David Einhorn.

When David Einhorn, the poker-playing hedge fund superstar, decides to publicly take on a company whose stock he owns (or has shorted), he usually gets results. Once you establish a reputation for astute calls on Wall Street—Mr. Einhorn’s most famous being his bearish call on Lehman in the spring of 2008—the lemmings can’t help but follow. His latest target: Apple.

Mr. Einhorn’s Greenlight Capital owns more than $600 million worth of Apple, but like others, he thinks the company needs to shake free of a months-long rut. To that end, Mr. Einhorn made clear last week his wish that the company become more flexible in how it thinks about returning cash to shareholders. It’s no small matter, considering that Apple has $137 billion of the stuff sitting on its books, and he sued the company over a possible violation of securities laws last week to make his point. The stock rallied 3 percent on Thursday as a result.

The question of whether or not Apple should do as Mr. Einhorn wishes is an interesting one. On the one hand, Apple has never kowtowed to the needs or wants of Wall Street. On the other, that was a legacy of Steve Jobs, and Mr. Jobs’s successor Tim Cook has to be somewhat concerned about the company’s precarious status as a stock market darling. Returning more cash to shareholders can only help in that regard. Smarty-pants commentators will of course point out that with no external financing needs to speak of, Apple need not pay any mind to Mr. Einhorn or any other institutional investor. But what of its employees? As singular as it may be, the company does have competitors. And when you’re trying to retain your people, a rising stock price beats a falling one.

My bet is that the company caves, but not in the precise way Mr. Einhorn wishes. These are proud people, after all, and there’s no way they’re going to let some guy from New York tell them what to do. But they’re also smart enough to know that $137 billion is too much, and that taking care of shareholders becomes a more nuanced challenge when growth begins to moderate.

In suing Apple, Mr. Einhorn took an issue everyone had already been talking about and put it on the front page. More interesting than the question itself is the fact that nearly every piece of coverage about it—in papers, on TV, in the blogosphere—invoked the label “activist investor” when describing Mr. Einhorn. The term, which is generally applied to hedge fund managers who buy a stake in and then urge companies into some sort of action, has never been explicitly derogatory. But the arrival of said “activism” is usually remarked upon (or typed) in a certain tone, as if someone had just farted at the dinner table.

Why? Perhaps it’s because its most effective (and self-promoting) practitioners have always been the most arrogant that Wall Street has to offer—from 1980s pioneers Carl Icahn and T. Boone Pickens to today’s most prominent, Daniel Loeb (he of the poison-pen letters to CEOs and boards) and his contemporary Bill Ackman. Mr. Einhorn is an unusual exception: he’s so self-effacing, it’s almost hard to believe he works on Wall Street at all, let alone as one of its most successful hedge fund managers.

The unspoken criticism of activist shareholders seems to be that they’re in it for themselves, that their activism is just Wall Street greed in one of its many costumes. That may have been true when it came to the old practice of greenmail, or when hedge funders end up profiting at the expense of others by exploiting companies’ capital structures to their sole advantage. But what about when it’s just another common shareholder like you and me? Such activism is great for everyone, isn’t it? If you own Apple stock in your IRA, Mr. Einhorn’s interests are aligned with yours. So why is this “activism” treated with distaste? Have the public equity markets become so disconnected from reality that no one expects the actual owners of companies to have a say in how they are run?

That’s not to say that activism is itself rare. Pershing Square’s Mr. Ackman has done a great—and captivating—job over the last few months of focusing other investors (and perhaps securities regulators) on a simple question: does multilevel marketing giant Herbalife have many—any?—customers beyond its distributors? If not, it’s a pyramid scheme. And if that is the case, Mr. Ackman’s short position in the stock will pay off big-time. Deride short-sellers all you want, but the man is just asking a question. Why the hell don’t more big investors do that?

(On the subject of Mr. Ackman, did you see the clip of him doing battle with Carl Icahn on CNBC? It’s a classic, and surely the first time I’ve ever told non-business types that a segment from the cable network is a must-see. Mr. Icahn came across as a bit of a jackass, particularly when he berated the reporter for the audacity of asking him questions, but in the end, he’s just an investor who actually tries to force companies into action. And he’s good at it. Thus, a mea culpa: in a previous column on Mr. Icahn and Netflix, I concluded that his agitation probably wouldn’t result in any movement in that stock. Shares of Netflix have, um, doubled since then. Whether or not it had anything to do with Mr. Icahn seems irrelevant at this point. Nice one, you old dog.)

Mr. Einhorn’s complaint is technical—he’s arguing that by bundling a proposal that would prohibit the company from being able to issue preferred stock without a shareholder vote with some other matters, Apple was somehow violating securities laws. But that’s the law for you—sometimes the only way into an issue is through the side door.

