Now That Serial Is Over, What Will My Brain Do?

The podcast Serial has finally reached its conclusion-- and while the ending might not satisfy the binge-listeners, anyone who listened to Sarah Koenig slowly explicate the case: the major and minor players, the details, the neighbor-boy and Mr. S., the time-lines, the Nisha call, the Asia alibi, the theories, the issues, the geography, the criminal justice system, the nature of narrative, human nature and truth . . . anyone who consumed this thing week-by-week, with plenty of time to process and discuss each episode with other rabid fans-- these people can't be disappointed by the ending (and I am speculating, of course, which is just what the podcast simultaneously invited us to do and warned us against) but the final episode had it all-- new shit, old theories, new possibilities, Deirdre, the phrase "West Side Hitman," and a final (sort of) conclusion about the case and our justice system; this is not to say that I wasn't rooting for The Last Minute Solution and the greatest forty-five minutes of digital audio ever recorded, and it's not to say that I didn't laugh (really hard) at the Funny or Die parody of the ending-- but I was setting the bar low (because that is the key to happiness) and I set it low enough (and I'm not ashamed to admit) that I got a bit teary-eyed at Adnan's last words-- his stoic attitude towards the universe and the case; he leaves Sarah with this: "I think in a sense you leave it up to the audience to determine" but Sarah says she can't do this -- she can't "take a powder" on a conclusion-- and then she says what we know she has to say, and while it's not last second Hail Mary into the end zone (my friend Kevin said it was more like when the quarterback takes a knee in order to preserve a hard fought tie) but I still think it was more than enough-- she provided plenty of drama and thought provoking commentary, brilliant pacing and superb detail and flawless transitions and dense tape-- tape we have listen to, and so we have to really pay attention, we can't just look at it and draw some quick conclusions; generally the only type of drama that can get me all weepy like the last two episodes of Serial are sports stories-- Friday Night Lights and Hoosiers and Rocky, that sort of stuff-- and I think that's how I felt here; I admired the fight, both from Sarah and her "little garden spade" and from Adnan, who allowed this awful time to be pried back open and scrutinized (would a guilty man agree to go through with this?) and even though it's cliche, sometimes you play as hard as you can, and you don't get a result, and that's frustrating and disappointing, but the important thing is that you put it all on the line and played . . . and that's what this podcast and Sarah Koenig and Adnan did . . . I don't think I've ever spent three months following anything this closely: a news story, a TV show, a book, a sports team . . . Serial takes the cake in that department, and now it's finally come time to conclude this sentence and I think I will end with the moral of the story-- endings are hard . . . there's so few that are memorable and perfect (The Shield, The Winter's Tale, and Let the Right One In immediately come to mind) but that's because endings are contrived and in reality there are no endings, things just keep on going, whether we like them or not . . . so hopefully Episode 13 of Serial (otherwise known as the universe that Serial resides in) will eventually provide us more information about the case, but we have to remember that our universe isn't obligated to explicate anything, and so we just do the best we can with what we have.

Serial Season 2: You Should Listen to It (and write an essay about it)

This review is a bit late-- but I loved Serial Season 2, and while I recognize that Serial Season 1 was incredibly compelling because of the solve-it-yourself-mystery and the constant interaction between Sarah Koenig and Adnan, Season 2 is more in my wheelhouse-- Middle Eastern politics, military strategy, assessment of government bureaucracy and hierarchy, the conflict of vision between liberals and conservative, and-- most significantly-- a guy who was indignant because he couldn't wear shorts when it was really hot (same deal where I work, no AC and no relaxation of the dress code when it's 93 degrees in the classroom . . . don't get me started) and, ultimately, a main character who appears one way on the surface: a selfish deserter who-- according to Donald Trump-- deserves to be shot, but when you dig deeper into the story, systemic problems and existential questions reveal themselves . . . anyway, my students wrote synthesis essays about Serial Season 2, Hamlet and Inside Out and they were excellent-- all three works revolve around the question "Who's there?" and they all feature introverted main characters navigating the world without a solid social framework of friends and family . . . and all three characters decide to run away in order to solve their problems; just in case you want to write the essay for your own personal erudition, I've included the prompt AND a sample paragraph I wrote . . . at the very least this will give you an idea of how much high school has changed in the past decade . . . I wish when I went to school that I had the chance to connect a Shakespeare play to a popular podcast and a Pixar film: these damned kids don't know how good they have it.

