USPS (b. 1775)

At The New Yorker, Casey Cep writes about the United States Postal Service, its origin, history, current woes, possible futures, and cultural value. An excerpt:

If the coronavirus kills the Postal Service, its death will have been hastened, as so many deaths are right now, by an underlying condition: for the past forty years, Republicans have been seeking to starve, strangle, and sabotage it, hoping to privatize one of the oldest and most important public goods in American history.

[Have you written a letter today? Me, not yet.]

Rats in your engine

From The New York Times: “Time to Check Your Pandemic-Abandoned Car for Rats.” No joke.

We had this problem in a minor way a few years back, after leaving our car in an airport parking lot for a week. Our dealer offered a suggestion for the future: leave the car with the AC/heat set to recirculate. Good advice? I don’t know, but if the car is parked, going nowhere, it can’t hurt.

If the Times had comments on for this article, I’d leave one. Instead, I’ve made this post.

Today’s Saturday Stumper

DNF. I Did Not Finish today’s Newsday Saturday Stumper, by Lars G. Doubleday, aka Doug Peterson and Brad Wilber. But I DNF — Dang Near Finished, stymied by two baffling clues: 49-A, six letters, “’60s singer named for the Count of Monte Cristo” and 41-D, three letters, “Mugger.” What? If “’60s” and six letters led you to think of rock/pop and some mononymous singer and the name by which the singer is known, you’d be taking a wrong turn. As I did. As for “Mugger,” well, who knows what that’s about? I do, now, because I looked it up. Now I GI. Get It.

Some clue-and-answer pairs I especially like:

13-D, ten letters, “Father-to-be.” I had a hunch about this one.

17-A, nine letters, “100+ products at shopdisney.com.” It’s an amusing answer, even if it’s a reminder of cultural decadence.

23-A, five letters, “OK.” Such indirection. Adjective? Adverb? Noun? Verb?

27-D, ten letters, “Puppy activity.” URINATINGONTHECARP — no, too many letters.

36-A, seven letters, “Humorous movement.” I suppose I like this clue because I knew the answer and felt a bit smarty-pants about it.

63-A, nine letters, “Mozart, fraternally.” An unexpected answer.

But my favorite:

28-D, ten letters, “Whistler in 10 films.” A spelling challenge, at least for me.

No spoilers: the answers are in the comments.

Missing from MOOCs

I remember being in a class with a prof who was still teaching while getting radiation for cancer. He was not in good shape, but he’d come in smelling of aftershave, because he had taken the time to shave before class. You can’t get that from a MOOC.

I remember smoke breaks with another prof in the hallway during long once-a-week classes. Two or three of us with cigarettes, one guy with a pipe, our prof with Winston 100s, always for some reason in a Marlboro 100s pack. Or was it Marlboros in a Winston pack? Either way, you can’t get that from a MOOC. But you can’t get that anywhere now anyway. No smoking.

What do you remember that you can’t get from a MOOC?

[That’s just two. Elaine said I should mention the knock and weather. I’ll add unerased blackboards and pre-class blackboard art by students. And ice cream. And more ice cream. Somebody stop me before I remember again.]

Great performances and interactions

Kara Miller recently interviewed David Autor for the WGBH radio program Innovation Hub. Autor is an MIT economics professor and co-chair of the MIT Work of the Future Task Force. He believes that the coronavirus pandemic will strengthen some areas of the economy — higher education, for one. He says that “the change in educational modality” will be disruptive at first but beneficial in the long run. Why? Because in-person residential education is expensive, and all interactions “happen at low scale”:

“In hundreds of classrooms every fall, economics instructors open up Greg Mankiw’s Principles of Economics and do their version of that book for undergraduates. And it’s like, in a thousand theaters, a thousand mediocre versions of Hamlet are all being performed. [Laughter.] Why not just have one great performance by the British Shakespeare Society and we can all watch it on video?”

I guess the work of the future will require far fewer economics instructors. (MIT grad students, take note.) Far fewer directors, actors, theater managers, and set and costume designers too. Not to mention plays. Autor presents such a diminished idea of education — as one-way communication, with spectators watching a star at work. That’s the model, of course, for the MOOC (massive online open course), which I daresay is far inferior to many a local starless effort in building human abilities and relationships.

