Anthony Horowitz, the author of A Line to Kill, once again puts the fictional version of himself-- slightly less famous, more maligned version of himself?-- in the midst of murder . . . murder in an unlikely setting, the tiny Channel Island of Alderney, which last saw any great violence when it was occupied by the Nazis during WWII . . . but there hasn't been any murder since then-- until now-- Tony and his subject, Hawthorne (the rather unlikeable ex-detective with a checkered past, turned Sherlock-esque police consultant) are invited to a literary festival on Alderney, along with a panoply of literary luminaries, including blind psychic Elizabeth Lovell, TV chef Marc Bellamy, war historian George Elkin, beloved children's author Anne Cleary, and French modernist poet Maïssa Lamar-- and the novel quickly goes from an ensemble cast vacation to a version of Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians . . . the murderer is on the island and the solution will be elaborate, puzzling, and unexpected-- because, despite the meta-inclusion of the actual author, this isn't reality, it's detective fiction-- and don't you forget that.
Showing posts sorted by date for query christie. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query christie. Sort by relevance Show all posts
2020: A Good Year For Reading Books
I read 54 books in 2020-- the most since I've been keeping this list-- and one of those books was The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling, a monstrous time that should count as two books-- and while there are a number of good reads on the list, if I had to pick three favorites, they would be:
Best Literary Fiction: Deacon King Kong by James McBride
Best Non-fiction: Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein
Best Sci-fi: The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
and the best detective series would be the first three Easy Rawlins books by Walter Mosley
here's the complete list, happy reading . . .
1) The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston
1) The Lost City of the Monkey God: A True Story by Douglas Preston
2) The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age by Leo Damrosch
3) Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré
4) Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
5) This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
6) Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
7) Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino
8) A Red Death by Walter Mosley
9) White Butterfly by Walter Mosley
10) Death Without Company by Craig Johnson
11) Best Movie Year Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by Brian Rafferty
12) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
13) Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh
14) The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding
15) The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
16) A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey
17) The Secret History by Donna Tartt
3) Our Kind of Traitor by John le Carré
4) Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe
5) This Is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
6) Devil in a Blue Dress by Walter Mosley
7) Wilmington's Lie: The Murderous Coup of 1898 and the Rise of White Supremacy by David Zucchino
8) A Red Death by Walter Mosley
9) White Butterfly by Walter Mosley
10) Death Without Company by Craig Johnson
11) Best Movie Year Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen by Brian Rafferty
12) The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie
13) Dead Men's Trousers by Irvine Welsh
14) The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling by Henry Fielding
15) The Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey
16) A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey
17) The Secret History by Donna Tartt
18) Phil Gordon's Little Green Book by Phil Gordon
19) Elements of Poker by Tommy Angelo
20) Harrington on Hold'em Vol I by Dan Harrington
21) The Bat by Jo Nesbø
22) Small Stakes No-Limit Hold'em by Ed Miller, Sunny Mehta, Matt Flynn
23) Hold'em Poker by David Sklansky
24) Harrington on Hold'em Vol II by Dan Harrington
25) To Love and Be Wise by Josephine Tey
26) Waiting for Straighters by Tommy Angelo
27) American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodard
28) Townie by Andre Dubus III
29) Every Hand Revealed by Gus Hansen
30) The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers
31) Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie
32) Do Not Resuscitate by Nicholas Ponticello
33) The Biggest Game in Town by Al Alvarez
34) The Cipher by Kathe Koja
35) Bad Boy Brawly Brown by Walter Mosely
36) Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World by Anand Giridharadas
37) "H" is For Homicide by Sue Grafton
38) The Perfect Nanny by Leila Slimani
39) Strategies for Beating Small Stakes Poker Tournaments by Jonathan Little
40) Soccer Systems and Strategies by Jens Bangsbo and Birger Peitersen
41) The Full Tilt Poker Strategy Guide edited by Michael Craig
42) Orphans of the Sky by Robert A. Heinlein
43) The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters
44) Tightrope: Americans Reaching For Hope by Nicholas D. Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
45) The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie
46) The Peripheral by William Gibson
47) Set My Heart To Five by Simon Stephenson
48) The Inner Game of Tennis by W. Timothy Gallwey
49) A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine
50) Why We're Polarized by Ezra Klein
51) Deacon King Kong by James McBride
52) Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked by Adam Alter
53) Agency by William Gibson
54) The Fifth Season by J.K. Jemisin
Dave and Arthur Hastings in the Same Boat
While reading Agatha Christie's first published novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles, I was in the same boat as Hercule Poirot's rather guileless companion (and the narrator of the story) Arthur Hastings; the plot is a bit byzantine for my taste-- so many possibilities, so many characters-- and if you are a bit dim-witted (like Hastings and me) then you will certainly think this:
“Still you are right in one thing. It is always wise to suspect everybody until you can prove logically, and to your own satisfaction, that they are innocent."
and I suppose Christie plays fair-- if you follow the clues then you can unravel some of the mystery-- but Hastings doesn't feel this way and neither did I:
“Well, I think it is very unfair to keep back facts from me.”
“I am not keeping back facts. Every fact that I know is in your possession. You can draw your own deductions from them. This time it is a question of ideas.”
I even missed this utterly simple education (and I hate the heat and I'm really not fond of fires . . . I should have picked up on it)
“The temperature on that day, messieurs, was 80 degrees in the shade. Yet Mrs. Inglethorp ordered a fire! Why? Because she wished to destroy something, and could think of no other way."
in the end, the inscrutable Hercule Poirot decides that romance must be the final arbiter of morality, which is kind of cute (considering an old lady got poisoned) and he reasons thus
“Yes, my friend. But I eventually decided in favour of ‘a woman’s happiness’. Nothing but the great danger through which they have passed could have brought these two proud souls back together again."
Great Mysteries of Life (Spoilers Ahead)
My body is in an odd battle with itself. Fatness versus fitness. It is a mystery how it will turn out. To begin, I am snacking way too much during this quarantine (Trader Joe's Dark Chocolate Peanut Butter Cups are a particular problem . . . I've told my family to hide them from me, but I always manage to find them. And then I consume them all. I've also been eating cupcakes for breakfast. Covid-19 has claimed Adam Schlesinger from Fountains of Wayne, so if I want a cupcake for breakfast, I'm having it. Same goes for beer (but not for breakfast . . . contract hours are over at 2:15).
On the other hand, I've been working out like a madman. Running, kickboxing, tennis, biking, push-ups, pull-ups, random weight-lifting in the living room, etc. What else is there to do?
Today, after a fifteen-minute warm-up run, I ran a 7:27 mile. Ian and I were out on the canal path, and I didn't kill myself. I kept a smooth, steady pace and felt fine when I was done. This is thirty seconds better than the last time I ran a baseline mile. I think I could do an even better time on the track (where I would have a better idea of my pace).
I ran this faster time despite the fact that I've gained two or three pounds since the quarantine started. So I'm just a shade over 190 pounds instead of just a shade under.
What's going to happen in the end? Who knows?
I'll be most annoyed if I get into really great shape, and then contract Covid-19 and end up on a ventilator. That's going to kill my fitness level fast (and perhaps me).
The other mystery I'd like to discuss today is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This is a good one and I highly recommend it-- as does the Crime Writers Association-- but if you're not going to read it, forge ahead to hear why it's brilliant (there will be spoilers . . . but you philistines never read the mystery novels I recommend, so you might as well learn what happens).
The novel starts with a suicide and then a murder. There are lots of characters, alibis, timelines, clues, and sequences-- it's hard to make sense of them all. Then, Hercule Poirot comes out of retirement and sorts it all out.
The narrator of Poirot mysteries is usually Arthur Hastings-- he's Hercule's Watson-- but this book has a different narrator: Dr. James Shepard. Weird, right?
Dr. Shepard has a nosy sister, who is always prying into things, and the good doctor himself seems quite curious about this crime. In fact, he writes everything down. In chapters. Weird.
Late in the book, Poirot discovers this and asks to read them. It's super-meta.
Here's the moment:
Still somewhat doubtful, I rummaged in the drawers of my desk and produced an untidy pile of manuscript which I handed over to him. With an eye on possible publication in the future, I had divided the work into chapters, and the night before I had brought it up to date with an account of Miss Russell’s visit. Poirot had therefore twenty chapters.
Poirot reads Shepard's "book," which is the same book we've been reading . . . and-- of course-- he solves the mystery. The narrator did it! It's as if Watson committed the crime, and Sherlock Holmes had to catch him. From Watson's own journals. Totally wonderful.
Here are some other moments I enjoyed . . .
Poirot's purpose in life:
Understand this, I mean to arrive at the truth. The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to the seeker after it.
The reason I was fooled by the narrator:
Fortunately, words, ingeniously used, will serve to mask the ugliness of naked facts.
The truth about men, according to Caroline:
“Never worry about what you say to a man. They’re so conceited that they never believe you mean it if it’s unflattering.”
The one thing I will say with conviction about this quarantine is this: thank the good Lord (and Edgar Allan Poe) for the detective story.
On the other hand, I've been working out like a madman. Running, kickboxing, tennis, biking, push-ups, pull-ups, random weight-lifting in the living room, etc. What else is there to do?
