War Games

Along comes the NYT with this sobering tale: "A growing work force of home-office laborers and entrepreneurs, armed with computers and smartphones and wired to the hilt, are toiling under great physical and emotional stress created by the around-the-clock Internet economy that demands a constant stream of news and comment . . .

"At the same time, some are starting to wonder if something has gone very wrong. In the last few months, two among their ranks have died suddenly."

But blogger Larry Dignan of ZDNet has an interesting back story about being interviewed by the Times's Matt Richtel:

"When I talked to Matt the theme of the story was clear, but I had doubts about the premise. I played devil's advocate and outlined my day, which didn't exactly dovetail with the primary example of the guy who is in his Brooklyn studio blogging until he passes out at his computer. If that person weren't blogging my guess is he'd pass out playing Xbox or something else.

"And that brings me to my point with Matt. Yes, blogging is stressful. Yes, it can be insane. But is it any worse than being a corporate lawyer? How many of those folks dropped in the last six months? How about mortgage brokers? Hedge fund traders? FBI agents? Any job where you gnash your teeth together? We write for a living, yap all day and don't have to wear suits. You could do worse than blogging."

Plus, Dignan explained that he works out every morning before blogging. "Clearly, this answer wasn't going to work for Matt's story." Dignan didn't make the cut.

Slate's Tim Noah also oozes skepticism:

"The symptoms of toxic blogging, Richtel informs the concerned reader, include 'sleep disorders,' 'exhaustion,' and--heads I win, tails you lose--'weight loss or gain.' The number affected is 'unclear,' but 'surely several thousand and maybe even tens of thousands." Richtel, a salaried employee at the Times, is particularly flummoxed that bloggers are often paid based on how much they write and whether anyone reads them. . . A less lurid but more accurate comparison would be to freelance writing, an occupation I've held from time to time. It is not, I promise you, a hazardous occupation, unless you report from a war zone . . .

Richtel strongly implies that bloggers drop dead because they work in their apartments or houses all day and never get out. Never mind that Russell Shaw, a 60-year-old tech blogger who provides 50 percent of Richtel's evidence that blogging kills, died while reporting on-scene at a conference 3,000 miles from his home and that "it's not clear what role stress played in his death."

I don't know how many of you are watching the excellent HBO series "John Adams," but I found an example of fictionalizing in the latest episode. It's 1796, and Adams has just learned that he won enough electoral votes to become the nation's second president. After addressing his fellow members of Congress, he passes George Washington, who says: "I am fairly out and you are fairly in. See which of us will be the happiest!"

I'd heard that line before, and assumed it was accurate. But a check of Wikipedia reveals that Adams wrote to his wife Abigail: "A solemn scene it was indeed . . . Methought I heard him think, 'Ay! I am fairly out and you are fairly in! See which of us will be the happiest!' "

So it was history as rendered by John Adams's imagination.