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.

Ira Glass, Futility, and Politics

The new episode of This American Life preaches to the choir, and will definitely not be heard by people that need to hear it (like the people who live behind me-- they are proudly displaying a Trump/Pence sign on their lawn, the only one I've seen in Highland Park) but the candid sincerity in which Ira Glass investigates the lies propagated by the Trump campaign and sad, almost futile conclusions he arrives at will make you wonder what happened to facts, the truth, and the general knowledge of your average American; the show starts with Trump's claim that Hillary Clinton started the birther movement and he ended it, which is so patently ridiculous that it seems to belie further exploration-- aside from the fact that now 1/3 of Americans believe this "fact"-- and worse than this is Trump's assertion that NAFTA was the worst trade agreement in the history of the universe, because before Trump both Democrats and Republicans believed that trade agreements were good for the economy, created new markets, put money in everyone's pockets (because of lower priced goods) and strengthened diplomatic relations between countries . . . but now, despite the fact that 95% of economists (polled by the University of Chicago) believe that NAFTA is good for our economy and 5% are undecided and zero point zero percent of economists believe that NAFTA is bad for our economy, despite this, Clinton has backpedaled on trade agreements and has entertained the idea that manufacturing jobs might actually return to the U.S. (and I'm sure this is just a public position for debating Trump, but it's still disturbing that he could have that much influence over a policy discussion that anyone with any expertise regards as a no-brainer . . . certainly trade agreements cause some specific economic pain, but it's actually far cheaper to pay-off and retrain the people who lost their jobs than it is to punish the entire economy) and so now you've got both major parties taking a contrary position on trade agreements, when that was usually only a radical maneuver-- remember the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle? . . . anyway, the episode doesn't even get into the email "scandal" and the fact that the Bush administration lost five million emails (or 22 million . . . it doesn't make it right, but politicians get rid of emails and politicians use private emails to communicate to avoid the public records act, so unless you're going toss George Bush and Dick Cheney and Colin Powell and lots of other people in jail, Hillary Clinton does not belong in jail) and the episode also didn't discuss the thing that out-trumps all the other Trump stuff, his anti-vaccine stance: this indicates a complete disbelief in the scientific method, peer reviewed experimentation, and logic in general . . . and while disbelief in global warming is typical right wing silliness (Dan Levin just said that there is NO proof whatsoever that there is global warming . . . pretty bold and incredibly dumb, but who cares) not vaccinating children is extremely dangerous and a possible return to plague times is as good a reason as any not to vote for Trump; I'm considering voting for Jill Stein, despite the fact that the Green Platform is against trade agreements, but that's for environmental reasons-- which just might be the right reason to be against trade agreements (despite the fact that trade agreements help foreign countries, though they often use environmentally unsound methods of manufacture, and while helping foreign economies doesn't make America great,  that doesn't mean it's an awful thing) but then I heard that Jill Stein is an anti-vaxxer, but it seems the accusations that she's against vaccines were taken out of context so she's still a viable choice for me . . . I don't think I'm going to decide until I get behind the curtain, but the super sad thing, the thing that made Ira Glass so depressed in this episode (especially when he's talking to his Uncle Lenny, an 81 year old plastic surgeon who has consumed a whole host of right wing conspiracies and lies about President Obama and thus will vote for Trump) is that even if Trump is crushed in this election, it isn't going to help the cause for truth, logic, the scientific method, and the facts . . . social media and niche journalism have made it so people on the left and the right (and everywhere in between) can find exactly what they want to hear and then believe it.

I Want to Say One Word to You: Shame

My town has banned plastic bags and while this feels like a good thing, there are actually a number of problems with this small step toward sustainability-- when plastic bags are banned, sales of heavy trash bags go up, and producing paper bags and canvas totes may be even worse for the environment than manufacturing those little lightweight plastic bags-- but I will say this about the ban: it's got me thinking and feeling shame . . . yesterday on my way home from acupuncture, I stopped at the grocery store to grab some seltzer (I'm trying to drink less beer and I like my tequila with a splash of lime seltzer) and I forgot to bring one of our reusable reusable canvas tote bags, so I had to ask for a paper bag-- shame!-- and then I took a look at what I was buying and it was flavored bubbly water . . . inside plastic-- shame!-- and just before I stopped at Stop & Shop, I went through the Dunkin' Donuts drive-thru and got an iced coffee-- normally I go inside and refill my reusable cup, but it was raining and I was lazy, so my coffee came in a plastic cup with the Yankees logo on it (Made for Pinstripe Pride) accompanied by a plastic straw -- shame upon shame!-- and while it's going to be tough to change all these little habits, the first step is recognizing them (and realizing that if I were more of a man, I wouldn't need to cut my tequila with flavored bubbly water).