Today, after a fifteen-minute warm-up run, I ran a 7:27 mile. Ian and I were out on the canal path, and I didn't kill myself. I kept a smooth, steady pace and felt fine when I was done. This is thirty seconds better than the last time I ran a baseline mile. I think I could do an even better time on the track (where I would have a better idea of my pace).
I ran this faster time despite the fact that I've gained two or three pounds since the quarantine started. So I'm just a shade over 190 pounds instead of just a shade under.
What's going to happen in the end? Who knows?
I'll be most annoyed if I get into really great shape, and then contract Covid-19 and end up on a ventilator. That's going to kill my fitness level fast (and perhaps me).
The other mystery I'd like to discuss today is Agatha Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. This is a good one and I highly recommend it-- as does the Crime Writers Association-- but if you're not going to read it, forge ahead to hear why it's brilliant (there will be spoilers . . . but you philistines never read the mystery novels I recommend, so you might as well learn what happens).
The novel starts with a suicide and then a murder. There are lots of characters, alibis, timelines, clues, and sequences-- it's hard to make sense of them all. Then, Hercule Poirot comes out of retirement and sorts it all out.
The narrator of Poirot mysteries is usually Arthur Hastings-- he's Hercule's Watson-- but this book has a different narrator: Dr. James Shepard. Weird, right?
Dr. Shepard has a nosy sister, who is always prying into things, and the good doctor himself seems quite curious about this crime. In fact, he writes everything down. In chapters. Weird.
Late in the book, Poirot discovers this and asks to read them. It's super-meta.
Here's the moment:
Still somewhat doubtful, I rummaged in the drawers of my desk and produced an untidy pile of manuscript which I handed over to him. With an eye on possible publication in the future, I had divided the work into chapters, and the night before I had brought it up to date with an account of Miss Russell’s visit. Poirot had therefore twenty chapters.
Poirot reads Shepard's "book," which is the same book we've been reading . . . and-- of course-- he solves the mystery. The narrator did it! It's as if Watson committed the crime, and Sherlock Holmes had to catch him. From Watson's own journals. Totally wonderful.
Here are some other moments I enjoyed . . .
Dr. Shepard's description of his sister Caroline:
Caroline can do any amount of finding out by sitting placidly at home. I don’t know how she manages it, but there it is. I suspect that the servants and the tradesmen constitute her Intelligence Corps. When she goes out, it is not to gather in information, but to spread it. At that, too, she is amazingly expert.
Caroline can do any amount of finding out by sitting placidly at home. I don’t know how she manages it, but there it is. I suspect that the servants and the tradesmen constitute her Intelligence Corps. When she goes out, it is not to gather in information, but to spread it. At that, too, she is amazingly expert.
Poirot's purpose in life:
Understand this, I mean to arrive at the truth. The truth, however ugly in itself, is always curious and beautiful to the seeker after it.
The reason I was fooled by the narrator:
Fortunately, words, ingeniously used, will serve to mask the ugliness of naked facts.
The truth about men, according to Caroline:
“Never worry about what you say to a man. They’re so conceited that they never believe you mean it if it’s unflattering.”
The one thing I will say with conviction about this quarantine is this: thank the good Lord (and Edgar Allan Poe) for the detective story.
Donald Trump Stars in "Risky Business" Sequel (Michael Lewis and The Fifth Risk)
If you really want to hate Donald Trump-- but you don't want to get on your moral high horse and repeat a bunch of stuff everyone knows-- then the new Michael Lewis book The Fifth Risk is for you.
First let's state the obvious. There's no question that Trump is morally repugnant, a racist who hates folks from "shithole countries", a laughingstock and a pussy grabber; Trump used campaign money to pay off a porn star and he has a twisted infatuation with Vladimir Putin, a leader that meddled in our election and is rumored to kill journalists and political opponents. His toxic tweets undermine the mission of our government, his lies foment discord, and he believes he's above the rule of law. He struggled to condemn white supremacists and Nazis, and he had trouble praising the recently departed John McCain. He separated families at the border. He's not loyal to anyone (including U.S. intelligence agencies). He mismanaged a crisis in Puerto Rico, and his version of Yule Tide cheer is to shut down the government. He's a gross human. You can go on and on with this kind of character assessment/assassination, but where does it get you?
Michael Lewis does something different in his new, rather short and slightly fragmented book. Lewis gives us a number of factual, quotidian, and concrete reasons to hate Trump. While it might not be as groundbreaking and perfectly written as his classic works (e.g. Moneyball, The Blind Side, Flash Boys, and The Big Short) it's probably more important. First of all, it's timely (the book sprang from articles he wrote for Vanity Fair). It takes a fairly apolitical look at what's happening right now in several departments in the United States Government (The Department of Energy, The Depart of Commerce, The USDA, and the NOAA).
The second reason the book might be bigly, hugely, and powerfully significant is that Michael Lewis is so well regarded-- both as a journalist and as a writer-- that conservatives might actually read this book. If they do, they will learn something: the American government is great. Not the bipartisan political side of the government, but the mundane departments within the government and the people within these departments. The people who do the things that markets will never do. The people that insure the safety of our electrical grid; the people that contain and monitor all the nuclear waste we've created; the people that collect data on weather and soil and oceans and tornadoes; the people that fight wildfires; the people that concern themselves with the nutrition and health of our impoverished children; the people that monitor the safety of our food and livestock.
Donald Trump, mainly through incompetence and corruption, has managed to severely undermine these departments. And Michael Lewis doesn't even write about the EPA. This might be for political reasons-- the EPA seems to strike a really nasty chord with many conservatives (mainly because many conservatives-- especially in the energy sector-- don't believe externalities should be monitored, they want to do as much damage to the environment as possible, especially if it helps them to make more money . . . and then, they espouse, someday in the dystopically flooded and polluted future, the market will magically clean things up). It's impossible to be apolitical when you start talking about Trump, Scott Pruitt and the dismantling of the EPA. It's egregious. I think Lewis wanted this book to be politically palatable so he avoided this truly hot button stuff. Or he's writing another book.
Anyway, here's what Lewis does explain. When you take over the government, you are legally required to prepare for the transition. You need to appoint 700 people to very important government positions. Many of these positions aren't particularly political. They are positions involved with health, disease preventions, pandemic readiness, data collection, wildfires and nuclear waste, and R & D project management. Trump has done an utterly abysmal job with these appointments. He's appointed business people with conflicts of interest, unqualified friends, Trump loyalists, and-- disturbingly, in hundreds of positions-- no one at all.
You need to read the book to get the full ramifications of this very measurable, very factual incompetence. Lewis doesn't need to get into Trump's character all that much. He simply portrays his brash idiocy in contrast with the professional dedication of these often brilliant, mission-driven government employees; these people who make America great despite Donald Trump. The people who keep our technologically depend infrastructure working. If you think you're some kind of Ron Swanson-esque rugged individualist, then get real. Our government employs 9000 people to keep a glacier sized underground mass of nuclear waste from poisoning the Columbia River. Your gun, your tools, and your wood stove can't protect you from that.
Here's are some highs (and lows) from the book.
I'm a public school teacher, so I hate Chris Christie as much as the next guy, but juxtapose Christie with Trump and Christie comes off looking like a gentleman and a professional. Christie took on the responsibility of convincing Trump that in the unlikely case that he won the election, he had to actually prepare to run the government. It was his legal responsibility to create a transition team, and the Obama administration had prepared the best government transition protocol in history (although Lewis commends the Bush administrations protocol as well). Trump-- who apparently had no victory speech written and didn't really believe he was going to win-- told Christie that he was "stealing my fucking money" because Christie used it for the transition team, which investigates potential appointees. Trump told Christie that if they won, they could leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition themselves. Then Trump fired Christie, probably because Christie prosecuted Jared Kushner's father in 2004.
Trump was quite determined to not learn anything about running the government, and also determined to not hire anyone who could help him with this task.
John MacWilliams, DOE chief risk officer during the Obama administration, outlines the top five risks that government agencies monitor and maintain.
The fifth risk is the one we can't conceive. The unknown unknown. The problem with these risks from a cognitive perspective is that we can't accurately measure their probability. Trump's lack of appointments may increase the likelihood of a nuclear disaster from one in a million to one in 10,000. That's an exponentially huge increase, but most people will shrug their shoulders at it.
What's the difference? They're both big numbers.
Humans are awful at judging risk. We're more afraid of sharks than we are of french fries. And we have no heuristic method to add up all these small increases in risk and understanding the overall implications. But the truth of the matter, is that every day that goes by without some sort of major disaster in our infrastructure is a testament to our government.
MacWilliams explains the consequences of Trump's proposed budget cuts: ARPA-E loans, climate research, national labs, and the security our electrical grid will all suffer.
I also understand that science is bringing the robots and factory automation. Destroying traditional industry. It's also measuring the externalities that businesses don't want to deal with. And it's increasing the distance between the haves and the have-nots. The nerds are winning. The Trump supporters struck back at this. So I get it.
