States could also exploit the threat from the living dead to acquire new territory, squelch irredentist movements, settle old scores, or subdue enduring rivals. The People’s Republic of China could use the zombie threat to justify an occupation of Taiwan. Russia could use the same excuse to justify intervention in its near abroad. The United States would not be immune from the temptation to exploit the zombie threat as a strategic opportunity. How large would the army of the Cuban undead need to be to justify the deployment of the 82nd Airborne?

And maybe Kirkland House knows something the rest of us don’t…

Major universities have developed mock contingency plans for a zombie outbreak, and an increasing number of college students have been found to be playing “Humans vs. Zombies” on their campuses, whether to relieve stress or prepare for the invasion of the undead.

Can someone go to Drew Faust’s office hours and ask if we have a zombie preparedness plan? If not, we’d better convene a task force immediately. I’d gladly serve.

Meanwhile, Android is already outselling Apple, according to market researcher NPD…My sense is that today’s Apple event marks an important tipping point—the point where Android starts to surge past Apple the way Windows surged past Apple in personal computers back in the 1990s.

The media loves conflict, and nothing could be better than finding the mythical “iPhone killer” or seeing Steve Jobs fail spectacularly. And now, we have an exciting narrative for the tech press: a great powers war between Apple and Google for the hearts and minds of smartphone users. But I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that Daniel Lyons is totally wrong. Market share is indicative of nothing. Ever heard of Symbian? Well, Symbian by Nokia owns about 44% of the global smartphone market (by 2010 Q1 shipments), with Apple clocking in at 15% and Android at 10%. But, volume does not equate to success, especially for Apple. Steve Jobs would never make the devil’s bargain of cheapness for market share—the strategy of PC makers for some time (Dell). That’s part of the reason Apple struggled in the 1990s.

Steve Jobs truly cares about only one thing: creating amazing experiences. It’s not about this feature or that feature. It’s about creating something that people want and feel an emotional bond with. You might even say people treat their smartphones like their politicians. Policy and features be damned, we want things (and politicos) we can love. The tech press is filled with number-obsessed nerds (like the political press) who think that consumers choose based on obscure features. But, normal consumers don’t care what kind of processor goes into a phone or whether the phone’s software is open source. They want something that works, that is easy to use, and that makes them feel good.  That’s Apple’s strength and something Google can never beat Jobs at. Sentiments like this couldn’t be more wrong:

Also, a lot of what Apple is focusing on in the new phone seems to be kind of cosmetic. (I wanted to say “foofy,” but I guess that’s not an actual word.)…He showed off a new gyroscope that will let you play cool games, which is fine, except I’m a grown man and don’t really sit around playing games on my phone.

People love “foofy.” People gawk at the iPhone’s design and at the extremely sharp text in iPhone 4. We want to be wow’ed. Who cares what an OLED screen is or how IMAP is implemented? Grown men and women do play games on their iPhones as they sit on the train or bus. The tech press simply can’t get the average user, how they actually use and connect with their technology. Users don’t judge phones on feature lists, but on feel and everyday use; they don’t think about using phones, they use them. That’s the world that Apple excels in and the world that the tech press just can’t really get.

Icing is the practice whereby a prankster ambushes his or her victim with a Smirnoff Ice, typically by hiding it someplace the victim is likely to stumble upon it. The victim must then drop to one knee and immediately drink the entire malt beverage, during which time the prankster usually takes photos or videos of the icing-in-progress. This prank began at Southern college fraternities, which is why anyone involved in an icing is usually referred to as a “bro.”

The Wire goes on to recommend (sarcastically, I really hope) that Congressmen should start icing one another. As a college student, I am qualified to proclaim this trend as phenomenally dumb. The “meme” deserves not another inch of writing, even ceaseless, unforgiving mocking. It is idiotic beyond criticism. At this point, I can only apologize to you for having sullied your mind with such painful inanity. Oh, and don’t forget to read this 1,300 word Fortune report on it.

PS. Did I mention Goldman Sachs traders are icing one another?

I just finished watching Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks’ The Pacific, an HBO miniseries following a group of marines in WWII. And it was truly epic. Melodramatic and overwrought maybe, but the war in the Pacific was no jungle romp. As The Pacific vividly shows, it was unimaginably gruesome, traumatic, and relentless. The marines battled the unyielding and suicidal Japanese on malaria-infested, rain-ridden islands for months at a time. In one scene, a marine idly tossed rocks into a Japanese soldier’s open head, soupy with blood.

