I pride myself on being a logical person, versed in numeracy, literacy, and many topics-- but one thing I don't fuck around with is medical information . . . I don't read about medical stuff, I don't investigate it, I don't wonder at it, I don't think about it-- when I was a kid, I skipped that page in Discover about medical mysteries (was it called Vital Signs?) and while I know this is ridiculous, I just think it's bad juju to wonder about how your body works . . . if you read about heart attacks, you might have one; if you watch a medical show where someone has an aneurysm, your body might follow suit; if you research too much about your kidneys, they might stop working, and I did not read one page of Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (even though I heard it was an excellent book) and then yesterday, we were discussing strokes (because my friend's dad had a stroke) and I got a terrible headache-- and I never get headaches-- and it was like a spike had been nailed into my head above my right eye and I could barely teach and I had to cancel my dermatology appointment . . . but apparently lots of people get headaches-- some far worse than the one I experienced-- and I wasn't having a stroke and it went away when I had some acetaminophen and coffee, but I still don't want to know how this stuff works (my friend Rachel told me she has lots of little white scars on her brain from migraine headaches!)
Fuck Capitol One!
Capitol One double charged us a week ago-- my wife paid $3823 two days early so she could sort out our budget and then Capitol One automatically took another $3823 two days later-- their auto-pay extracted that amount again, even though our balance was zero-- so that our bill was now negative three thousand and some dollars-- and when we called to rectify this, their customer service was atrocious-- NOBODY could do anything . . . apparently they can take your money but they can't give it back-- and the fucking customer service people just read and read from their script and no one could bump you up to anyone with actual power . . . we were finally promised that after an "investigation" they would return the money they stole from us-- at first they said they would return it in the form of a check, but we were like: "you fucking took the money digitally so you can return it digitally" so the rep said he would do that ASAP-- but he was a liar-- and then a week went by and we received nothing so I called again this Saturday-- and now we were in worse shape because our credit card statement no longer reflected that we were three thousand in the negative . . . but we didn't have the money-- and I must point out that we were lucky enough to have enough money to pay our Rutgers bill, as this double-charge was enough money to cripple some families financially-- and the lady couldn't even see that there was some weird payment correction pending and she also had no supervisor working she could refer us to-- so after much yelling she finally figured out that Capitol One had sent us a letter-- a letter!-- informing us that they would soon be sending us a check-- a fucking check, though they stole our money digitally-- and this is obviously because some percentage of people never get the check and never follow up, so Capitol One makes even more money by bilking people . . . so it's going to take a couple weeks (I hope) to get our money back that they stole by double billing us, though they extracted it digitally, so as soon as we get the money we'll be cancelling our account and I implore everyone to cancel their Capitol One accounts and forward this story and tell your friends and family to FUCK CAPITOL ONE because they are crooks with atrocious customer service.
Pandemic Stuff
Michael Lewis's new book The Premonition: A Pandemic Story is not satisfying reading but it's sure as hell informative and interesting-- it's not satisfying because there's no end to this story in sight, and our country was ill-prepared, ill-informed, and barely organized in its response to the COVID pandemic; you'll learn why certain things went the way they did and you'll also learn that there isn't a "cabal of people at the top controlling this entire thing"-- which is what an old guy at a wake told me last Sunday-- because all the decisions came from the bottom up-- often from state and county employees referred to as "L6" because apparently, the answer to big problems doesn't come from top administrators-- you've got to go six levels down until anyone knows how to actually do anything . . . one piece of logic I learned was that when that first person died of COVID at the end of February, it was all over . . . because COVID kills about a helf of one percent of people and it takes a while to die from it, so that meant that 200 people had COVID 3-4 weeks before that person died-- so the genie was way out of the bottle, there was no reason to close the borders, the virus was rampant, no one had been contact traced and the rest was history . . . if this isn't enough, Sam Harris just did a major take on the lessons of the pandemic, and here are some highlights from the book:
The CDC was avoiding controversy
Charity could see that the CDC’s strategy was politically shrewd. People were far less likely to blame a health officer for what she didn’t do than what she did. Sins of commission got you fired. Sins of omission you could get away with, but they left people dead.
In a pandemic, you've got to utilize utilitarian thinking
Ahead on the tracks, you spot five people. Do nothing and the train will run them over and kill them. But you have an option! You can flip a switch and send the train onto a siding, on which, unfortunately, there stands a man named Carl. Do nothing and you kill five people; flip the switch and you kill Carl. Most college freshmen elect to kill Carl and then, wham, th professor hits them with the follow-up. Carl has five healthy organs that can be harvested and used to save the lives of five people in need of them. All you need to do is shoot Carl in the back of the head. Would you do that, too? If not, explain the contradiction . . .
All Thinking is Flawed
He found a book called Human Error, by a British psychologist aptly named James Reason. “It was like reading the owner’s manual of the human mind,”
Carter poked fun at the way Richard walked around saying important-sounding things, like “All models are wrong; some of them are useful,” but he felt the alchemy in their interactions.
Richard viewed models as a check on human judgment and as an aid to the human imagination. Carter viewed them more as flashlights. They allowed him to see what was inside a room that, until now, had been pitch-black.
My Job is a Hot Zone
“I couldn’t design a system better for transmitting disease than our school system,” he said after his visit. To illustrate this point he created a picture, of a 2,600-square-foot home, but with the same population density as an American school, then turned it into a slide. “The Spacing of People, If Homes Were Like Schools,” read the top. The inside of the typical American single-family home suddenly looked a lot like a refugee prison, or the DMV on a bad day. “There is nowhere, anywhere, as socially dense as school classrooms, school hallways, school buses,” said Carter.
You Need to React Quickly
“Public Health Interventions and Epidemic Intensity during the 1918 Influenza Pandemic,” the piece revealed, for the first time, the life-or-death importance of timing in the outcomes of 1918.
Cities that intervened immediately after the arrival of the virus experienced far less disease and death.
Charity Dean Came From Another Planet: rural Oregon
They told me I should be at the fiftieth percentile of my class. No better.” After the next semester, when her grades remained high, the church elders sent her a letter instructing her to drop out of medical school and return to Junction City.
It Could Have Been Worse
So little about it was known that a trained pathologist had stared at a picture of it and mistaken it for human immune cells. It had been detected only a few dozen times since its discovery—once in a dead four-year-old girl. No one knew what it ate when it wasn’t eating the brains of mandrills or humans. Asked to explain what he’d found, Joe would only say, “Balamuthia is an amoeba and it eats your brain, and there is no cure.”