There are two reasons Apple’s other large institutional shareholders haven’t tried that door. One: Apple doesn’t give a shit what its shareholders want. It never has. So some investors have surely (and correctly) concluded that it wasn’t worth the effort. Two: institutional shareholders are a bunch of wimps. They don’t apply pressure on outrageous CEO pay, decry stupid mergers or acquisitions, or move for entire boards to be fired in instances of egregious failings of oversight. Most of them, in other words, are a CEO’s dream.

Shouldn’t an owner be able to ask questions about strategy or execution? Even CalPERS—the nation’s largest pension fund—which The Wall Street Journal referred to on Friday as “a loud voice on corporate governance,” isn’t really all that. It only became concerned about the Freedom Group—maker of the AR-15 Bushmaster, the favored gun of mass murderers—after  it was used to savage effect Newtown, Conn. That’s not activism. That’s covering your ass in the court of public opinion. Strangely, CalPERS supports Apple’s desire to restrict itself in the ways it can pay out cash to shareholders. Don’t ask me why.

Of course, if you don’t like what management is doing, you are free to sell your shares and take your money elsewhere. (Why anyone would ever own shares in Wall Street firms themselves, for example, which Andy Kessler described to me once as compensation schemes masquerading as publicly owned companies—“they literally exist to pay out half of their revenue as compensation”—is beyond me. But that’s a discussion for another time.)

And yet we still erupt in spasms of disbelief when activists make a ruckus. But really, people, which is more unbelievable? That some hedge fund guy has the audacity to ask a company to consider a change, or that the rest of us have come to accept the status quo? In an interview with CNBC last week, Mr. Einhorn said that when he finally got Apple CEO Tim Cook on the phone after failing to make headway with the company’s CFO, Mr. Cook told him that he hadn’t even been told about Mr. Einhorn’s concerns. Steve Jobs would be proud.

Blogger Barry Ritholtz chastised Mr. Einhorn in a post last Friday for trying to salvage a poorly timed investment in Apple stock by pushing the company to release more cash, and coined a “law of activist fund managers”—“No matter how much money a company makes for investors, they all eventually want more.” But why shouldn’t they? They own the damn thing.

Mr. Ritholtz knows how to get attention as effectively as the activists he mocks—he titled the post “The Colossal Gall of Bad Apple Investors”—and he decreed that Apple’s decision to sit on that obscene pile of cash is simply part of its genius. In his mind, Mr. Einhorn’s move is not a reasonable request from an owner of more than $600 million of stock but simply the sour grapes of a sore loser. But that’s absurd. By that reasoning, an owner of a stock that has gone up a lot before going down has no right to question management. The fact that we react with surprise when they do says more about us than it does about them.

Photo illustration by Ed Johnson.

I’m sure you heard the big news about Apple last week.

What? The bottom fell out of the company’s stock, you say? Nearly $52 a share—almost 9 percent—to $533?

That wasn’t what I was referring to. I meant to point you instead to a report from ABC News that revealed that the number of parents naming their daughters Apple jumped 15 percent in 2012, while the number who named their boys Mac went up 12 percent. So it’s official: we don’t own our Apple products or our Apple stock, my friends; they own us. They don’t just allow us to call each other anymore—they now tell us what to call each other. (Even Siri as girl’s name rose 5 percent. Eat your heart out, Suri Cruise.)

But okay, let’s talk about the stock, if that’s on your mind. And why shouldn’t it be? The company, which accounts for a remarkable 4 percent weighting in the S&P 500 index, is, as they say in the trade, a bellwether. If you don’t own it outright, you own it in an index fund or your pension fund or somewhere else. As goes Apple, so goes the national investing mood. Apple is our future! Look out below!

So Apple was bringing us down last week, an unusual occurrence for the stupendously successful company whose legendary guiding force Steve Jobs was an enthusiastic acid head. Apple customers may still be peaking, but its investors have surely begun to wonder whether they’re suddenly staring into the gaping maw of a bad trip.

Where’s the love, Wall Street? Because it was also last week that Apple CEO Tim Cook promised to bring jobs (not Jobs) back to the United States. Who does that anymore? And if Apple is our economy, and Apple makes a move to bolster our economy, shouldn’t that bode well for Apple stock? Reading the fine print, it turned out he was only talking about 200 jobs or so.

Wait, how does that even qualify as news? Oh right, it’s Apple!

Or maybe the trouble was that Mr. Cook only pledged to put a laughably paltry $100 million of the company’s own money behind the move. This from a firm with about $30 billion in cash on its balance sheet. Stop the presses! Wait, what presses? The Apple economy has destroyed the news business. There are no more presses. Go read about it on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or your iPad.