This Underground Railroad is Actually Underground

I was pleasantly surprised (and pleasantly horrified) by Colson Whitehead's novel The Underground Railroad . . . I assumed that because of all the critical praise the book received (and because of the content) that reading it would be like eating fiber, good for you but no fun, but I was very wrong; Whitehead starts with the childhood conceit that the underground railroad is actually an underground railroad, and in the spirit of the magical realists, he makes you buy his fantasy . . . and in between the dream-like underground journeys on the train, the main character Cora-- a runaway slave-- who suffered abominably on the plantation and witnessed things even worse than she endured, finds herself in a fragmented variegated mainly hostile country; each stop on her journey is insidiously evil in it's own unique way; there are scenes reminiscent of the Tuskegee experiment, Anne Frank's captivity, Flannery O'Connor's Gothic South, and the stereotypical Southern plantation . . . and the common thread that unites this ugly patchwork of loosely connected territories of racism and abuse, is the slave-hunter Ridgeway and his odd companion/slave Homer, an educated and erudite miniature lackey on a bizarre epic journey far from his African-American roots, making his way in the only way that he can, betraying his people in order to thrive and survive; the book certainly evokes the state of our country today: fragmented, unsympathetic and divisive, and the theme is ominous-- perhaps only a civil war and the consequent reconstruction can mend the rips and tears in the fabric of our nation . . . but despite this heaviness, the novel is a damned good read . . . horrific, hallucinatory, compelling, and epic by turns, and just when you think you can't take it any longer, when you've entered the broken mind of the slave and see no escape from the shackles and chains, then the plot takes off and you're on the train, underground, excited to poke your head above ground in some new place, with some new tone and tenor, possibly better than what came before.

Back Up The Beehive (21 Years Later)

 

Twenty-one years ago, my wife and I honeymooned in Bar Harbor-- and we stayed in a cottage, which was a step-up from our usual peanut-butter and jelly/hotdog camping excursions to Acadia; things have changed since then-- we have two teenagers and the park is MUCH more crowded-- but our kids were game to get up early on a very hot day and we clambered back up the iron rungs and sheer cliff faces to the top of the Beehive Mountain, which overlooks the Sand Beach-- and then we hooked around, climbed Gorham Mountain, and took the Ocean Trail back to the beach, nearly a three hour trek in extreme Maine heat; it was hard to keep up with the kids but we did it, but it definitely wiped me out . . . we ended at the Sand Beach but the water was VERY cold-- Alex and I did the plunge but Catherine and Ian did not-- and then we drove back to Hancock and took long naps in the A/C . . . I'm so glad we're not camping in this heat (and things could be worse, it's even hotter in New Jersey).

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!)

Dogs vs. Geese

I hate the park by my house right now -- it's muddy and full of goose-shit -- and the only way to solve the problem (without resorting to violence . . . and I will admit that violent thoughts about these geese cross my mind all the time) is to allow dogs free roam of the park, as the only thing that these geese are afraid of are dogs . . . but this might lead to a park full of dog-shit, or even worse, a headline like this: Wild Dogs Kill Four in Mexico City Park . . . so maybe I should stop complaining and just deal with the goose-shit.

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.

Hitchhiker's Guide meets Star Trek Meets a Modern Feminist Perspective . . .

If you've ever wondered what Star Trek would be like if it were written by a woman, check out Becky Chambers sci-fi novel The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet.

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. 

Along the episodically plotted journey, Chambers tackles interspecies coupling, AI rights, gene-tweaking, symbiotic sentient viruses, alien diplomacy, specieism, cloning, and moral relativism. But the book is mainly about a well-developed and fascinating group of sentient beings trying to get along in a small space on an epic journey.

I also learned the word "ansible."

Here's how the reptilian Aandrisk feel about children . . .

The death of a new hatchling was so common as to be expected. The death of a child about to feather, yes, that was sad. But a real tragedy was the loss of an adult with friends and lovers and family. The idea that a loss of potential was somehow worse than a loss of achievement and knowledge was something she had never been able to wrap her brain around. 

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. 

In the middle of the book, there is a wonderful essay on this. The way it is inserted into the novel reminds me of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. It is ostensibly written by a sagacious Aandrisk scientist . . . but it's definitely Becky Chambers laying out the reason her story works. I've put it here in its entirety-- thanks to my Kindle-- and because it's so good.

