the case for the newspaper

I've noticed that people who read newspapers struggle to explain why they like them. At best, their response is a detailed description of what they do - they like walking to the store, they like feeling it in their hands, they like spreading out its many sections on the table. But if you want to know why? Good luck.

If I were hired to make the argument for this inarticulate crowd, I would point out that newspapers are readable, at least in comparison to the online equivalent. In a newspaper, there are no glittering banner ads, no embedded videos, and no insistent hyperlinks - it's just the promise of a story and a few hundred words, printed without the distractions, that may or may not hold up the bargain.

blowing holes through the bubble

I just spent a few minutes cruising up and down the Information Superhighway to see if anyone relevant had test-driven my theory on why election polls were not just wrong, but likely to remain wrong for the foreseeable future. The Atlantic came close, identifying "the poll clique - pollsters and analysts alike" in this column posted a month ago, but it's slightly different from what I had in mind; cliques are keenly aware of what outsiders think, using that knowledge to maintain exclusivity, but in this case we know the so-called "poll clique" had very little idea what outsiders thought - that's why the polls were off. The clique idea is a good comparison, but I think there is a better explanation.

Pollsters, I suspect, fit the definition of a group working in a certain kind of bubble, which is a word I'm using outside the commonly invoked ideological sense - I'm thinking about a bubble defined by education. Articles like this FiveThirtyEight piece from September wander toward this idea, noting that white voters without a four-year degree were underrepresented in 2016 polling, but it stops short of tearing down the fourth wall behind which I suspect there is a more universal explanation waiting to be found. There are hints to this reality if you are the type to read into things, such as by using job descriptions as a proxy measure for the type of person who ends up on the payroll; my review of these for roles such as "Politics Reporter" or "Survey Data Analyst" uncovered requirements such as "experience working with data" or "Proficient with Python and/or R and/or Excel and/or SQL", which from my experience as a hiring manager almost always signals (at minimum) a candidate in possession of a four-year degree (1). The descriptions and their requirements are consistent with my understanding that over the past few years polling has shifted toward a data-driven mentality, which suggests its job market favors candidates with skills common to graduates of four-year programs.

I wonder if the type of polling error we've seen over the past few years is a consequence of this shift toward data-driven thinking, its subsequent effect on the type of person employed by the industry, and the inability of those people to relate to anyone dissimilar to them; the problem would be exacerbated by the widely alleged polarization of America, where people are spending more of their time in self-selecting echo chambers and becoming less capable of relating to neighbors holding different views. It would explain an odd claim that the above linked FiveThirtyEight piece calls a "theory that won't die" - Trump supporters are too shy to admit they support him, then gleefully vote for him on Election Day, which throws off the polling numbers. The article explains the lack of evidence for the theory - I gather there was never much evidence - but it stops short of offering an explanation for the persistence of the idea.

One possibility is that the media - which I suspect tends to employ people with four-year degrees, and is often accused of a leftwing bias - has been unwittingly keeping this idea alive because it speaks to a phenomenon they've seen firsthand. My speculation is based in part on my own experience - in 2008, a close friend told me that he felt unwelcome accepting a ride to the polls from a student group on our liberal (arts) campus; he was voting for McCain. I remember my reaction to this day - I was shocked he wasn't voting for Obama! But as I think back, I realize I didn't have the full picture, since I can hardly recall anyone at school supporting McCain, and it just isn't realistic that all of my classmates supported the same candidate (and that's before I get the demographics of the student body); I suppose it wasn't worth the trouble to announce your McCain support in the dining hall. It's a similar situation at my current workplace, where my most vocal colleagues seem to speak on the behalf of a silent majority that supports Biden, and the next word of support for Trump will be the first; we almost all possess, at least, a four-year degree. The only problem of being immersed in these overly liberal environments is if you start to think that it represents "normal", in the sense that it's representative of every American's experience; this is even worse if your job depends on you remaining objective, since you'll just become bad at your job if you think the whole world is like a small liberal arts college.

A shared perspective within teams, it seems, is almost inevitable - it's hard to envision any kind of organization that would have an entirely neutral appeal, attracting job-seekers in equal numbers on both sides of various issues. But homogeneity shouldn't be accepted as an inherent characteristic of large groups, especially if idea generation is important to its success - it doesn't take much for a collection of like-minded people to establish consensus because they will share a certain perspective regarding the way of the world, but consensus has a way of shutting down debate. In the world of polling, this can have ramifications in the results - during those Obama years, for example, pollsters struggled for some time to account for cellphone-only voters; I can only speculate that the decision-makers in the industry were predominantly landline users, and agreed with each other about their methods because they didn't know very many cellphone-only voters (they probably reached this consensus over phone calls made on landlines). The current situation, in some ways, doesn't seem much different - two consecutive national elections have raised questions about the way certain voters are being represented in the polls, and many are left scratching their heads over the matter; I'm wondering if the answer isn't as simple as those voters not being represented in the organizations trying to reach them.

Footnotes

1) I don't mean to come off as cynical with this kind of remark (longtime readers should know by now that if I suspect selfish motives, I'm more than happy to point those out in my writing). What I mean is that posting a job sans the "four-year degree" minimum requirement only means a resume gets through the first round of screening. Inevitably, if the job asks for skills that are strongly correlated with a degree, any applicant without a degree will inevitably end up competing against candidates with a degree. So who's your money on now? It's really just a question of whether you think a hiring manager will take a candidate without a degree over a similar applicant with a degree - speaking from my own experience, I can say that I've never seen anyone make such a decision.

leftovers #2 - monster (posing the question)

A few days after posting this review, I realized I had a much simpler way of describing why I thought so highly of Walter Dean Meyers's Monster. Some books pose important questions while others offer answers; Monster, by leveraging its form, puts the reader in the position of actively answering the question.

toa rewind - fallen leaves

I went out for a short run today. I started on the Boston side of the Charles River, jogging without incident until I was around one hundred yards from Mass Ave. At that point - whoosh! - a hawk appeared in front of me, flying about ten feet over my head, and I turned back to catch one last look at its tan feathers before it flew out of sight around the curve of the path.

Around thirty minutes later, I was finished with my run and walking through the Boston Common. There were squirrels everywhere, and I was alert to the possibility of one jumping onto my shoulder, or even directly underfoot. The situation with the squirrels grows bleaker each year, or so it seems to me; one of the new winter traditions in these public spaces is having a squirrel come within inches of me, its emaciated form the last reminder of the summer tourist, whose consistent buffet of crumbs, scraps, and well-intended philanthropy meant it was always possible to put off learning how to find its own food, until one day the time had passed. On the bleakest days, I come across the fallen in the leaves.

The squirrels had an extra urgency today, like passengers on a sinking ship elbowing their way toward a waiting lifeboat, flirting with the thin line between respectful and insistent. My mind drifted to the ridiculous possibility that they could read the skyline, and therefore knew the truth - the familiar wintry blend of gray clouds blurring into fading orange, the result of a sun that drops rather than sets at around four o'clock, which is always the indisputable sign of the new season. It was then that I saw the tan reflection again, flapping furiously, this time with dinner wriggling in its talons.