Yet, for all its cringe-inducing visual effects and messages of heroism, love, and friendship, I came away from The Pacific with just one feeling: the overwhelming pang of generational inadequacy. In the first episode, a marine at Guadalcanal mentions that his birthday had just passed. It was his 18th.

I finally understood the generational existential crisis. As A.O. Scott wrote recently (about Milo Burke’s novel “The Ask”) in the New York Times,

“Maybe not the glory of rushing a Nazi foxhole, or braving municipal billy bats to stop a war in Indochina,” he notes, trying to get a fix on what exactly he and his ilk achieved in their heroic youth, “but the privileged of our generation did what they could, like the rest of us.”

It’s hard to measure up to a generation that gave everything to defend the free world. It’s hard to live up to the fact that in 1945, some of us would have been at Okinawa; yet, here we are lounging around, playing Xbox and watching Lost. It is nothing short of inadequacy, a generational poverty of accomplishment.The Greatest Generation’s successors struggled through Korea, Vietnam, and the Cold War. But, we didn’t save the world. We didn’t storm Normandy or watch our friends die. We browsed Facebook. I couldn’t shake the feeling.

As I ruminated, I stumbled on the answer. Its lack of immediacy was telling. Our accomplishment is ongoing and more subtle, easy to forget, but also impossible to. This wasn’t our crisis; we aren’t old enough to have mid-life crises. After all, A.O. Scott was writing about Gen X, born in the midst of Vietnam and too young to remember or to have taken part in it. Yes, this is their crisis of inadequacy: coming of age at the end of the Soviet Union and taking full advantage of the Clintonian “end of history” and Pax Americana. But we millenials—Generation Y, whatever—didn’t have that luxury. Peace and economic expansion collapsed suddenly, in front of our eyes. Peggy Noonan, rather perceptively, caught on:

I’ve been thinking about those who were children on 9/11, not little ones who were shielded but those who were 10 and 12, old enough to understand that something dreadful had happened but young enough still to be in childhood…Nine-eleven, he felt, changed everything for his generation. “It completely destroyed our sense of invincibility—maybe that’s not the right word. I would say it made everything real to a 12-year-old. It showed the world could be a dangerous place when for my generation that was never the case. My generation had no Soviet Union, no war against fascism, we never had any threats. I was born when the Berlin Wall came down. It destroyed the sense of carefree innocence that we had.”

We have our own war; it is not an existential one, but it is important and unlike any before. We live our daily lives, but we are at war everywhere at all times. The frontline is in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also Times Square and Heathrow. It is less striking, less brutal, less sweeping, but more complicated and more nuanced. There are no islands to invade, but our enemies are everywhere. Gen X can have a crisis of confidence, but we should never let that feeling creep up. Our generation has its own heroes and its own fight:

He remembered after 9/11 those who rose up to fight terrorism. Even as a child he was moved by them. There are always in history so many such people, he said. It is always the great reason for hope.

The miniseries of our generation won’t lend itself to great television, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t an epic to be told.

I won’t go on about the nomination process, which has been covered to death. But, I just wanted to point out this particularly conspiratorial, but savvy, analysis at Above the Law about Deputy Principal Counsel (and Harvard law professor, again) Dan Meltzer:

Also on Friday, Daniel Meltzer resigned as deputy principal counsel, to return to his post as a professor at Harvard Law School. What does this mean?

“Meltzer is out — meaning he didn’t get his way,” a source told us. “Expect an announcement Monday that [the nominee will be] Kagan.”

Hold on a sec. Dan Meltzer was on the Harvard Law faculty before joining the White House counsel’s office. Shouldn’t he be playing for Team Kagan?

Actually, no. Meltzer has been trying to sink Kagan throughout the entire process. Why? Because of a grudge dating back to their days in Cambridge. He threw his hat into the ring for the Harvard Law School deanship at the same time as Kagan, but lost out to her — and has never forgiven Kagan for beating him out for the post.

Now Meltzer is headed back to Harvard — where someday he might become dean, perhaps after Martha Minow finishes out her term. With Kagan out of the picture, after her confirmation to a life-tenured position on the Supreme Court, he won’t have to worry about her pesky meddling!

They further note that Meltzer played a key role in preparing Justice Sotomayor for confirmation, something he presumably wasn’t particularly excited about doing with his old rival…See, Harvard administrative politics is everywhere—even at the highest court in the land! And we thought faculty meetings were boring.

The fight bears watching for a few reasons. This is New York, a crucible of city journalism, a place that has seen newspaper wars for almost three centuries. At one time or another, the city has hosted over 20 newspapers, but this time around, it is not a couple of scrappy tabloids in the fray, but broadsheet behemoths with ambitions to match.