Big Pharma is big science, and Big Pharma certainly contributed to the opioid epidemic. Many people in this country feel they have no control over their life, and they are probably right to think this. They might be addicted to opiates, or in an area that has been left behind. Most American don't have one thousand dollars socked away in case of crisis. These same people have access to the internet and see everyone surpassing them, and wonder: what has science done for me? What has the government done for me?
These are the people that need to read this book.
To head up the USDA transition team, Trump appointed one man: Brian Klippenstein. A really strange choice. Klippenstein ran an organization called Protect the Harvest, which basically "demonized institutions like the Humane Society." Klippenstein's group worried that if people got too concerned about animal welfare, we would stop eating animals.
Here's what Lewis has to say:
National Geographic reports:
No way.
Here's an example:
Probably less so than Trump. Or he's an amazing actor. No section of the book will make you angrier than "All the President's Data."
Barry Myers is the CEO of AccuWeather. AccuWeather is the Myers family business. Lewis explains that since the 1990s, Barry Myers (with a "straight face") has argued that the National Weather Service should be "with one exception, entirely forbidden from delivering any weather-related knowledge to any American who might otherwise wind up a paying customer of AccuWeather. The exception was when human life and property were at stake."
And even when human life is at stake, Myers is hesitant to let people rely on the National Weather Service.
This should piss you off. What should piss you off even more, is that AccuWeather bases all its forecasts on data it receives from the National Weather Service. Data it receives free of charge.
Rick Santorum, a recipient of Myers's family campaign contributions, tried to codify this inanity into law in Pennsylvania. Lewis starts to lose his generally objective tone:
The lesson here is to get your weather from weather.gov. That's what I do. No ads. Same information. Straight from the source. If the law Myers lobbied for would have passed in Pennsylvania, then the website would have been blocked there.
Barry Myers is the ultimate symbol of Trump's bizarre business forward political corruption. Everything about what it is to be a Trumpian conservative is rolled up into this appointment, and this part of the book-- while not quite as exciting as the possibility of a nuclear disaster-- is really educational and really really ire-inducing. Don't read it before operating a motor vehicle.
The NOAA website used to have links to weather-forecast. Now those links have been buried. This is why:
First let's state the obvious. There's no question that Trump is morally repugnant, a racist who hates folks from "shithole countries", a laughingstock and a pussy grabber; Trump used campaign money to pay off a porn star and he has a twisted infatuation with Vladimir Putin, a leader that meddled in our election and is rumored to kill journalists and political opponents. His toxic tweets undermine the mission of our government, his lies foment discord, and he believes he's above the rule of law. He struggled to condemn white supremacists and Nazis, and he had trouble praising the recently departed John McCain. He separated families at the border. He's not loyal to anyone (including U.S. intelligence agencies). He mismanaged a crisis in Puerto Rico, and his version of Yule Tide cheer is to shut down the government. He's a gross human. You can go on and on with this kind of character assessment/assassination, but where does it get you?
Michael Lewis does something different in his new, rather short and slightly fragmented book. Lewis gives us a number of factual, quotidian, and concrete reasons to hate Trump. While it might not be as groundbreaking and perfectly written as his classic works (e.g. Moneyball, The Blind Side, Flash Boys, and The Big Short) it's probably more important. First of all, it's timely (the book sprang from articles he wrote for Vanity Fair). It takes a fairly apolitical look at what's happening right now in several departments in the United States Government (The Department of Energy, The Depart of Commerce, The USDA, and the NOAA).
Do Conservatives Think Michael Lewis Is Part of the Liberal Media Conspiracy? Maybe Not?
Donald Trump, mainly through incompetence and corruption, has managed to severely undermine these departments. And Michael Lewis doesn't even write about the EPA. This might be for political reasons-- the EPA seems to strike a really nasty chord with many conservatives (mainly because many conservatives-- especially in the energy sector-- don't believe externalities should be monitored, they want to do as much damage to the environment as possible, especially if it helps them to make more money . . . and then, they espouse, someday in the dystopically flooded and polluted future, the market will magically clean things up). It's impossible to be apolitical when you start talking about Trump, Scott Pruitt and the dismantling of the EPA. It's egregious. I think Lewis wanted this book to be politically palatable so he avoided this truly hot button stuff. Or he's writing another book.
Anyway, here's what Lewis does explain. When you take over the government, you are legally required to prepare for the transition. You need to appoint 700 people to very important government positions. Many of these positions aren't particularly political. They are positions involved with health, disease preventions, pandemic readiness, data collection, wildfires and nuclear waste, and R & D project management. Trump has done an utterly abysmal job with these appointments. He's appointed business people with conflicts of interest, unqualified friends, Trump loyalists, and-- disturbingly, in hundreds of positions-- no one at all.
You need to read the book to get the full ramifications of this very measurable, very factual incompetence. Lewis doesn't need to get into Trump's character all that much. He simply portrays his brash idiocy in contrast with the professional dedication of these often brilliant, mission-driven government employees; these people who make America great despite Donald Trump. The people who keep our technologically depend infrastructure working. If you think you're some kind of Ron Swanson-esque rugged individualist, then get real. Our government employs 9000 people to keep a glacier sized underground mass of nuclear waste from poisoning the Columbia River. Your gun, your tools, and your wood stove can't protect you from that.
Here's are some highs (and lows) from the book.
The Unlikely Hero: Chris Christie . . .
Trump was quite determined to not learn anything about running the government, and also determined to not hire anyone who could help him with this task.
The Chief Risk Officer's Take on the Risky Business
John MacWilliams, DOE chief risk officer during the Obama administration, outlines the top five risks that government agencies monitor and maintain.
- Theft, loss and/or detonation of a nuclear weapon
- North Korea
- Iran's nuclear program
- Failure of the electrical grid (through disaster, attack, espionage, etc.)
- ??????????
The fifth risk is the one we can't conceive. The unknown unknown. The problem with these risks from a cognitive perspective is that we can't accurately measure their probability. Trump's lack of appointments may increase the likelihood of a nuclear disaster from one in a million to one in 10,000. That's an exponentially huge increase, but most people will shrug their shoulders at it.
What's the difference? They're both big numbers.
Humans are awful at judging risk. We're more afraid of sharks than we are of french fries. And we have no heuristic method to add up all these small increases in risk and understanding the overall implications. But the truth of the matter, is that every day that goes by without some sort of major disaster in our infrastructure is a testament to our government.
MacWilliams explains the consequences of Trump's proposed budget cuts: ARPA-E loans, climate research, national labs, and the security our electrical grid will all suffer.
All the risks are science based. You can't gut the science. If you do, you are hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the DOE, you gut the country.This is the part of Trumpism that's most disturbing and difficult to conceive: the dismissal of science. I know it's tied in to the hatred of elites and Hillary Clinton, that trusting scientific results is somehow akin to trusting the government and the liberal media conspiracy and the deep state, that trusting science will grant the pointy-headed social engineers the power to tell people what to do and how to live. It's true that science may occasionally do these things. Science now tells us that smoking and soda and having a gun in the house are really bad for us, that factory farming is an environmental disaster, and that cows and coal are contributing to global warming. Economists tell us that immigrants are good for the economy. These are inconvenient truths. It's fun to smoke and drink soda and eat burgers and shoot guns and hate immigrants. So Trump supporters don't want to hear it and they cover their ears.
I also understand that science is bringing the robots and factory automation. Destroying traditional industry. It's also measuring the externalities that businesses don't want to deal with. And it's increasing the distance between the haves and the have-nots. The nerds are winning. The Trump supporters struck back at this. So I get it.
Big Pharma is big science, and Big Pharma certainly contributed to the opioid epidemic. Many people in this country feel they have no control over their life, and they are probably right to think this. They might be addicted to opiates, or in an area that has been left behind. Most American don't have one thousand dollars socked away in case of crisis. These same people have access to the internet and see everyone surpassing them, and wonder: what has science done for me? What has the government done for me?
These are the people that need to read this book.
Weirdest Trump Appointee: Brian Klippenstein
Here's what Lewis has to say:
One of the USDA's many duties was to police conflicts between people and animals. It brought legal action against people who abused animals, and it maybe wasn't the ideal place to insert a man who was preternaturally unconcerned with their welfare.After Klippensteins's appointment, data disappeared. This has been the case in several departments. The USDA suddenly purged all the animal abuse records. There was public outcry and some of the data has been re-posted, but the most important and specific stuff seems to have gone missing. And to access this data, which was public and accessible, you now need to submit a Freedom of Information Act request.
National Geographic reports:
The restored records represent a minuscule portion of the 17-year database, and they exclude thousands of inspection reports on puppy mills, private research facilities, and zoos that constitute the public record of commercial animal abuse. Since February 3, those reports have been accessible only by submitting a Freedom of Information Act request, a byzantine process that can take months or even years.What the fuck?
Does Trump Understand Irony?
Here's an example:
But the more rural the American, the more dependent he is for his way of life on the U.S. government. And the more rural the American, the more likely he was to have voted for Donald Trump. So you might think that Trump, when he took office, would do everything he could to strengthen and grow the little box marked "Rural Development." That's not what happened.Do rural Trump supporters understand irony? I hope so. Because they fucked themselves.
Does Barry Myers Understand Irony?