It was a similar scene four winters ago that prompted me to take a wild swing at something which had been stuck in my mind since reading Will Durant's Fallen Leaves, and that I mentioned briefly in a comprehensive reading review - the solution to a big, difficult problem is education; this is the only solution. I've learned over the ensuing four years that there is a little more to this lesson - it works just the same for the smallest of our concerns. If we lack education, we lack the tool required to understand our lives, and we become forever unable to take control in ways that allow us to make the most of the day.

Luckily, education doesn't need to come out of a textbook, or from the words of a teacher. Education is very simple - it means trying to apply something you know to a situation that you can make better. And if you aren't entirely sure what will happen, my recommendation is to just try it, and see what ensues - the worst outcome is that you'll be wrong, which means you'll learn something; that's the whole point.

toa rewind - thanksgiving riff-off (leftovers - i miss you when i blink)

Folks, today's a holiday, which means I'm not up for writing anything new, but I recognize that there might be more time than usual for some TOA nonsense; it's kind of the paradox of the holidays, I suppose, which was true even before COVID and all its associated challenges. So, for those in need of an extra helping of traditional TOA nonsense, let's crank up the rewind machine, and have a look at some throwbacks through a classic riff-off. 

We'll take these from a few notes I set aside while putting together Tuesday's reading review of Mary Laura Philpott's I Miss You When I Blink; these leftover ideas all reminded me of something I've written about in the past, so I'll include a "TOA Rewind" link to the associated post.

As always, the thought from the book notes is in italics.

Babies are the closest thing we have to real magic - one second there was no one, and then suddenly they are here.

This note reminded me of John O'Donohue's Four Elements, a book I reviewed in May 2018. The section 'Death' in my post contains a very similar thought to Philpott's comment about babies. I think many of us wonder about where we go when we die, but I believe it was O'Donohue who turned the question around - where do babies come from when they are born? If I recall correctly, the answer made me laugh, despite being somewhat unsatisfying - babies come from where we'll go, when we die.

People should give directions in a way the recipient will be able to make use of them. Go east a mile? Make sure they have a compass.

I think Philpott missed the mark on this insight. Sure, she makes a good point, but in my mind most people who ask for directions are resigned to defeat from the moment they ask for help. I mused on this phenomenon a couple of years ago, when a decisively lost tourist suddenly took off just as I'd started describing the exact shape of concourse outside South Station, leaving me to shout in vain at the back of his head as he disappeared into a crowd headed toward the Boston Common. I'm sure he found Chinatown, eventually; if I've managed it at 3AM after a few pops, I'm sure anyone with basic cartography skills and the bare minimum of resilience could eventually figure it out.

Acknowledging hard combinations means accepting that one truth cannot always win out over another. You can love being here and want to leave.

This looks like a tribute to a George Saunders quote, who I once saw read from Lincoln in the Bardo; he made quite a few memorable remarks at that reading, but didn't add to the thought from the quote (he talked quite a bit about one of his characters having a huge penis, which for some reason I couldn't find on the Goodreads quoteboard).

The note I highlighted from I Miss You When I Blink is a strong observation, but it lacks the power of Saunders's quote in the context of creative work; his comment is an acceptable thesis statement for the artistic process. I wrote about it in September 2018, a post that I believe at best gets an A for effort, which is my way of saying "read it at your own risk". For the TLDR crowd, I'll note that it did contain a fairly memorable attempt at articulating my life philosophy - "You grow up, try to do the right thing, find out you were wrong a few times, and then die." When I get my Goodreads quoteboard going, I'll get that posted on page one.

Show me mercy, from the powers that be; show me mercy, can someone rescue me?

The stated purpose of this book was Philpott's attempt to examine how her life, or perhaps the way she saw her own life, needed to change after she realized the futility of defining success by ticking off all the boxes on the "right things" checklist - career, house, family. I suspect the key moment in the journey was that minute, the longest sixty seconds of anyone's life, where you feel completely trapped by the irresistible force that has complete dominion over your destiny, and no, I'm not referring to voting machines...

...what...?

OK, fine.

That's not a thought from I Miss You When I Blink, those are lyrics from 'Mercy' by Muse, which to the spirit of this post I did write about back in the summer; the post included this link to what I feel is their best performance of the song. This is a riff-off, after all - who better to end it than Muse?

Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy the day, and thanks for reading.

leftovers - u2 by u2 (channel flipping)

It's a holiday tomorrow, so why read? Let's watch Zoo TV, or just listen.

My favorite comment from U2 by U2 was about the Zoo TV tour, which satirized the way television (and particularly the news) normalized sensory overload for the audience - the book points out how the channel hopping enabled by the modern media should be far more upsetting than is commonly acknowledged. The thesis is very clear in the first two minutes or so of this video, though it's perhaps best represented in this performance of 'Desire', at least if you live in America.

Breaking overnight, a man was shot in the city, though thankfully the Celtics won, but first the weather, which is nice and sunny with a chance of late showers... and Zoo TV was two decades before social media; it's surprising we haven't all lost our minds.

reading review - i miss you when i blink

This collection, which I've seen described as "memoir-in-essay", was an easy read - almost a perfect fit for my esteemed "just before bedtime" category. I remember enjoying many of these short essays but I didn't note any specific chapters, suggesting that these didn't go much further than retelling a series of moments in the author's life, captured with humor and, perhaps unexpectedly for me, relatability. 

I Miss You When I Blink by Mary Laura Philpott (September 2019)

I related to this book - even as it explored foreign topics like perfectionism, parenting, or a total incomprehension about sports - because Philpott frames her experiences in broad terms, seemingly effortlessly, using general reference points that cut across a wide range of circumstances. In one section, for example, she notes that it's best to respect a "probationary period" with a new group, an idea that puts her specific story in a context that likely applies far beyond the details of her anecdote. This same theme is evident in how she describes the isolation of parenthood as losing out on small things - like being called your own name - or how small talk is problematic as soon as it replaces real talk; the details of time and place suggest we are all living vastly different lives from one another, but at the core we all share certain needs - to be seen, heard, and accepted - that form connections from one person to another, which can be explored in the manner we choose to tell our stories.

This is not to suggest that our differences don't matter at all - Philpott herself suggests taking time to think about the ways someone's life differs from ours. It's advice I see reflected in her observation about parenting - it's important to help children identify their own potential by observing their response to new experiences and encouraging them to continue their exploration, but this isn't possible for parents who see a child as an extension of themselves. It's also a good tactic in the moments after a revelation, as our first instinct may be to address our main concern - ask instead for clarification, an idea I agreed with because it reflects my belief that our selfishness, indulged at the expense of acknowledging or respecting our differences, does far more to drive us apart than the consequences of any single event. 

TOA Rating: Three blinks out of four.

My book notes - as mentioned above - were missing references to specific essays, but I did take the unusual step of writing down specific quotes, such as "it looks like the ass end of destruction in here" or "it's a front, but it preserves friendships". I'm not sure what the latter referred to, but I don't think it matters - we can all relate to the ways we give in to maintain the peace; thank you for reading.

the toa 2020 december rereading list

Longtime readers will recall that I reserve December exclusively for rereading. In this year of COVID, it's occurred to me that it's a good bit of advice in general for anyone finding it difficult to read - instead of trying something new, return to the familiar. Given my experience earlier this year rereading The Game, Eureka Street, and two books by Walter Dean Meyers, I can vouch for its effectiveness.