Explaining stock price movements with a simple narrative is a fool’s errand, no matter what CNBC or Bloomberg will tell you, but seeing as we’re tripping balls here, we might as well give it a shot. Why is Apple’s stock in free fall? Because the iPad mini isn’t a new product, just a smaller version of an old one. Because not enough people have bought the iPhone 5. Because the beautiful notion of Apple crushing the cable television oligopoly with an elegant interface is still a pipe dream. And because its patent war with Samsung is going the way all patent wars go, which is nowhere, and those Galaxy phones and tablets keep on selling.

It’s not that Apple isn’t still blowing the doors off, performance-wise. It’s that there’s only so much one can expect from a single company. Apple is now competing against itself, and that’s a pretty high bar to top.

Look, don’t get me wrong. I’m as much of an Apple fan as anyone. I’ve been an Apple customer since about 1981, when my parents bought me an Apple II+. I own six Apple products at the moment, and I love every single one of them. I’ve bought numerous iPads as gifts. All this in spite of the obvious disdain the company shows for its customers, whether it’s through planned obsolescence or shitty customer service (is there any customer support function more enraging than the Genius Bar?).

And what of the cult of Steve Jobs? I’m not immune to fan-boy behavior—there was a time when I would read anything anyone wrote about Bob Dylan—but the whole Steve Jobs thing seems a little, well, excessive. I don’t usually speak ill of the dead, but has there ever been a bigger credit hog than this guy? Even he seemed to believe that Apple was a one-man show, a myth that’s been proven blatantly false as the company continues to roll along just over a year after his death. (I made this point before he died, though, so consider me on the record before his premature death. RIP Steve Jobs. I really was a fan, but you’re no Bob Dylan.)

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that things have really—finally—gone too far. Fortune has a writer whose entire job seems to be to write about Apple. It would be a great job, of course, but is there really that much to say about a maker of computer hardware and software, even if it does do $150 billion in annual sales? Answer: not really, but people like to read about it. And so we write. Another scribe at Fortune called the stock a value play this week. Note to investors: there are no value plays in technology. Just ask Research in Motion. Or Microsoft. Or Dell. You’re either a growth story or you’re nothing at all.

So the open question is whether this is a growth story anymore. Some apparently believe it is not: the good people at Bespoke Investment Group pointed out last week that Apple’s 6.45 percent drop on December 5 was the first dip of more than six percent since December 2008. It’s only happened 20 times in the last decade. But after four years of hallucinatory success, here we are. When a stock’s 50-day morning average falls below its 200-day moving average, the technical analysts call it a “death cross.” And Apple is on the verge of that ominous-sounding development. In other words, more and more people are bailing on this stock. The only question now is how many more will follow.

Perhaps it’s fitting that Apple start falling victim to emotional stock market behavior, given as it’s the company’s own damned iPhones that so often put the rest of us into emotional tailspins in real life. Why hasn’t she texted me back? She must be in bed with some other guy! Why hasn’t he liked my Facebook post? Because he’s probably emailing with some girl from his office instead! Why does this map app still suck so badly? And why can’t they fix the bugs in Words With Friends?

My friend Susan recently took off to New Orleans for four days by herself. Beyond the fact that she loves the music of Rockin’ Dopsie, one of the reasons she did so was to disconnect as much as possible (if only for a long weekend) from the always-on life that Apple and its imitators have hooked us into, whether we signed up for it or not. She wasn’t that successful in her quest—I received a not-entirely-necessary text message that included a photo of a soft-shell crab po’boy mid-weekend—but she was right to at least give it a try.

Because things really have gone too far. Do any of us actually need to be staring into our iPhone screens all day, from the subway to the street corner to the elevator to the dinner table? The sane answer is no, but walk down the street in any city in this country and you will see that iPhone addiction trumps sanity, hands down. So this really is your fault, Apple. You are now a cliché—the victim of your own success—and this is the universe paying you back for your crimes against humanity. Only this time, the only thing everyone is looking at on their iPhones is your plummeting stock price.

Dermot Mulroney will be Mike Markkula (Getty Images)

Dermot Mulroney--the actor from My Best Friend's Wedding and The New Girl who is often confused for Party Monsters and American Horror Story's Dylan McDermott--has taken a role in the non-Aaron Sorkin-related Steve Jobs biopic.

Is that the one with Ashton Kutcher? We're so confused!

Vulture explains:

Mulroney will portray Mike Markkula, an early investor and eventual CEO. The New York Times in 1997 said of Markkula that Apple's "quixotic nature, and thus its strengths and its weaknesses, has much to do with Mr. Markkula's personality and his passions."