Politics Played a Role
But then, on April 9, 2018, Trump hired John Bolton as his national security adviser, and the next day, Bolton fired Tom Bossert, and demoted or fired everyone on the biological threat team. From that moment on, the Trump White House lived by the tacit rule last observed by the Reagan administration: the only serious threat to the American way of life came from other nation-states. The Bush and Obama administrations’ concern with other kinds of threats was banished to the basement.
Sometimes You've Got to Light a Fire to Escape
“Escape fire,” was what they’d call it. The event so captivated the writer Norman Maclean, best known for his only other book, A River Runs Through It,
In fire you could see lessons for fighting a raging disease. He jotted them down:
You cannot wait for the smoke to clear: once you can see things clearly it is already too late. You can’t outrun an epidemic: by the time you start to run it is already upon you. Identify what is important and drop everything that is not. Figure out the equivalent of an escape fire.
It Wasn't Just in Italy
On March 1, it announced that the United States would screen people arriving from other countries for symptoms of the virus. “I wouldn’t waste a moment of time on travel restrictions or travel screening,” Carter wrote. “We have nearly as much disease here in the US as the countries in Europe.”
Most of Us (Including Me) Had No Clue
Ken Cuccinelli, the acting deputy secretary of homeland security and a member of Trump’s coronavirus task force. “He said, ‘Charity, you need to push these things through. You’re the only one who can do this.’ ” She was taken aback by his insistence. “He wasn’t pleading with me to do the right thing. He was yelling at me. He was basically implying that the White House is not going to do the right thing. The White House is not going to protect the country. So California needs to take the lead.”
Charity Dean realized just how lost and desperate the people at the top were.
half of 1 percent of the people who get the disease die, you can surmise that for every death, there are 199 people already walking around with it. That first death—which California already had experienced—was telling you that you had two hundred cases a month earlier.
In Park’s time with the federal government, he’d dealt with one technology crisis after another. He’d noticed a pattern that he’d first identified in the private sector: in any large organization, the solution to any crisis was usually found not in the officially important people at the top but in some obscure employee far down the organization’s chart. It told you something about big organizations, and the L6s buried inside them, that they were able to turn Charity Dean into a person in need of excavation.
Sometimes You Need the Government to Take the Lead
Far more often than not, some promising avenue of research would die as a failed company. He hated that; he hated the way financial ambition interfered with science and progress.
The absence of federal leadership had triggered a wild free-for-all in the market for pandemic supplies. In this market, Americans vied with Americans for stuff made mainly by the Chinese. Marc Benioff, the CEO of Salesforce, flew in a planeload of materials from China to the UCSFmedical center with boxes of functional, though less than ideal, nasal swabs on board.
American government, circa April 2020, was just how different appearances on the outside could be from the understanding on the inside. Inside California state government, inside even the Trump administration, there was some logic to everything that happened;
“The greatest trick the CDC ever pulled was convincing the world containment wasn’t possible,” she said. “Our dignity was lost in not even trying to contain it.” She wondered if perhaps they had undergone a process similar to her own—a descent, which
You have this burden of maintaining optics. It’s all optics.”
He finally more or less gave up on the state. “There was something deeply dysfunctional about how the government worked that I never fully grasped,” Joe would later say. “There’s no one driving the bus.” And the CDC—well, the CDC was its own mystery.
Her conclusion had pained her some. Once she’d become a public-health officer, she’d imagined an entire career in public service. Now she did not believe that the American government, at this moment in its history, would ever do what needed doing. Disease prevention was a public good, but the public wasn’t going to provide anything like enough of it. From the point of view of American culture, the trouble with disease prevention was that there was no money in it. She needed to find a way to make it pay.
Back Up The Beehive (21 Years Later)
More Vehicular Woes! And a Nice Lake Swim . . .
We made it up to Hancock, Maine without mishap-- stopping for Bissell Brothers beer and Salvage BBQ in Portland-- and while our rental is a bit cluttered, it's in an amazing location, near some tidal falls full of pools dotted with pink starfish-- yesterday, we took a ride out to the Schoodic Peninsula and there was a scenic pull-off in Sullivan and not only were the views of Mount Desert Island and Cadillac Mountain majestic, but there was also a grass tennis court just below the hilltop; this was too much stimulus for the driver (yours truly) and I turned a bit too late to park and hit the curb-- which turned out to be a very high and sharp curb made of granite-- so I popped the tire and bent the rim of our last remaining vehicle; luckily, Alex and I knew how to access the spare tire in the van (because he popped a different tire on a sewer grate a month ago and we learned that 2008 Toyota Sienna's have the most inaccessible spare tires in the auto world-- you need a five sided hex nut because of a weird recall, to lower it down from a wire from directly beneath the car-- even the Triple A guy didn't have one, so the car had to be towed, but after the first flat, I bought one on Ebay and put it in the glove box) and so while Catherine called Triple A, Alex and I tried to change the tire-- and it was hot, REALLY hot . . . and we finally got the tire loose from the bottom of the car, and it was really rusty (from being under the car) and it was very difficult to remove the tire from the wire-- the metal part that held it eventually just fell apart and then we tried jacking the car up, but forgot to put the parking brake on, so it titled over-- meanwhile, Catherine found out the wait for Triple A assistance was over and hour, so we pulled the car up a bit, got the jack in the right spot, put on the brake, and slowly and sweatily jacked the car up, pulled off the old tire and put on the donut-- and then we headed to Complete Tire Service in Ellsworth, where they could have gouged us or made us wait-- they were busy-- but they were so friendly and accomodating and got a new rim and new tire on the car in less than an our and charged us a total of $237-- could have been far worse-- and then we ate lobster rolls and seafood at Jordan's, headed back to our place, let the dog out, and then got back in the car and drove to the beach at Donnell Pond, a scenic sandy cove at the end of a large lake in the mountains (and later in the evening, Ian beat me twice in a row at cornhole, which I blamed on tired forearms from jacking the car up).
College Admissions: More Than You Need To Know . . .