ITEM NAME: Thoughts on the Galaxy—Chapter Three

AUTHOR: oshet-Tekshereket esk-Rahist as- Ehas Kirish isket-Ishkriset

ENCRYPTION: 0

TRANSLATION PATH: [Reskitkish:Klip] 

TRANSCRIPTION: 0 NODE IDENTIFIER: 9874-457-28, Rosemary Harper

When meeting an individual of another species for the first time, there is no sapient in the galaxy who does not immediately take inventory of xyr physiological differences. These are always the first things we see. How does xyr skin differ? Does xe have a tail? How does xe move? How does xe pick things up? What does xe eat? Does xe have abilities that I don’t? Or vice versa? These are all important distinctions, but the more important comparison is the one we make after this point. Once we’ve made our mental checklists of variations, we begin to draw parallels—not between the alien and ourselves, but between the alien and animals. The majority of us have been taught since childhood that voicing these comparisons is derogatory, and indeed, many of the racial slurs in colloquial use are nothing more than common names for nonsapient species (for example, the Human term lizard, to describe Aandrisks; the Quelin term tik, to describe Humans; the Aandrisk term sersh, to describe Quelin).

Though these terms are offensive, examining them objectively reveals a point of major biological interest. All demeaning implications aside, we Aandrisks do look like some of the native reptilian species of Earth. Humans do look like larger, bipedal versions of the hairless primates that plague the sewer systems of Quelin cities. Quelin do bear some resemblance to the snapping crustaceans found all over Hashkath. And yet, we evolved separately, and on different worlds. My people and the lizards of Earth do not share an evolutionary tree, nor do Humans and tiks, nor Quelin and sersh. Our points of origin are spread out across the galaxy. We hail from systems that remained self-contained contained for billions of years, with evolutionary clocks that all began at different times. How is it possible that when meeting our galactic neighbors for the first time, we are all instantly reminded of creatures back home—or in some cases, of ourselves?

The question becomes even more complicated when we start to look beyond our superficial differences to the wealth of similarities. All sapient species have brains. Let us consider that seemingly obvious fact for a moment. Despite our isolated evolutionary paths, we all developed nervous systems with a central hub. We all have internal organs. We all share at least some of the same physical senses: hearing, touch, taste, smell, sight, electroreception. The grand majority of sapients have either four or six limbs. Bipedalism and opposable digits, while not universal, are shockingly common. We are all made from chromosomes and DNA, which themselves are made from a select handful of key elements. We all require a steady intake of water and oxygen to survive (though in varying quantities). We all need food. We all buckle under atmospheres too thick or gravitational fields too strong. We all die in freezing cold or burning heat. We all die, period. How can this be? How is it that life, so diverse on the surface, has followed the same patterns throughout the galaxy—not just in the current era, but over and over again?

We see this pattern in the ruins of the Arkanic civilization at Shessha, or the ancient fossil beds on the now-barren world of Okik. This is a question that scientific communities have wrestled with for centuries, and it seems unlikely that an answer will present itself in the near future. There are many theories—asteroids carrying amino acids, supernovae blowing organic material out into neighboring systems. And yes, there is the fanciful story of a hyperadvanced sapient race “seeding” the galaxy with genetic material. I admit that the “Galactic Gardener” hypothesis has fueled the plots of some of my favorite science fiction sims, but scientifically speaking, it is nothing more than wishful thinking. You cannot have a theory without evidence, and there is absolutely none that supports this idea (no matter what the conspiracy theorists lurking on Linking feeds would have you believe).

For my part, I think that the best explanation is the simplest one. The galaxy is a place of laws. Gravity follows laws. The life cycles of stars and planetary systems follow laws. Subatomic particles follow laws. We know the exact conditions that will cause the formation of a red dwarf, or a comet, or a black hole. Why, then, can we not acknowledge that the universe follows similarly rigid laws of biology? We have only ever discovered life on similarly sized terrestrial moons and planets, orbiting within a narrow margin around hospitable stars. If we all evolved on such kindred worlds, why is it such a surprise that our evolutionary paths have so much in common? Why can we not conclude that the right combination of specific environmental factors will always result in predictable physical adaptations? With so much evidence staring us in the face, why does this debate continue?

