Senecan advice for travelers

Wherever you go, there you are:

How can the sight of new countries give you pleasure? Getting to know cities and places? That agitation of yours turns out to be useless. Do you want to know why your running away doesn’t help? You take yourself along. Your mental burden must be put down before any place will satisfy you.

Seneca, Epistles 28.2. Quoted in Ward Farnsworth’s The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual (Boston: David R. Godine, 2018). Adapted from an unidentified public-domain translation.

Also from this book
Senecan advice for liberal-arts types : Dunning-Kruger Montaigne

“Or primitives”

My favorite sentence from a profile of Steve Stone, a Chicago White Sox sportscaster who claims psychic powers:

“Let’s say you and I as cavemen, or primitives, we come across a sabertooth tiger.”

That’s the prelude to an explanation of “the inner voice.”

Thanks, Seth.

“Personalized learning”

“I want to just take my Chromebook back and tell them I’m not doing it anymore”: The New York Times reports on students and parents in Kansas protesting the arrival of Summit Learning and its program of “personalized learning,” with a curriculum developed by Facebook engineers and funded by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. The quotation marks are fitting: what “personalized learning” amounts to is a student sitting in front of a screen for most of the day, with teachers devoting their time to “mentoring.” The Summit Learning website, which does not show children sitting in front of screens for most of the day, mentions “weekly 1:1 checkins” with teacher-mentors. Students in Kansas report anxiety, eye strain, hand cramps, headaches, seizures, and stress from lack of contact with teachers and peers.

Irony of ironies: as the Times reported in 2011 and again in 2018, tech types often do all they can to keep their children away from screens.

So many falsehoods at work in the Summit vision of what, really, is depersonalized learning, one child to one machine. And such a mistaken understanding of what it might mean for a teacher to be a mentor. My best teachers were mentors all the time. When they were standing or sitting in front of a classroom, they were teaching me how to think, how to feel, how to communicate, how to be a good human. All of which is much more valuable than “weekly 1:1 checkins.”

Income disparity at Disney

The Washington Post reports that Abigail Disney is calling attention to income disparity at The Walt Disney Company. The specifics: in 2018 Bob Iger, CEO, was paid $65.5 million dollars, 1,424 times the median Disney salary.

For comparison: in 2017 a 333:1 ratio at Honeywell International made news. There too, the ratio measured CEO compensation against median salary.

Also for comparison: the management sage Peter Drucker recommended this ratio for highest and lowest pay in a company: 20:1.

Other Drucker-related posts
On figuring out where one belongs : On income disparity in higher ed : On integrity in leadership : On efficiency and effectiveness : What Drucker might have thought about Trump and Charlottesville

[I am an unlikely reader of Peter Drucker’s work. No management type, I. I caught on by way of the excellent little book On Managing Onself (2008).]

“Others say”

This morning on Weekend Edition Sunday, Lulu Garcia-Navarro asked Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren (D, CA-19) about Russian hacking of United States elections:

“I want to talk to you about Florida, because there is, uhm, a difference of opinion on this. On the one hand we have Mueller saying this did happen. There were Democrats in that state like Ben Nelson who reported that there had been an attack on the election infrastructure there. But others say that it didn’t happen.”

Lofgren replied by citing the Mueller report and noting that the Department of Homeland Security was aware of the attack. And Garcia-Navarro left it there, with no follow-up. Here’s the relevant passage from the Mueller report, volume 1, page 51, footnote numbers omitted:

In November 2016, the GRU sent spearphishing emails to over 120 email accounts used by Florida county officials responsible for administering the 2016 U.S. election. The spearphishing emails contained an attached Word document coded with malicious software (commonly referred to as a Trojan) that permitted the GRU to access the infected computer. The FBI was separately responsible for this investigation. We understand the FBI believes that this operation enabled the GRU to gain access to the network of at least one Florida county government. The Office did not independently verify that belief and, as explained above, did not undertake the investigative steps that would have been necessary to do so.

There is indeed a debate about what happened in Florida, and it appears to be a matter of semantics, about what must be accomplished for an attack to qualify as an attack, or for an attack to qualify as a hack. But if the GRU sent spearfishing e-mails to Florida county officials, NPR does its listeners no service by presenting “Others say it didn’t happen” as a legitimate point of view.