Jeffrey Selingo's Who Gets in and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions is a great book-- well-written, compelling, and chock full of telling anecdotes and vital information; here are a few things I learned:
1) ignore the mail . . . it's random-- you are NOT being recruited by Princeton if you have 1350 on your SAT and a 3.7 GPA and happen to get sent a brochure;
2) there are hidden agendas-- more men, more English majors, more people from five states away, more people that pay;
3) elite colleges are more difficult to get acceptance now but the rest are not;
4) you need a cohesive story of why you actually want to go to a particular college . . . colleges track website visits, they pay attention to who visits and attends admission presentation, they like legacies, they know who opens emails, etc . . . colleges are trying to figure out who will go to the college-- not give an award of acceptance;
5) Early Decision serves the needs of the college "a hell of a lot more" than the needs of the student-- again, colleges are trying to lock-in people who will pay full tuition or play football or boost SAT scores or increase diversity . . . so you're probably not going to get into your reach school just because you apply ED . . . and you won't be able to shop around and negotiate;
6) Selingo breaks colleges into "buyers" and "sellers" . . . sellers are well-known schools with low admission rates and a brand name-- buyers are schools that need to purchase a class of incoming students-- and they need to offer more discounts to excellent students to lure them in . . . there are some excellent schools in both categories-- and many state schools are "buyer" schools that should be considered . . . but it's best to apply to some of each and then weigh the finances and merits of the schools;
7) rich white people take advantage of using sports to get into school more than people of color . . . while basketball and football may admit a number of black students, most of the other sports-- lacrosse, gymnastics, sailing, soccer, rowing-- have mainly white participants, often rich white kids who played elite, club versions of these sports for their entire childhood;
8) college essays could be helpful, but most are "mind-numbingly boring" and deal with several topics: overcoming an athletic injury; dealing with depression, anxiety, or sexuality; or discovering themselves on a trip . . . honest slice-of-life essays have the best chance of capturing admissions' officers severely depleted attention;
9) it's very difficult to determine the cost of a college-- the sticker price is often not indicative-- and the maze of subsidized and unsubsidized loans, financial aid, grants and scholarships is difficult to navigate, even for guidance counselors-- it sounds worse than buying a used car;
10) don't get sold on the tour . . . a tour is just a tour and it's easier to improve the quality of the tour than it is to improve the quality of an undergraduate engineering program;
11) slow down and don't get caught up in Early Decision . . . Selingo hope the COVID might turn some of this process on its ear: less reliance on test scores, college recruiting students the way they recruit athletes, students searching for what they want to do at school-- not for a particular brand name, government subsidies and encouragement so selective schools can take more middle and lower-income kids, he also hopes that some of these brand name universities enlarge their classes; the actual price of college could become more transparent and that students and parents expand the field beyond just certain selective colleges . . . there's no perfect fit and no perfect college-- you need to be very flexible in your shopping;
12) most importantly, everyone involved agrees that college admissions is a short-sighted, out-of-your-control process and you can't get too caught up in it;
13) here are some random bits of advice from the appendix:
--worry about what you do in high school, and less about standardized tests;
--use freshman year to explore your academic and extra-curricular interests;--take the hardest courses available, but also what interests you;
--keep your grades consistent and don't blow off senior year;
--don't ask for recommendations from the usual suspects;
--make your initial college list about your needs and fuss with names later on;
--visit any campus, not just schools you want to go to;
--connect with colleges;
--think about the money;
--think about each application individually, not collectively;
--be sure those who recommend you know you;
--figure out the narrative you want to tell;
--it doesn't really matter what college you go to-- people with the same grades and SATs make the same amount of money whether they go to Harvard or Penn State;
--mindsets and skills matter more than colleges and majors;
--the majors you think are a guarantee to make money aren't necessarily that. . . the top quarter of earners who majored in English make more over their lifetime than the bottom quarter of chemical engineers . . . even history graduates who make just above the median income for that major do pretty well compared to STEM . . .
and most importantly, don't get too wound up about this because college admission is not the end-all-be-all:
"one cannot tell by looking at a toad how far he will jump"
for more on this topic, check out This American Life: The Campus Tour Has Been Cancelled . . . the pros and cons of college admissions in a post-standardized test, pandemic universe.
It's Time For Everyone To Leave the House
Last night at 10:30 PM I was woken from a sound sleep by my older son-- who was on a Zoom call playing Monopoly with his friends and found it necessary to yell at the top of his lungs-- so I trudged downstairs and watched Serena Williams lose to Naomi Osaka in the Australian Open . . . then this morning around 10:30 AM, while I was teaching school in the study-- because of a winter storm I was remote today-- I heard my younger son Ian screaming bloody murder . . . it sounded like a bad burn or a broken bone, and I charged up from the study and my wife ran up from the basement-- where she was teaching-- and we found Ian shrieking on the floor in the aftermath of a fistfight that began over some gummy worms and a two-for-flinching-game, and ended in punching, biting, kicking, and a knee to the groin . . . I directed every expletive in the book towards my children-- who had an actual snow day . . . something which doesn't even exist in my district any longer . . . they had no responsibilities at all-- and luckily both my wife and I had ended our class meetings, or some student would have called DYFS; now the kids are doing chores all day and buying us dinner tomorrow night; the takeaway is that we all need to go back to school and get out of each other's hair . . . I have been back for a week or so and though everything is worse in school: the internet is bad, my room was 50 degrees, the technology is wonky, it's impossible to teach kids in the room and virtual kids simultaneously, etc etc. it's still better to be out of the house; I get way less work done and but I'm much happier, sharing my misery with my colleagues, and far from my children (they went back for a day this week and Catherine actually had the house to herself for a few hours!)
I Give Up: Here's a Bunch of Random Stuff From "Why We're Polarized"
I highly recommend Ezra Klein's new book Why We're Polarized for both liberals and conservatives-- and it should be the last thing you read that mentions national politics for a long while; warning, this post is going to be epically long-- because I dog-eared so many pages in the book and then used the Google Doc "voice-typing" tool to input all the information into the computer and while it was pretty fun to read aloud and watch the text scroll, the post is a total mess; you're not going to get accurate quotations, as I didn't take my time, but I'm going to boil down Klein's words into a sort of plagiaristic of Dave/Ezra Klein that is perfectly fitting for this ridiculous blog medium; while Klein is a self-avowed liberal (and usually a vegan . . . but not when he travels) who co-founded Vox and is a regular on the podcast The Weeds, this book is not a liberal paean . . . it's an explanation and the take-away is this: stop following national politics like it's more than a football match or a soap opera and-- if you truly want to enact political change-- start worrying about your hometown and the things going on in the state in which you live-- Jersey pride!-- these are the things you can actually influence; anyway . . . here is some stuff from the book, partly paraphrased, partly with Klein's wording, and partly insane rambling;
1) America used to be full of ticket splitters-- and you knew plenty of ticket splitters-- so you didn't identify too heavily with either party;
2) policy was a mixed bag . . . Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush signed legislation raising taxes for instance that would be unthinkable in today's Republican Party-- almost every elected Republican official has signed a pledge promising to never raise taxes under any circumstances; Bush also sign the Americans with Disabilities Act into law and oversaw a cap-and-trade program to reduce the pollutants behind acid rain; Reagan signed an Immigration Reform Bill the today's Democrats venerate and today's Republicans denounce; Reagan supported amnesty for illegal immigrants; President Bill Clinton' stance on illegal immigrants was much akin to Donald Trump's position; Clinton launched his administration with a budget designed to reduce the deficit and an all-out effort to pass the North American Free Trade Agreement NAFTA . . . he famously ran against the left-wing of his own party flying back to Arkansas to preside over the execution of a brain-damaged inmate and publicly denounced the rapper Sister Souljah; in 1965 a Democratic president created a massive single-payer healthcare system for the nation's elderly-- but as liberal as Medicare was in both conception and execution-- it still received 70 Republican votes in the house as well as 13 Republican votes in the Senate; Obamacare, by contrast, was modeled off Mitt Romney's reforms in Massachusetts and built atop many Republican ideas relied on private insurance for the bulk of its coverage expansion and it ended up sacrificing its public option but the legislation didn't receive a single Republican vote in either the house or the Senate;1982 Senator Joe Biden voted for a constitutional amendment that would let States overturn Roe v Wade, etc. etc.
