These numbers look like huge under-estimates to me. The obvious interpretation is that much online crime is never reported to the FBI. Interesting though that women fall for fake romance scams, while men lose their marbles over automobiles.

Source

Louis Menand is, IMHO, the best living literary critic. Perhaps that’s because he’s the most readable. At any rate, I will read anything he writes, on any subject.

One of his gifts is that, like Hemingway, he lures the reader in at the very beginning. Here he is doing it in a recent New Yorker essay on Saul Bellow:

Herzog is the book that made Saul Bellow famous. He was forty-nine years old when it came out, in 1964. He had enjoyed critical esteem since the publication of his first novel, “Dangling Man,” in 1944, and he had won a National Book Award for “The Adventures of Augie March” in 1954. But “Herzog” turned him into a public figure, a writer of books known even to people who don’t read books—an “author.” At a ceremony honoring the success of “Herzog” at city hall in Chicago, Bellow’s home town, a reporter asked the mayor, Richard J. Daley, whether he’d read the novel. “I’ve looked into it,” Daley said.

You get enough people saying that and you have a best-seller…

See what I mean? Read on.

Many thanks to the numerous people who wrote to tell me that Maureen Dowd had mentioned me in her splendid column about Uber. She wrote:

“I know Uber has the image of an obnoxious digital robber baron, a company that plays dirty tricks and proves that convenience “makes hypocrites of us all,” as John Naughton put it in The Guardian, noting that its very name has connotations of Nietzschean superiority. (Travis Kalanick, the C.E.O., coined the word “Boob-er” to describe his greater appeal to women because of his success.)”

Actually, even if Ms Dowd hadn’t mentioned me I would have rated her column highly because she highlights one of the odder aspects of the Uber phenomenon. She was puzzled because when she tried to summon a Uber car, most of those in her immediate vicinity immediately headed in the other direction. The explanation was provided by the driver who did pick her up, namely that they had all checked her Uber “rating” and discovered that she only got 4.2 out of 5. (Drivers rate passengers as well as vice versa.) In the end, she learned how this reputation system can be gamed: before you part company with your driver you make a deal: “five for five”.

QED.