Barry Myers is the CEO of AccuWeather. AccuWeather is the Myers family business. Lewis explains that since the 1990s, Barry Myers (with a "straight face") has argued that the National Weather Service should be "with one exception, entirely forbidden from delivering any weather-related knowledge to any American who might otherwise wind up a paying customer of AccuWeather. The exception was when human life and property were at stake."
And even when human life is at stake, Myers is hesitant to let people rely on the National Weather Service.
This should piss you off. What should piss you off even more, is that AccuWeather bases all its forecasts on data it receives from the National Weather Service. Data it receives free of charge.
Rick Santorum, a recipient of Myers's family campaign contributions, tried to codify this inanity into law in Pennsylvania. Lewis starts to lose his generally objective tone:
Pause a moment and consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.
The lesson here is to get your weather from weather.gov. That's what I do. No ads. Same information. Straight from the source. If the law Myers lobbied for would have passed in Pennsylvania, then the website would have been blocked there.
Barry Myers is the ultimate symbol of Trump's bizarre business forward political corruption. Everything about what it is to be a Trumpian conservative is rolled up into this appointment, and this part of the book-- while not quite as exciting as the possibility of a nuclear disaster-- is really educational and really really ire-inducing. Don't read it before operating a motor vehicle.
The Takeaway
The end of the book focuses on the people who collect and utilize data for the government, how incredibly valuable this data is for everyone-- citizens, researchers, scientists, and private businesses, and how a new conflict greater than bipartisan tomfoolery is jeopardizing the system.The NOAA website used to have links to weather-forecast. Now those links have been buried. This is why:
The man Trump nominated to run NOAA thought that people who wanted a weather forecast should pay him for it. There was a rift in American life that was now coursing through American government. It wasn't between Democrats and Republicans. It was between the people who were in it for the mission, and the people who were in it for the money.I'm a public school teacher. I'm in it for the mission. I generate a lot of good ideas every day, and so do my colleagues. I can't tell you enough how smart, dedicated and professional most of them are. We share these ideas with each other. There's no reason not to. We don't get paid more for having better ideas, but it feels good to have them. It feels good to be a better teacher. It increases your status in the eyes of your friends, colleagues, and students. America has grown so cynical that a good number of people don't believe that people like this exist any longer. They view the government as a stupid bloated nefarious system that begets and pays itself. This book might remind them otherwise.
Literacy: It's Not a Contest . . . Or Is It?
Over the past year, my friend (and fellow philosophy teacher) Stacey did something rather remarkable. I'm going to let her tell her story . . . but, before she begins, I have some rather remarkable commentary about her story (of course I do). I've conveniently put my words in vivid red, so if you want to skip them, you can proceed directly to Stacey's post. But you'd be missing out on some interesting context (and, not only that, you'd be missing out on all my thoughts and feelings, which-- if you've made your way to this corner of the internet-- you find either incredibly fascinating or so annoying that you can't stop reading them).
When Stacey started this project I was worried. Worried that she threw out the proverbial baby with the proverbial bathwater. I use the word "proverbial" here so readers unfamiliar with the idiom do not call DYFS and report Stacey for infanticide.
The "proverbial baby" Stacey tossed out of her life has more than a passing resemblance to an actual baby. It's immature, needs support in getting established, and possesses great potential. And it has a cute name. Podcast. Stacey threw out listening to podcasts, the nascent audio format that's still toddling around the media-milieu with an adorably anachronistic name. This freaked me out, because Stacey and I have both bonded with a number of different podcasts. It seemed kind of cold-blooded of her to cut ties completely with the art form (especially since we make one of our own). This would be like Steven Spielberg deciding not to watch movies (which might be the case, judging by how old the movies are that inspired him).
I'll let Stacey explain the specific ins and outs of why she quit this fledgling media cold turkey, but her general reason was so she could read more books. Now I'm all for reading books, but I don't like these kinds of arbitrarily strict deontological rules. I prefer case-by-case utilitarian ethics. The "deon" in deontological is Greek for duty, and Stacey decided it was her duty as an English teacher and an intellectual to change her ways. But I don't think you should completely quit something with as much potential value as podcasts. The right number of podcasts to listen to isn't zero. The right number is of podcasts to listen to is difficult to determine, but the golden mean, the amount of podcasts you can enjoy while still finding time to read, is probably somewhere around two per day. That seems reasonable. I wrote a long and winding post about the difficulties with this kind of Aristotelean morality and I do concede that it's easier to make a categorical rule if you want to get things done, but a good podcast is better than a bad book. I explained all this to Stacey, but she stuck to her principled guns.
I had other reasons for worrying about Stacey's project, some of them altruistic and some of them selfish. In all sincerity, I wanted Stacey to enjoy the new season of Serial. I wanted her to listen to two fantastic takes on human memory, one of them dead serious serious (Revisionist History "Free Brian Williams") and the other absurd and funny (Heavyweight "#16 Rob"). I wanted her to enjoy the weirdness of Benjamin Walker's Theory of Everything "Victory is Ours." But she would not bite. She was determined and focused.
Slightly more selfish was the fact that I wanted to be able to kill time at work discussing these podcasts with Stacey. I'd recommend them and she'd tell me "Not yet. I want to finish strong . . . December 2nd." I'd tell her she was nuts, that life is too short for hard and fast rules, and she shouldn't deny herself the pleasure, but there was no talking to her.
I was also worried that she might be reading a bunch of crap, just to amass a huge list of books. Loads of Jojo Moyes and Liane Moriarty and Nicholas Sparks. Chick-lit and cheese. This was rather stupid and sexist of me, it turns out.
My greatest anxiety was a selfish one. I was worried that she would read more books than me. I average forty-some books a year, a number I'm quite proud of. I always post the list, and I'm always impressed with myself (which isn't difficult . . . I set the bar low). It turns out I didn't need to worry about this. It wasn't even close. Stacey read so many books that I'll never count how many books I read in a year again. Because I'll never live up to her list, so why bother to count? It's not a contest anyway. Right? And the point of this blog is to slow down . . . so perhaps with my shorter list, I'm winning the contest.
I'd also like to clear up what might be a misconception: if you think Stacey was doing some sort of analogue back-to-basics return to reading on paper from books checked out from the library, you'd be dead wrong. She spent a shitload of money on this project-- that's how she rolls. She checked zero books out of the library. She bought zero hardcovers with which to adorn her shelves. Instead, she purchased the Kindle version of each book and the discounted Audible version as well, so she blew through books in an efficient digital combination; she read for about an hour or so each day on her phone, and then when her eyes got tired or she was driving or getting ready for school or working out, she listened to the audio version. High tech.
Stacey's Story of Her Badass Book list (In Her Own Words)
Every year around this time, I try to reflect on my life. I evaluate my strengths and weaknesses and think about the type of life I want to lead.
My father and I had a conversation once about how New Year’s resolutions are always so strict and limiting. They force you to place unnecessary rules and restrictions on your life. These resolutions tell you what you can’t do and seldom leave room for any fun. We both agreed we were sick of resolutions telling us “don’t drink soda,” “don’t eat sweets,” “don’t watch as much tv” and the worst: “don’t drink beer.”
We decided that, from that point on, we would make our resolutions positive. For a full year we resolved that we would curse more — much to the chagrin of my mother. Whenever I called, my dad would bellow: “How the fuck are you?!”
Cursing more was fun. It was funny. It was easy. At the end of the year, we wished each other a “happy fucking New Year,” and I set to work picking another positive resolution.
Last year, I realized I was wasting an inordinate amount of time listening to podcasts hosted by self-congratulatory comedians boasting about the importance of their work. Of course, there would be an episode of Serial or Waking Up With Sam Harris thrown into the mix, but overall, I was not listening to anything of real academic merit. The etymology of the dick joke could not be considered high brow media consumption. Clearly, this was not a valuable use of my time.
My resolution became clear: I wanted to read more. Anytime I would normally spend idly listening to a podcast - I would instead pick up a book.
I started December 1st (I am never ready to make big life changes on the 1st of January). I find I can keep my resolutions if I have a month to ease into them, but it didn't matter for this one. I did not “ease” into this resolution. In December of 2017 I read eight books. This quickly turned my resolution into a challenge. I wanted to see how many books I could read in one year. I didn’t think I could maintain the pace of two books a week while still working full time - but I wanted to see what I was capable of.
Any time one of my friends mentioned a book they were reading, I immediately added it to my list. I scoured the New York Times and Washington Posts “Best Books of the Year.” I joined Goodreads at some point in this venture (I can’t believe it took me this long). If a book was highly rated - I was going to read it.
I did not select books based on how long they were (even though Dave would like to believe I did). Maybe next year I will do that, so I can double my list — but that doesn’t sound very appealing.
As this year draws to a close, I can say that my resolution was a success. I am incredibly proud of myself for what I have accomplished. I’ve read more this year than I have in probably the past six or seven years combined.
I have not yet decided my next resolution - if you have a suggestion, I am open... As 2018 draws to a close, I can truly say “this was a good fuckin’ year.”
(Editors note: Dave has bolded all the books he has read, and therefore approves of. Thirty of them! So many good ones, but number 80 is my favorite book I read this year).
