Every time I read a novel by Emily St. John Mandel, I start thinking about what I need to have with me (which should all fit in a largish messenger bag) for a one-way trip to a destination unknown, and what I can leave behind. That thought experiment never ends well, for the real work of deciding what to carry and what to leave behind is about the memories that attach to things. It gets called baggage for a reason, after all. In this way, Mandel�s new novel, The Lola Quartet is a variation on a theme. Like her first, Last Night In Montreal, this book is about the consequences of running away with your child and your love for her � but this time scored for orchestra instead of chamber music.

The Lola Quartet was a high school jazz ensemble, formed by students at an arts-oriented magnet school to earn extra credit that won awards but broke up after high school. The Lola Quartet is the story of the members: Gavin, the trumpet player who moves to New York to become a reporter, only to be fired for fabricating his news stories; Daniel the bassist who would wind up a detective in his home town; Jack the overly talented saxophonist who to music school to study jazz piano only to drop out in his second semester; Sasha the drummer who would wind up living down her gambling addiction waiting tables at an all-night diner. Their unexpected ten-year reunion comes thanks to Anna, Sasha�s half-sister and Gavin�s then girlfriend, who still lived in terror after going on the run with her newborn daughter Chloe and $120,000 stolen from a meth dealer in Utah.

After the collapse of his journalism career, Gavin works for his sister�s real estate business, offering foreclosure victims cash for keys. Where The Singer�s Gun was her 9/11 novel, The Lola Quartet is Mandel�s story of the subprime meltdown. The first of Gavin�s fabrications is the name of a woman in Sebastian Florida, a small town north of Miami that has been engulfed the suburbs, about the encroachment of wild former pets like iguanas and anacondas who told him, �We thought we were coming closer to nature, but all along nature was creeping closer to us.� The second story was about disgraced financier Jonathan Alkaitis, a stand-in for Bernie Madoff. �It�s a nightmare that we can�t wake up from.� While the mortgage backed securities were traded in New York, the exurbs of Florida were some of the hardest hit by the housing crash. The common thread that binds the Ponzi scheme and the attempt to build a better life by building farther into the suburbs is wanting something and making it so by wish. Our world is made by our actions, but it is solipsism to believe we can dictate the consequences. Faced with real life, these wishes turn into mere lies.

Gavin, with his 1973 Yashica and perfect lens, fedora, &c., is guilty of this basic failure to meet the world on its own terms. Indeed, the fabrications in his newspaper stories didn�t so much cause his downfall as hasten it by a few months � even his editor would be laid off within a couple of months of his firing. The lesson that he learns is that nostalgia � an incurable longing for time lost � is not a way of connecting with a purer, more authentic self that has been eroded away by a relentless present, but a sort of pathology that prevents us from authentically living the one life that it is possible to live.

What brings Gavin crashing back to Earth is the discovery that he fathered a child with his high school girlfriend before he left for college. Once he returns to Florida, he decides to find his daughter. This turns out to be more difficult than he imagined, so he becomes his own private detective. He discovers far too late that things have been in motion for ten years, none of which he can retrieve. He gets himself shot. He learns that there was nothing he can do now and nothing he could ever have done to change things with his daughter. When he does find Anna, she displays a hard-boiledness he can�t stomach. Anna tells him,

After I left Utah that time, when I was seventeen. I ran and hid for years, and I just couldn�t do it again. You don�t know what it�s like. Always looking over your shoulder, looking out for strange cars, the way all windows have eyes. This time there wouldn�t have been any money, Gavin, this time we would�ve been in hiding forever, Chloe and I. New names, no friends, no more family, no money, and this time I�d be with a child who was old enough to understand and old enough to give us away, and the people we left behind would be in danger, like I said. There wasn�t a choice.

And that thought makes it much harder to want to disappear to destination unknown, because it would take the sort of desperation that nobody could want. But that�s the fun of Mandel�s novels, you get the romance of disappearing without the desperation. Well, that and the breathlessly good prose.

If a weaker bank than JP Morgan had a $2B loss and failed, “we” do not have to step in. The right thing to do would be to let it fail, and then deal with the downstream consequences, like making FDIC payments to depositors. Stop saving banks. If they want to take risks and twist in the wind, let them. We would be all the better for having banks that aren’t counting on a rescue.

One theme of the internet commentariat, such as in this Slate piece, is that Amazon is the bad guy, and will destroy the publishers.

