Hank Jones and the New York Times

New York Times reporters Corey Kilgannon and Andy Newman accompanied a landlord as he bashed a hole in a door. Behind the door, the room in which pianist Hank Jones lived (when not on the road) in the last year and a half of his life.

This shoddy — and perhaps illegal — invasion of privacy has yielded a maudlin, uninformed piece of reportage: A Jazzman’s Final Refuge. If you read it, read too the comments, in which Jones’s manager, family members, and fellow musicians offer their comments on Corey Kilgannon, Andy Newman, and Hank Jones’s life and art.

A related post
Hank Jones (1918–2010)

How to pronounce “Zooey”

Aaron Cohen poses the question. J.D. Salinger’s literary agency has already answered: “zoh-ee.” I will continue to think that “zoo-ee” makes better sense.

Three Franny and Zooey posts
A Salinger catalogue
Another Salinger catalogue
“[D]ark, wordy, academic deaths”

How to pack

A New York Times slideshow: flight attendant Heather Poole shows how to pack.

Google!

Blinky, Pinky, Inky, and Clyde: Google today celebrates a thirty-year anniversary. Go to Google and see.

Now if only they could fix FeedBurner.

[May 25, 2010: FeedBurner has been fixed, and the game is here.]

Adam Wheeler’s résumé

It’s available as a PDF from The New Republic (where Wheeler applied for an internship). TNR calls the document “rather remarkable.” No further comment needed.

More: The résumé annotated, a PDF from the Harvard Crimson.

[I follow Garner’s Modern American Usage in spelling résumé.]

Simulacrum alert

The New York Times reports today on recreations of lost New York City restaurants and nightspots. Here are descriptions of the real things, two of them, circa 1964:




From Harold H. Hart’s Hart’s Guide to New York City (New York: Hart Publishing, 1964). Illustration by Ruby Davidson.

“Risqué palaver” and what looks like a three- or four-drink minimum: that must have been quite a scene.

Also from Hart’s Guide
Chock full o’Nuts
Greenwich Village and coffee house
Mayflower Coffee Shop(pe)
Record stores
Schrafft’s

iPad, the user as consumer

John B. Judis:

I still recall my disillusionment when I visited Apple in 1991 to do a story on John Sculley, who was then the company’s CEO. What I found was an emphasis on computer users as consumers who would buy products they saw on the screen. Of course, from a commercial standpoint, Apple was pursuing what turned out to be a successful strategy. But it’s still one that grates on me.

The iPad is the latest iteration of that strategy.

We Are Not All Jobsians … Yet (The New Republic)

Or in Elaine Fine’s words, “The iPad seems to be the gift that keeps on selling.”

(Thanks, Elaine!)

The Adam Wheeler story

Says his lawyer, “He’s never been in trouble before.” But Adam Wheeler is in trouble now.

For me, the most remarkable detail in the Adam Wheeler story is his application essay for the Rhodes Scholarship, which plagiarized the work of Stephen Greenblatt. A Harvard English major plagiarizing the work of a Harvard English professor: the plagiarizer’s self-confidence suggests the Dunning-Kruger effect. Then again, Wheeler’s Harvard career seems to have given him good reason to think that he could get away with anything.

I suspect a movie in a couple of years. A good title: Veritas.

Campuses Ensnared by “Life of Deception” (New York Times)
Ex-Harvard Student, Adam Wheeler, Pleads Not Guilty to Charges of Fabricating Academic History (Harvard Crimson)
Wheeler’s résumé (via The New Republic, where Wheeler applied for an internship)

The Dunning-Kruger effect

David Pescovitz posted at Boing Boing last week on the Dunning-Kruger effect, which accounts for a curious relationship between incompetence and confidence. From the abstract of a 1999 paper by Cornell psychology professor David A. Dunning and (then) graduate student Justin Kruger:

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.

The Dunning-Kruger effect helps to explain why students with serious writing deficits can often have wildly inflated opinions of their abilities (and thus regard as “nitpicky” someone who points out run-on sentences and tangled syntax). Dunning-Kruger also helps to explain why the students who worry most about their competence are usually those with genuinely strong skills.

And Dunning-Kruger helps me to understand my unease about recommendation forms that ask for an appraisal of student self-confidence. Instead of answering, I write “A high level of self-confidence is not necessarily a good thing.” Maybe now I’ll just write “See Dunning and Kruger (1999).”

iPads at the IIT

More college-and-iPad news: the Illinois Institute of Technology will be giving iPads to incoming freshmen in Fall 2010.

Says Assistant Director of Media Relations Evan Venie, “It won’t be any more of a distraction than laptops in the classroom.”

Related posts
The iPad and college students
“iPads for EVERYONE!”
“Sort of gimmicky”
Steve Wozniak on the iPad and college