And here is Mr. Markkula, talking about the early Apple days. Can you spot a resemblance?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6LlTikerBs

Mr. Mulrooney will be playing against Mr. Kutcher, which unfortunately means that this movie's success will be riding on the strength of Mr. Mulrooney's personality and his passions (as well as that of his costars, Matthew Modine and Josh Gad). Can someone just hire Anthony Michael Hall and Noah Wyle back for one of these productions?

If they were giving out prizes for best ledes, the same issue of New York would be our top pick as well. Remember?

"The first time they had sex, during that initial exploration of unfamiliar flesh, John Ross uttered words to Ann Maloney that would sound to her like prophecy. 'You have the body of a young girl. You need a baby.'"

Chills!

Bloomberg Businessweek won the Business & Technology category for its last-minute Steve Jobs cover.  Two different Real Simple covers—both blown-up photographs of flowers—won the Health & Fitness and Women's Interest categories, while GQ's Mila Kunis with iced coffee cover won Men's Interest.

Many more accolades to come at tonight's Ellies.

Daisey, performing "The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs"

PRI's This American Life has retracted its most popular broadcast ever, "Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory," because it contains "significant fabrications," host and executive producer Ira Glass announced today. An excerpt of Mike Daisey's one-man show The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, it has been downloaded 888,000 times and streamed another 206,000.

Mr. Daisey said he regretted allowing his one-man show--a combination of "fact, memoir, and dramatic license" --to be billed as journalism.

"My mistake, the mistake I truly regret, is that I had it on your show as journalism, and it's not journalism. It's theater," he wrote.

In the play, Mr. Daisey talks about visiting the FoxConn iPhone and iPad factory in Shenzen, China. Upon hearing the segment, Marketplace China correspondent Rob Schmitz, who had already done quite a bit of reporting on Apple's supply chain, doubted the veracity of Mr. Dasiey's experiences. Mr. Schmitz tracked down Mr. Daisey's interpreter in Shenzen, and she disputed much of the material in the play.

The fabrications include one of its most dramatic moments, involving an injured factory worker operating an iPad for the first time (Mr. Daisey's iPad) with his mangled hand, and the allegation that he met many underage factory workers. (That one also snuck by this paper.)

"Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast," Mr. Glass wrote. "That doesn't excuse the fact that we never should've put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake."

When This American Life fact-checkers asked for his interpreter's contact information, Mr. Daisey said her cell phone number no longer worked and he had no way of reaching her.

"At that point, we should've killed the story," Mr. Glass said. "But other things Daisey told us about Apple's operations in China checked out, and we saw no reason to doubt him. We didn't think that he was lying to us and to audiences about the details of his story. That was a mistake."

This American Life has dedicated this weekend's program to correcting the errors in the piece, including interviews with Mr. Schmitz, Mr. Daisey and his interpreter, Cathy Lee. Which actually sounds kind of like your typical, things-are-never-what-they-seem This American Life tale of ambition, human fallibility, and the vagaries of truth and art. The show's home station, WBEZ Chicago, has also cancelled Mr. Daisey's live performance at the Chicago Theatre on April 7 and is refunding tickets.

Mr. Daisey responded on his blog, in the style of John D'Agata in The Lifespan of a Fact:

I stand by my work. My show is a theatrical piece whose goal is to create a human connection between our gorgeous devices and the brutal circumstances from which they emerge. It uses a combination of fact, memoir, and dramatic license to tell its story, and I believe it does so with integrity. Certainly, the comprehensive investigations undertaken by The New York Times and a number of labor rights groups to document conditions in electronics manufacturing would seem to bear this out.

What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism. For this reason, I regret that I allowed THIS AMERICAN LIFE to air an excerpt from my monologue. THIS AMERICAN LIFE is essentially a journalistic ­- not a theatrical ­- enterprise, and as such it operates under a different set of rules and expectations. But this is my only regret. I am proud that my work seems to have sparked a growing storm of attention and concern over the often appalling conditions under which many of the high-tech products we love so much are assembled in China.

And the show must go on, according to Cult of Mac, which got this statement of support from The Public Theater, where Agony is currently running.

In the theater, our job is to create fictions that reveal truth — that’s what a storyteller does, that’s what a dramatist does. THE AGONY AND THE ECSTASY OF STEVE JOBS reveals, as Mike’s other monologues have, human truths in story form.

In this work, Mike uses a story to frame and lead debate about an important issue in a deeply compelling way. He has illuminated how our actions affect people half-a-world away and, in doing so, has spurred action to address a troubling situation. This is a powerful work of art and exactly the kind of storytelling that The Public Theater has supported, and will continue to support in the future.