So what? Whatever happened to the fear (from just a couple of years ago) that the publishers were becoming too concentrated, and firms like Random House and Penguin would (together with Barnes and Noble) completely control what’s available to be read? And what about Apple? Remember when Apple ate the lunch of the music labels? But Apple is the savior of the music labels. Natch.

(My paranoid side is telling me that it’s the Cult of Steve Jobs at it again, somehow, but my paranoid side says that about everything.)

I’m not really worried because big publishing doesn’t really publish what I really want to read anyway. Mostly, they’re interested in creating the latest blockbuster, even if it’s a literary blockbuster. They give Jonathan Safran Foer gobs and gobs of money because. Um. Because I don’t know why. And we’re supposed to feel sorry for them?

Go to an independent bookstore, like 57th Street Books. Buy a book from an independent publisher, like Unbridled. Like maybe one buy some author with (gasp!) a day job, like Emily St. John Mandel. Her latest? The Lola Quartet, that one’s a real treat.

I wonder if this is worthwhile pursuing as a philosophy of language inquiry. ‘Like’ isn’t transitive. This is something that people who think about modeling know. That podcast gives the example that a picture of a bird looks like birds, but birds do not look like the drawing.

And of course, love is like a bottle of gin, but a bottle of gin is not like love.

So, in this Atlantic piece, Marty Nemko opposes doubling the price of gas because driving is a freedom. Well. I guess, sort of. But then he goes on to propose that in order to curb emissions, we should increase CAFE to 100 mpg.

So in other words, why achieve a policy goal with a tax that incentivizes when nonsensical direct regulation will do the job? What nonsense.

Oh, and if you think it’s nonsensical for a libertarian to espouse doubling the price of gas, it’s not. I just happen to think that the costs of driving should be borne by drivers. It’s a bedrock libertarian principle, that one shouldn’t impose one’s costs onto others. And within the price of driving, I wish to include the price of policing the Middle East.

I have been thinking quite a lot lately about the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and every time I think about it, I can’t help but think about how stupid the individual mandate is. Unfortunately, the stupidity of the thing has nothing to do with the unconstitutionality of it.

So here is my go at why I think it’s just stupid. The problem with Obamacare is that it’s basically Romneycare. And what’s wrong with Romneycare is what’s wrong with all big-government Republican policies. It privatizes the gains, and socializes the losses. Like it was before, only more so.

First, individual mandate will not make insurance more affordable for people either can’t afford insurance or choose not to buy insurance. It will either stay the same, or it will go up to whatever the insurance company thinks your tax under the penalty clause would be. (Yes, I know, it’s not a tax. But it’s not a penalty either. Context.) Do I have numbers to back me up on this one? No. But anyone who seriously believes that the price of individual coverage will go down, well, I have this bridge, see…

Second, I don’t think the scary story about how young and healthy people will stop buying insurance until they get sick passing on the cost of health care to those who actually have to buy it. If the medical bankruptcies by people who are insured tells us anything (and remember, a majority of medically caused bankruptcies are by the insured), the vast majority of health plans don’t cover nearly enough anyway. Nor will the minimum coverage plans insurance companies will be required to make available. So no matter what, they’ll really just be imposing costs on the rest of us by using hospital services they can’t afford anyway, just like they do today. Or else minimum coverage will cost so much that the government (we) will wind up paying for it anyway. In other words, even if the free rider problem of that the individual mandate is meant to solve gets solved, aggregate health care costs will remain sky high. The underlying problem doesn’t get fixed.

Here is my order of preferences. 1. deregulated health insurance, without the no-gross-income for employer provided insurance rule, 2. true socialized medicine, 3. what we had before, 4. Romney/Obamacare.

Is it constitutional? Stay tuned.

In the latest issue of Barista Magazine, Jesse Raub, the newly minted Wholesale Educator at Intelligentsia, offered some thoughts on high volume brew to order. The gist of the article is that, with enough dedication and practice, you can offer a variety of brew to order options as your only brewed coffee choices. A lot of it comes down to efficient workflow, and efficient communication between the register and the barista. Well, ok, but can you make it taste good?

Ok, granted, Jesse is probably a more talented syphonista than I am. And he’s almost certainly a more talented V60ist than I am. That would be true when we can give our full attention to each brew one cup at a time – as in truly full attention, no moving onto the next brew, no expediting to do. And a well crafted cup of syphon or V60 will bring out more nuance than an equally well-dialed brew from a batch brewer like a Fetco. But when a barista is making two cups of coffee at one time, all while sorting out a line of orders, the quality will drop, and hard. V60, the default brew method at Intelligentsia is especially touchy. Without near-virtuoso skill, the cup will be severely underextracted like whoa. It’s hard enough done one by one, but imagine doing two at a time, one in each hand! (Yes, I’ve tasted it. Intelly V60s taste reliably underextracted like whoa).