2018 Books:
1. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
2. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
3. Behind Closed Doors by BA Paris
4. The Power by Naomi Alderman
5. The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
6. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
7. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline
8. The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley
9. The Outline by Rachel Cusk
10. Little Fires Everywhere by Celest Ng
11. Lab Girl by Hope Jahren
12. What Made Maddy Run by Kate Fagan
13. Atonement by Ian McEwen
14. Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
15. Hillbilly Elegy by J.D Vance.
16. Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut
17. Tenth of December by George Saunders
18. Heroes of the Frontier by Dave Eggers
19. American Gods by Neil Gaiman
20. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut
21. Bear Town by Fredrik Backman
22. My Grandmother Asked Me to Tell You She’s Sorry by Fredrik Backman
23. White Houses by Amy Bloom
24. Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
25. Cemetery John by Robert Zorn
26. The Breakdown by BA Paris
27. The Identicals by Elin Hilderbrand
28. Less by Andrew Sean Greer
29. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
30. This Is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz
31. Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
32. Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin
33. Before We Were Yours by Lisa Wingate
34. An American Marriage by Tayari Jones
35. I’ll Be Gone In The Dark by Michelle McNamara
36. Surprise Me by Sophie Kinsella
37. Sing, Unburied, Sing by Jasmine Ward
38. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston
39. The Woman in The Window by AJ Finn
40. Drown by Junot Diaz
41. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho
42. Artemis by Andy Weir
43. Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman
44. Then She Was Gone by Lisa Jewell
45. Calypso by David Sedaris
46. Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
47. A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay
48. The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz
49. The Wife Between Us by Greer Hendricks and Sarah Pekkanen
50. Eleanor and Park by Rainbow Rowell
51. The Last Mrs. Parrish by Liv Constantine
52. The Hating Game by Sally Thorne
53. All The Missing Girls by Megan Miranda
54. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer
55. Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
56. The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah
57. The Couple Next Door by Shari Lapena
58. The Alice Network by Kate Quinn
59. The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
60. A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles
61. Ask The Dust by John Fante
62. Lamb by Christopher Moore
63. Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal
64. Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff
65. Dear Committee Members by Julie Schumacher
66. American Pastoral by Philip Roth
67. The Shakespeare Requirement by Julie Schumacher
68. Straight Man by Richard Russo
69. Where the Crawdad Sings by Delia Owens
70. Warlight by Michael Ondaatje
71. The Rules of Magic by Alice Hoffman
72. The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas
73. This Is How It Always Is by Laurie Frankel
74. Be Frank With Me by Julia Claiborne Johnson
75. Angela’s Ashes by Frank McCourt
76. Florida by Lauren Groff
77. The Other Woman by Sandie Jones
78. Between The World And Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
79. The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt
80. Boom Town by Sam Anderson
2017 Book List
I just finished my 46th book of 2017 this afternoon and it's a fitting one for the end of the year; Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millenials by Malcolm Harris is an intelligent, analytical and provocative book written by a millennial about the millennial generation that might just change your mind about millennials in general . . . from my perspective, this book is about the end of my era, Generation X, and any slackerly influence it might have had upon the world: kids these days are more prone to anxiety, work harder, do less drugs (drug overdoses seem to be following the Baby Boomer cohort), have less sex, do more homework, get surveilled more-- for a scary take on this, watch Episode 2 of season 4 of Black Mirror-- take out giant student loans which fund ever expanding building projects on college campuses, intern more, get paid less, compete more in an organized fashion, train for this organized competition in areas that are supposed to be fun and healthy-- sports, music, the science fair, dance; are trained by their cell phones to be more available and productive than any work force in history, and don't have much of a shot at the wealth in our nation, which has increasingly been hoarded by the old and the 1% . . . Harris backs this up with plenty of data-- beware: there are charts in this book-- but it is slender and if you have kids or teach or coach or work with kids in any capacity, then you should read this book; the conclusion is not very hopeful . . . I worry about my own children and this book is making me take a step back in my expectations for them and for myself as a parent; the book is also making me enjoy my stable and noncompetitive union job, as the millennial generation will experience job precarity as a matter of course; anyway, this ties in nicely with my New Year's Resolution, which is to try to live more in the slow, meditative, and profound world of great books, and avoid the twitchiness of the internet as much as possible . . . I did a pretty good job of it in 2017, especially because we cut the cable and I stopped watching football (and playing fantasy football, which is another one of those productivity training devices that "prepares" people for 24/7 availability and efficiency) and while I didn't quite reach my goal of a book a week, I was close . . . anyway, here is the list-- I discussed my seven favorites on Gheorghe: The Blog-- and wrote reviews of all of them here on Sentence of Dave . . . my favorite book of the year is The Power by Naomi Alderman: if you're going to read one book in 2018, that should be the one . . . and you should try to read at least one book a year, just to avoid being part of the American 26% that reads zero books each year; these are just the books I finished, I started plenty of others and bailed, so anything on this list is pretty good:
1) Selection Day by Aravind Adiga
2) Bill Bryson: One Summer: America, 1927
3) Mark Schatzker's The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor
4) Whiplash: How to Survive Our Fast Future by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
5) The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly
6) The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis
7) Steven Johnson: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
8) Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty
9) Normal by Warren Ellis
10) Jonah Berger: Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Behavior
11) Where It Hurts by Reed Farrel Coleman
12) The Not-Quite States of America by Doug Mack
13) Tyler Cowen: The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
14) Ill Will by Dan Chaon
15) Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell
16) Love Me Do! The Beatles Progress by Michael Braun
17) The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley
18) Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
19) Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty
20) Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific by Robert Kaplan
21) Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
22) Why the West Rules-- for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris
23) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
24) Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
25) Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World by Jeff Madrick
26) Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
27) 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden Hue
28) Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
29) Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
30) The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie
31) A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane
32) Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman
33) The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
34) David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
35) Michael Connelly: Nine Dragons
36) Gar Anthony Haywood's Cemetery Road
37) Time Travel: A History by James Gleick
38) Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
39) Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
40) How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
41) Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly by Adrian McKinty
42) Roddy Doyle's Smile
43) The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
44) Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
45) The Power by Naomi Alderman
46) Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of the Millenials by Malcolm Harris.
1) Selection Day by Aravind Adiga
2) Bill Bryson: One Summer: America, 1927
3) Mark Schatzker's The Dorito Effect: The Surprising New Truth About Food and Flavor
4) Whiplash: How to Survive Our Fast Future by Joi Ito and Jeff Howe
5) The Wrong Side of Goodbye by Michael Connelly
6) The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds by Michael Lewis
7) Steven Johnson: Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
8) Gun Street Girl by Adrian McKinty
9) Normal by Warren Ellis
10) Jonah Berger: Invisible Influence: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Behavior
11) Where It Hurts by Reed Farrel Coleman
12) The Not-Quite States of America by Doug Mack
13) Tyler Cowen: The Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream
14) Ill Will by Dan Chaon
15) Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell
16) Love Me Do! The Beatles Progress by Michael Braun
17) The Relic Master by Christopher Buckley
18) Await Your Reply by Dan Chaon
19) Rain Dogs by Adrian McKinty
20) Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End of a Stable Pacific by Robert Kaplan
21) Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and What the Internet Can Tell Us About Who We Really Are by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
22) Why the West Rules-- for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future by Ian Morris
23) How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain by Lisa Feldman Barrett
24) Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Grann
25) Seven Bad Ideas: How Mainstream Economists Have Damaged America and the World by Jeff Madrick
26) Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
27) 1968: A Turning Point of the American War in Vietnam by Mark Bowden Hue
28) Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter by Tom Franklin
29) Oblomov by Ivan Goncharov
30) The A.B.C. Murders by Agatha Christie
31) A Drink Before the War by Dennis Lehane
32) Every Secret Thing by Laura Lippman
33) The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer
34) David Foster Wallace: Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
35) Michael Connelly: Nine Dragons
36) Gar Anthony Haywood's Cemetery Road
37) Time Travel: A History by James Gleick
38) Meddling Kids by Edgar Cantero
39) Nancy Isenberg's White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America
40) How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu
41) Police at the Station and They Don't Look Friendly by Adrian McKinty
42) Roddy Doyle's Smile
43) The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins
44) Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
45) The Power by Naomi Alderman
46) Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of the Millenials by Malcolm Harris.