Here's my list for December, which is a bit ambitious for one month, but I'm fine with the process bleeding into the early days of 2021; December is reserved for rereading, but it's a great activity at any time.

• The New New Thing by Michael Lewis
• Talking to Strangers by Malcolm Gladwell
• Lost Cat by Caroline Paul and Wendy MacNaughton (illustrations)
• First and Last Notebooks by Simone Weil
• A Room of One's Own by Virginia Woolf
• A Writer's Diary by Virginia Woolf
• Behind the Beautiful Forevers by Katherine Boo
• Idiot America by Charles Pierce
• The Football Ramble by Marcus Speller, Luke Moore, Pete Donaldson, and Jim Campbell

paying the price

I made a couple of snarky remarks a few months ago about paywalls (remind me to delete those posts when TOA inevitably goes behind the cash curtain) though it's not clear to me why I tend towards making negative comments about these toll collectors. They support journalism by funding certain aspects of news organizations, which is both important and necessary in the post-newspaper economics faced by these firms, so in that sense I see them as almost a critical feature of a democracy; a free press is vital, I'm told, for our system of government, so I should support anything that protects this institution. It's hard to talk myself into fully embracing this point of view, however, because every time I click on a promising link only to crash into a paywall, I roll my eyes a little bit - a paywall, in one sense, is like gaining access to a new part of the internet, but the problem is that no one complains about there being too little internet; if it were a physical structure, you'd surely be able to see the internet from space. The paywall offers the kind of promise you see at certain buffet restaurants - after you pay for the dinner menu, you learn that those premium desserts still require a small additional charge. My skepticism is based in part on my conviction that there is little behind the paywall, or at least anything necessary (though I won't argue with anyone who contends a dessert is necessary).

There is more to it than just an arrogant assumption, however, about the unseen content - the paywall aggrieves me at a visceral level. It's the same reaction I have to anyone who withholds information from me, particularly if that information has some possibility of changing the course of my life. I'm reminded of a thought I referenced in my reading review of Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk - when is it OK to withhold information from the public, especially if it could save lives? The answer should be fast and direct - never, it is never OK! - but the reality is more complicated. As Lewis noted, there are private weather companies withholding forecasts from people for the simple crime of being nonsubscribers. I'm tempted to explore the difference between a forecast about your beach day and that of an approaching storm, and debate where a company should draw the line between private good and public service, but I fear such an exercise suggests my acceptance of the idea that an organization is the appropriate authority for deciding whether I'm entitled to certain information; the mere existence of the expression "business ethics" leaves me skeptical of an organization's ability to correctly make this determination. No matter how you spin it, there is only one word when you are asked to pay for the right to remain alive, but I fear we don't have enough hostage negotiators to deal with every tollbooth in digitized America.

The more challenging aspect of this complaint is that, despite my high-minded misgivings about certain subscription services, the ability to profit from the harm caused to someone else is so ubiquitous to the American experience that it might as well be written into the Constitution. It's hard to point a finger at someone making weather forecasts when the cigarette market - which you'd be forgiven for thinking was on its last breath since the Surgeon General's 1964 report - is worth almost a trillion dollars today; if the tobacco industry can survive without its smokescreen, it's hard to craft a compelling argument against somewhat cloudy. The larger problem is that something is malfunctioning, perhaps akin to a mutation in the DNA of modern society, which lets us accept these endless of examples of one person or entity benefitting from the harm brought to someone else. This is starting to look like a topic way above my pay grade; perhaps when Bob Woodward is finished tallying up his most recent royalty checks, he can find some time to write a book on the pandemic of informed silence, and muse on the duty of citizens and organizations to turn state's evidence for the good of the community. Or maybe, he can simply offer up some insights into why the practice of informed silence is so commonplace in our society, such a routine occurrence that we barely notice when an entity is profiting by keeping something from us, or why there is such a strong incentive to exchange the communal good for individual gain; if it's the price we pay for a free press, I'm not sure it's worth it.

leftovers - monster (my civic duty)

I sometimes worry that when I'm finally selected to serve on a jury, I will be responsible for some kind of chaos during the deliberations; I don't think reading Monster did anything to change my thinking (which I consider a positive).

I already waste most of my social capital explaining to people not necessarily that they are wrong, but that they aren't quite right, yet. It's just not a huge stretch to imagine me explaining to someone, a fellow juror, a stranger, that the prosecution has to prove guilt, is it? And yet, given all the wrongful convictions that are overturned every year, I know something isn't working correctly in the backrooms of the judicial process - I fear discovering firsthand why this is the case.

proper corona admin, vol 89 - zoom fatigue fatigue

It took me a few months of working from home before I understood the concept of "Zoom fatigue" and how it applied to me. It seems like I always need a few extra minutes to rest after a Zoom call, and the rest increases more than proportionally based on the length of the meeting - it might be just a few minutes after a half-hour call, while an hour-long meeting means I'll need around thirty minutes for recovery. But is this situation specific to Zoom, or is there something else leading to the fatigue?

I think the answer lies in how the method of collaboration has changed without a corresponding adjustment to the schedule. Office work meant a meeting was an opportunity to get away from the desk, giving the eyes a precious break from staring at the same screen. This is no longer the case; I suspect meetings require a greater focus on the screen than for individual work. But it seems to me that meeting frequencies have not changed (if anything, they've likely increased) leading to the current situation of more screen time that also happens to be at a greater intensity than to what we were accustomed prior to COVID. I'm tired of the phrase "Zoom Fatigue", but no matter what you call it the mental toll is real, and an important issue for any organization interested in maximizing productivity and well-being during this trying time.  

reading review - invisible women

This book explores the gender data gap that exists in almost any field that has traditionally been led by men (and if the gap doesn't exist, it's probably because of the lack of data rather than equitable practices). Invisible Women is full of information that details the scope of this problem and each new piece of information is meticulously researched, cited, and presented throughout this work; the volume is overwhelming at times, like using a firehose to wash eating utensils, but it's effect is to underscore the devastating force of this data crisis on the lives of women throughout the world. Readers should find some way to become familiar with this work, whether through interviews with the author that explore select areas of the work, or in the wild and unnecessary world of the TOA book notes.

Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez (February 2020)

The best supporting actor in this book - and I do use actor, grudgingly, in the manner of the Oscars - would be The Reference Man, the standard measurement unit that appears throughout Invisible Women to expose the consequences of dismissing the importance of sex-disaggregated data. Those who are familiar with The Reference Man will recognize Him as the god-like figure whose physical proportions determine the standards for medicine dosage, car safety features, and the size of consumer electronics, among other examples. The Reference Man draws the line between the exception and the rule, a concept in clear evidence on the CDC page for heart attacks (scroll to 'What are the symptoms of a heart attack?') -  there are 137 total words, of which the first 105 describe symptoms as if they applied to all people; the final 32 words, an afterthought, note additional symptoms that may apply specifically to women.