Who's there?

Use Hamlet, Inside Out, and Serial Season 2 to frame an argument about one or more of the following topics: character, motivation, consciousness, art, aesthetic purpose, ethics, grief, perspective, layers in art, running away, introversion, morals, human nature, action, inaction, family, friendship, political intentions or anything else that applies to these works. These are dense pieces of art that connect to many themes-- so you should be choosing something YOU want to write about.

Use evidence from these works of art to bolster your argument. Do NOT simply summarize and compare/contrast the works, use them to help make your own point. This will require minimal amounts of summary, some logical analysis, transitions and connections, and-- most importantly-- a clear thesis as to what YOU are saying and clear topic sentences that connect to YOUR argument. Your introduction should get across this idea that you are going to explore, explain, and support.

Use at least two quotations from Hamlet, two quotations from Serial, and one quotation from Inside Out. You may mention one of more of the works in the introduction if they connect to your main idea-- but you do not have to mention all the sources in the introduction, you could just blend them into the body paragraphs. Be sure to properly cite all your quotations.

Topic sentence 1: The world does not always conform to idealized rules, and if a person does not learn how to adapt to this concept, he may suffer tragic consequences.

 Hamlet believes that his mother and father's marriage was ideal; he cannot endure his mother's betrayal, so much so that he wishes his flesh would "melt" so he that he won't have to deal with the "unweeded garden" (I. ii. 133-139) that his world has become. It takes him too long to accept that his world is messy and ugly, and that he will have to adjust his morals, actions, and attitude to this new normal. Because of this, his life ends tragically. While he finally comes to the conclusion that "the readiness is all" (V. ii. 238) and accepts his fate as an angry and vengeful son, he realizes this too late. Bowe Bergdahl suffers a similar fate. Like Hamlet, he keeps his romanticized ideals intact into his young adulthood. This philosophy does not mesh well with life in the military.  In Episode 1 of Serial (DUSTWUN) Bowe likens himself to "Jason Bourne." His interviewer, Mark Boal, describes Bergdahl's aspirations to be a super-soldier. The reality of Bergdahl's military experience is far different than what he imagined. OP MEST was a godforsaken shithole (literally) and the army mission there was ambiguous at best. Bergdahl could not reconcile what he thought the military should be with his actual experience, and this led him to make a rash decision.

Topic Sentence 2: People who learn how to cope with with the instability of the world when they are young are much more likely to be mentally resilient. 

Winter Solstice Miracle!