The answer, of course, is that the laws of biology are nearly impossible to test, and scientists hate that. We can launch probes to test theories of gravity and space-time. We can put rocks in pressure cookers and split atoms in classrooms. But how does one test a process as lengthy and multifaceted as evolution? There are labs today that struggle to find the funding to keep a project running for three standards—imagine the funding needed to run a project for millennia! As it stands, there is no way for us to efficiently test the conditions that produce specific biological adaptations, beyond the most rudimentary observations (aquatic climates produce fins, cold climates produce fur or blubber, and so on).

There have been bold attempts at creating software that could accurately predict evolutionary paths, such as the Aeluon-funded Tep Preem Project (which, though well-intentioned, has yet to unravel the mysteries of biological law). The problem with such endeavors is that there are too many variables to consider, many of which we remain ignorant of. We simply don’t have enough data, and the data that we do possess is still beyond our understanding. We are experts of the physical galaxy. We live on terraformed worlds and in massive orbital habitats. We tunnel through the sublayer to hop between stellar systems. We escape planetary gravity with the ease of walking out the front door. But when it comes to evolution, we are hatchlings, fumbling with toys. I believe this is why many of my peers still cling to theories of genetic material scattered by asteroids and supernovae. In many ways, the idea of a shared stock of genes drifting through the galaxy is far easier to accept than the daunting notion that none of us may ever have the intellectual capacity to understand how life truly works.

A Book You Could Only Read During Quarantine (Not That You Should)

This is a momentous day for me. Miraculous. I finished something that I started three months ago to the day. Despite obstacles and adversity, I persevered. I can now say, with a healthy dollop of pedantic douchery, that I have read The History of Tom Jones: A Foundling. With apologies to Henry Fielding, there will be spoilers ahead. For good reason . . .

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.

So I kept plowing away at the Kindle version. Apparently, the book is anywhere from 750 to 963 pages, depending on the font. I made the Kindle font quite large, so I probably read 2000 Kindle pages of Tom Jones. Maybe more.

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.

And when wenches are so coming, young men are not so much to be blamed neither; for to be sure they do no more than what is natural.

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.

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.

Bury This Post, Evil Algorithm . . . I Dare You

It's been nearly a year since I told you to read Cathy O'Neil's book Weapons of Math Destruction, and you ignored me . . . or perhaps you didn't ignore me, perhaps-- and this is far worse-- the algorithm that chooses what you see and don't see on social media buried this post (and wouldn't that be just what an insidiously malevolent algorithm would do? bury a post about the dangers of algorithms?) and so if this post reaches you-- and I'm not confident that it will-- then I've got something quicker and easier for you than reading an entire book: just listen to this week's 99% Invisible . . . the episode is called "The Age of the Algorithm" and Cathy O'Neil is the special guest; she reminds us that the internet is a curated propaganda machine designed to brainwash you in a most pleasant and undetectable manner, and she's not afraid to admonish all of us for allowing this to happen . . . when society is presented with a difficult question-- what makes a good teacher? what is the purpose of jail? who deserves to get a loan? what should we encounter on the internet?-- we now tend to skirt the issue and let an algorithm do the "math," because it's easier to hide behind a formula, even though the variables and values in the formula were chosen by a human, and the formula itself was designed by a human . . . and often a human who didn't have any stakes in the outcome of the equation . . . O'Neil isn't condemning all algorithms, some are incredibly useful-- in fact, New Jersey is employing an algorithm to implement bail and it has been quite successful-- but she is advocating transparency, we need to pull back the curtain and took a look at the wizard that makes these decisions, and we need to be able to see what other people are seeing on Facebook and Twitter and such, to get an idea of the fake news and political ad campaigns and other persuasive rhetoric that is happening beyond our perspective . . . and the sad thing is that the people who see this post will be the people who already know this, maybe I need to photocopy it on regular paper and drop it from an airplane.

Bad Hair Night

Thursday night, minutes before I had to drive my kids to indoor soccer, I noticed some stray and unseemly gray hairs poking from the right side of my head, and I decided that I would trim them with my beard trimmer, but-- perhaps because I was in a rush-- I slipped . . . and cut a dent into my hair just above my right ear, and in my attempts to "even things out," I made the situation much, much worse, but then I felt obligated to make it equally as "even" on the other side of my head, so that at least my new style would be symmetrically bad . . . and in the end, I essentially gave myself a mullet (and a poor one, at that) and though I frantically tried to erase this by trimming randomly around the back of my head, I couldn't fix things and I had to take the kids to soccer and Catherine was at a meeting about charter schools, so I went to soccer looking like a lunatic, which the other parents found highly entertaining, and then when I got home, I was slated to go out for beers, and so I asked my wife if she would fix my hair first but she said, "No way, I'm exhausted, I'll do it tomorrow," and then she laughed at my misfortune and took a picture of the back of my head . . . but I was happy enough to be getting out on the town and so I said, "Who cares what I look like, it's not like I'm going out to pick-up girls," and she said, "Not that you could," and then, luckily (or unluckily for my students, who would have really enjoyed getting a look at my sorry head) we had a delayed opening due to snow and Catherine used a number 1 to shave away my remaining hair and make things look decent again.