I haven’t seen the WSJ NY edition, but I’d like to. For all the wailing about the death of print, you have to give credit to the one man who’s betting on expanding print: Rupert Murdoch. It certainly makes for a striking contrast with Katherine Weymouth, Washington Post publisher, who visited Harvard recently. She spoke as though her job were to bail out a sinking ship (made of newspaper). Mr. Murdoch, dumping $30 million into a New York daily, well, he’s full speed ahead on the Titanic.

Or is he? Maybe the economics do work out. The Times’ greatest costs are its expensive national and foreign bureaus. Since the WSJ already faces these big fixed costs, creating a New York team should be relatively cheap. Here, then, is an affordable way to tap into a the largest local advertising market in America. Then again, maybe Murdoch just wants to get into a fight with the New York Times. Either way, things are heating up in the ink on dead trees market once more…

Amid his distracting asides and Bono-isms, Bono hits all the right points. The Mo Ibrahim prize is probably one of the most innovative prizes ever created. Designed to incentivize good African leaders to step down peacefully and without looting their countries, it gives $5 million USD over 10 years and $200,000 every year after that to its laureates. And its laureates have been excellent choices (well, all two of them), the Presidents of Botswana and Mozambique, two African success stories to date. Last year, the prize was awarded to no one.

The Ibrahim prize is a sign of the slow shift in strategy for Africa. As the failed World Bank/IMF structural adjustment policies of decades past recede into the past, a new view on helping Africa has emerged, Bono pins it down: “Because most Africans we met seemed to feel the pressing need for new kinds of partnerships, not just among governments, but among citizens, businesses, the rest of us. I sense the end of the usual donor-recipient relationship.” There’s life out there besides massive government aid transfers and conditionality. We live in an aid landscape of the Grameen Bank, cellphone e-commerce, and Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Randomized trials and micro-projects are the name of the game, trying everything and seeing what sticks.

This is the era of smart aid. To Bono again, “Not the old, dumb, only-game-in-town aid — smart aid that aims to put itself out of business in a generation or two. “Make aid history” is the objective.” Yes, aid creates horrible incentives at home and abroad, but we still need it. Bono? “It’s crucial, if you have H.I.V. and are fighting for your life, or if you are a mother wondering why you can’t protect your child against killers with unpronounceable names or if you are a farmer who knows that new seed varietals will mean you have produce that you can take to market in drought or flood.”

So, we still don’t have the answers to create growth anywhere, but where old aid was shouting out answers, at least smart aid is guesstimating.

Photo credit: blvesboy on Flickr

Rahm Emanuel

New York Times Magazine, I know you’ve probably been working on this magnum opus on Rahm Emanuel for weeks, but I feel like this take from the New Republic was more than enough.

Oh, and this. And this. But, yes, I’m a sucker and read all of them anyway.

PS. And this.

Photo credit: spdpurtill’s flickr.

Professor Hazlett estimates that selling off this spectrum could raise at least $100 billion for the government and, more important, create roughly $1 trillion worth of value to users of the resulting services. Those services would include ultrahigh-speed wireless Internet access (including access for schools, of course) much improved cellphone coverage and fewer ugly cell towers. And they would include other new things we can’t imagine any more than we could have imagined an iPhone just 10 years ago.

The last time we held an auction for 17 channels, it went for $20 billion (about the annual federal tax revenue from South Carolina), with the juiciest chunk going to Verizon for $5 billion. Few people know about it, but this is an extremely expensive high-stakes game for the private sector and a lucrative one for the federal government. Acquiring a new band of spectrum can open the door to new wireless services and faster data, allowing a company to leapfrog competitors. The last auction turned into a game of brinksmanship between the telecoms and Google. At the end of the day, Google had offered a minimum bid of $4.6 billion, and Verizon sued the FCC to block Google’s proposed “open access” terms for the sale. Google won the court case, and Verizon won the auction.

The pundits and political classes love jousting over their pet political causes, but there are far more important things in the air than Carly Fiorina’s demon sheep ad. The outcome and rules of wireless auctions may sound esoteric, but how they play out is vital for the technological progress and innovation that the internet age promises. Not only can more spectrum availability open the door to more and better internet access, but $100 billion is more than a drop in the bucket for the federal budget. This proposition is, as Thomas Friedman loves saying, not just win-win, but win-win-win-win. Upset that your iPhone keeps dropping calls, that you can’t use wifi on your laptop everywhere you go? Or more importantly, why do rural schools still have poor internet access, and why can’t doctors do surgery in high definition across the country via robot? Well, the answer lies in wireless auctions.

Photo Credit: Ian Miller on Flickr.