“Others say” that so many things didn’t happen: the Holocaust, the moon-landing, the Sandy Hook shooting. I could go on. Not every question has two sides.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

Today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Greg Johnson, is a tough one. It’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard. It’s a hard Saturday Stumper, but it was a-gonna fall, I knew it, if I could keep at it. I did. It did. I wonder if Bob Dylan likes crossword puzzles.

A clue that taught me something: 41-Across, five letters, “Word from the Latin for ‘it lacks.’” Another clue that taught me something: 35-Down, eight letters, “Art that can fluoresce.” A third clue that taught me something: 51-Down, five letters, “Work signed on Mary’s sash.”

One bit of snark: 66-Across, ten letters, “Rolls Royce Ghost, e.g.” PRICEYAUTO? Nah. (By the way, that should be Rolls-Royce, with a hyphen.)

An especially odd and inventive clue: 62-Down, three letters, “Treat ‘served’ by Elvis, Gandalf, Glinda, etc., etc.” LSD? Wha?

No spoilers: the answers are blowin’ in the wind in the comments.

“The uh, rhapsody maker”

[Baby Blues, April 20, 2019.]

“What’s this group of stars, Dad?” I like the way Darryl takes his nonsense one step further — not just “Bohemia” but a description thereof.

It’s funny, yes, but an authentic professor would confess to not knowing. And then try to find out.

See also “Keats’ Eremite.”

[A P.S. to S.H.: I remember your presentation on “Rhapsody on a Windy Night,” beginning with the dictionary.]

George Conway on fiduciary obligations

George Conway, writing in The Washington Post:

The Constitution commands the president to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” It requires him to affirm that he will “faithfully execute the Office of President” and to promise to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.” And as a result, by taking the presidential oath of office, a president assumes the duty not simply to obey the laws, civil and criminal, that all citizens must obey, but also to be subjected to higher duties — what some excellent recent legal scholarship has termed the “fiduciary obligations of the president.”

Fiduciaries are people who hold legal obligations of trust, like a trustee of a trust. A trustee must act in the beneficiary’s best interests and not his own. If the trustee fails to do that, the trustee can be removed, even if what the trustee has done is not a crime.

So too with a president.

A friend with a background in estates and trusts thinks that Conway’s analogy is dead-on. Conway’s conclusion:

White House counsel John Dean famously told Nixon that there was a cancer within the presidency and that it was growing. What the Mueller report disturbingly shows, with crystal clarity, is that today there is a cancer in the presidency: President Donald J. Trump.

Congress now bears the solemn constitutional duty to excise that cancer without delay.

“Because I never. . . .”

Statements are made about me by certain people in the Crazy Mueller Report, in itself written by 18 Angry Democrat Trump Haters, which are fabricated & totally untrue. Watch out for people that take so-called “notes,” when the notes never existed until needed. Because I never....

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 19, 2019

“Because I never. . . .” Never what? Never took notes in class?

Oh, wait:

...agreed to testify, it was not necessary for me to respond to statements made in the “Report” about me, some of which are total bullshit & only given to make the other person look good (or me to look bad). This was an Illegally Started Hoax that never should have happened, a...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 19, 2019

And now it’s been four hours. A . . . long time between tweets. Maybe they’ve taken his phone.

And talk about angry, and talk about conflicted. No collusion, no obstruction, he says, but, he also says, it’s all the work of “Angry Democrat Trump Haters.” He fully cooperated, he says, but, he also says, he never agreed to testify. Donald Trump gives new covfefe to the word incoherence.

Apartments

Marška’s sister Joška has been snooping around, trying to find the money Marška’s employers have left with her.


Johannes Urzidil, “The Last Bell.” In The Last Bell. Translated from the German by David Burnett. (London: Pushkin Press, 2017.)

From the jacket flap:

Johannes Urzidil (1896–1970) was a German-Czech writer, poet, historian and journalist. Born in Prague, he was a member of the Prague Circle and a friend of Franz Kafka and Max Brod. He fled to England after the German occupation in 1939, and eventually settled in the United States. Best known during his lifetime for the collections The Lost Beloved and Prague Triptych, he won numerous awards for his writing, and even had an asteroid named after him.

I knew nothing about Johannes Urzidil before seeing this book on a table at Three Lives & Company. What swayed me: a page-ninety test and the name of the publisher. Pushkin Press has brought out Stefan Zweig’s novellas and short stories in English translation. Aside from this volume, Urzidil’s fiction is unavailable in English. I hope that more will appear.