My Week Was More Epic Than Yours (Unless You Were Involved in a Flood or Hurricane)
It is the first real Friday of the school year (last week the students only attended school for three days) and while I know many of you work long hours, have tedious commutes, and are responsible for many tasks and duties on a day-to-day basis (and I also recognize that many of you are without power, living through natural disasters) but still, you've got to understand just how epic a week this was for me-- and you've got to realize I had the whole summer off, so I got used to a certain lifestyle and rhythm of existence, and second, you've got to understand that I'm a rare and delicate flower, with many hobbies and interests and peccadilloes, and working gets in the way of this groove I've cultivated, and third, it was hot and humid and there's air-conditioning neither in my classroom nor on the soccer fields . . . anyway, here are my stats, in case Governor Christie wants to peruse them:
1) in the last seven days, I coached eleven soccer events and attended two others . . . so just shy of two a day;
2) my high school scheduled back-to-school-night early this year, on Wednesday, from 7 - 9 PM . . . so Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I worked fourteen hour days;
3) we've begun the narrative unit in my Expos class, so in order to prepare the students for the looming menace of their college essays, I reviewed Dan Harmon's 8 step story template, and I ended up telling the students a buttload of exemplary stories for my own life (which is exhausting) and the same thing happened in Creative Writing (for similar reasons) and Philosophy (mainly to do with perception, as we're doing Plato's "Allegory of the Cave") and so, to make a long story short, I recounted a lot of anecdotes, some multiple times in one day . . . here's an incomplete list, for those of you keeping score at home:
4) I also did some phenomenal acting on Wednesday, for three periods in a row in my Expos classes; in order to illustrate the lesson in Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant"-- the fact that authority figures will often compromise their morality and do what the crowd expects, in order to not look a fool-- I staged an incident of disobedience and secretly asked a student in each class if they would pretend they had not read the essay, refuse to take the quiz, make a bit of a scene, and then storm off to guidance-- disobeying my command to stay put and fail-- and each student that I asked did a phenomenal job, and then I had to fake-deal with the situation, which was fake-exhausting, I had to act like Orwell and let the class (the Burmese) push me around-- some classes wanted me to write up the student, other classes wanted me to give them a break, there were spurious phone calls and real-fake texting, the student couldn't be found anywhere-- not in the bathroom or in guidance, I fake-contacted the security guards and was very fake concerned because I had fake-lost a child . . . and I did all this in the real heat and humidity of my blind-less classroom (they took my blinds! I wanted them to fix my blinds, but instead they took them, so we're baking and we have a glare)
5) but I shouldn't complain because guidance came to visit my three senior Expos classes today, to inform the kids how to apply for college, and so I got to skip class and hang out in the air-conditioned office and explain my two simple rules of women's fashion-- which really annoyed Brady, who was also off all day, because I'm so unfashionably dressed, but I don't think it matters how I dress, it just matters if I can give women some good advice on how they should dress-- and my two rules of women's fashion are very simple . . . rule number one is tighter is better and rule number two is skin to win . . . and I'm pretty sure these are the rules of fashion every male is following when they comment on a woman's clothing (Stacey said when Ed makes a positive comment about an outfit, she knows that she can't wear it to work, because it's inappropriate for high school boys).
1) in the last seven days, I coached eleven soccer events and attended two others . . . so just shy of two a day;
2) my high school scheduled back-to-school-night early this year, on Wednesday, from 7 - 9 PM . . . so Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday I worked fourteen hour days;
3) we've begun the narrative unit in my Expos class, so in order to prepare the students for the looming menace of their college essays, I reviewed Dan Harmon's 8 step story template, and I ended up telling the students a buttload of exemplary stories for my own life (which is exhausting) and the same thing happened in Creative Writing (for similar reasons) and Philosophy (mainly to do with perception, as we're doing Plato's "Allegory of the Cave") and so, to make a long story short, I recounted a lot of anecdotes, some multiple times in one day . . . here's an incomplete list, for those of you keeping score at home:
4) I also did some phenomenal acting on Wednesday, for three periods in a row in my Expos classes; in order to illustrate the lesson in Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant"-- the fact that authority figures will often compromise their morality and do what the crowd expects, in order to not look a fool-- I staged an incident of disobedience and secretly asked a student in each class if they would pretend they had not read the essay, refuse to take the quiz, make a bit of a scene, and then storm off to guidance-- disobeying my command to stay put and fail-- and each student that I asked did a phenomenal job, and then I had to fake-deal with the situation, which was fake-exhausting, I had to act like Orwell and let the class (the Burmese) push me around-- some classes wanted me to write up the student, other classes wanted me to give them a break, there were spurious phone calls and real-fake texting, the student couldn't be found anywhere-- not in the bathroom or in guidance, I fake-contacted the security guards and was very fake concerned because I had fake-lost a child . . . and I did all this in the real heat and humidity of my blind-less classroom (they took my blinds! I wanted them to fix my blinds, but instead they took them, so we're baking and we have a glare)
5) but I shouldn't complain because guidance came to visit my three senior Expos classes today, to inform the kids how to apply for college, and so I got to skip class and hang out in the air-conditioned office and explain my two simple rules of women's fashion-- which really annoyed Brady, who was also off all day, because I'm so unfashionably dressed, but I don't think it matters how I dress, it just matters if I can give women some good advice on how they should dress-- and my two rules of women's fashion are very simple . . . rule number one is tighter is better and rule number two is skin to win . . . and I'm pretty sure these are the rules of fashion every male is following when they comment on a woman's clothing (Stacey said when Ed makes a positive comment about an outfit, she knows that she can't wear it to work, because it's inappropriate for high school boys).
Enterprises of Great Pith and Moment . . .
As the summer wears on, my enterprises of great pith and moment start to lose the name of action . . . at the outset of summer break, I bulled my way through some dense tomes covering recent history, fairly recent history, macro-political-historical synthesis, and psychology and I ambitiously queued up another stack of erudite works, but I didn't get very far in these:
1) Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies . . . a book which details the approaching age of artificial superintelligence and how we should tackle this . . . I read fifty pages and I might read more, or I might just wait twenty years and see what happens;
2) The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by Eric Hoffer, which is a lot of fun if you're not a fanatic as it implies that fanatics have nothing going on upstairs, not much self-esteem, and are psychologically incomplete and thus "find themselves" in whatever mass movement they join . . . I'm halfway through and I think I've got the main idea;
3) Fernand Braudel's The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism 15th - 18th Century Vol 1 . . . this book is more entertaining than it sounds and I'd really like to have read it, but I doubt I'll actually read it;
4) The Paranoid Style in American Politics by Richard Hofstadter . . . I probably don't need to read this one because we're all living it;
5) The American Language by H.L. Mencken . . . this is free on the Kindle and for good reason, it's mainly a list of words that are American as opposed to British, and some fun assessment of the American character . . . we Americans, we'll steal any word we want, use it any way we want, and we'll spell it however we damn please . . .
meanwhile, realizing that my ambition was fading, I checked out a bunch of mysteries and thrillers from the library, so I had some books I would actually finish, and I whipped through Agatha Christie's The A.B.C Murders . . . Hercule Poirot is a lazy French douchebag, but he comes through in the end and solves an utterly ridiculous case . . . everything had me fooled and I learned absolutely nothing about anything (except that you can trick people into confessing if you pretend to find their fingerprints in a compromising location) and now I'm getting into a gritty Boston-area Dennis Lehane thriller.
Incentives and The Prize
I'd like to know what economic lessons Tim Harford would find behind Mark Zuckerberg, Cory Booker, and Chris Christie's attempt to transform the Newark school system; Zuckerberg donated 100 million dollars, Cory Booker-- a passionate proponent of charter schools-- raised sums to match this money, and Chris Christie saw this as an opportunity to attack the unions; Dale Russakoff explains all this and more in her book The Prize: Who's In Charge of America's Schools? and the morals of the story are complex, ugly, ambiguous, messy, and occasionally inspirational:
1) there is no magic bullet to fix education in an impoverished city;
2) top down directives, even if they use excellent jargon, don't change broken infrastructure;
3) you can't move kids around willy-nilly in a city like Newark to fill charter schools-- because the kids left behind have no where to learn, and the kids who get moved may have issues with with where they are moved-- gang turf, lack of busing, etcetera;
4) if you don't consult the community before implementing giant initiatives that involve their kids, they will feel angry and oppressed, especially if these directives are ordered by a white superintendent in a primarily black city;
5) you can be a rock-star or a mayor, but you can't be a rock-star mayor;
6) it's difficult to measure what parents and administrators find important in education, so the bureaucracy tends to find important what is easy to measure-- which is usually test scores-- and this can bite you in the ass;
7) consultants know how to bill hours and make a shitload of money from a situation like this (and it seems Zuckerberg has learned this lesson and is trying a different approach in the San Francisco bay area);
8) kids in a city like Newark need all kinds of additional support besides teaching, many of them have experienced horrible tragedy and violence, and they need counseling and psychological support as much as they need reading and math review;
9) Newark's billion dollar education budget is the "prize" sought after by politicians, unions, government and citizens . . . and there is going to be greed and corruption surrounding this much money;
10) there are superb teachers and students in the current system, and smart parents shepherd their kids through, but it's difficult to get rid of poor teachers because of union rules;
11) politicians and philanthropists will eventually lose interest and move on with their lives, but the parents and the kids and the community remains-- so change has to come from the bottom-up, and it needs to come from people that are going to stay in the community-- Booker went on to a senate position, Christie had to deal with Bridgegate and his presidential campaign, and Zuckerberg moved on to a new project-- meanwhile, the two hundred million dollar donation was a drop in the bucket, and got eaten up by consultants, contract negotiations with the union, and some charter schools-- but the main infrastructure in Newark is still ancient and crumbling, teachers still go to work in that environment, and students attempt to learn there . . . and the work needs to be done one student and one teacher and one classroom and one school building at a time, which is far more boring than radical, transformational top-down change;
12) if you want to understand some of the complexities of educational reform, read this book.