And yes, I know, batch-brewed coffee can taste awful. But batch-brewed coffee that tastes awful is usually the result of wrong ratios, bad programming, inattention and neglect. How often do old pots of coffee get dumped? (It’d better be every 20 minutes) How often do the shuttles get rinsed? (It’d better be between each brew cycle) How often are the shuttles cleaned with detergent? (It’d better be daily or close) Scrubbed out with green scrubbies? (weekly). What temperature is your brewer set at? Are you using the right amount of preinfusion and bypass? Do you have that new magnetic dispersion guide on your Fetco? If you answered no to any of those questions, maybe that should be fixed before you throw away the Fetco with the putrid coffee?

It’s not as if I’m against slow coffee. Far from it, nothing makes me happy like a good cup of coffee that was made just for me. It’s why I fell in love with espresso in the first place. The problem is when that love becomes unyielding dogma. There is a place for a decent cup of coffee you can get off a tap, in a hurry, in the morning. And it’s not just that sometimes coffee should be fast. I’ll bet you anything that a good cup of Fetco coffee from a shop that does it right tastes better than even the best V60ist pouring two-handed. If you want high volume coffee, make it using the best high volume methods.

If anything, a Fetco is the best thing to happen to a brew-to-order program. Having a very good cup of coffee available at the ready frees your baristas to slow down on their coffee to order, and make a truly excellent cup. The brew to order methods also frees the barista to start deep cleaning the Fetco before close and take care of whatever orders for coffee trickle in with a dripper. There’s a real synergy to be captured by an enterprising coffeeshop.

2010 was such a strange year. I really don’t know what to make of it. I was a barista trainer for a while, I did odd jobs at a coffeeshop for a some time, I drove an old CTA bus for a week across Iowa, I went to law school for the rest of it. See? Strange. So very much was unexpected and new, and so much of it was just how it should have turned out. As much as everything has changed, 2010 may have been the first year where I have felt comfortable in my skin. It is strange to say, because everything up until law school, I knew to be temporary, and ever since law school, I have done nothing but miss everything that has come before. Still, I have never felt more at ease putting one foot in front of the other, and going on.

2010 was the first year I was really good with bikes, too. It helps that it was the first winter I didn’t really stop riding. It was the first time i ever raced (well, if Goldsprints counts as racing). I rode my first two centuries. And it was the first year I really started getting good at working on bikes. I got a road bike.

So. 2011.

I should get better at law school. I should learn to fix everything on my bikes by myself, and maybe race. I should take photographs again. That’s a manageable set of resolutions, so here is one rather awful, unhelpful, possibly unachievable resolution: get down to a riding weight of 138.

So the latest shop in Chicago is Andy Atkinson’s Dark Cloud, at 2122 N Halsted, in Lincoln Park near DePaul University. As you might gather from their equipment (A Slayer, a Robur-E and an Anfim Super Caimano, V60s, and syphons), they are up to some innovative things. They have a solid core of baristas with Andy and Matt and Dex, and I expect some great things.

What really impresses me about the place is how much attention gets paid to the smallest details. There isn’t a roaster underwriting the equipment, so they select a new, seasonal, lineup of coffees from roasters around the country every few weeks. Expect a lot of Intelligentsia, Metropolis and Alterra in summer and winter when ground shipping would treat roasted coffee poorly, and more adventurous selections from the coasts in the spring and fall. They milk from Kilgus, a family farm in central Illinois, which is the best milk to use with coffee that I have ever tasted. They do everything over a scale whenever possible. And they make all coffee to order.

Of course, this would all be meaningless if the coffee didn’t taste good. And the coffee tastes good. It should only get better.

Hi there blog audience. Sorry about neglecting you all semester, I really should write more. But anyway, I came across this neat cooking blog, Hilah Cooking, and thought I might share it. It’s witty, and you have to admire a cook who calls for an egg nog thick enough to stand a spoon in. I used to make egg nog from scratch, but stopped when I discovered that Oberweis is pretty good, and if I drank a glass or two and replaced the rest with bourbon, I could get my whole family trashed out of their minds. Fun stuff.