Mike is an artist, not a journalist. Nevertheless, we wish he had been more precise with us and our audiences about what was and wasn’t his personal experience in the piece.

Update: An earlier version of this post said NPR's This American Life, it's in fact PRI's.

Colin Donnell and Elizabeth Stanley in "Merrily." (Photo by Joan Marcus)

“Yesterday is done.”

Those are, appropriately enough, the first words you hear in the current version of Merrily We Roll Along, the long-troubled and oft-reworked musical with music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and a book by George Furth.

Merrily, based on a 1934 play by George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart about the slow demise of a close and fruitful friendship among three successful creative types—Franklin Shepard, a charming and ambitious composer-turned-producer; Charley Kringas, an idealistic playwright and Shepard’s collaborator; and Mary Flynn, a novelist—is most notable for being the 1981 bomb that demolished the close and fruitful collaboration between Mr. Sondheim and Harold Prince, the producer and director. It’s also notable for being told, like the play it’s based on, in reverse-chronological order, so that the three friends begin the show old and jaded and end it young and hopeful. Merrily is about looking fondly, but not too fondly, back at the past, hence the opening lyric. But the act of presenting Merrily, whenever it is newly staged, is also an argument that the production we’re seeing is an improvement on whatever less successful versions came before. Yesterday, each successive Merrily insists of its predecessors, is done.

And yet it never seems to quite escape the past.

The new production that opened at City Center Encores last week (and runs though this weekend in an atypically long Encores engagement) is directed by James Lapine, who directed and wrote the book for several of Mr. Sondheim’s classics, including Sunday in the Park With George, which won the pair a Pulitzer Prize. In 1985, he urged Messrs. Sondheim and Furth to rework Merrily for a La Jolla Playhouse production that was more successful than the original.

There’ve been innumerable other revisions since, for a run in Washington, D.C., in 1990, for Off-Broadway’s York Theatre Company in 1994 and for various iterations in Britain. All of that is combined into what’s onstage now, along with a further dash of new work from Mr. Lapine.

And indeed this is a very coherent production, crisp and polished. As has not been the case in all previous Merrilys, the story progresses—that is, regresses—smoothly, with clear and comprehensible transitions further back in time. The cast—led by Colin Donnell, charming but oddly vacant as Frank; Celia Keenan-Bolger, in a series of terrible wigs, as Mary; and an appealing low-key Lin-Manuel Miranda as Charley­—is strong. Together with the mighty Encores orchestra, directed as usual by Rob Berman, they make Mr. Sondheim’s songs—some of them truly lovely, haunting reflections on the loss of friendship—sound fantastic. There’s a bustling chorus and smooth choreography (by Dan Knechtges) that at one point even includes an involved, acrobatic number. (The once-minimal staging of Encores’ shows keeps getting more and more maximal.)

And there are some wonderful moments. Mr. Miranda, for example, performs a version of “Franklin Shepard Inc.”—Mr. Sondheim’s brilliant, one-song dissection of how a successful artist sells out—that keeps the song’s pathos, so often subdued below its comedy, bubbling right at the surface. Betsy Wolfe, as Shepard’s jilted first wife, delivers an amazing, wrenching take on her ballad of jilted love, “Not a Day Goes By.” The comic patter song “Bobby and Jackie and Jack” is a silly gem, presented with glee. There are thoughtful passages on the dilemmas of a successful artist (presaging Mr. Sondheim’s 1983 Sunday in the Park), and there are beautiful meditations on regrets and unrequited love and roads not taken (echoing his 1971 Follies).

But there are also problems that are not surmounted here, and are perhaps insurmountable.

At the most basic level, friendships fall apart; it’s what happens in life. (“Most friends fade / Or they don’t make the grade / New ones are quickly made,” the song “Old Friends” acknowledges.) So it’s a bit difficult to view as tragic the loss of a friendship between a Hollywood macher, a Pulitzer-winning playwright and a best-selling author. That’s especially true because it is never clear why these people were such great friends in the first place, beyond repeated assertions of great friendship and an occasionally invoked three-way pinky handshake.

We wait for the final scene to discover what so deeply bonded this trio together—and discover that they all merely happened to go up on their apartment roof at the same moment one night in 1957 to watch Sputnik cross the sky. (Which is a nice, if obvious, metaphor for the start of their lives, the moment when everything is changing—until Mr. Furth’s book pounds its shoe on the table: “Nothing’s ever going to be the way it was, not ever again,” he has Frank say, even more obviously. “Do you guys realize that now we are going to be able to do anything? What a time to be starting out.” Excessive exposition, it seems, is what bonded these friends together.)

