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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Timothy Noah and Marjorie Williams

the breakfast table
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from: Marjorie Williams

Trading Places

Posted Wednesday, July 15, 1998, at 4:57 PM ET

Dear Tim,

Well, I did get off to a grumpy start this morning. I have since mellowed enough to note a disturbing new trend in our correspondence: we're trading places. I'm becoming you and you're becoming me. To wit: I'm supposed to be the one who soaks up Metro/murder stories, and I hadn't even noticed the killer granny you asked about in your last e-mail. I'm supposed to lean toward micro, while you're the macro man. I'm supposed to be the one who thinks everything in public life can be explained by plumbing private behavior. (This observation concerns our debate, of yesterday, about Lawrence Kudlow's cocaine habit), while you're the policy guy. I'm supposed to be the one with endless tolerance for the kind of "Lifestyle" feature I dumped on this morning and you praised.

What's happening here? I know all marriages induce this sort of swapping sometimes; but I'm starting to think that Breakfast Table performs a very exaggerated version of this phenomenon. (Sort of like ontogeny recapitulating phylogeny.*) My friend Sally has rightly rapped my knuckles, for example, for ignoring here the amazing story of Sante and Kenneth Kimes, the mother and son team who are suspected of doing away with Manhattan dowager Irene Silverman. But when I jumped into yesterday's full-page yarn about them in the New York Times, I felt exhausted by the weight of it--the bad deeds, the mother's horrible suffocation of the son. (Though the story, I did notice, had one of the great ledes: "Wherever she went, flaunting her bad wigs and diamonds and hostile charm, something seemed to disappear...") Anyway, I'd like to go back to the way we were, please: it was much more fun being me.

Finally made it to the business section of the Post, where there's a really interesting story about a new company called BrainBank. Its business is to take money-saving suggestions (via the Internet) from the employees of other U.S. and Canadian companies--suggestions that have been spurned by the employees' bosses, or that the workers feel powerless to advance--and then sell those suggestions back to the employers in question for 50% of the first year's savings. (In between they research the particulars, and write up a proposal and no doubt dress it up in a fancy cover.) This is a pretty poor comment on the way businesses now communicate with their workers, say various sources in the story. And so it is. It's also a wonderful example of the way ideas accrue status according to their source. Never mind what Sam-the-forklift-operator thinks; but when a consultant suggests turning off all the lights at night, why, there's an idea worth the CEO's time. (The other thing I like about it is that BrainBank sets its fees the same way Travis McGee did in John D. MacDonald's wonderful series of McGee mysteries. Travis would agree to try to recover something that had been stolen or scammed from the victim, and then take 50% as payment, since it was money the victim would otherwise never have seen again. Though in BrainBank's case, it passes a good chunk of its fee back to the forklift operator who first e-mailed the idea.)

Also: did you notice that Crown Books finally went into Chapter 11, after an eternity of searching unsuccessfully for a buyer? Crown stores--which, in the days before Borders and Barnes & Noble Superstores, were once the state of the art in bulk book retailing--were always horribly understocked and unfriendly. Now, apparently, they're so broke that most stores have only half the stock they used to. They've got nothing left: they don't have the charm of independents or the stock of the big guys, and they don't undersell Amazon.com. With apologies to the folks who draw their paychecks there, Crown's demise is proof of justice in the market economy.

Mercilessly,

Marjorie

P.S.: My Word spelling function is baffled by both "ontogeny" and "phylogeny." Are the physical sciences really so obsolete?

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Marjorie Williams

Trading Places

Posted Wednesday, July 15, 1998, at 4:57 PM ET
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Timothy Noah writes Slate's "Chatterbox" column. Marjorie Williams is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair.
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