Let's try to remember that the lesson of this post is that Dave is a Super-Genius (not an idiot) and that The Subconscious of Dave is constantly working to make brilliant connections, however they might manifest themselves; so it was very dark yesterday morning, as we are very close to the Winter Solstice, the moment when the sun is at its most southern declination, resulting in the day with the least amount of sunlight (technically, I think it happened last night, but who cares-- dark is dark, and Monday morning was very dark) and so I was barely able to crawl out of bed when my alarm went off at 5:30 AM . . . and I turned on the light on in the bathroom, cracked the door, and got dressed in that faint sliver of light (so as not to wake my wife) and drove to school in the dark, and then began teaching first period in the dark because first period starts at 7:26; I was teaching Season 2 of Serial-- which is investigating the Bowe Bergdahl desertion and captivity case-- and we were reviewing how a good story promises you certain things, and then hopefully makes good on those promises . . . and one of the main things this season of Serial promises us is a glimpse into Bergdahl's brain, the reason why he ran away from his post into Taliban territory . . . but before I brought up Serial, I talked about the Pixar film Inside Out, which many of the students had seen-- and asked what this film promised . . . which is something very similar to Serial Season 2 . . . Inside Out is very, very ambitious-- as it promises to explain to us how the brain works and why we do certain things, from the inside out (and the film succeeds-- it made me cry . . . poor Bing Bong) and it wasn't until fourth period that I realized what a brilliant connection this was, because not only do Serial Season 2 and Inside Out promise the same thing, they promise it about the exact same kind of decision, as the little girl -- Riley Andersen-- also runs away from where she is supposed to be, and the film illustrates the development and emotional underpinnings of the exact same kind of radical, angry idea, AND HERE'S THE MIRACLE . . . when I thought of this, during first period, I was wearing my gray golf shirt INSIDE OUT . . . it was so dark when I got dressed, and I was so logy, that I put it on with the tag sticking out on the back collar, the buttons on the inside, another tag sticking off the side seam, and I didn't notice, and while no one said anything to me until the period was over-- they said they were too embarrassed to tell me during class, someone must have muttered the words "inside out," as in "our teacher is an idiot, he's wearing his shirt inside out" and that must have led to the wild firing of neurons that me think of the movie and then the astoundingly brilliant Subconscious of Dave went to work, and now I've got this awesome hook to get kids into the new season (and I wore the shirt inside-out for two periods of teaching . . . best Winter Solstice ever!)

Serial Season Two vs. Dave's Brain!

Last year, I taught Serial Season 1 to my high school seniors-- I couched the podcast within a process analysis unit, and the kids really enjoyed it; Serial Season 2 is a bit harder to get a grip on, but I like it even better than Season 1, perhaps because it reminds me of all the things I learned when I lived in Syria, and-- despite the difficulties, I am teaching to my seniors and (with the threat of constant quizzing) they are doing a fantastic job with a dense and difficult story . . . this time I've embedded the podcast in a compare/contrast unit, because that seems to be the main structural trope that ties the story together . . . here are some of the topics that the podcast invites you to compare and contrast:

1) the liberal interpretation of Bergdahl's story vs. the conservative perspective . . . Katy Waldman (on  the Slate's Serial Spoiler) calls the tone of the podcast "radical empathy" while many of Bergdahl's fellow soldiers consider him a deserter and a traitor;

2) Bergdahl and Jason Bourne;

3) Bergdahl and a "golden chicken";

4) Bergdahl and a "ready made loaf";

5) Bergdahl and and a "free-floating astronaut" with no tether;

6) the American Army and a "lumbering machine" and an AT-AT;

7) the Taliban as a mouse running beneath the machine's legs;

8) Pakistan as "home base," the mousehole in the wall in Tom & Jerry;

9) the rumors about Bergdahl vs. the reality of his captivity;

10) The Haqqani Network and the Sopranos;

11) Bergdahl's imprisonment and treatment vs. the imprisonment and treatment of Muslim detainees in Guantanamo Bay, Bagram, and Abu Ghraib;

12) the feelings about infidels of moderate Muslims vs. radical Muslims;

13) the code of conduct required for POW videos vs. actual military expectations for POW videos;

14) the sovereign state of Pakistan and the tribal area of North Waziristan;

15) the captivity of Bergdahl and the captivity of David Rohde . . . Rohde was kidnapped and held for three months by the Haqqani network in the same area as Bergdahl at nearly the same time, he is a civilian journalist and not a soldier, and he wasn't blindfolded and isolated as much as Bergdahl, but his story is still very helpful in understanding what happened to Bergdahl;

16) the entire story and the children's book Zoom;

and these are the issues that I think will surface in the future-- I'm speculating, of course, but that's necessary when you're teaching a piece that's not finished yet . . . it's like teaching a book that hasn't been finished, it's exhilarating and exhausting, but also really fun; I can teach Hamlet and Henry IV in my sleep because I know what happens, while doing this is really keeping me on my toes, and this is where I imagine the story is going:

17) there will be comparisons drawn Bergdahl's endurance in captivity and the hero's journey . . . the fact that Mark Boal was interested in interviewing him for a movie and the fact that he is the longest held captive since the Vietnam War and the fact that they are viewing him with such empathy in the podcast leads me to believe it will head in this direction;

18) good leaders vs. toxic leaders . . . if Bergdahl is going to be portrayed as heroic, Serial is going to have to provide a reasonable story of why he deserted his post, and I think they are saving that portion of the narrative and I also think that it is going to open a whole crazy can of worms about the military and it's purpose;

19) the motivation behind Bergdahl's decision and the Pixar film Inside Out . . . which I have promised to show to my students if they survive the podcast;

20) the reaction you should have when you think about how long Bergdahl spent in captivity and the following clip from Grosse Pointe Blank (and while I realize that it doesn't connect exactly in a mathematical sense, the tone is perfect).

Icy Stairs vs. Hannibal Lecter

We just started watching another crime show about a serial killer (True Detectives) and this made me wonder how often serial killing actually occurs-- because if you watch Luther and The Fall and Dexter and Hannibal and The Following (I've only seen the first two on the list-- and that's enough serial killing for me) then you'd think that the world is absolutely overrun with psychopathic homicidal maniacs . . . but it turns out (according to Scientific American) that only one percent of the 15, 000 murders that occur in the U.S. each year are the work of serial killers, and the FBI estimates that there are 25-50 serial killers operating at any particular time . . . which is actually more than I thought, but you should still worry more about getting the ice off your porch steps then the chance that your neighbor has a bunch of frozen heads in the freezer.

Serial Hyperbole

For nine weeks, I've been touting the podcast Serial, and people are finally starting to listen to me-- in fact, there's even a Slate Spoiler podcast about the podcast-- but while I'm proud to say that I was hip to this thing when it started, and let everyone know it, I certainly wasn't smart enough (or brave enough) to teach it to my students, but -- thanks to my friend Alec, who sent me a link to "Why I'm Teaching Serial Instead of Shakespeare" and double-thanks to a generous and altruistic English teacher (Michael Godsey) who provided lesson plans, hand-outs, and connections to the Common Core Standards-- I started teaching Serial on Friday . . . and though I'm not going to skip Hamlet, I will say this: I've never had a kid say to me, when I introduced a new book "now I know what I'm doing this weekend" but a bunch of kids stayed after class to ask me questions about the podcast (which I could barely answer, because this story is so complicated) and that's what one student said before she left the room (another student listened to seven episodes in one day before I even started teaching it . . . Sarah Koenig has invented a new genre of media, and created a masterpiece in one fell swoop).

Sarah Koenig, Laura and the Dude Profanely Grapple in the In-Between Place (Philosophical Shit Part 2)

If you go 38 minutes and 40 seconds into Episode 8 of Serial, then you get to hear Sarah Koenig set up what she calls "her favorite piece of tape from all her reporting so far"-- and then you hear a friend of Jay's named Laura stumble and stutter and curse her way to the conclusion that she's very confused and things are extremely complicated-- there's just too much conflicting information; Sarah Koenig says that Laura's stream-of-consciousness equivocating could be her own . . . and all this reminds me of the scene in The Big Lebowski when the Dude proclaims, in the same stuttering, stumbling epithet-laced manner that "new shit has come to light" -- and the Dude and Sarah Koenig occasionally strike me as similar, though Koenig is a far more seasoned and professional investigator, but she still seems slightly over her head-- digging away at the case with her "little garden spade" . . . and open to all possibilities, as the Dude is, and though this is a wonderful trait, it means Serial may end like The Big Lebowski . . . an excellent picaresque journey that disappears into a scattered collection of phenomenal fragments (at the start of Episode 9 of Serial, Koenig presents the "new shit"-- three things that are fairly well substantiated, but actually increase the fog, complexity and ambiguity of the case).