Not all the points in this book are about life and death, opting instead to stress how the gender data gap diminishes the female experience. Criado-Perez finds that children's programs tend to overwhelmingly feature male characters (including when characters are animals or robots) and notes that the piano world is generally reluctant to allow pianists to use instruments optimally sized to their hands. She also cites various research that supports points made previously on TOA, such as the important of blinding in a selection process; one researcher concluded that blind auditions (playing behind a screen) helped the New York Philharmonic Orchestra approach a 50% hiring rate for women.

Invisible Women explores a critical idea that should be required understanding - if not reading - for anyone in a position to influence the future of policy and power in society. A programmer writing an algorithm without understanding the problem of the gender data gap will create digital tools that exacerbate this problem; the legislator who fails to include female sanitary products among a list of tax-free necessities subtly reinforces mechanisms that transfer wealth from women to men. In the current despair of the COVID pandemic, I can only hope that those in charge of early vaccine trials appreciate the potentially deadly consequences of dismissing the possibility that sex differences may necessitate different treatments.

TOA Rating: Three reference men out of four.

proper corona admin, vol 88 - mailing it in

I suspect the following fits squarely into the category of "plausible BS", though I'll hold my final verdict until someone far smarter than me to fails to prove it (yet still writes an eventual bestseller based on the theory). But doesn't it seem like the pandemic response was the decisive factor in the election?

Here's the chain of my thinking - the response was mailed in from the start, which increased the appetite for safe voting options, such as the mail-in ballot; states that have used mail-in voting in the past have seen major increases in voter turnout, which was a significant factor in tipping the final result. Don't they always say a higher turnout would favor the left? Your move, talking head.

reading review - u2 by u2

This 2005 release was pulled together by Neil McCormack from hours of interviews with the band and their longtime manager, Paul McGuinness, into an oral history of the band's origins and first forty or so years (may there be forty more). As it always goes with these music (auto)biographies, it's highly recommended to hardcore fans and an easy skip for everyone else. Those caught in the middle should note that there is a coffee table original release and the standard paperback follow up; the pictures come out much better in the former, if you are that sort of "reader". I suppose you can also have a peek at my book notes to get a sense of the material, which reads as a bizarre cross of a personal to-do list (songs for me to listen to) and a collection of the assorted bits of wisdom the band included in this work. 

U2 by U2 by U2 with Neil McCormack (December 2019)

The most rewarding aspect of the book was the endless anecdotes detailing the origins of their records. One example is about Achtung Baby B-side 'Lady With The Spinning Head', a song that the band struggled with which eventually formed the foundations for three others - ‘The Fly’, ‘Zoo Station’, and ‘Ultraviolet’; the story about The Edge, fearing he might forget the riff for 'Desire' until he could find a tape recorder in his house, was another such story (he had to open the door for the mailman while playing). Those who've followed the band's recent progress might have noticed some interesting hints about "upcoming" work, which (perhaps appropriately) seemed to come almost exclusively from Bono. In one passage, he describes a famous group they played with in the 1980s as, and I paraphrase - having played with the fire until the fire played with them; this expression is familiar to anyone who's heard 'Moment of Surrender' (which is my choice for their best song released after this book's publication). The shame of U2 by U2 is that the equivalent doesn't exist for every one of my favorite bands.

The only obvious issue with U2 by U2 is the lack of a true outside perspective on the band - we don't get a sense of why the band has such a huge fanbase, or a seemingly equal number of detractors. The best anyone can do, I suppose, is look through this book for hints. One possibility is in the note that when people struggle so much with grief that they choose to bottle it up, art gives them an opening to have conversations and explore ideas that they find impossible with other people. It ties nicely to the thought that an artist's job is to not only point out problems, but to also leverage creativity to find opportunities and solutions in otherwise devoid places. These are ideas I can relate to in the context of why I like the band and I suspect it would be a common feeling among my fellow fans. The flip side of these ideas is that not everyone, and possibly not most people, care at all about this when they listen to music. As the book notes, people will pick music simply because it sounds good through their speakers or headphones, and in that respect I think U2 is doing just as well as any other famous group, but no better - great art isn't always what you want to hear.

TOA Rating: Three out of forty.

toa rewind - urusai; true, false, racist

For some reason, there was a one-week period in October where this was among my most viewed posts. It was published exactly three years ago today, so shut up and read it, reader.

I have no idea what happened to get it on the list. It's possible that this isn't even my best post from November 16 - that honor probably goes to the 2018 post, where I clumsily offered a lifeline to all those racists who, quite frankly, are finding out about their bigotry at the same time as the rest of us, and are the most surprised of all about the fact.

The two posts share one thing - I might not be technically right, but you won't find someone with a better understanding than me.

coaching down bias

Most of us accept the general premise that we are biased in some way or another, and when presented with clear evidence of our bias manifesting in a specific context I think we should be agreeable to making immediate corrections. I'd like to claim I've been doing this for my entire life (though of course I may be a biased source for such a claim). I believe my first bias correction came when I was ten years old. My baseball coaches told me that I was hitting weak pop-ups because I was swinging up at the ball; this was completely normal because most players have a natural "uppercut" swing, which means the bat traces a smile-shaped arc as it swings through the air. The remedy for my swing sounded to me like a Jedi mind trick - I had to visualize myself swinging down, but not too much, since a slight downward intent cancelled out the natural uppercut motion, and resulted in a level swing; as the great Yogi Berra once said about the sport itself, 90% of the game is half-mental.

In hindsight, I recognize the blessing that I knew exactly how to fix my bias, and I wonder if it's simply a lack of information that hinders many from taking steps to correct their own bias. But before I go down this road, let's consider for a moment how my ten-year old self gathered the information about the swing - it was delivered to me by my coach, who watched me take hundreds of swings. I played various organized sports for nearly two decades so, to me, the idea of a coach delivering important corrections after focused observation is perfectly sensible; my conviction about coaching leaves me wary of potential approximations. Take the role of a life coach, for example: unless this person is observing someone's life for a couple of hours a day, which from my understanding is not the common case, then it seems very unlikely to me that any "life coaching" is possible; the more accurate title in my mind would be something like life adviser, or perhaps life guidance counselor. It's important to me that every time we call someone a coach, we do so carefully, with the knowledge that the person is indeed coaching, but it seems like we've passed a certain point of no return; the standard for calling someone a coach seems to be set at a permanently low bar, almost as if the government had banned using more accurate words like mentor or guide, and we'd all agreed to replace them with coach.

I don't mean to suggest a life coach - or any kind of coach - won't try to make your life better; my point is that someone called coach these days might not spend much time coaching. Some will contend that it's no big deal because it's just semantics, a dispute over a label; I do agree that a label has no inherent meaning, and of course calling someone coach often sounds more distinguished than other titles. But the problem with the label, with any label, is the possibility that people start to associate the label with the activity - what initially identified the activity becomes the word for the activity; we don't use a search engine, we google things. The point of such a transformation is to clarify language, and this is always vital, but there remains potential for things to go wrong as I believe it has done for coaching. I suspect there is a widespread perception that coaching encompasses any activity which is intended to improve performance - advice, instruction, training - because we see coaches doing these things. It's easy enough to stop there and conclude that a coach is anyone who does these things, but that would limit the understanding to the coach's visible responsibilities.