1) there is no magic bullet to fix education in an impoverished city;
2) top down directives, even if they use excellent jargon, don't change broken infrastructure;
3) you can't move kids around willy-nilly in a city like Newark to fill charter schools-- because the kids left behind have no where to learn, and the kids who get moved may have issues with with where they are moved-- gang turf, lack of busing, etcetera;
4) if you don't consult the community before implementing giant initiatives that involve their kids, they will feel angry and oppressed, especially if these directives are ordered by a white superintendent in a primarily black city;
5) you can be a rock-star or a mayor, but you can't be a rock-star mayor;
6) it's difficult to measure what parents and administrators find important in education, so the bureaucracy tends to find important what is easy to measure-- which is usually test scores-- and this can bite you in the ass;
7) consultants know how to bill hours and make a shitload of money from a situation like this (and it seems Zuckerberg has learned this lesson and is trying a different approach in the San Francisco bay area);
8) kids in a city like Newark need all kinds of additional support besides teaching, many of them have experienced horrible tragedy and violence, and they need counseling and psychological support as much as they need reading and math review;
9) Newark's billion dollar education budget is the "prize" sought after by politicians, unions, government and citizens . . . and there is going to be greed and corruption surrounding this much money;
10) there are superb teachers and students in the current system, and smart parents shepherd their kids through, but it's difficult to get rid of poor teachers because of union rules;
11) politicians and philanthropists will eventually lose interest and move on with their lives, but the parents and the kids and the community remains-- so change has to come from the bottom-up, and it needs to come from people that are going to stay in the community-- Booker went on to a senate position, Christie had to deal with Bridgegate and his presidential campaign, and Zuckerberg moved on to a new project-- meanwhile, the two hundred million dollar donation was a drop in the bucket, and got eaten up by consultants, contract negotiations with the union, and some charter schools-- but the main infrastructure in Newark is still ancient and crumbling, teachers still go to work in that environment, and students attempt to learn there . . . and the work needs to be done one student and one teacher and one classroom and one school building at a time, which is far more boring than radical, transformational top-down change;
12) if you want to understand some of the complexities of educational reform, read this book.
Aleppo Causes Me Cognitive Dissonance
I'm having a hard time reconciling what I remember about Aleppo and what I have been reading about the city recently; an article in The Week called "Life Under the Caliphate" describes the some of the things happening in the region, which is mainly under control of ISIS:
1) unIslamic activities-- smoking, listening to music, wearing hair gel-- are punished by flogging, execution, and amputation;
2) there is video footage of gay men being thrown off tall buildings to their deaths;
3) Jews and Christians are given the choice to convert or die;
4) public executions and floggings happen nearly every day;
5) an ISIS pamphlet from Aleppo lists some crimes and punishments . . . drinking alcohol is 80 lashes, as is slander, spying for infidels and renouncing Islam both result in death;
6) women may marry at age 9 and should be married by age 16, and they must wear two heavy robes to conceal their figure . . .
and so I went back to the email updates that I sent from when I lived in Syria (200-2003) and looked at some of my recollections from our various trips to the city and surrounding regions;
1) we wandered through the Dead Cities, abandoned Byzantine olive-oil towns in the hills just outside of the city;
2) we watched Embassy folk collect ancient pottery shards at various tells and middens;
3) we stayed at the Baron Hotel-- the spooky but notable spot where Agathie Christie wrote "Murder on the Orient Express"-- drinking beer at the bar is right out of The Shining (but apparently, the place is closed down now):
4) our Syrian friend Yara told us tales of covered women in Aleppo that openly took lesbian lovers and I wrote a treatment for an erotic Syrian film:
the taciturn husband warns his wife not to leave the house for any reason, and then goes to play backgammon with his friends . . . a woman covered in black from head to toe shows up at the door, and the lady of the house invites her in for tea . . . she lifts her veil and gives her host a long concupiscent look . . . soon enough she’s shedding her robe, and there’s nothing underneath . . .
5) we ate-- notably at the Beit Sissi-- drank, wandered the city and the region, were mobbed by Syrian children who treated us like rock stars, took tours with our favorite guide in the Middle East-- Jihad-- and generally felt like we were on vacation . . . Aleppo always seemed a little less oppressive and a little more Western than Damascus, a little more like Turkey . . . but apparently those days are gone, and I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this (I also read that ISIS beheaded the antiquities expert for Palmyra-- the spectacular Roman city in the Syrian desert-- because he refused to reveal where valuable artifacts were hidden . . . ISIS considers preserving ancient artifacts "akin to idol worship and punishable by death" and when they say that, apparently they aren't kidding . . . if you've got a strong stomach, you can watch ISIS sponsored beheadings all day on the internet, even some done by children . . . this really diminishes my concern over my basement beer fridge, which has lost it's ability to chill beer-- though the freezer is still fully operational-- at first I thought it was a crisis, but then I read about this stuff, and now it doesn't seem all that significant).
1) unIslamic activities-- smoking, listening to music, wearing hair gel-- are punished by flogging, execution, and amputation;
2) there is video footage of gay men being thrown off tall buildings to their deaths;
3) Jews and Christians are given the choice to convert or die;
4) public executions and floggings happen nearly every day;
5) an ISIS pamphlet from Aleppo lists some crimes and punishments . . . drinking alcohol is 80 lashes, as is slander, spying for infidels and renouncing Islam both result in death;
6) women may marry at age 9 and should be married by age 16, and they must wear two heavy robes to conceal their figure . . .
and so I went back to the email updates that I sent from when I lived in Syria (200-2003) and looked at some of my recollections from our various trips to the city and surrounding regions;
1) we wandered through the Dead Cities, abandoned Byzantine olive-oil towns in the hills just outside of the city;
2) we watched Embassy folk collect ancient pottery shards at various tells and middens;
3) we stayed at the Baron Hotel-- the spooky but notable spot where Agathie Christie wrote "Murder on the Orient Express"-- drinking beer at the bar is right out of The Shining (but apparently, the place is closed down now):
4) our Syrian friend Yara told us tales of covered women in Aleppo that openly took lesbian lovers and I wrote a treatment for an erotic Syrian film:
the taciturn husband warns his wife not to leave the house for any reason, and then goes to play backgammon with his friends . . . a woman covered in black from head to toe shows up at the door, and the lady of the house invites her in for tea . . . she lifts her veil and gives her host a long concupiscent look . . . soon enough she’s shedding her robe, and there’s nothing underneath . . .
5) we ate-- notably at the Beit Sissi-- drank, wandered the city and the region, were mobbed by Syrian children who treated us like rock stars, took tours with our favorite guide in the Middle East-- Jihad-- and generally felt like we were on vacation . . . Aleppo always seemed a little less oppressive and a little more Western than Damascus, a little more like Turkey . . . but apparently those days are gone, and I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around this (I also read that ISIS beheaded the antiquities expert for Palmyra-- the spectacular Roman city in the Syrian desert-- because he refused to reveal where valuable artifacts were hidden . . . ISIS considers preserving ancient artifacts "akin to idol worship and punishable by death" and when they say that, apparently they aren't kidding . . . if you've got a strong stomach, you can watch ISIS sponsored beheadings all day on the internet, even some done by children . . . this really diminishes my concern over my basement beer fridge, which has lost it's ability to chill beer-- though the freezer is still fully operational-- at first I thought it was a crisis, but then I read about this stuff, and now it doesn't seem all that significant).
Governor Christie, Try Cracking One of Those Old-Fashioned Books Of Which You Speak
Governor Christie makes some interesting claims in this video, including the opinion that teachers are "getting paid a full time salary for a part time job" and then he demands that, for the sake of the children, teachers work longer hours-- despite the fact that we are getting paid less every year (because of increased health care "donations" and increased pension payments . . . even though Christie refuses to pay what the state owes to the pension fund) and while he also believes that we should get rid of all those antiquated school books and instead give every kid an Ipad, he should try reading Elizabeth Green's book Building a Better Teacher so he can appreciate the productivity of American teachers, who spend far more time in the classroom and teach far more students than the countries that are tops in education (notably Finland and Japan) and while one of my recent goals is to follow politics more closely-- to start, I'm listening to Dan Carlin's podcast Common Sense-- but perhaps this is a bad idea if I'm going to be an effective teacher, as it's hard to teach when your blood is boiling.
Rick Perlstein is Not Ersatz
I'm trying to get fired up about Governor Christie breaking the law and not paying into my pension fund, but it's an abstract concept that won't affect me until far in the future so it's hard to get as indignant about it as I should (and I'm trying to be proactive and "tweet" my opinion to the proper politicians, but that's a fairly abstract way to protest as well) but meanwhile, I'm banging my way through Rick Perlstein's dense book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus and learning just how galvanized America was politically in the early sixties; the theme of the book is that it was just as fun and exciting and rebellious to be a conservative as it was to be a liberal civil rights champion, or-- a few years later-- counter-culture hippie . . . everybody was getting radical and the middle of the road (Nelson Rockefeller) was boring (aside from his new woman) . . . Perlstein uses my favorite word (ersatz) to describe the rumored American model town the Soviets built so they could train Communist spies in "indigenous American arts" like sipping sodas at drugstore fountains . . . these were the sorts of things that the John Birch Society was worried about-- if you weren't into communal living, then you might be into building a bomb shelter in your yard-- and though a Communist defector killed Kennedy, he was killed in a city of vehement right-wing lunatics . . . soon after, George Wallace discovered that there were racists in every state, not just Alabama . . . and while Kubrick was satirizing the bomb, intelligent people were having serious discussions about how we might use it and what the death toll might be . . . and people came out in droves to protest, to sit-in, to firebomb, to riot, to root for radical candidates-- very different than the digital protests that happen today; these were wild times, and deserve deserve wild and whirling words, and Perlstein provides them (including, among others, the words "cloture" and "vitiated") and while his works aren't light reading by any stretch (and I recommend using Kindle so you can control the font) they are required reading if you want to understand the political zeitgeist of the sixties and early seventies.