Like Father, Like Mad Cartographer

Last night, at Frankie Feds-- a thin crust pizza joint in Freehold that you should visit-- my son Alex said something inadvertently resonant. He said it to me, and my wife did not hear (it was really loud-- there was a kid's birthday party, and the kids were young and screaming, and the parents were drunk-- as you need to be when you've got young kids-- and they were screaming over the kids. Two large tables of loud adults and one large table of shrieking children. The wait staff gladly moved us as far away from them as possible, but you could still hear them. Also, everyone had a pumpkin).

Anyway, down at our end of the table, my father was telling Alex and Ian he had an atlas for them-- someone gave it to him-- and Alex made a wisecrack about how many atlases we have around the house (though I've cleaned out my books, I just can't seem to part with the atlases) and then he thought for a moment and asked a serious question. "Could I tear pages out of the atlases and put the maps on my wall? Over the Lego Star Wars?"

Alex has an amazing Lego Star Wars mural on his wall, painted by the artistic sister of a friend way back when he was into stuff like that. But now he's a sophomore in high school.

If he's ever going to kiss a girl, it's probably time to obscure the mural.

My younger son Ian chose a slightly more classic theme in his room: a jungle tree full of stylized animals.

Ian should be fine with the ladies. The King himself had a jungle room.

I made Alex walk over to the other side of our big table and repeat the question to my wife.

"Mom, can I cover my Lego Star Wars wall with maps? We have all these atlases . . ."

My wife laughed. The apple does not fall far from the tree. When she first met me, I lived in a disgusting flophouse in East Brunswick, right on Route 18. It was old-- historic-- with lots of little rooms. A bunch of my friends had rented it for cheap, and we were primitive.  I slept in a sleeping bag on a camping pad. I shared the room with my buddy Ryan. He agreed to my cartographically themed decorating plan.

I raided the old National Geographic magazines in my basement, and I took all the maps. I covered every surface of our room with them. Walls, doors, closets, and ceiling. And for some reason that I can't recall now, I hung all the maps with toothpaste.

This worked.

Sort of-- until it didn't.

Then the maps hung in assorted ways on the walls and ceiling, corners flopping and flapping. And the room smelled like mint. It's shocking that my wife continued to date me, as a room with no mattress, a sleeping bag, and an array of maps on every surface is a stone's throw away from a serial killer's den (maybe not even a stone's throw, maybe closer than that, maybe a shot-put toss away from a serial killer's den).

So Catherine laughed at Alex's request to cover his walls in maps. She had been there before.

I told him to go for it. In my limited experience, chicks who dig maps are cool.

More Than Your Typical Serial Killer Mystery

The Cold Cold Ground, by Adrian Mckinty, is so much more than your typical police-procedural-hunt-down-the-serial-killer mystery; it is set in 1981, amidst "the troubles" in Northern Ireland, and Belfast is close to complete anarchy . . . Sean Duffy, a Catholic cop (or "peeler") works on an entirely Protestant force, and has to investigate a killer targeting homosexuals while navigating a byzantine world of IRA heavies, hunger strikes and the death of Bobby Sands, Protestant Militia groups, and angry unemployed locals . . . but the book still has a sense of humor (quite a bit more than this film) and some romance between the murders, riots, and explosions; a quick read that takes you back to a chaotic time with which Mckinty is extremely familiar: nine severed hands out of ten.

Serial Acronyms

While season two of Serial is fantastic, and swinging for the fences as far as big journalism goes, it's also a bit more difficult than the first season; this is partly caused by acronym overload, so here's a key to ten of them:

1. DUSTWUN . . . duty status whereabouts unknown;

2. OP . . . observation post;

3. FOB . . . forward operating base;

4. TCP . . . traffic control point;

5. IED . . . improvised explosive device;

6. GI . . . gastrointestinal;

7. MRE . . . meals ready to eat;

8. MRAP . . . mine resistant, ambush protected vehicle;

9. CIA . . . Central Intelligence Agency;

10. PL . . . platoon leader;

and so while you're listening, you have to be prepared for dialogue like this: Bergdahl wanted to get from OP Mest to FOB Sharana, while causing a DUSTWUN, so that his PL would have to contact the FOB, but some of his fellow soldiers, who were already dazed from suffering GI infections because they couldn't wash their hands properly before eating the MRE, thought that he might have been a mole in the CIA, but Bergdahl was hardly that, and though he had a plan to pinpoint where Taliban had planted an IED near the TCP, so that the specialists could drive an MRAP and defuse the IED, he actually just caused a huge SNAFU.