After seeing Merrily last week, I reread Frank Rich’s 1981 Times review, the one that famously began with the lament that “to be a Stephen Sondheim fan is to have one’s heart broken at regular intervals.” It’s actually not as mean as it sounds—Mr. Rich was being playful in that lead, noting the accidental heartbreak caused by Mr. Sondheim’s failures but also the intentional heartbreak induced by his incisive songwriting. But I was surprised to discover that so many of his three-decade-old criticisms were the same as mine on Friday: The lack of insight into the characters and their friendship, Mr. Furth’s weak book, an unflattering-by-comparison similarity to Follies.

For all the work that’s been done, yesterday is still very much here.

Tuesday’s Times led with the news that Apple, for the first time, is instituting an outside audit of working conditions at its Chinese factories. Nowhere in the article, nor in the two investigative pieces the Times published last month detailing the appalling abuses in those factories, does the name Mike Daisey appear. That’s surprising, because Mr. Daisey, a writer and performer, has for the past several years been delivering a monologue about his investigation into the appalling abuses in those factories.

The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which first came to the Public Theater in the fall, is Mr. Daisey’s thrilling, funny, occasionally horrifying story of Apple, his own obsession with the company, and his visit to Shenzhen, China, were Apple’s products are made at the giant Foxconn factory. It is, essentially, the Times’s exposés, but it came first, and it’s entertaining. It’s back for a limited return at the Public, and you should see it.

editorial@observer.com

Illustration by Fred Harper.

“You will surely make noise when I take you deep,” texted Representative Anthony Weiner, the great BlackBerry lover, to his virtual inamorata, Lisa Weiss, the famous dissident, aviatrix and Vegas blackjack dealer.

“Yes I will,” she texted back. “I will be sore for days.”

This past year took the world deep, and the world made noise, but unlike Ms. Weiss, it had, in its soreness, no luxury of bed rest. We started with Middle Eastern uprisings and a Japanese nuclear meltdown, either of which might have filled a whole decade in some simpler era but in ours soon became back-page news. And yet, for all its careering, history could seem to stand ominously still. Writing in Vanity Fair at year’s end, Kurt Andersen rightly described the moment as creatively stagnant, perhaps exhausted, a late imperial Gaga-ing of high empire forms.

But as algorithms make consciousness a built environment, perception itself becomes in some way designed, in which sense 2011 wasn’t totally stuck in the past—it offered a new sensation-of-being: Drudge’s report on Trump’s quest for Obama’s birth certificate sends you clicking Facebook pictures of a lost love’s fat children as prelude to a brief viewing of the Muammar el-Qaddafi snuff film, Tim Tebow chatting-up Yahweh on the 50-yard line or, attention span permitting, Fukushima’s “heroes” streaming across your iPhone in frog masks and body suits, their solemn death-trudge naturally interrupted by a billing reminder from Verizon Wireless.

“It’s nice to have moments that are real,” said Ashton Kutcher to the young girl, sharing a little postcoital wisdom.

The real and the unreal, the historic, the mundane—this year they all rushed together, passing through the absurd en route to the grotesque.

Europe’s debt crisis festered until, by November, Poland—Poland—was begging Germany for salvation. The uncertainty frustrated America’s recovery; we saw the true unemployment rate at 17 percent, reports of gun-hoarding and ammunition shortages, and a national debt that in November passed the $15 trillion mark—a number that defies fathoming by minds made for counting mastodon.

In simpler times you might dose up on Prozac and just ride the shit out, but even that escape was lost. Writing in The New York Review of Books this summer, Harvard Medical School’s Marcia Angell described how the life-tenderizing antidepressants required by more and more Americans to endure their lifestyle paradise—including an estimated 500,000 toddlers on antipsychotics—didn’t beat their placebos once studies were controlled for side-effects. The vast majority of contributors to the DSM, psychiatry’s gospel, were receiving money from pharmaceutical companies, making it at best a brochure, and at worst proof that the age of fraud had compromised even our own self-understanding.

We buried two business legends, Steve Jobs and Jon Corzine. Jobs died gaunt and hollow-eyed, uttering the final words “Oh wow, Oh wow, Oh wow,” suggesting that the magic he brought into this world saw him out of it. Corzine expired somewhat less gracefully: under his leadership MF Global used $700 million in clients’ money to cover its own losses, an act of shameless, vile theft. The former Goldman CEO then went before the once-mighty U.S. Senate, which he’d joined years before as a short-lived retirement gig. “Senator, unfortunately I do not know where the money is,” said the Wall Street lion-turned-hyena, searching for impunity within stupidity.