3) Policy and ticket splitting is no more . . . it's ALL identity politics on both sides-- and we're going to have to get used to and live with it . . . or maybe not because you probably don't live near people from the other party: House Democrats now represent 78% of all Whole Foods locations but only 27% of Cracker Barrels . . . it's easy to overstate the direct role partisanship is playing in these decisions, and while it's true that Democrats prefer to live among Democrats and Republicans like living among Republicans, people are still people . . . they look at schools and housing prices and crime rates and similar quality of life questions . . . BUT the big decision they make-- or their parents have made-- is whether to live in an urban or rural area . . . and as the parties become more racially, religiously, and ideologically sorted into geographically different areas the signals that tell us a place is our kind of place heightens our political divisions . . . most Republicans (65%) said they would rather live in a community where houses are larger and farther apart and where schools and shopping are not nearby, while a majority of Democrats (61%) prefer smaller houses within walking distance of schools and shopping; that's a preference that seems non-political on it's face but adds to the stacking of identities;5) it's a mistake to imagine our bank accounts are the only reasonable drivers of political action-- as we become more political we become more interested in politics as a means of self-expression and group identity; it's not that citizens are unable to recognize their interests, it's that material concerns are often irrelevant to the individual's goals when forming a policy opinion;
7) it turns out that there's only a weak relationship between how much a person identifies as a conservative or liberal and how conservative or liberal views actually are; one reason policy is not the driver of political disagreement is most people don't have very strong views about policy: it's the rare hobbyist who thinks so often about cybersecurity and who should lead the Federal Reserve-- but all of us are experts on our own identities;
8) Bill Clinton had the same "draconian" stance as Trump on immigration;
9) one study shows that Democrats and Republicans cared more about the political party of a student vying for a scholarship than the student's GPA . . . partisanship simply trumped academic excellence;
10) another study found that Democrats and Republicans performed better at math when the math skills helped them find an answer that boosted their ideology-- say gun control for liberals-- and the better the person was at math, the dumber they got when getting the problem wrong would NOT bolster their ideology . . . yikes;
11) it's become common to mock students demanding safe spaces, but if you look carefully at the collisions in American politics right now, then you find that everyone is demanding safe spaces-- the fear is not that the government is regulating speech, but that protesters are chilling speech, the Twitter mob rules the land looking for an errant word or a misfired joke . . . in our eagerness to discount our opponents as easily triggered snowflakes, we've lost sight of the animating impulse behind much of the politics and indeed much of life: the desire to feel safe, to know you can say what you want without fear;
12) Klein summarizes the first half of the book thusly: the human mind is exquisitely tuned to group affiliation and group difference; it takes almost nothing for us to form a group identity, and once that happens, we naturally assume ourselves in competition with other groups; the deeper our commitment to our group becomes, the more determined we make sure our group wins . . . making matters worse, winning is positional, not material; we often prefer outcomes that are worse for everyone so long as they maximize our groups advantage over other groups . . . the parties used to be scrambled both ideologically and demographically in ways that curbed their power, but these ideological mixed parties were an unstable equilibrium reflecting America's peculiar and often abhorrent racial politics; the success of the Civil Rights Movement and its alliance with national Democratic party broke that equilibrium and destroyed the Dixiecrat wing of the Democratic party and triggered an era of party sorting; ideological Democrat now means liberal and Republican now means conservative in a way that wasn't true in 1955; partisanship is in part a rational response to the rising party difference-- if the two sides hated and feared each other less 50 years ago, well that makes sense they were more similar 50 years ago, but that's sorting has also been demographic today the parties are sharply split across racial, religious, geographic, cultural and psychological lines . . . there are many many powerful identities lurking in that list and they are fusing together and stacking atop one another so a conflict or a threat that activates one, activates all of the characteristics and since these mega-identities stretch across so many aspects of our society they're constantly being activated in an era of profound powerful social change; a majority of infants born today in America are non-white and the fastest-growing religious identity is "no religious identity at all"; women makeup the majorities on college campuses; foreign-born groups are rising in population and rising in power and they want their needs reflected in the politics and culture; other groups feel themselves losing power want to protect the status and privileges they've in the past when America was "great" and this conflict is sorting itself neatly into two parties; Obama's presidency was an example of the younger more diverse Coalition taking power and Trump's presidency represented the older whiter Coalition taking it back;
13) an Essential Truth Klein has learned: almost no one is forced to follow politics-- there is some lobbyist in government affairs who need to stay on the cutting edge of legislative and regulatory developments to do their job, but most people who follow politics do it as a hobby in the way they follow a sport or a band; political journalism has to compete with literally everything else for retention; Rachel Maddow is a war with reruns of The Big Bang Theory; Fox competes with Xbox; time spent reading this book is time not spent listening to the podcast Serial;
14) misperceptions were high among everyone, but they were particularly exaggerated when people were asked to describe the other party; Democrats believe 44% of Republicans earn over $250,000 a year-- it's actually 2%; Republicans believed that 38% of Democrats were either gay, lesbian, or bisexual-- the correct answer is about 6%; Democrats believe that more than four out of every 10 Republicans are seniors-- in truth seniors make out about 20% of the GOP; Republicans believe that 46% of Democrats are black and 44% belong to a union and reality about 24% of Democrats are African American and less than 11% belong to a union; what was telling about these results is that the more interested in politics people were, the more political media they consumed, then the more mistaken they were about the other party . . . it makes sense if you think about the incentives driving media outlets . . . the old line on local reporting was if it bleeds it leads, but for political reporting the principal is if it outrages it leads-- and outrage is deeply connected to identity;
15) people have far more power to influence their mayor, state senator, or governor than they have to influence the national discussion; people should be involved in local politics and be most engaged in the tangible states of the politics nearest to their experience . . . of course you're likely to donate to defeat the politician who serves as the villain in the political dramas you watch rather than some local legislator whose name you can't remember . . . of course the stakes of national politics with their titanic clashes of good vs. evil, the storylines omnipresent on social media and television, dominate consciousness . . . but it's counterproductive;