What most people don't see a coach doing is perhaps the single most important skill for good coaching - being observant. I don't think it's possible to be a good coach without being observant. Merely understanding this isn't enough because the reality is that the hardest part is what the lesser performers tend to skip, and being observant is challenging; the picky eater finishes dessert after leaving broccoli on the plate. The end result is an awful lot of awful coaches, in all walks of life, whose mediocrity is a consequence of doing everything but observe, whether out of ignorance or sloth; these coaches do everything well except coach. A good coach is first and foremost an observer; a great coach is an unbiased observer.

The reason I value this skill so highly in my definition of coaching is because observation is the surest way to identify bias, and I feel being unable to identify bias is the single biggest obstacle most people encounter as they attempt to master any skill. I believe we all do our best to remain unbiased but some goals are impossible to achieve without constant vigilance against bias, which is nearly impossible alone. Imagine how difficult it would have been for ten-year-old me to hit a baseball if I'd spent my whole season assuming I had a level swing; this is the situation for most of us doing most things most of the time, completely unaware of how our best but biased intentions undercut our aspirations. It was lucky for me that my coach thought to observe my swing and offer a specific approach for improvement; a coach lacking in observation skills likely wouldn't have been much help because any proposed solution wouldn't have addressed my specific problem. The great coach, leveraging the impossible distance of being someone else, plays an invaluable role by taking a critical first step toward helping someone overcome bias by collecting information through the meticulous observation.

Information on its own is not enough, however, to ensure a change in behavior. My hunch is based on, for the lack of a better expression, the current condition of the world, which boasts endless examples of stakeholders ignoring information about their biased behavior. The USDOJ's investigation into Yale's admissions practices is one such example, which is summarized in this press release that includes the following - "Yale rejects scores of Asian American and white applicants each year based on their race, whom it otherwise would admit." I haven't looked at any data regarding this investigation so I can only speculate that the underlying numbers demonstrate obvious evidence of discrimination, and that it was merely an academic exercise to prove the charge; these investigations never come down to fractions of percentage points, or start from them. Imagine my reaction, then (it was delight, really) when I read a story covering the investigation that noted "Yale quickly defended its admissions process in its own statement Thursday, calling the Justice Department’s allegations 'baseless.'"

I don't know much, but I know the allegations aren't "baseless". They are based in a society where almost every single teacher I ever met in my life was white, where a remote colleague once walked up to me on his first onsite visit and noted that he only saw one Black person among my thirty colleagues. The allegations are based in a world where people make selection decisions, and often do so in a biased manner, which becomes obvious only in hindsight; the fact that people making these decisions, or at least the ones I know, almost always do their very best to make unbiased choices isn't part of the discussion. I don't make this point flippantly - many of these people I know work outside the scope of their roles to train, study, and practice in order to become better at their craft. They often seek out coaches to help them, and I'm sure the coaches do their best, but I'd say the results speak to a different conclusion about coaching. In this world, in which these allegations are based, we have endless examples of aggregated bias in so many aspects of society despite the tireless individual efforts to become unbiased decision-makers, often with the help of coaches; I've heard practice makes perfect, but the evidence in this context suggests practice doesn't make anyone better, or at least the practice being conducted by a society that seems overrun with so-called coaches.

The role of collecting and distributing information, even in the sense of overseeing a practice session, isn't the entire story of coaching; it's possibly up to 90% of the work, but it's only half the battle. The rest of coaching, or at least the way I see it, is making it possible to use that information within a personalized framework, leveraging an evolving understanding of the individual which is updated through continuous observation. The catch is that such a process exposes those cookie-cutter training programs as being practically useless for a majority of the participants. Coaching is hard work because it doesn't scale; it's far more grueling than looking at a few aggregated numbers and saying "well, we expected to see a few more Asians here, statistically speaking". The coach develops a nuanced understanding of cause and effect, knowing that one effect might be the result of various causes which will differ across many individuals; coaching means understanding each person so that instead of teaching a set of general skills to combat bias, it's instead possible to point out specific examples of biased thinking, behavior, and decision-making that apply to and resonate with the individual. The reason anyone, whether it be an organization or an individual, reacts defensively to most allegations of bias is because bias is one of many possible explanations for a result, yet the allegations lead with the outcome rather than the specific process examples that connect cause and effect, which makes it impossible to get to work on the problem.

If this all makes coaching sound like tough work, well, life's tough, mostly because our biases mean trying our best is rarely enough to ensure good results. The path to a better life, and a better world, isn't to look for some plan, process, or method that promises to make you better with a formula that applies to all - the path is to find out why doing your best isn't good enough so that you can do better. This is the essence of coaching, the process of observing to understand why someone's best isn't good enough for reasons specific to the individual, and the desire to share this understanding; it's about encouraging someone to keep doing their best, and how, because with just a little bit of good coaching anything can become better.

reading review - sum

I returned to Sum last December as part of my rereading month. The collection includes forty short stories that all imagine various versions of the afterlife. In terms of simply telling the idea of each story I can think of few books better than this, but at some point between my first time and this reread my preferences drifted toward fiction that is more about its characters than its plot.

Sum by David Eagleman (December 2019)

My book notes from this work were spare (alert, I note and briefly describe the five stories I reread in my notes, though I don't see anything resembling a spoiler) but one of my comments did jump out to me almost a year later, which said that people would better understand God if they ignored the guesses of their ancestors. I think this idea sums up the book quite nicely - these stories bring some much-needed imagination to the eternal question of the afterlife, and Eagleman brings the vision to life throughout Sum's forty tales.

Readers who are on the fence about this book can check out this excerpt from the author's site. It's quite a coincidence that this story is the one he posted, for it's the one I remembered from the first time; it will forever change the way you look at a street named after some long-dead local legend.

TOA Rating: Three pearly gates out of four.

the period of cancel culture

I wonder if anyone who talks about cancel culture connects it to the way criminal records affect employment prospects, though of course I only ask because it seems unlikely - it's considered a "new" phenomenon, cancel culture, which makes it easier to attack than the larger issues that are so deeply embedded into our society, into all of us, that I suspect the opening skirmish of the decisive battle must take place at the mirror; I'd say more, but I believe this sentence, like all sentences, should end when it's time, the period bringing down a curtain on a life's sentence, on schedule and as scheduled, so that the next one can begin while there's still time.

reading review - monster

It's fitting that I read Monster a few weeks after Slam!, the book by the same author that I wrote about at the end of October, because there is a certain connection between the two books. It's not strictly in the sense that one book is a sequel to the other, but there are certain themes fully explored in Monster that were merely introduced in Slam!. I felt that reading the two books within a short enough time range to expose this loose connection was more rewarding than just reading one or the other as separate ideas; you know what I mean.

Monster by Walter Dean Meyers (August 2020)

This book is written as a screenplay, with notes detailing the distance of the camera shot or indicating the start of a voiceover. I felt the style put me at arm's length from the story in a way that I'm not accustomed with fiction; this isn't the kind of reading where it's possible to "lose yourself" in the imagined world. It's effective. By the end of Monster, I recognized that this isn't a story about Steve Harmon, or whether he's guilty of the murder charge for which he is on trial throughout the book - it's about whether I think someone is more likely to be guilty for the mere fact of being on trial.

