.

This NY Times op ed by Jim Dyer is one of the day’s must reads: In Love With Death: Years of grieving and war. But recall, too, the hour of human decency.

The Fire This Time by Reza Aslan in the Los Angeles Review of Books looks at the long-term affect of September 11, 2001, on America, and on the Arab world. I was going to post a clip here, but I’d be doing Reza’s essay a disservice. It’s too good to present piecemeal. Just read it.

This week’s Talk of the Town in the New Yorker magazine is devoted to 9/11 memories and musings by various writers. They are all good, but best when read in a string, for their cumulative weight. I especially recommend the stories by Zadie Smith, Edward Conlon, who was a NYPD officer at the time, Jonathan Safran Foer and Edwidge Danticat (none of which, thankfully, are stuck behind the NYer paywall, for those of you who don’t subscribe.

LA HAS A 9/11 COMMEMORATION EVENT AT USC’S BOVARD AUDITORIUM

The mayor and other dignitaries came, as did approximately 1000 students. (My former Annenberg student Josh Woo shot most of the video.)

Neon Tommy reports on the interfaith commemoration at City Hall.

By the way, the original New Yorker cover above is by Art Spiegelman, and to me is still the only magazine cover that could even vaguely suggest the emotional magnitude of what occurred. Simply representational photographs couldn’t even touch it, which is why art matters. (The 10th anniversary cover is by Francoise Mouly.)

For the NYFD firefighters and the NYPD officers and who died that day.…Your heroism still stuns.

“It was dark, too dark to see, you held me in the light you gave
You lay your hand on me
Then walked into the darkness of your smoky grave
Somewhere up the stairs into the fire
Somewhere up the stairs into the fire
I need your kiss, but love and duty called you someplace higher
Somewhere up the stairs into the fire…

May your strength give us strength
May your faith give us faith
May your hope give us hope
May your love give us love”
–Bruce Springsteen, “Into the Fire”