Alex and Ian Spin an Exhausting Web of Disinformation

The trick with fake news and disinformation is to mix the real story with so many lies, alternatives, and obfuscations that it becomes exhausting and possibly even counterproductive to pursue the actual truth to its end-- it becomes more efficient to deal with the dilemma at hand, in the present, and forget about judgement and justice . . . here are a couple of cases in point . . . two recent incidents with my children:

1) Alex was certainly wrestling with three of his friends in the locker room before gym class, and he may have been warned twice to get out of the locker room by the gym teacher, he may have pinned down one of his friends, beaten him, and he may have also kneed this friend in the testicles-- causing him to cry-- although Alex claims he was only warned once to leave the locker room and did not knee his friend in the testicles . . . and then Alex definitely got very upset and lost his shit because the gym teacher would not listen to his side of the story and told Alex he was writing him up and calling home and Alex definitely used some profanity, and this profanity may have been directed at the gym teacher (or, as Alex claims, the expletives may have been directed at himself because he was upset that he was going to get in trouble) and then Alex probably smacked the write-up off the teacher's clipboard-- but it was initially reported that he smacked the write-up out of the teacher's hand . . . which certainly would have been worse, but now we've come to the consensus that the clipboard was on a desk in the gym, next to the teacher, a marginally better detail (but not much better) and there were definitely calls to my wife about the incident from the gym teacher (who did not mention the clipboard smack, possibly to protect Alex) and the vice-principal (who did report about Alex smacking the disciplinary write-up) and I think Alex and his friends went to the office to tell their side of the story, that it wasn't a real fight and they were only fooling around, and that Alex wasn't the testicle-crusher . . . but the story got so complicated that it became futile to try to figure out the actual truth-- and we explained to him that no one cared about the truth . . . he was acting like a total idiot and so were his friends, and once you're in that context, you don't get to explain slight gradations in culpability because everyone involved is in trouble and we left it at that and grounded him for two weeks and made him write a letter of apology to the gym teacher for being a complete nightmare . . . and we're not sure what the consequence will be at school, but there hasn't been anything yet (besides the phone calls home) and so they may be experiencing the same disinformation exhaustion that much of the country is working through;

2) last week, Ian may have mistakenly touched the spray bottle that he uses to humidify his lizard tank with the ceramic heat emitter-- a flattened bulb that screws into a clamp lamp, gets rather hot, and sits on top of the mesh top of the tank-- when I noticed the horrible plastic burning stench, this is what Ian claimed, and then he pointed out a tiny melted spot on the bottle, but today I noticed that the lamp was not turned on, and so I turned it on, and within minutes, the same burning plastic smell began emanating from the ceramic bulb and when I investigated closely, I noticed there was a bunch of brownish gunk on the ceramic bulb, and after further interrogation, Ian admitted that he had touched the bulb to another piece of plastic-- perhaps the top to a Play-Doh box-- and this was done purposefully and in the name of experimentation, I think, and then he turned off the ceramic heat bulb because he noticed it was making an awful plastic burning stench and didn't tell us anything, and I could not remove the melted plastic from the bulb, though I tried alcohol, vinegar, and bleach, and so he's going to have to buy a new one and we gave him a lecture about starting fires, doing dangerous things in the house, and not telling us when he's damaged something vital-- he could have killed his lizard (either with plastic fumes or lack of heat) and I told him that I did many similar experiments when I was young (and was often obfuscating with my own parents . . . why is there a sock marinating in lighter fluid in the basement? why is this squirt bottle filled with kerosene? where did all these melted lead D&D figurines come from? why does it smell smoky in the basement?) and that I understood his inquisitive nature . . . but he was still going to have to pay for a new ceramic heat emitter . . .

anyway, I hope this illustrates my point-- it was exhausting trying to get to the truth, and I don't think we were successful; God only knows if our punishments fit the crimes, and while we tried our best to give each child pertinent lessons for future situations, they never seem to apply anything they "learn" from us . . . but it's not like there's a better way to go about it.