As for “the British Shakespeare Society,” there is, of course, no such organization. There is a British Shakespeare Association, which describes itself as “committed to bringing together scholars, students, teachers, theatre practitioners, community workers and other professions with a shared interest in Shakespeare.” And there’s the Royal Shakespeare Company, an institution no doubt gladdened by the thought of people performing Shakespeare wherever they may be. Ian McKellen himself appeared in a documentary about the Hobart Shakespeareans.

To his credit, Autor says that changes in the shape of higher education will show us what was valuable in past ways of doing things, and that we will better understand “why we were paying for all that.” But notice: were, as if the changes he anticipates have already happened, everywhere, for everyone.

A 2014 OCA post, The gold standard, haircuts, and everyone else, has more about the rhetoric of disruption in higher education. Why haircuts? Because there, too, all interactions “happen at a low scale.”

[I’ve edited Autor’s words to remove many you know s.]

Empires and fields

Bernardo Soares, the authorial identity at work in this prose work, is, at times, unmistakably stoic:


Fernando Pessoa, from Text 102, The Book of Disquiet, trans. from the Portuguese by Richard Zenith (New York: Penguin, 2003).

Related reading
All OCA Pessoa posts (Pinboard)

Madeline Kripke (1943–2020)

Of the coronavirus. Keeper of one of the largest private collections of dictionaries. The New York Times has an obituary.

Flow, a Mac app

Flow is a free app for Mac, a Pomodoro-style timer with a bonus: it allows the user to blacklist apps (thus avoiding distractions when said user is supposed to be working).

I’ve long used the free timer Tomato One. Tomato Two (macOS 10.15+ only), also free, blocks websites with an in-app purchase. One could avoid all sorts of work by engaging in an internal debate about what’s more useful, blocking apps or blocking websites. Why not retain both options? To my mind, the more timer apps and mechanical timers one has around, the better. Had we world enough and timers.

Thanks to Matt Thomas for recommending this app.

Related posts
Orange timer art : Ozeri Kitchen and Event Timer : The Pomodoro Technique Illustrated (A review)

Made to order

Remembering an unsettling knock on a classroom door made me remember another great moment in pedagogy.

I was an undergrad at Fordham College, in a Shakespeare class with a beloved professor, Paul Memmo. It was mid-afternoon, and King Lear was raging on the heath. All at once, the Bronx sky darkened. Then, distant thunder, and the rain came down. It was weather made to order, as everyone understood.

On Duke Ellington’s birthday

Duke Ellington was born 121 years ago today.

Here’s an unembeddable performance, piano alone, a recital for television broadcast, taped in Paris, July 2, 1970. The program, with all compositions by Ellington except as noted:

Fleurette Africaine : Carolina Shout (James P. Johnson) : Take The “A” Train (Billy Strayhorn) : Black Beauty : Warm Valley : Things Ain’t What They Used to Be (Mercer Ellington) : Paris Blues : New World A-Comin’ : Paris Blues : Come Sunday : Lotus Blossom (Strayhorn)

Ellington is in rare form here. I’d point in particular to “Fleurette Africaine,” “Black Beauty” (first recorded in 1928), and “Come Sunday.” And there’s “Carolina Shout.” When in later life Ellington revisited the stride-piano style of his early years, it was typically in the form of brief novelty performances of his “Soda Fountain Rag.” (For instance.) “Carolina Shout,” too, wraps up pretty quickly, but Ellington seems to be playing to give Johnson his due. “There never was another,” Ellington wrote of him in Music Is My Mistress.

A bonus Ellington-related detail: if you watch the broadcast with “Soda Fountain Rag,” you’ll see the pianist Aaron Bridgers. He and Billy Strayhorn had a nine-year relationship, 1939–1948.

Related reading
All OCA Ellington posts (Pinboard)

[Ken Vail’s Duke’s Diary, Part Two (2002) omits “Carolina Shout” and adds “Dancers in Love,” “In the Beginning God,” and “Satin Doll.”]