TOA Rating: Three key grips out of four.

My book notes are here. The only thought that jumped out at me on my review reinforced my approval for the format. The screenplay style was a refreshing way to write this story, and it kept the reader away from jumping to any conclusions for the mere fact of noticing something predictable in the way Meyers told the story.

a minute's silence

I don't really have an answer for why I became a Liverpool fan, but I usually say it's because of their supporters. I have a vague memory of a game from early in 2006, I think it was away to West Ham, when I was flabbergasted that the deafening noise from the television was coming from the travelling fans who were outnumbered ten to one. I supplemented those first few months of watching soccer with hours of research, where I learned more about the club's fanbase - I discovered not just that it could make Anfield the most intimidating home ground in all of the sport, but that it could also organize for goals outside the game - for example, the citywide boycott of The S*n. My support for Liverpool came at a perfect time, just as college was diluting my ability to connect through a shared interest in Boston's various teams, and by fall break of my freshman year I was fully invested in the club.

I'm never asked why I'm still a Liverpool fan, and I think that's just fine - I don't have an answer. I'm in my thirties and I watch soccer games - it's one of those things that's hard to explain to someone who doesn't already understand. I'm not sure what my fellow supporters would say either, mostly because I don't count any other Liverpool fans among my close friends. The only place I've interacted with them at all is at The Phoenix Landing, a bar in Cambridge, where I've seen a few matches over the years. I remember a cold November morning when I walked in, barely awake, but fully alert to the vague possibility of community that clings to the air around anyone who walks alone into a bar. The screens showed the players lined up at midfield, with Anfield waiting around them for a minute's silence before kickoff. The whistle blew and everything went quiet - not just in the ground, but in the bar, too. I remained silent mostly out of stunned surprise. The quietest sixty seconds I'd ever heard soon came to an end, and this time the whistle brought the crowd back to life. The unity in the noise was the same as in the silence, and maybe somewhere in there I should have found my answer.

compartments undone

I've mentioned E.F. Schumacher's Small is Beautiful on a number of occasions throughout TOA's history - once in a 2017 reading review, and again in a 2018 post. The latter may seem superfluous on first glance, but since I didn't mention intermediate technologies in 2017, I suppose it was only a matter of time before I rectified the omission. Intermediate technology has a certain "official" definition in the context of development economics, but I've managed to distort it over the years into terms I can use within the context of my own life - I now think of it as the achievable short-term target within the process of reaching a larger long-term goal. A recent example came around this time last year when I became interested in doing pistol squats, which is a strength training exercise that resembles a full squat on one leg. I came across a blunt insight while researching the movement - if you can't do a full squat while using both legs, it's simply impossible to do it on one leg; I forgot all about the pistols and turned my attention toward the full squat.

The pandemic must have forced me out of this habit of reframing larger problems in terms of smaller, achievable targets because I was caught-off guard last week by an innocent question - how should hospice volunteers respond when they are uncomfortable with a new resident? The question lingered in the air for a few moments, threatening to become its own example, but I soon realized the problem with the premise - it reminded me of the way I first thought about pistol squats. I think the biggest issue for a hospice volunteer is thinking about the role as some version of life that happens entirely apart from everything else, like trying to support all of your weight on one leg before you can do so on two. It becomes yet another moment where we divide ourselves, leaving our accumulated experience and wisdom at the door; I think compartmentalizing is healthy, but only in brief spells, and always with the intent to reunify as quickly as possible.

One way to think about a challenging situation, like the first few shifts in a new volunteer role, is to frame it like an athlete approaches the game, the student approaches the exam, or the artist approaches the performance; the problems that arise on the big occasion should then inform the rest of your life, which is like training, studying, or rehearsing before the next shift - if you learn on your first assignment that you can't cook, you go home and cultivate those culinary skills in your kitchen. It's all about understanding the big target - becoming a great volunteer - and thinking about it in steps that give us a plan for the day. This is the feedback process, this is the performance improvement approach, this is the commitment to growth and personal development that eludes us when we compartmentalize for too long, which makes it impossible for the volunteer to understand the razor-thin margins between the shift and the rest of his or her life.

proper corona admin, vol 87 - college logic

I remember being surprised when I found out I could take logic as a college course. Logic was pretty simple as far as I was concerned. What next, a major in common sense? I could see where logic might be useful, like the way memorizing the periodic table could help in chemistry, but no one ever explained to me why it might fit a liberal arts curriculum.

I look back and realize my problem - I was just a kid. Or I should say, I wasn't an adult, which meant I had never lived in the real world. My bubble kept me blissfully unaware of the atrophied state of public logic, which lowered the standard for making reasoned arguments. The president himself goes on stage and suggests increased COVID testing leads inevitably to increased COVID prevalence; it passes for logic in this country.

put up the house and bet the odds

It's Friday afternoon, and like many Americans - like many people, probably - I've spent the past few days pulling in election analysis from an eclectic set of sources: network news, the FiveThirtyEight live blog, people calling and texting; each new update had an undeniable effect, though generally very small, on my mood at the time. But if I think about the source that had the strongest influence over me, there's only one possibility - the betting odds, which I tracked across a handful of European markets. It was a bit of a roller coaster - Biden started on Tuesday at around 65%, which doesn't strictly equate to a 65% chance of victory (but thinking of it in those terms is appropriate for the context of this piece). Later that night, Trump jumped up to almost 75% at 10 PM (EST) as Ohio and Florida cleared their throats, then Biden clawed back to almost even by around 1 AM for the lack of other surprises, which is when I finally called it a night. I learned the next morning that Trump had actually surged past 70% again at around 3 AM, but by the time I saw it news from Wisconsin and Michigan had pushed Biden above 70%, saving me the trouble of worrying about Trump's brief rally. As you know, Biden's looked more likely to win with each passing day; he's at 95% at time of writing.

I think my undergraduate background in statistics coupled with my lifetime interest in sports - and perhaps the occasional winner I've cashed at the Keno desk - predispose me toward accepting the betting market as the most reliable source of real-time election analysis. But when I share this preference, I'm often met with confusion - what makes someone putting up the odds or betting the house more reliable than a news network, or a pollster? It's been an interesting experience trying to answer this question, almost like being asked to explain my positions on certain issues, like ending racism; it's hard to explain what we take for granted. My standard responses have included attempts to describe a variety of related factors - the underlying science of probability, the nature of betting markets, or the inability of media coverage to correctly link cause and effect.

I realized last night - while listening to complaints about certain networks calling Arizona too early - that I should have offered a far simpler answer: the betting markets work because there are consequences for being wrong. A person who wagers $100 on an election outcome ends up with one of two results - more than $100, or $0. Which of those outcomes do you think is more likely to result in another bet? The far more straightforward consideration is that casinos go out of business very quickly if the oddsmakers set ill-advised betting lines. On the other hand, if Fox News turns out to be wrong about its early Arizona call, will they be banned from covering the 2024 election?