The God-death extended into celebrity: 2010 offered the prescription-killing of Michael Jackson, tabloid pictures of Gary Coleman’s morbid intubation—the end-stage of a demystification of celebrity that started in the 1990s, and in 2011 seemed to tire even of itself, offering Charlie Sheen as a toothless maniac, and Lindsay Lohan, once compared to Marilyn Monroe, sneaking cigarette breaks from her court-ordered real-death experience changing the blood- and fluid-stained cadaver sheets at the L.A. County morgue.

We made new idols, hastily, brutally: Rebecca Black became a new, demented form of celebrity when, in the space of a few days, her unwitting tribute to the nihilistic-mundane, Friday, registered 60 million hits on YouTube. There was no ideal here, no message, no skill, just the freak-appeal of a meme sputtering out of control along with everything else. Later in the year, Penn State, which has one of America’s most storied college football programs, was revealed as a self-aware child sex ring focusing on the unprivileged and disempowered.

People sought escape in near and distant pasts.

The Tea Party longed for the moral purity of Eisenhower’s America, when gays responsibly took electroshock therapy, the military vaporized Pacific atolls as light recreation, and little black girls showed respect for German shepherds. Pot-bellied in nylon powdered wigs, they blamed Barack Hussein Obama—the obvious product of a Kenyan-Indonesian-Hawaiian-Ivy League conspiracy to do exactly what was never clear—for everyone’s troubles, demanding a return to a “pure” capitalism that had never existed, and which, as the they pushed America toward default, felt increasingly like Hobbes’s state of nature.

Occupy Wall Street evoked 1960s protest culture while failing to learn its lessons—that the police always win because they have the guns, and that the Flower Children became the Manson Family.

A tent city can be made to disappear, but Occupy’s unanswered questions won’t: How is no one in jail for the mortgage catastrophe? How can anyone preach “pure” capitalist gospel after the 2009 bailouts? How does a society that claims exceptionalism tolerate such staggering income inequality, and the awful loss of promise that is its greatest cost?

Filling the silence was a primal howl that had been building in America even during the boom. By 2006 reality shows like Top Chef and Project Runway, which promised to make you a better consumer, shared cultural space with Man vs. Wild, which taught you how to trap and eat lizards in primordial jungles, offering the fantasy of the stronger, more capable and fulfilled person you might become if magically delivered from everything around you that was making you miserable.

This year we went deeper into antisocial dreams. In 2010 The Colony succeeded as apocalyptic reality show simulating viral apocalypse. In its finale, one contestant, an increasingly paranoid carpenter, hid in a patch of tall weeds when simulated government agents offered help, assuming that their incompetence had been translated into the story line. It drew 2.3 million to the Discovery Channel at 10 o’clock on a Tuesday night, only to be outdone this year by The Walking Dead, whose pilot drew 5.7 million to AMC with a vision of apocalypse as pure cliché—the Sheriff, the Rich Elitist, the Crotchety Old Man, the Token Black Guy—all bickering before a legion of hopelessly dehumanized zombies in stunning anticipation of the Republican debates.

There were biological rites. Bin Laden’s assassination was pure death ritual, Delta Force-like spider monkeys on a primal raid. The web demanded pictures of a corpse, and when none were released people simply Photoshopped their own, mutilating an eye here, bruising flesh there, mouse clicks crushing human skull. They went viral—not exactly real or unreal, more the feeling of the one thing rubbing against the other.

The Royal Wedding was a fantasy-fertility spectacle in which Kate Middleton, the gifted AIDS researcher, finally succeeded in her long struggle to escape the upper middle class. Twenty-four million people watched, ratings so good that Kim Kardashian pretended her own marriage six months later. She drew 4.4 million viewers, made $17 million, then filed for separation, at which point a minor miracle occurred: after a decade of abuses and betrayals by elites, there was still, somehow, enough American capacity for belief that people claimed outrage at Ms. Kardashian’s disregard for the sanctity of marriage. But she was soon forgiven. And why not? With Kim’s Fairytale Wedding: A Kardashian Event, she’d let people abandon themselves for a two-part, four-hour E! stupor, and that was worth something, because in 2011, mainly, there was no escaping the present: there was way too much of it coming way too fast, conning, pleading, plotting, perverting even alpha into omega.

Wild monkeys will soon be joining the ranks of Fukushima’s heroes. The monkeys will be unleashed to test radiation in the site’s forbidden areas. One assumes they’ll be strapped with Chinese-made HD cameras, in the spirit of the day. The footage will be shaky, but that will let us know it’s real. We’ll watch as they go yapping, loping, hooting, meeting modern horror with primal awe. And maybe a few will pause in their heroism to find each other in the isotopic wreck, to mount and caress and conceive in naked assertion of life over death—

They’re up to the 92nd floor of One World Trade Center, which will replace the twin towers, whose destruction a decade ago began this whole regrettable era. They added 40 new stories this year, almost one a week. What everyone knows but won’t say is that we loved the old buildings only in the negative, as shafts of light on summer nights. They were violent in their homogeneity, in their Bauhaus rejection of history, “a pair of fangs” at the end of Manhattan, as Norman Mailer put it when arguing against them ever being built, rightly predicting that if they did go up, they’d be working for the devil.