What's Better Than One Serial Killer?

Two serial killers, obviously-- The Dollmaker and The Follower-- and though Michael Connelly's third Hieronymous "Harry" Bosch novel was written back in 1994, The Concrete Blonde still feels relevant today because of the lurking theme under the double menace of the killers: unauthorized use of force by authority; Bosch shot The Dollmaker in the line of duty four years before the novel begins, and story opens with him being sued by the Dollmaker's widow for being a vigilante-- he shot the purported killer while he was naked and reaching for something under his pillow, which turned out to be a toupee, not a gun, and while there was a preponderance of evidence linking the suspect to the case; the plaintiff's attorney, Honey Chandler, brings up Rodney King and the noted corruption and civil rights abuses in the L.A.P.D. and meanwhile, the killings continue, making everyone-- including Bosch-- wonder if he got the wrong guy; while the book eventually veers away from this heavy stuff into more procedural law and the usual hot pursuit, with the requisite twists and turns (and plenty of pornography and violence) this is no lightweight beach read . . . so far it is my favorite of all the Connelly novels, and so I'd like to thank Joyce Carol Oates again for recommending him (you can say "you're welcome" in the comments, Joyce).

You've Got to Have Dreams

Erik Larson's non-fiction book The Devil in the White City deals with two dreamers: Daniel Hudson Burnham, the architect and director of the magnificent and monolithic Chicago World's Fair of 1894, and Henry H. Holmes, the serial killer who built a "death hotel" on land in Englewood, near the World's Fair, so he could gas young women, children, and other unsuspecting folks that he pulled into his magnetic field of trust . . . and while one of these men was working for civic duty in order to better a city he loved and the other for evil and perverse motivations that perhaps even he didn't understand fully, they both had the need to build an architectural impossibility to achieve their dreams . . . and they both succeed! . . . Larson does an amazing job of smoothly presenting all the details for both events, details both glorious and heinous -- he did all the reading for you (as evidenced by the bibliography and pages and pages of copious notes) and I highly recommend this book, especially for folks who love architecture, civic politics, urban planning, and serial homicide.

How Many Serial Killers Are There In London Right This Instant?

Luther is a very dark but excellent British police show on Netflix; Idris Elba (who infamously played Stringer Bell in The Wire) is a detective with a checkered past that constantly haunts him, and he inhabits what appears to be a gritty version of modern East London, but is actually a parallel universe where every third person is some kind of sociopathic serial killer (it took me a few episodes to get over this absurdity, but it makes the show run at a rapid clip, unlike the world of The Wire, where it could take an entire episode to get a search warrant).

Philosophical Shit

I think teachers often forget Aristotle's idea that "the roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet" because they are already educated, so they know how to do the tasks they assign, and find it hard to imagine themselves stumbling around in the shadowy ignorance of Plato's allegorical cave; and while I do my best to empathize with the plight of my students, I certainly know some of my material too well to remember what it's like not to know it -- which is why teaching the podcast Serial has been so difficult and enlightening . . . I've learned that I am much better at reading than I am at listening, and that I have trouble with details, timelines, and auditory descriptions of geography . . . I made my students write an essay connecting Plato's cave metaphor to Episode 7 and 8 of Serial and one essay explained that Sarah Koenig couldn't be manipulating us (the audience) because she is also in a shadowy cave of ignorance, the maze of her investigation, and we are -- like Inception-- inside an even shadowier cave within her cave, and then I added another layer to this: though I am the teacher, I'm not great at organizing things this dense and detail-oriented, and so I am in an even darker cave within that cave; anyway, I am listening to the episodes two or three times, in order to plan and teach each one, and the students are helping me as much as I am helping them (and often summarizing and analyzing things in ways more eloquent and precise than I am capable of, which is impressive . . . and the main thing you should learn from all this, is that if you're life is on the line, you don't want me arguing your case).