16) people in America used to identify with their state more than the country-- but this has changed-- and it would have confounded the Founders . . . at the core of this newfound nationalization is an inversion of the founders most self-evident assumption: that we will identify more deeply with our home state and with our country . . . a guy named Hopkins proved this with a text analysis of digitized books-- state identity came up WAY more than national identity until recently. . . so I'm bringing that back: I'm Jersey strong and Jersey proud and Bruce and Bon Jovi and all that shit and the rest of the country can do what it wants;
17) America's political system is unusual in that it permits a divided government and is full of tools minorities can use to obstruct governance; imagine that you work in an office where your boss who you think is a jerk needs your help to finish his projects, but if you help him he keeps his job and maybe even get the promotion and if you refuse to help him, you become his boss and he may get fired; now add in a deep dose of disagreement. . . you hate his projects and believe them to be bad for the company and even the world and a bunch of colleagues who also hate your boss will be mad at you if you help him-- that's basically American politics right now, bipartisan cooperation is often necessary for governance but the rationale for the minority party is to stonewall; it's a hell of a way to run a railroad, but this was our structure during much of American History because one party was usually dominant enough to make cooperation worth it for the minority;
19) crucially the Democratic party isn't just more diverse in terms of its members, it's also more diverse in its trusted information sources and 2014 the Pew Research Center conducted a survey measuring trust in different media sources, giving respondents 36 different outlets to consider and asking them to rate their trust in each; liberals trusted a wide variety of media outlets ranging from center-right to left: ABC, Al Jazeera, BBC, Bloomberg, CBS, CNN, The Colbert Report, The Daily Show, The Economist, The Ed Schultz Show, Google News, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Mother Jones, MSNBC, NBC, The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, PBS, Politico, Slate, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and Yahoo . . . conservatives only trusted a handful of sources: Fox News, Breitbart, The Wall Street Journal, The Blaze, The Drudge Report, the Sean Hannity show, The Glenn Beck program, and The Rush Limbaugh Show.
20) Democrats are often derided for playing identity politics, but that is not in truth a difference between the parties . . . Republicans have built their coalition on identity politics as well, but the difference between the parties is at the Democratic candidates are forced to appeal to many more identities and more skeptical voters than Republicans do successful National Democrats construct broad Coalition and that's a practice a cut against the incentives of pure polarisation what national Republicans have learned to do its construct deep coalitions relying on more demographically and ideologically homogeneous voters . . . Republicans, instead of winning power by winning the votes of most voters they win the power by winning the votes of most places
21) Republicans appeal to voters significantly to the right of the median voter but it's forced them into a dependence on an Electra that feels its power slipping away and demands a response the portion it to its fears this is the way in which the parties are not structurally symmetrical and that's why they have not responded to a polarizing are in the same ways Democrats simply can't win running the kinds of campaigns and deploying the kinds of tactics that succeed for Republicans Democrats can move to the left and they are but they can't abandon the center in December 2018 well into the Trump era Gallup as Democrats and Republicans whether they wanted to see their party become more liberal or conservative or more moderate by a margin of 57 to 37% Republicans wanted their party to become more conservative by a margin of 54 to 41% Democrats wanted their party to become more moderate
22) the relevant factor I'm urging you to pay attention to his identity what identity is that article or Twitter thing or video invoking what identities making you defensive what does it feel like when you get pushed back into an identity can you notice it when it happens you log on to Twitter nine times a day can you take a couple of breasts at the end and ask yourself how differently you feel from before you logged on the ID here has become more aware of the ways that politicians and media manipulate us. There are reams of research showing the reaction to political commentary and information we don't like his physical. Are breathing speeds up, are pupils naira, our heart beats faster. Trying to be aware of how politics makes us feel, what happens when our identities are activated, threatened, or otherwise inflamed, is it necessary first step to gaining some control of the process. That is not to say we should become afraid of our identities being inflamed or strong emotion being Force for its to say we should be mindful enough of what's happening to make decisions about whether we're pleased with the situation sometimes it's worth being angry sometimes it's not we don't take the time to know which is which we lose control over our relationship with politics and become the unwitting instrument of others
24) For all our problems we have been a worse and uglier country at almost every other point in our history you do not need to go back to the country's early years when new arrivals from your drove out and murdered indigenous peoples brought over millions of enslaved Africans and wrote laws making women second-class citizens to see it just a few decades ago political assassinations were routine in 1963 President John F Kennedy was murdered on the streets of Dallas in 1965 Malcolm X was shot to death in a crowded New York City Ballroom in 1968 Martin Luther King Jr was killed as was Robert F Kennedy in 1975 Lynette Squeaky Fromme standing about an arm's length from President Gerald Ford aims her gun and fired the bullets fail to discharge Harvey Milk the pioneering gay San Francisco city Supervisor was killed in 1978 President Ronald Reagan was shot in 1981 the bull shattered rivet punctured alone for much of the twentieth century the right to vote was for African Americans no right at all lynchings were common Freedom Writers were brutally beaten across the American South police had to escort young African-American children into schools as jeering crowd shouted racial epithets and threatened to attack violence broke out at the 1968 Democratic National Convention urban riots ripped across the country crime was Rising the United States launched an illegal secret bombing campaigning campaigning in Cambodia National Guard members fired on and killed student protesters at Kent State Richard Nixon Road a backlash to the Civil Rights Movement into the White House launched an Espionage campaign against his political opponents provoked a constitutional crisis and became the first American President to resign from office by impeachment proceedings this is not a counterintuitive take on American history by the way among experts that is closer to the consensus the varieties of democracy project
25) American democracy was far less Democratic and far less liberal and far less decent than today; Trump's most intemperate outbursts pale before the opinions that were mainstream in recent history and the institutions of American politics today are a vast improvement on the regimes that ruled well within living memory . . . if we can do a bit better tomorrow we will be doing much much better than we have ever done before.
Hitchhiker's Guide meets Star Trek Meets a Modern Feminist Perspective . . .