These considerations alone ensure nothing, but it's suggestive of the type of person who prefers to wager on an outcome rather than speculate endlessly on camera about all remaining possibilities. The confident bettor is also more likely to wager large amounts, and dollar totals are reflected in the odds (with wagers, unlike in an election, the tally is almost always irrelevant). The betting market of my imagination likely has no time for the faces that filled my screens this past week, these pundits who earnestly analyze the results in real-time and weave the newest event into an ever-evolving web of predictions. It didn't take long to realize the same people who were wrong four years ago were back to explain why they were wrong again; you'd be forgiven for thinking the media operated like the Supreme Court, and offered lifetime appointments. 

I don't blame the media for the state of election analysis (I have other media complaints, which I'm saving for later). I certainly don't blame any individual within the media for the state of election analysis, even if some of them - like the pollsters - should probably know better, having been burned once by their pie charts in the sky. I believe the media is doing the best it can as it covers an endlessly complex story, which is essentially a series of fifty counting exercises that is confused by the countless ways each next vote can count, or when, and that's assuming they count at all, and then of course the question of whether we can count on those folks who would rather count ballots than count votes, and then this all leads to a final count being tracked simultaneously to the smaller counts, which is what really counts; I just don't think it's possible to cover this adequately, like a five-foot blanket on a six-foot man. But it's important to me that I understand the system of incentives and consequences that contextualize someone's opinion because I'll know what's at stake; the architect can tell me the bridge is sound, but I'd much rather he cross first.

leftovers - business bro, working manager (specialization)

Last week, I shared some thoughts on the idea of "working managers". One thing I excluded was how the trend runs against what I perceive as the widely accepted preference for specialization. If your organization values management as a skill, wouldn't you want those who are good at management to focus a majority of their time in the role much in the same way you'd like your best programmers to spend most of their time writing code?

Of course, the other possibility is that "working managers" is just another example of how organizations find ways to waste time. If I think of the working manager as an equivalent to the programmer who spends half the week in listless meetings, perhaps my perspective on this topic will change.

the show must go on

I imagine someone new to sports would struggle with the way games handle injuries; even I'm sometimes unsettled when play resumes just seconds after a broken athlete is peeled off the turf. Basketball games often continue around an inured player lying in a heap on the court; sometimes a healthy player trips over the body. If we don't stop for a devastating injury, what will ever slow us down?

It's odd how this perspective only comes to me when I think about sports. A commuting cyclist is killed by an eighteen-wheeler, and out come the orange cones to divert traffic around the mops and buckets; a ghost bike will eventually oversee an otherwise unchanged scene, where the show goes on. A sporting event and its customs can only do so much, I think, to counter the indifference of the society it entertains.

reading review - dreyer's english

Benjamin Dreyer, copy chief of Random House, pulls together much of his accumulated wisdom into this prose guide. It's in many ways exactly what you'd expect, but Dreyer's wit - which couldn't be any drier - makes for an entertaining read. I found the second half of the book quite a slog compared to the first - the easy reading gave way to endless lists, which to me always felt like something better suited for Google rather than a book; I'd suggest Dreyer's English is most useful to a beginning writer, or perhaps one who's never read a book on grammar.

For those who want to see the full list of things I learned, check out my book notes.

Dreyer's English by Benjamin Dreyer (August 2020)

I liked how Dreyer relies on common sense to explain certain ideas rather than referring to the fine print in the hypothetical all-powerful grammar rulebook. For example, he explains away the passive voice by noting that the best way to improve a sentence is by introducing the protagonist at the start. He also uses this approach as he describes the way an old standby is going out of fashion - removing articles from the title of a work if it's the object of a possessive noun - noting that odd results (he cites James Joyce's Dead) are leading writers to rethink the approach.

I also appreciated his solution-oriented approach to untangling convoluted writing. The challenge of punctuation collisions when a sentence ends with a quoted portion is familiar to any writer, but rather than including a prescription based on underlying grammar rules Dreyer instead suggests rearranging the sentence. He offers a similar hint for certain pluralized last names, using "the Jones's" as an example - "the Jones family" is a smoother expression. His diagnostic tools for certain conundrums have a similar mood, such as how to use whom (it's a replacement for him, her, or them rather than he, she, or they) or identifying the passive construction (if you can add "by zombies" to the end, it's likely in passive voice). I think the best writing advice (like great advice in general) is whatever gets the writer to the next sentence, and for the most part this book exemplifies my philosophy.

Dreyer's suggestion that ending a sentence with a noun is preferred to a preposition ending reminded me of my strategy during job interviews, or for any situation where my spoken sentences threaten to become paragraphs - the noun is a much more effective way to signal that it's someone else's turn. If I had to pick one or the other (not that I, or anyone, should) I would suggest this is more important in speech, where the speaker has no way to verbalize the punctuation that often ends a sentence, period.

The idea of using consistent number styling within a paragraph reminded me of a comment from Edward Tufte's (The) Visual Display of Quantitiative Information, which described a graphic as a paragraph about the data, and reminded readers throughout that great graphics allow the eye to make easy comparisons. Although a written paragraph hardly carries the same visual responsibility as the infographic, the writer should remember that as words become sentences and sentences form paragraphs, the most important task is to help the reader navigate the increasing complexity - consistent styling is but one of many tools for this task.

As a closing note, Dreyer states his admiration of Shirley Jackson's work through this book, and it convinced me to try a collection of her short stories. I'll write about these sometime in the next couple of months.

TOA Rating: Three semicolons out of four. 

pothole filler

I realized one rainy night that data collection is not a one-way street.

When I walk or run or ride a bike, one of my main concerns is potholes. A little pothole is an inconvenience, but a big pothole is a problem, being a potential cause for a number of calamities. At night, big potholes are also a safety issue, for what I assume are obvious reasons.

The rain offers a solution - a pothole filled with water is pretty obvious at night, especially if it's near a streetlight; I see it, so I can avoid it. But it creates a new challenge - the glossy surface applies to all, making it impossible to differentiate an indent from an ankle-breaker. More data, and the problem is solved, but now I have a new problem, which will require more data; I make do in the meantime and avoid every puddle, just in case.

reading review - eureka street

I didn't always intend on posting this today, but as the election approached I realized it would be a good fit, or at least the best of all my options.

Eureka Street by Robert McLiam Wilson (July 2020)

I've written about this book in the past, so let's start on Memory Lane, and stroll toward the present.

March 12, 2017

This one was more of a book review than a reading review. Somewhere in the rubble, I pointed out that Wilson masterfully demonstrates how everything in 1990s Belfast is reframed in the context of politics, which is a manifestation of the Catholic-Protestant divide. I also circled the way he explores the long-term consequences of fear, suffering, and violence for a city, though I don't think I fully understood it myself at the time, or at least well enough to explain it.

June 30, 2018

I noted in this terse summary that there is a difference between someone who supports a political position and someone who actually carries out the ideas. I don't think I explained it very well, so let's try again - what it means is that defending someone you support, or a fellow supporter, is very different from defending actions. Unsurprisingly, this makes sense to people in the context of their own side (our candidate breaks promises out of necessity) but they don't extend the same courtesy to the other side (their candidate is a liar). If this is the only thing you learn from reading Eureka Street, I suppose the time was well spent.