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).

Not For Those With Two Weeks of Vacation Time

All you folks with full time jobs probably don't want to hear this, nor will you believe it, but nothing is worse than the end-of-the-summer-holy-shit-I've-got-to-go-back-to-work anxiety stomachache . . . it's an awful feeling (but not so awful that I would choose to work in the summer . . . God bless the agrarian calendar) and my stomachache was compounded by the fact that a tooth of mine cracked off at the crown, and so on the same day that I return to work, I will also visit the dentist for some kind of procedure which I can only imagine to be horrific . . . and the worst part is I can't even whinge about all this because it falls on deaf ears, since most people have been working all summer long and have no sympathy.

Voodoo Health Shit

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!)

The Way We Were

For the past two weeks, my children have been starring in an epic saga of forgetfulness; they forgot their homework and the materials they needed for their homework multiple times (resulting in awkward phone-calls to their friends-- there is nothing worse than supervising nine and ten year old boys while they make phone-calls in which they actually have to glean some information from the communication) and then Alex nearly shit his pants when he realized that he forgot his saxophone-- his newly purchased very expensive saxophone-- "on the hill by the school" because he played some football right after school let out, but then his brother rushed him to leave . . . and so, nearly an hour after he left the very expensive saxophone on the hill, we raced back to school-- to find that the saxophone was no longer on the hill where he left it, and so there were even more tears, but he lucked out-- some goodhearted soul brought the instrument into the main office-- and as a result of all this forgetting, Catherine and decided that the two of them couldn't walk home for a week-- and that if either of them forgot their stuff, then they were BOTH losing TV for the night and that I would have to pick them up and check to see that they had everything they needed . . . and while I was annoyed with their irresponsibility, I was exactly the same way when I was a kid, so it was hard to actually be angry with them . . . and they do have to remember a lot of stuff; anyway, I raced out of my school last week so I could get to their school and check on them, and when I found the spot where the fourth graders were let out, I saw Ian and a few other kids engaged in an insane tackling and wrestling melee, with plenty of full speed running into each other and lots of chucking each other to the ground and it surprised me that this was happening on school grounds but they seemed like they knew what they were doing and that this was some sort of daily ritual so I forgot about it (especially since Ian had to return inside the school to find his trombone, which he forgot) and then the next day when I picked them up, my other son-- who is in fifth grade-- was also involved in this melee and I asked him if this happened every day and he said, "No, this never happens . . . but I saw them and joined in" which made me laugh because the whole thing looked so casually violent, like they always did this to let off steam after a school day, but I warned them that when some teacher or aid saw this, they were going to get in trouble and I told them about the very first after-school detention I received, which, coincidentally, was for-- and I quote this-- "play-fighting in the yard" (I'll never forget the description because I had to bring the detention slip home and get it signed) and I'm really hoping they start remembering their school materials because I don't want to see any more of this, as it's too stupidly nostalgic (and my wife doesn't care if I committed these same errors, she thinks we're all idiots).

Paint the Coronavirus by Numbers (Local Edition)

Radiolab has a new episode addressing all the numbers we are confronted with during this Covid-19 crisis, and how hard it is to interpolate them.

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.

The Agricultural Revolution: It Was a Trap

One of the controversial, mind-bending Guns, Germs and Steel type ideas in Yuval Noah Harari's book Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind is that the Agricultural Revolution, while advancing human institutions and increasing population, did more harm than good to the individual-- your typical farmer/peasant had it worse than your typical hunter/gatherer; the peasant ate a less varied diet, starved more often, worked much harder, and became bent, broken and diseased while tilling the fields . . . and Harari insists that we didn't domesticate wheat . . . wheat domesticated us (Malcolm Gladwell frames a similar argument in a more positive manner with Asian culture and rice production in Outliers) and with every toilsome step that humans took to make wheat more bountiful, we became more addicted to the high yields of the plant-- we buried the seeds deep instead of scattering them, we hunched over and cleared the fields of rocks and weeds-- though were meant to climb trees and chase antelopes-- we carried buckets of water to the fields instead of roaming the land in search of diverse nutrition, we built fences to keep out the animals and we dug canals to bring even more water, we fought diseases and blight . . . all so we could stay put and rely more and more on these few staple crops, which were flourishing, now that they had found willing slaves to take care of them . . . and in the lean years, when the crops failed, instead of moving on, people stayed and starved . . . and each step of the way towards this agricultural society was so miniscule that no one noticed what now seems obvious: cultivating wheat . . . it's a trap!