It's a space-opera with a sociological bent-- and while I like it much much more than Star Trek-- there's an archetypal similarity in the mission. The Wayfarer is a tunneling ship that opens up lanes through hyperspace in the Galactic Commons so that there can be communication and commerce between the affiliated species that live throughout the galaxy.
Instead of five years, the diverse crew of The Wayfarer is on a one year trip, but they are definitely going boldly to seek out new life and civilizations and strange new worlds.
The characters are modern and funny and mainly and manifoldly alien . . . humans are on the low end of the totem pole. The new clerk aboard the ship, Rosemarie, is just trying to fit in, knowing full well that the human race-- mainly by pure luck-- has just passed out of this stage:
Perhaps the most crucial stage is that of “intraspecies chaos.” This is the proving ground, the awkward adolescence when a species either learns to come together on a global scale, or dissolves into squabbling factions doomed to extinction, whether through war or ecological disasters too great to tackle divided. We have seen this story play out countless times.
I also learned the word "ansible."
Chambers works with the conceit that life abounds in the universe, that it will evolve towards intelligence, and that it is carbon-based. With limitations, is it any wonder that sentient creatures have more similarities than differences. Even so, Captain Ashby is mired in this mess . . .
As open and generous as Aeluons generally were to their galactic neighbors, interspecies coupling remained a mainstream taboo.
Every alien race has to come to grip that there are others out there, with goals and dreams and culture that has evolved on a grand scale, in some ways parallel to all life, and in some way completely different and unexpected.
A Book You Could Only Read During Quarantine (Not That You Should)
Just as Jesus died on the cross so you don't have to, I have plowed through this enormous tome only to advise you never to read it.
Some of you may know that I'm not averse to reading extremely long, rather old books. I'm a big fan of Tristram Shandy and Middlemarch. I'm also a big fan of novels themselves. They are empathy machines, and they are wonderful ways to model profound decisions without having to live hundreds of different lives. And they are entertaining.
Tom Jones is regarded as a classic. It's one of the first novels written in the English language. I've always wanted to read it, but I only had a paperback copy with a tiny font. I had started the book years ago and felt it was up my alley: the picaresque story of a foundling who must find his way in class-based 18th century England. I love a good picaresque novel.
On January 25th, I had a brilliant idea. I would get the book on my Kindle. Then I wouldn't have to worry about the small font. And I could read late at night and early in the morning. I didn't get very far, but then the pandemic hit and I figured: now or never.
But it was so disconcerting to read the book on the Kindle-- because the Kindle was only acknowledging my progress by percentage points . . . and it took a really long time to move that number. I decided to buy a hardcover version, so it would be easier to read.
Here it is:
I was very excited when it arrived-- you know how exciting it is to receive a package during quarantine-- but when I opened up the copy, to my chagrin, I found that the font was even tinier than that of my paperback copy.
Fielding likens reading his book to taking a long journey. This is what he writes near the end:
We are now, reader, arrived at the last stage of our long journey. As we have, therefore, traveled together through so many pages, let us behave to one another like fellow-travelers in a stagecoach, who have passed several days in the company of each other; and who, notwithstanding any bickerings or little animosities which may have occurred on the road, generally make all up at last, and mount, for the last time, into their vehicle with cheerfulness and good humour; since after this one stage, it may possibly happen to us, as it commonly happens to them, never to meet more.
I will grant him this. I'm glad I know the story, and I'm glad I met the characters. But I still implore you not to read it. It's just too many pages to get across what happens. It's TOO much time to spend with these people.
The plot does pick up around 92% of the way through, but it still takes a good eighty pages or so to conclude things.
If you care, the main themes are thus . . .
Tom Jones, a foundling who thinks he is of low birth, desires the heart of a truly chaste and lovely beauty named Sophia Western. Due to a gross misunderstanding with the country gentleman, Tom Jones has been turned out into the world, where he engages in various adventures-- violent and lusty. He also attends a gypsy wedding, which is quite fun. The main thing to learn here is that social class is EVERYTHING in this world. And marriage should be a reflection of social class (though some women wish this were not true).
In the end, Tom Jones finds out-- of course-- that he IS a gentleman after all-- this is the big reveal: he is the nephew of his benefactor Mr. Allworthy. But his desired love, Sophia Western, is still skeptical about marrying him. She thinks he is a libertine because she knows of some of the picaresque and bawdy adventures he has partaken. He definitely slept with a few women when he was out in the world, and perhaps even impregnated one-- but he assures her his love is true.
She just needs to understand this:
The delicacy of your sex cannot conceive the grossness of ours, nor how little one sort of amour has to do with the heart.
The ol' double standard. Boys will be boys, but then they can repent and settle down.
The women can be headstrong and lusty and plotting in the novel too, but not as much as the men.
This Will Barnes was a country gallant, and had acquired as many trophies of this kind as any ensign or attorney's clerk in the kingdom. He had, indeed, reduced several women to a state of utter profligacy, had broke the hearts of some, and had the honour of occasioning the violent death of one poor girl, who had either drowned herself, or, what was rather more probable, had been drowned by him.
The men also succumb to the silliness and stupidity of alcohol.
For drink, in reality, doth not reverse nature, or create passions in men which did not exist in them before. It takes away the guard of reason, and consequently forces us to produce those symptoms, which many, when sober, have art enough to conceal.
One of my favorite sections, which might be worth reading if you are an English teacher, is when Tom Jones attends Hamlet with his trusty (and dopey) sidekick Partridge.
Partridge offers running commentary throughout the play. At first, he is not scared by the ghost, because he knows it is a man dressed in a costume, but then when he sees the great David Garrick playing Hamlet, he gets frightened because Garrick is so affrighted.
"Nay, you may call me coward if you will; but if that little man there upon the stage is not frightened, I never saw any man frightened in my life."
Partridge then issues his take on acting, which is fabulous. He does NOT believe Garrrick is the best actor in the play, because Garrick behaved exactly as a normal person would, when seeing a ghost. He prefers the bloviating of the king-- because THAT is acting. Good stuff-- and a fine collision of worlds with another (excellent) book I read called The Club.
"He the best player!" cries Partridge, with a contemptuous sneer, "why, I could act as well as he myself. I am sure, if I had seen a ghost, I should have looked in the very same manner, and done just as he did. And then, to be sure, in that scene, as you called it, between him and his mother, where you told me he acted so fine, was never at a play in London, yet I have seen acting before in the country; and the king for my money; he speaks all his words distinctly, half as loud again as the other.—Anybody may see he is an actor."