Two News Stories People Can Relate To . . .
I'm plugging away at After the Music Stopped: The Financial Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead and though I've read more than a few books on this topic, I'm still learning a lot from Alan S. Blinder (did you know that the repeal of the Glass-Steagall act probably didn't have much effect on crisis? fascinating, right?) and while understanding the never-ending saga of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown of 2008 is close to being a job, not all news stories are so dense and difficult; last week was especially good for engaging and easy news . . . first there was the "polar vortex," which everyone enjoyed talking about-- I enjoyed all the fun facts: parts o Minnesota are colder than Mars! New Jersey is colder than Antarctica! and Alaska!-- and the other great story (especially if you live in New Jersey) is Bridgegate, and while I don't think Chris Christie is stupid enough to be directly involved in this fiasco, I sure hope he is . . . and everyone I know is rooting for this outcome as well-- it just seems like the act that will define him-- and it's so much easier to understand traffic and revenge, as opposed to economic policy . . . and if you're one of the seven people in America who hasn't seen the John Stewart bit on the topic, check it out.
Irony, Hypocrisy, Christie
While the extensive media coverage of Governor Christie's use of the State Helicopter to go to his son's baseball game is bi-partisan politics at its worst-- we have far more important things to debate in New Jersey-- there is still a delicious irony to the fact that Christie actually said this on the record: "People in New Jersey now feel as if there have become two classes of people in New Jersey: public employees who receive rich benefits, and those who pay for them," and, of course, if you call for a "shared sacrifice" to balance the State Budget, then you'd better be prepared to be called a hypocrite if you're not "walking the walk"-- but, considering his plump figure and the fact that he was driven in a limo the hundred yards from the helicopter to the ball field-- it is doubtful that Christie walks anywhere.
I'd Better Pace Myself
Governor Christie promises he will pay into the state pension fund if a number of his demands are met (that's how collective bargaining works now in New Jersey) and one of his prerequisites is to raise the retirement age for teachers to sixty-five . . . and while I realize that 65 might be a typical retirement age in the private sector, it is not what was promised if you dedicated your life to education-- when I started teaching, the retirement age for teachers was fifty-five: it was one of the alluring things about the career-- and although the age has been raised periodically for new hires, it hasn't changed if you were "grand-fathered in," but the new proposal states that anyone with less than 25 years teaching experience must work until they are 65 before they can receive their pension, and I understand that the Governor is trying to balance the budget, but I am not sure that he's thought about the ramifications of this proposal:
1) Though it won't be so bad for this generation of kids, the next generation of children will rarely have the joy of a new, young teacher, idealistic and fresh out of college . . . instead they will be taught by old, bitter and wilted hags and crones, eking out those last few years before retirement and the big sleep . . .
2) It will be extremely difficult for new teachers to get jobs, because the old teachers won't be able to retire . . . and teaching is a young person's job-- it requires an incredible amount of energy and endurance-- so health care and logistical costs will sky-rocket because old teachers will be taking loads of sick days and using far more health care than young teachers . . .
3) The only time students will get a new, fresh, young idealistic teacher is when their old teacher dies, and this will inevitably happen in front of students, and the psychic toll this exacts on our population-- the collective trauma our youth will share, that they all have seen a teacher fall over in the middle of class, croak out a last bit of wisdom, and then die in front of them-- will off-set any budgetary benefits from the proposal;
4) On the plus side, this makes the rest of my life very easy to figure out . . . I don't have to worry about thinking about early retirement . . . what I might do with myself, where I might want to live . . . I will be in the same spot for the next twenty-five years, doing the same job, watching my colleagues grow old and wrinkled, living in the same house in the same town . . . and enjoying a higher quality of living that the vast majority of the humans on the planet . . . and there's something comforting in that, as long as I pace myself.
1) Though it won't be so bad for this generation of kids, the next generation of children will rarely have the joy of a new, young teacher, idealistic and fresh out of college . . . instead they will be taught by old, bitter and wilted hags and crones, eking out those last few years before retirement and the big sleep . . .
2) It will be extremely difficult for new teachers to get jobs, because the old teachers won't be able to retire . . . and teaching is a young person's job-- it requires an incredible amount of energy and endurance-- so health care and logistical costs will sky-rocket because old teachers will be taking loads of sick days and using far more health care than young teachers . . .
3) The only time students will get a new, fresh, young idealistic teacher is when their old teacher dies, and this will inevitably happen in front of students, and the psychic toll this exacts on our population-- the collective trauma our youth will share, that they all have seen a teacher fall over in the middle of class, croak out a last bit of wisdom, and then die in front of them-- will off-set any budgetary benefits from the proposal;
4) On the plus side, this makes the rest of my life very easy to figure out . . . I don't have to worry about thinking about early retirement . . . what I might do with myself, where I might want to live . . . I will be in the same spot for the next twenty-five years, doing the same job, watching my colleagues grow old and wrinkled, living in the same house in the same town . . . and enjoying a higher quality of living that the vast majority of the humans on the planet . . . and there's something comforting in that, as long as I pace myself.
Some Aid For Governor Christie
I've been very critical of Governor Christie's treatment of teachers, so in the spirit of fair play, I'll give him some ammunition to wield in his next attack on us: teachers are paid in salary and benefits, but we are also paid in moral superiority and no one accounts for how much this is worth monetarily when they are computing school budgets . . . I know when I'm done teaching a lesson about Shakespeare's Henry IV pt. 1-- one of great works of Western Civilization-- that I feel pretty damn superior; my self-esteem is riding high, my body is full of all kinds of positive hormones, and I feel as though I'm contributing something fantastic to the world . . . and that's worth a lot of money . . . of course, I don't feel as morally superior as one of those doctors without borders or someone who volunteers to work with the homeless or a scientist who has just cured leprosy . . . but I certainly feel morally superior to a gun runner arming a genocide or a guy who tranches synthetic CDO's or an elephant poacher.
Charter Schools and Vouchers: The Math Doesn't Add Up
Once again, I have written an argument against charter schools and vouchers, but this might appeal to more conservative minds, as it deals with the financial consequences of Governor Christie's legislation; please read it, get involved, sign the petition, write letters to the newspaper and your political representatives, and I promise to return to my usual stupidity.
Diane Ravitch Speaks About Education
This Diane Ravitch lecture is rather long and dry (like Diane Ravitch's excellent and comprehensive book, The Life and Death of the Great American School System, which I summarize here) but she summarily refutes the claims of Governor Christie's favorite documentary, Waiting for Superman, and she exposes some of the myths behind data based teacher evaluations, charter schools, No Child Left Behind, unions, market-driven school reform, and tenure . . . I highly recommend the book, but if you don't care enough about our nation's educational system to read an entire book-- which I completely understand, because it's almost Black Friday and you probably need to start reading the circulars-- then you can use this clip (she starts speaking ten minutes in) as a guide, albeit an ersatz one.
Governor Christie Needs to Read His Shakespeare
In Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, the characters are bound to each other both by their inherent status and by the contracts they enter-- this is what generates the conflict in the play (Shylock cannot escape his status as a vilified minority so he clings to his contract for a pound of Antonio's flesh; Antonio maintains his status as the merchant of Venice despite forfeiture, yet he will not break contract because Venice thrives on business, Bassanio has the status of a gentleman so Portia enters into the marriage contract with him despite his insolvency; Portia is bound by an odd contract to her dead father; Shylock's daughter Jessica would like to erase her status as a Jew by entering a marriage contract with Lorenzo; etc.) and whenever I teach the kids this, I start to apply the terms of status and contract to the world around me (the status of being someone's teacher is a an excellent one-- no matter how smart, famous, and powerful my students become in the future, I will always be able to say to them, "I taught you everything you know," and this is similar to the status of "coach," as no matter how far my players go in soccer, I can always say, "I got them started") and so here is my new application of the terms: the reason Governor Christie has incited so much anger and rage among the teachers of New Jersey is because he ignored (and sometimes assaulted) the status of being a teacher-- which is the reason most people teach: to be a respected individual in the community, to make a permanent connection with generations of students, and to feel as though you are doing something positive with your career . . . it's certainly not for the money-- so when he said teachers were using students like "drug mules" and that schools grant tenure to anyone "still breathing", and then immediately turned to financial and contractual issues, teachers took incredible offense, and, predictably, like Shylock, when they were robbed of any status, they clung to their contracts and refused a pay freeze . . . perhaps if he were more diplomatic with teachers about their status in the community, they would be willing to cooperate with him . . . but apparently he hasn't read his Shakespeare.
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