June 14, 2020

I mention Eureka Street briefly in this surprisingly good post that meanders along the line between fiction and nonfiction, noting that if these characters were based on people Wilson knew, there was no way he could actually write about them, unless of course he renamed them Chuckie or Jake or even Shague Ghintoss - who might be the perfect character to demonstrate the necessity of fiction. Unfortunately, Eureka Street doesn't offer anything in terms of what to do about these people and their qualities, whether it's their casual bigotry, their questionable business aspirations, or their poisonous politics - if anything, the implication is that we can't expect to do much about it at all, except paint the picture in all its detail.

November 3, 2020

I looked through my book notes for a line, any line, that might jump out at me, and although there were some possibilities - embarrassment is an underrated driver of social change, empathy is impossible without imagination, or that the prospect of steady employment often defeats ideology - I didn't see anything that represented the way I felt about Eureka Street. The thing that I've always remembered about this book is the stunning chapter in the center that suddenly changed the entire mood of the story; the thing I learned this time is that I'm finally capable of understanding why the characters got tired of their own plot.

Ultimately, I think Eureka Street is a pretty simple idea - it holds up a mirror to a society, or a moment in a society, that will look anywhere except at itself. You can't change until you know what you are, until you know yourself; self-awareness didn't seem a high priority in 1990s Belfast. I'd love to get my hands on the equivalent for November 3, 2020, in these United States, but I'm not holding my breath. This book will do for today, I think, for at least I recognize these characters, who turn off the news because it only tells them the things they can figure out on their own, though of course they never take that step, and work out the calculations; we know these characters because they refuse to know anything about themselves.

TOA Rating: Four out of four.

proper corona admin, vol 86 - chance assumptions

I've heard some stories about people assuming they were sick with COVID early in the spring, which they've used to justify their relatively carefree lifestyle over the balance of 2020. A reliable source told me about a specific couple that fell ill in April, exhibiting some COVID symptoms, but they never got tested; if Boston is on the path to herd immunity, they are our unmasked shepherds.

I've made my own assumption, which I realized about ten days ago - I'm high risk. No rhyme, no reason. But why? Maybe I'm just cautious, or perhaps it's my family history of certain cancers. Or maybe, it's that night I had dinner with a friend, just hours before the ER's shocking discovery, which internalized a sense of the precipice in me; we should all take our chances, and make the most of them, but we should never assume a second one.

the toa newsletter - november 2020

No trick, and definitely no treat - it's November, reader.

No debating it.

Definitely no debate.

The weather is like an f'ing joke.

Right, odd to see snowy leaves, and obviously causing novel problems - the leaves allow so much more snow to sit on branches than usual, as in the usual case of branches being bare in the winter, and the wet snow meant some collapsing wood around here; for once, it wasn't just the Green Line branches having issues, though they did. Spectacular sights, though, to see the white layered onto the traditional autumn colors. I'd recommend it if it didn't feel like an endorsement for climate change.

At least the beers changed on time, right?

What?

Well, the Winter Warmer just came out, and usually those are three months ahead of season - not this time.

Oh, good point.

So what now?

Well, we'll just pick up right where we left off exactly four weeks ago, when I was rudely interrupted - time to do a little cleanup of the notes, half-posts, and general admin that's accumulated around here over the past couple of months. Read them off, please.

Sure. What posts did you stop working on? Let's start with corona complaints-

Right, there's only so much you can say, but who is doing the thinking when an outdoor patio leaves a two-foot wide sidewalk? Like seriously, go to Faneuil Hall, have a look around, or even try Cambridge, and point out the geniuses who came up with these layouts; I want to borrow their yardstick, I'll be the tallest man on earth.

But isn't he short?

Huh?

Never mind. Any other corona thoughts?

I miss quite a bit about pre-pandemic life, but I do NOT miss holding doors, just standing there waiting with my mouth open, trying to decide if someone eleven and a half feet away was in range where I'd be expected to hold the door, and then that awkward half-scurry, followed by, like, seventeen seconds of "thank you! no, thank you!!"; the pandemic made us all stop pretending like holding a door was the most important moment in human history, thank god. If I can go the rest of my life letting doors slam I'll live happily ever after-

Uhh, maybe a different topic? How about business, any new rants?

Sure, I was thinking last week about how some business bros are so dumb, with their inane expressions like "low-hanging fruit", maybe I could convince one of them that the expression actually means a difficult task, because wink-wink, apples grow from the ground, right? So if it hangs it means uh-oh, right? Some of them are dumb enough to buy it, I know it, I bet most of these people haven't been outside since remote-

OK, forget it, anything except corona or business-

Yeah, fine, well I was trying to write something about how people love to admit being wrong, but they'll never admit that other people were right. It's always "my views changed", never "well those people I vilified, turns out, were right all along". And that's weird, right?

No-

Like the problem when one person turns out to be right after so much time? It means that despite being right, they were considered wrong, which really seems like a huge waste, and instead of acknowledging how tough that was and trying to repair the damage, people say "hey, I was wrong". What does that mean? We all know this, but the person who was right the whole time definitely knows it. So this admission, it doesn't really work, does it? But I couldn't really squeeze a post out of the idea.

You know, I'm almost sorry I asked about abandoned posts.

Well, it was a stupid question, by definition you're gonna get stupid answers.

How about those pop culture complaints you were doing? Like every Friday?

Those are done, never again. Can't really complain about something you don't care about, right?

Even COVID Seinfeld?

I did think about the possibility of George and Elaine faking a marriage just so they could get into reduced capacity arenas - I'll leave the details to the experts, or the bored. 

OK, let's close up, then. Any Halloween plans?

None, though I basically went trick or treating earlier at CVS - spent three bucks, got three Kit-Kats, and since they gave me three dollars in CVS money, it kinda worked out like I was eight years old, you know? CVS is either the greatest place in America, or about to go out of business.

Apple update?

As of October 31, Appple ($1.89T market cap) can mail a $2K check to every American (331M) and remain a trillion-dollar company. 

And finally - the TOA budget deficit...

It's like, six thousand words over-

Yikes.

Longtime readers will recall the endless string of broken promises regarding the word count budget, honestly it's like I was running for office. Here's the newest one - 300 words per day, except for Sundays, which I'm not going to count any longer.

So today doesn't count?

Correct.

So why am I here?

Just shut up and read the cue cards, this is almost done.

Anything else?

Yes, I think with November finally here, and the clocks turning back-

The clocks are what?

You millennials, it means when all your digital numbers mysteriously change by one hour, OK? Back in my day you had to know what was going on, and actually do things. Anyway, it's officially time to worry about the dark days of winter, which will amplify all the problems that existed before the pandemic.

Sad!

Right, like SAD. This isn't official advice, I'm not a doctor, I only have a B.S-

We all know you have a lot of BS-

What? Quiet down, anyway, take this advice with a grain of salt - for those who like to do everything they can, who like to worry about things they can control, just remember the importance of that extra initiative to get out into the sunlight, and move around; sixty minutes of each - which can be done simultaneously - always worked wonders for my mood.

Nice parting thought-

Or a starting thought, if you will. It's day one of the rest of your life.

Oh, for the love of-

Thanks for reading, see you in November!