I'm proud that I finished this book, and excited to be free of it. It weighed on me each and every day, the way that one's social class constricted the folk of 18th century England. I am glad to be free (somewhat) of that burden . . . although it is certainly economic class distinctions that gave me the time during quarantine to read this book-- my house is big enough for me to find quiet spaces, I'm working from home on my own schedule, and I'm not worried where my next meal is coming from. There are plenty of people in much worse situations, though we consider ourselves beyond all this 18th-century class tomfoolery . . . social distancing has been happening in America long before Covid-19.
Required Listening (If You Care About U.S. China Relations)
The episode is going to be difficult for liberals who like to believe everything Trump has said or done is wrong. It's going to be difficult for ethical relativists who don't think you should evaluate a culture. It's going to be difficult for dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, who believe globalization and free trade are always the answer. It's going to be difficult for multi-culturalists who believe that criticizing the Chinese government could lead to racism against Chinese people in the United States. It's going to be difficult for Americans in general because we've trusted China too much, we've not recognized that the Chinese government is at odds with our core values, and the Chinese response to the pandemic has painted this in black and white.
Steven Dubner talks to Michèle Flournoy, who runs a strategic-advisory firm called WestExec. She is a once and perhaps future government official.
FLOURNOY: In my former life, I was the undersecretary of defense for policy in the Pentagon in the Obama administration. And in that capacity, I dealt with a full range of policy issues, including U.S.-China relations.
Here's how Auslin describes himself.
Michael AUSLIN: I am a distinguished research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford and before that, was a professor at Yale.
DUBNER: And I hate to force each of you to reduce yourself to a label, but if you had to categorize yourself on the China-hawk/dove spectrum, where do you stand?
FLOURNOY: I’m a clear-eyed pragmatist. I see the challenges and threats pretty clearly, but I also am willing to work towards areas where it’s in our interest to cooperate.
AUSLIN: I’m not a China hawk; I’m a C.C.P. hawk. I just think that we understand the nature of the Communist Party in that it is adversarial to the values and systems that we cherish.
Paint the Coronavirus by Numbers (Local Edition)
We all have different numbers we care about.
I like to think about how many people in New Jersey have tested positive for Covid-19, but I like to think of it in smaller numbers than are presented in the news.
How many people-- on average-- out of a hundred have tested positive?
How many out of every thousand?
I can imagine a hundred people. That's about how many students I have each year (divided among five classes).
I can imagine a thousand people. When we have a pep rally at our school, there are two thousand students in the bleachers. So divide that in half.
There are 14,000 people in my town, and my town is only 1.8 square miles-- so I can imagine that sort of density. It's seven pep rally bleachers of people, scattered about town.
There are 9 million people in New Jersey. So if ten percent of the population gets Covid-19, that's nearly a million people.
If that happens, you will certainly know a LOT of people that tested positive. Sadly, you'll probably know someone who gets hospitalized (or worse).
Even if 1 out of 100 people test positive, chances are you'll know a bunch of them. This would happen if we hit the 90,000 mark. This will probably happen. Hopefully not too soon.
New Jersey has over 13,000 cases now.
That's 1 person in every 700. I have 542 friends on Facebook. I certainly know a lot more people than that. If you live in New Jersey, there's a good chance you know someone who has tested positive. And--unless you have very few social connections--you definitely know someone who knows someone with the virus.
Once I start thinking about the entire country, it all falls apart. There's too much space in America, too many regions, too many cities and towns and rural areas and vast wilderness. I don't think anyone can predict exactly how this thing is going to ripple across the country. But I hope there are some smart people trying.
Are Dogs the New Black Dudes?
So who suffers?
My family doesn't watch many scary movies because my older son Alex is a sniveling coward. Catherine, Ian and I like them, so it's always a treat when we get to hunker down and put one on. I'm definitely not a horror movie aficionado though. Usually when I mention a horror movie I've seen to someone who really likes horror movies-- usually one of my students-- she'll be like: "That's not scary!"
I get scared by pretty much anything (especially Blair Witch and Paranormal Activities).
The other night, Alex elected to go upstairs and pirate some Star Wars spin-off series called The Mandalorian (which sounds like a citrus fruit) so Catherine, Ian and I watched The Babadook.
It's really scary!
Terrifying.
It's the story of a mom who is possessed by the physical disembodiment of her tragic grief. And her super-creepy kid. And an even creepier children's book. There are some mean Australian moms, too-- a macabre Liane Moriarty milieu. It's well acted and vivid, and-- in the end-- profound about death and loss. A good scare and a good film.
My only complaint is the use of the dog.
Malcolm Gladwell Tackles Stranger Danger
I'm a fan of Malcolm Gladwell, but even if you're not, his newest book is a good one. It's called Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About The People We Don't Know and it begins and ends with the Sandra Bland/Brain Encinia West Texas traffic stop and ensuing tragedy.
The book then barrels through various interactions with strangers that go awry: Cuban double agents, diplomatic meetings with Hitler, SEC investigations of Bernie Madoff, the Jerry Sandusky and Amanda Knox trials, Brock Turner's rapey encounter at Stanford, the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the motives and methods behind Sylvia Plath's suicide, and the Michael Brown/Ferguson MO debacle.
As usual, Gladwell is as good at narrative as he is at research. And the examples hang together particularly well (which doesn't always happen in his books).
It turns out that humans are ill equipped to deal with strangers, often at a systemic level. We default to believing we are being told the truth, and when the default doesn't work, we struggle. We either get things wrong, or we design systems that don't help matter.
We might police far too rigidly (this is detailed in Ferguson in Gladwell's podcast . . . a great episode that reveals that while the cop was truly threatened by Michael Brown, the policing system in place oppressed, terrorized, extorted and enraged the people of the town, most of whom were black).
We might not understand how much place and environment have to do with suicide and crime. Sylvia Plath might have killed herself because of the easy access to poisonous "town gas." We might overvalue getting answers, to the point that we destroy and distort a person's memories. We might be in a drunken haze, thus making the possibility of understanding a stranger's intentions even more difficult than it already is. We might be fooled by appearances. Madoff fit the bill as a savvy investor, so he passed muster. All parties involved had trouble indicting Sandusky. And they had trouble trusting Amanda Knox, because she was goofy and weird. Many nervous and anxious folks always appear as if they are lying, even when they are telling the truth. And even folks trained in reading people's emotions can get it very wrong, e.g. Neville Chamberlain. Whoops!
So what should we do?
We should try to have patience and humility and empathy when dealing with people we don't know. We should realize that environment is more important than what we judge as "character." We should realize that it's really easy to judge emotions when we are watching Friends, but that's because those folks are professional actors, trained in making incredibly emotive and easy to read facial expressions. The real world is more difficult to read.