But the new structure keeps surprising with its beauty. You’ll be downtown at night and you’ll look south and see its light-dotted form, fragile but determined—like a flower coming up through the snow.

editorial@observer.com

Dr. Anita Hill with a bunch of white guys.

This afternoon, Time magazine held its annual lunch and panel for it's prestigious person of the year issue. We went in with our money on Occupy Wall Street, but most of our other journo diners seemed to take it as a given that the honor would be bestowed on Steve Jobs.

It was an impressive panel led by Time's Rich Stengel: NBC's Brian Williams, Anita Hill, Jesse Eisenberg, Mario Batali, Seth Meyers, and Grover Norquist, president of the advocacy group Americans for Tax Reform.

The panelists themselves were split about the Jobs vs. the Arab Spring/OWS phenomenon (which Mr. Eisenberg voted for as a general "Populist Movement.") Mr. Williams cast his lot for the Apple founder, though Mr. Stengel was quick to point out that Time has never chosen a deceased person for their cover. (As if that would be a big deal...they put the friggin' iPad on there.) MSNBC contributor and Who's Afraid of Post-Blackness? author Toure may have had the only good point against putting Jobs on the cover, which he likened to giving someone who died an Academy Award even if they didn't give the best performance. "Did Steve Jobs actually change the world in 2011?" he asked the panelists. Mr. Stengel also likened putting Mr. Jobs on the cover with giving someone "a lifetime achievement award."

Mr. Batali was pro-Jobs, saying: "The smartphone has changed the world as much as the Bible has."

Mr. Williams worried that giving the honor of "Person of the year" to a protest wouldn't sit well with readers. "There is an institutional distaste for a movement without a face."

Perhaps that is why Dr. Hill chose  Elizabeth Warren for her attempts to enact real change in Washington. She also nominated a woman involved in the uprising from Cairo, because a "social justice movement" was more important than the technology behind it.

Mr. Meyers cast his lot with Nicolas Sarkozy or Angela Merkel should be in consideration for their role in trying to stop the euro debt crisis, but didn't know if they would end up being considered heroes or villains when the dust cleared.

Eloquent on stage, Mr. Eisenberg sounded like Jeff Goldblum on meth after the panel when we tried to ask him about Occupy Wall Street. Had he been down? What did he think of it?

"Sure, sure, sure," Jesse said, nodding his head vigorously.

Wait...so...he has been down to Zuccotti Park?

"Sure, yes, I have."

Thoughts?

"These protests are, uh, always good and, I hope that, you know, it grows into something."

There went our hope that the Social Network actor had winked at us earlier...it was probably just an involuntary tic.

Two American corporate giants. (MacRumors)

It is a POPS done right.

The Apple Cube on Fifth Avenue managed to transform a windswept plaza at one of the busiest intersections in Manhattan into a destination known the world over—one that became a shrine to its creator when Steve Jobs passed away earlier this week. The Journal's Eliot Brown (an Observer alum!) talked with reclusive developer Harry Macklowe about how the cube came to be. Like all things Apple, it wasn't his idea but Jobs'.

“Shortly after I won [the $1.4 billion bid for the GM Building],” Mr. Macklowe said, “the real estate director called me and said, ‘Your idea has been very well received in Cupertino – would you be available to make a presentation personally to Steve Jobs?’”

Mr. Macklowe said he made the trip, and walked into a conference room off Mr. Jobs’s office to find “a full model of my plaza and his idea of what could be built there.”

For the entrance, Mr. Macklowe proposed a number of options.

“We had crescent, we had rectilinear shapes, we had round shapes,” he said.

Mr. Jobs had a different idea.

“He is solely responsible for the cube,” Mr. Macklowe said. “I had different shapes and different ideas, and his cube was somewhat different than what it is now, but it’s Steve Jobs’s idea.”

Mr. Macklowe, who had to sell off his beloved GM Building two years after the Apple Store opened, is revered for his real estate genius, and while the plan for the Apple store was his—he reached out to the company first—of course Jobs prevailed when it came to the look of the building, which is in the process of being streamlined even further.

It is too bad neither of the men will be there to see it through.

Correction: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Mr. Macklowe purchased the building the year before he bought it, in 2007, as opposed to 2003, as was actually the case.

mchaban [at] observer.com | @MC_NYC