Summer of Podcasts

Most of you probably know this, but you can download a multitude of podcasts for free on iTunes (it's especially easy if you "subscribe" to them) and one of my favorites is an episode of RadioLab called "The Bad Show," which takes a look at the dark side of human nature -- and, among other things, includes bits on Stanley Milgram's experiment (a new take!), serial killers, the inventor of mustard gas, and some notably evil Shakespeare characters . . . I especially like the comparison between Iago's explanation for why he manipulated Othello into strangling his lovely and faithful wife Desdemona (demand me nothing, what you know . . . you know) and the explanation of the serial killer Gary Leon Ridgeway -- a.k.a. the Green River River Killer -- who may have killed over ninety women, when his interrogator finally asks him "Why?" Ridgeway tells him: "I needed to kill because of that . . ."

Frustrating Stuff

Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas and Nice White Parents by the Serial podcasting crew both get at the same frustrating theme: even people who espouse progress and change may also be perpetuating a beneficial status quo.

Giridharadas exposes the truth of MarketWorld. Business people use corporations to exploit workers and the environment and the law to make huge sums of money, and then-- once they have become extraordinarily rich-- these same people abrogate democracy and construct win-win business-oriented solutions to the very problems they have relied on for their success. 

It's not a fun read. The system is skewed, corrupt, and weighted impossibly in favor of the wealthy. Money can even bend ideas. Public intellectuals become thought leaders.

I think the only answer is unions. Workers need more power, not the well-meaning philanthropy of people interested in preserving the same systems that got them all their money and power. 

If you don't feel like reading the book, watch the "Why Billionaires Won't Save Us" episode of Hassan Minaj's excellent show Patriot Act. I can't embed it because it's from Netflix, but here's Giridharadas on The Daily.

The new podcast Nice White Parents treads similar ground. It's tracing segregation and diversity in New York Public Schools all the way back to the 1950s. Again, the liberal white parents of NYC talk a good game about progress, de-segregation, and change, but when it comes down to it they want to preserve the system. They're not ready to sacrifice their kids' education for their ideals. 

This makes sense. It's hard to change the system where you have succeeded. Frustrating stuff, if you're on the other side.

I Might Remember This

So Stacey rushes into the office and proclaims it's the best day of her life and then she pulls an essay anthology out of a bag, and slams a boxed set of leather-bound classics (Dracula, Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, etc) onto the table and then she goes into a long-winded and detailed account of how it's teacher appreciation week at Barnes and Nobles and how she got so many discounts because how she got the box of leather-bound books for next to nothing (two dollars? I can't remember) and I realized that this was some kind of woman thing -- "saving" money when you've actually spent money -- and I insisted that the books she bought weren't actually real books, they were prop books, and to prove this I read from each of them in a pompous British accent, and then I threw my apple at the trash and missed, and when I retrieved it, Stacey dared me to throw it at a helium balloon floating above the computer, and I took her up on the dare (and nailed the balloon from all the way across the room, a spectacular shot I might add, if I were a prick . . . which, apparently I am) and unfortunately the apple was a little mealy and it exploded all over the place when it hit the balloon and so I had to get down on the floor and clean up the apple shards and I'm recounting all this not because it's particularly profound, but because most off periods in the English office are uneventful and not memorable at all; aside from this one particularly weird off-period, I 'd have trouble discerning between any of the other ones from this year . . . and this is the theme of the first episode of a fantastic This American Life spin-off podcast-- how hard it is to remember a particular moment in any day of your life-- the podcast is called Serial, and I highly recommend it: a reporter revisits the alleged 1999 murder of a high school student and finds holes in the case (and if you know what happens, please don't spoil it, because I'm right in the middle of this thing and I love it).