Once we realize all this, we should carry on using truth as the default. We should design our systems in this way as well, except under the most extreme circumstances (and then we should train the hell out of people that are going to implement an aggressive system that does not default to trust).
Gladwell summarizes his argument in the last chapter:
Those occasions when our trusting nature gets violated are tragic. But the alternative-- to abandon trust as a defense against predation and deception-- is worse.
I Want to Say One Word to You: Shame
Skateboards vs. Cell phones
These are tough movies to watch, especially if you've got a genuine awkward middle schooler living in your house, enduring these very particular struggles (and we do). Middle school was a long time ago for me, but these films (and my son) remind me that it's a tough age, odd and half-baked. There's this inchoate desire to want to be something and want to belong to something, before you've become anything. Before you know what that something is.
Middle school is all about putting the cart before the horse, but carts and horses are passé . . . so instead we're dealing with skateboards and cell-phones.
Kayla has several unpleasant confrontations with people in meat space: a middle school crush who turns out to be a pervert, a creepy senior boy, and a couple of bitchy girls. She handles all of the situations with as much grace as she can muster, and learns that there's a bigger (and possibly better) world just ahead, in high school (that will have it's own perils and pitfalls, digital and analog).
The movie captures how important the digital world is to teenage girls. It's all consuming, and-- paradoxically-- it both ameliorates loneliness and amplifies it.
Eighth Grade begins with Kayla's amateur video . . . because with the advent of the cell phone, amateur video is ubiquitous. Mid90s ends with a video, and it took some time and work to make. This symbolizes the difference between the two worlds.
Fourth Grade-- who aspires to be either a film director or work at the DMV like his dad-- diligently compiles footage for the length of the film. The video takes hard work and complete dedication. Fourth Grade is the only one filming. The rest of the gang lives out their life on the streets, and they live large. There are no cell phones to disappear inside, to buffer reality. They do it all in public: skate, trespass, drink, do drugs, party, evade the police, fight, and bond.
Stevie, the twelve year old at the center of this story, frequently gets beaten up by domineering older brother. Stevie takes some hard hard falls. He gets hurt, he recovers. He gets hurt for real.
Both films are about that protean time when you might be anything, anyone. And which is the better place to experiment and explore (and possibly get hurt). Reality or social media?
Which is worse? Which is better?
Should youngsters develop their identities in digital space, like Kayla does? There are so many scenes in Eighth Grade where she's so terribly alone. Her dad tries to help and understand, but it's like he's talking from another planet. Her emotions are real, but she's in no actual danger. We know she's going to pull through and flourish in high school (but that's not the case for everyone . . . social media has been linked with depression).
Mid90s abounds with real danger. Some of these kids are not going to make it. But they're having a helluva time skating and partying. And some of them are learning lessons. Ray goes straight-edge and decides he is going to make it out. He's got aspirations and has given up on the drinking and slacker nihilism. Fuckshit, not so much. And Stevie is a coin toss. But they're all going to have amazing memories of a wild time when they skated, hung out, partied, and seized life by the balls. And no one remembers anything from the internet.
Maybe I'm making too much of this. Maybe social media is just another teen fad, like skateboarding. The rest of us old people, searching for eternal youth, have appropriated it. Maybe we'll all wake up in a few years from this fever dream of posting and liking and trying to go viral, and think: what the hell was that? And the kids will lead the way out. They'll start doing something else. VR sports. Massive holographic sculptures. Levitation.
Or I could be totally wrong. Maybe social media really is the crucible where future generations will form their identity. And what is the role of adults in these worlds? We know what to do when kids are skateboarding and drinking and doing vandalism. We yell at them, call the cops, run them off. It's easy enough. The kids scatter and go somewhere else to hang out.
But the internet is too big for that.
Maybe when this generation sees the effects of the social media lifestyle-- the vacuous distracting time-suck; the lack of concentration; the depression and loneliness and FOMO; the lack of anything substantive, memorable or insignificant-- they will change. Most of us have learned by now that if the internet was a book, no one would buy it or read it. Case and point: this shitty, half-thought out post. It's self-help, like Kayla's video, but putting it online gets me to think harder. It helps me work through it. But does the rest of the world need to see it? Probably not.
So things might change. People might wake up. I have hope for that. What gives me the most hope?
Crack cocaine.
Crack gives me hope. Or the lack of crack. Because the social media environment of the internet might be like the rise and fall of a heavily abused drug. Which particular drug? It doesn't matter. The podcast The Uncertain Hour has been doing a detailed history of the opioid crisis. They began with an episode about the crack epidemic of the 1980's.
What happened to crack?
One theory is that the reason the abuse of certain drugs rise and fall is that it takes a certain amount of time to see the devastating effects of addiction to that drug. Crack was supposed to destroy our nation, but people saw the effects: crack babies and crack dens and crack addiction, the drug was stigmatized. Crack still exists, but it's not an epidemic, not even on the radar. The same with acid. People saw the effects and most stopped. Hopefully, the same will happen with heroin, fentanyl, and oxy. People will get educated, get woke, and move on.
Could the same thing happen with the internet? Will some future generation collectively shut off the screens, dust off their skateboards, and head out into the world? Recognize the banality and stupidity of flicking through tiny images?
My older son was certainly inspired by Mid90s. But he was already a skateboarder, with his own rig. The film was preaching to the choir. He likes to film himself doing tricks. He rides around without a helmet. He lets our dog pull him while he's on his board. It's totally dangerous and he's going to get hurt. He's already been hit by a car, and he wasn't even on his board. It's scary, so I don't watch. But I still think it's probably better than living inside a phone. The trouble inside a phone is more abstract, but the emotions are real. And stuff posted on the internet can go viral, it can get amplified. And it has the potential to be permanent. A broken arm heals, but you never know on the internet. Some of that stuff never goes away.
Still, I'm not sure where I stand on this. Doing stuff on the internet can be fun and creative and rewarding, just as doing stuff in meat space can be the same. There's potential and danger in both zones. And both zones often bleed into each other.
One of the best takes on this is the Atlanta episode "The Woods." Check it out. If adults struggle to navigate between reality and social media, how are middle schoolers supposed to figure it out?
Analog and binary and the stuff in between. Mainly, we are left with questions.
Which is a safer space for kids? Which one is healthier and more relevant? Which space is better a place for experimentation? A better place to form your identity?
Are these even our questions to ask? Maybe not. The kids will figure out. I hope I'm around to see what evolves, but I know my understanding will be biased. I'm too fucking old to get it.