“Does there need to be?”

Pamela Paul, editor of The New York Times Book Review, in an interview about “sliding backward” on technology: “In general, when I hear the phrase ‘There’s an app for that,’ my first question is, ‘Does there need to be?’”

See also Neil Postman’s six questions. The first: “What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?”

Hillary Clinton on how to proceed

Hillary Clinton, writing in The Washington Post;

The debate about how to respond to Russia’s “sweeping and systematic” attack — and how to hold President Trump accountable for obstructing the investigation and possibly breaking the law — has been reduced to a false choice: immediate impeachment or nothing. History suggests there’s a better way to think about the choices ahead.

Clinton’s recommendation: Congressional investigations to fill in the gaps in the Mueller report, an independent bipartisan commission to safeguard elections, and health-care and infrastructure legislation from the Democratic House. Clinton sees the Mueller report as a road map to “the eventual filing of articles of impeachment, or not.”

I think that Clinton’s pragmatism might be the right choice here. I want to see Donald Trump impeached — everything he’s done and not done demands it. But I think of Omar Little’s wisdom: “You come at the king, you best not miss.” Impeachment would be a miss: the Senate will not vote to remove Trump from office, which would likely leave him boasting and gloating and feeling more empowered and reckless than ever. So instead of impeachment: lingchi, death by a thousand cuts, hearing after hearing after hearing. Even if those cuts — just metaphorical ones, please — leave Trump in office, they will likely leave his credibility and chances of re-election in ruins. The idealist in me says Impeach! Because if not Trump, then whom? But pragmatism might make better sense.

[Trump has tweeted and re-tweeted nineteen times today. Imagine what he’ll be like when hearings begin.]

“Realistic underwear”

The newly married couple share a dresser.


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

Also from this book
Apartments : “Well, that’s the Renaissance”

“Well, that’s the Renaissance”

Wenzel Schaschek, bank clerk, has stolen from a museum a painting of Eleonor, the Duchess of Albanera. The painted Duchess has begun to tell Schaschek of her life: after killing her first husband, she was determined to forgive her second husband anything. But he betrayed her by taking a lover, so she took that lover for herself, enslaved him to her body, and “worked him” until he plunged a dagger into her husband’s heart.


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

Also from this book
Apartments

Oscar’s (last) Day (of teaching)

Fare forward, George.

Toilet trouble

From WBEZ, Chicago: “Democratic Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, his wife and his brother-in-law are under federal criminal investigation for a dubious residential property tax appeal that dogged him during his gubernatorial campaign last year.”

Dubious indeed: the scheme involved the removal of toilets from a mansion to render said mansion “vacant and uninhabitable.” Total Pritzker property-tax savings: $331,432.

I was never a Pritzker fan, and I have proof: this post and this one. The last thing our civic life needs is another billionaire.

“Garnacha”

I was standing inside the front room of a narrow two-story house after a meeting of a community group and a taping of The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. I called my aunt, who had just moved to Montana, to tell her that a terrible snowstorm was on the way. I reached her secretary, who said that he had too many other things to do to relay the message. “Yes, but” — and we went in circles. I threw the handset into an enormous wastebasket.

Out on the front porch, I met up with our recently retired dentist. He wore a parka and a galero and walked down a long board that had been placed over the five or six steps from the porch to the sidewalk. It occurred to me that this board was a riskier proposition that the steps themselves. Our dentist was highly critical of some of the people at the meeting: they were there, he said, only to be seen.

And then I saw our old friend Margie King Barab. She was parked on the porch in an enormous sedan, the kind of car people once called a boat. I wondered how she had gotten the car up the steps. And how had she turned it around? How could there have been enough room? Margie now had to maneuver the car to drive it back down the steps. I started to push a large table toward the door of the house to free up room on the porch. As I did, a green and white sports car began to back out of the house, right toward the table. “Wait!” I yelled. “She has to get her car out.” “That’s gonna take a lot of time,” said the driver. He looked like Eric Campbell from the silents.

Later, Elaine and I saw the driver standing on the sidewalk. “Look,” I said. “He’s smoking a Gauloise and drinking espresso.” He corrected me: “Garnacha.”

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

[Possible sources: On Sunday I was listening to the Left Banke compilation There’s Gonna Be a Storm. A friend begins a job today doing a little of everything. Alexander King, Margie’s first husband, was a frequent guest on The Tonight Show in its Jack Paar days. The word prow, from a little crossword I made for Elaine, might have something to do with the car. I saw a little BMW convertible yesterday. Elaine thinks the table could be from If Beale Street Could Talk.]

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.”