Two Good (But Dark) Stories

I recently finished two horrific stories-- one fiction and one true-- and both tackled systemic corruption, immorality, and overreach . . . 

1) the first is quite fun and I highly recommend it: the Netflix mini-series The Fall of the House of Usher . . . which reimagines the gothic world of Poe through the sepia-toned lens of the filthy-rich Fortunato family and their opiate empire; 

2) the second is the new Serial production: The Kids of Rutherford County . . . a fine piece of journalism that uncovers incredible and absurd legal overreach in Tennessee-- Rutherford County juvenile court was illegally jailing children for over a decade, mainly due to a conservative judge, Donna Scott Davenport, who decided to run juvenile justice by her ethical tenets instead of the actual laws on the book . . . and it's also the story of the two underdog lawyers who challenge this insane but entrenched system and finally get some retribution and resolution for these much-maligned children . . . but you'll have to decide if it's enough retribution for the shit that went down.

The Tritium Age of Podcasts

For the past few years, I've grown more and more enthusiastic about podcasts . . . and I wasn't sure why this happened, as the technology has existed for a while; I can remember the first one I listened to back in 2007 (The History of the Byzantine Empire by Lars Brownsworth) and while I certainly enjoyed learning about my favorite period in history for free, I couldn't imagine that this was anything groundbreaking, nor did I think that my friends would be interested in the topic (unlike now: I'm recommending podcasts to everyone, 24/7) and after I finished learning about Diocletian and Justinian, I immediately went back to Howard Stern (on my Sirius radio) but this New York magazine article explains what's behind the current renaissance in podcasting . . . and while I love the fact that podcasts have increased exponentially in variety and quality, I don't like the reason why . . . because the reason isn't intellectual and the reason isn't futuristic; in fact, the reason is mundane and environmentally destructive; the reason is cars . . . cars have gone on-line, and so on-demand listening is easy and convenient, and Americans drive a lot-- so the advertising money works if you have a successful podcast, and so I'm going to have to begrudgingly thank the internal combustion engine because I'm learning a shitload of cool stuff; here's a sample:

1) the 99% Invisible episode Vexillonaire taught me that if you want to design a flag, you should draw a one-inch by one-and-a-half-inch rectangle on a piece of paper, and draw your flag in that tiny space, because that small drawing is exactly how a flag looks when you view it up on a pole;

2) the Radiolab episode Cities taught me that the speed people walk in various cities correlates with all sort of things: income, patents created, the number of libraries, how many fancy restaurants exist, etc. etc. and the bigger a city is, the faster people walk;

3) Desi Serna's Guitar Music Theory taught me that in a blues progression, you can play the parent major scale over any dominant seventh chord, so if you've got an E7 chord, then you can imagine that it's the fifth degree of the progression and play an A major scale over it;

4) Sarah Koenig's Serial is still teaching me what this medium can do . . . and that on-demand-listening might be more controversial than anyone imagined.

The Best Sentence of 2017 (That Was Never Written)

Here is my favorite moment of 2017 that I should have written a sentence about: we were doing some peer-editing in my college writing class and a sweet and lovely female student asked me my position on placing a comma after the penultimate item in a list-- she wanted to know if I was for placing this comma or against placing this comma, which is commonly known as the "serial comma" or the "Oxford comma," because it was traditionally used by editors and printers at Oxford University Press (but it was usually omitted by most newspapers, to save space and ink) and this lovely student asked me about this comma with all sincerity, as I am her teacher (and her writing teacher at that) but the projector was on and I couldn't ignore the perfect comedic set-up she had given me, so I told her I would play a short eductional video to explain what I thought on the matter (I love the "educational video" set up) and I cued up Vampire Weekend's song on this subject and let it play for 27 seconds and then we all laughed, as the matter was firmly resolved.