Archimedes’ Hot Tub

A while back I posted about a class I taught on the origins of narrative journalism in the U.S. I said W.E.B. DuBois’s The Souls of Black Folk was the best example of narrative reporting amongst the great journalistic works of that decade.

I’ve put together a semester-long course I’ll teach this fall at Harvard Extension School, looking decade by decade at the rise of narrative techniques in nonfiction, that is, applying fictional storytelling techniques in writing about real people and events.

I wanted to combine great journalism and great writing. Happily, I could follow New York University’s Top 100 Works of Journalism pretty closely. Of the 10 books I picked, six were on the list, and 13 readings overall. Where I deviated was mostly in the thinly represented 1920s and 1930s, and to reflect major cultural trends that weren’t overtly political, like sports and technology.

That’s Sever Hall, site of the class [image from Collegeprowler.com]

Here’s the reading list:

1900-1910

Ida Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company (selected chapters)

W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk

1911-1920John Reed, Ten Days that Shook the World

1921-1930

Ben Hecht, 1001 Afternoons in Chicago [selections]

Edmund Wilson, The Follies [selections, collected in American Earthquake]

Grantland Rice, “The Four Horsemen”
1931-1940

Dorothy Thompson, I Saw Hitler! [class handout]

Edmund Wilson, American Jitters, [selections, collected in American Earthquake]

Joseph Mitchell, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon [Selections, collected in Up in The Old Hotel]

1941-1950

John Hersey, Hiroshima

Joseph Mitchell, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon [Selections, collected in Up in The Old Hotel]

1951-1960

Lillian Ross, Picture

Joseph Mitchell, The Bottom of the Harbor, [Selection, collected in Up in The Old Hotel]

1961-1970

Joseph Mitchell, Joe Gould’s Secret [collected in Up in The Old Hotel]

Joan Didion, Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Tom Wolfe, The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby [article]

1971-1980

Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff

Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail [selections]

1981-1990Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine

1991-2000

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, “Trina and Trina” [article]

Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm

H.G. Bissinger, Friday Night Lights

Tom Junod, “The Abortionist” [article]Hat tips: This class draws from as far back as my Introduction to the Humanities course at the University of Chicago, taught by the great Wayne Booth, may he rest in peace. I would not be teaching it if not for my Nieman year, where I looked at the Harvard course catalog and wondered why there were zero classes on reported narrative as a literary form. It percolated without my knowing in classes taught by Paige Williams and Philip Fisher, and benefited from a generous e-mail encouragement from Jill Lepore after she came to share her talents with the Niemans. My indefatigable research assistant Tamara Turse was instrumental to the development of this reading list, and my syllabus.

To soften the blow of forcing the family to spend part of vacation wandering around Gettysburg, I took them to Hershey Park first. It was a hot day, spent mostly splashing around various water rides and standing in long lines made longer by having to wait until the person actually using the ride was completely away from it before letting the next person down.

It is a fun amusement park, and after 6 got a lot less crowded. We had good fun. Though I found something mournful about being up high at Hershey Park, on rides like the Kissing Tower, and seeing the remnants of the old Hershey factory, which will be replaced by something else.

I shouldn’t mourn the loss of aged factories, of course. Technologies emerge, markets develop, it’s part of the course of business. Hershey’s the company isn’t dead, because an aged factory disappears. A new, more efficient factory will be built, apparently in Mexico, and Hershey’s runs two other, newer factories in its namesake town. Why should I mourn that the factory is gone and the amusement park persists? Should I mourn that the stadium where Wilt Chamberlain scored 100 points in an NBA game, also next to Hershey Park, no longer hosts basketball games? The fact of the game is what matters, not where it was played. Wishing a factory were still on the same spot it ever was is a maudlin misapplication of mental energy.

I am happy we have preserved Gettysburg, the battlefield, and not turned it into a mall or some other monument to the modern economy. I had read Allen C. Guelzo’s new book, Gettysburg: The Last Invasion, before coming. It’s a decent book, approaches narrative history in a number of points, and incidentally offers a study in management: Guelzo makes the point that both generals, Lee and Meade, avoided micro-managing or even telling their subordinates what to do. They allowed them a good deal of freedom. Guelzo argues that Lee’s commanders didn’t act as aggressively as they should have: “They were too new at corps command to have shaken the smaller-scale habits of brigade and division command, and no longer operating on ground that gave them the confidence to act aggressively.” As for Meade, his “problem was the exact opposite of Lee’s…restraining his subordinates from acting as though he didn’t exist.”

Meade had run the Army of the Potomac for three days; his commanders thought of him as at best their peer. Guelzo argues that John Reynolds set the course of the battle (the movie “Gettysburg” puts cavalry commander John Buford in that role). Reynolds, Buford and other Union generals were certainly spoiling for a fight, more than Meade was, and their aggressiveness clearly surprised and vexed the Confederates.

I had arranged to have a park ranger give us a tour in our car, driving around the battlefield and seeing key points of the three-day conflagration. The terrain made it clear why the South suffered so many “martyrs of a fallen cause,” as Henry Timrod put it in Ode at Magnolia Cemetery.

Little Round Top is steep and easy to defend. Cemetery Hill lends itself to a strong defensive position. Pickett’s “Charge” made its way along a mile of open ground. And yet Lee’s army came so close to winning.

The place is just old farmland, and yet it feels special. Timrod’s poem ends:

“There is no holier spot of ground

Than where defeated valor lies,

By mourning beauty crowned.”

These sentiments seem to matter far more than mourning for a dead chocolate factory (though it, too, evinces a lost way of life).

A Union loss at Gettysburg could have created huge morale issues in a country appalled by war. Even with the victories at the two ‘burgs (Gettysburg and Vicksburg, which fell on July 4th), New York was just days later ‘taken by its rats” as Melville called those rioters protesting conscription in New York, in his poem The House-Top.

And what of that battle? Eight generations on, I stood at Little Round Top and then overlooked the field where Pickett’s men advanced and wondered, ‘do we still have a democracy Lincoln would admire? Is it still “of the people by the people for the people?‘

The phrase from the Gettysburg Address invariably found my children chanting a cartoonish “from the people!” from some cartoon they watch. They also thought adding a set of headphones and an iPod to the statue of Abe Lincoln outside the Gettysburg Visitors museum was funny. Perhaps Abe himself would laugh; he seemed to have a love of children and a good joke. He probably wouldn’t want to be a sacred cow, not to be disturbed. I thought it got too close to mocking something important about those who came before. But maybe I overreact, like Rabbit Angstrom in Rabbit, Redux, who groused (in 1971) that kids of his day act “as if (the country) just grew here instead of people laying down their lives to build it.”

Lincoln turned out to be a political giant; giving him headphones is not the same as standing on his shoulders.

And would those shoulders bow under the realization of our nation today? I felt less certain than I’d like. Our political paralysis and sheer nastiness make me feel wobbly about the strength of our democracy. The insidious role of money and its quiet corrupting effect — 47 percent of Congress were millionaires in 2011 — A lot of them seem to get rich after being elected, a telltale sign of trouble in a democracy.

Yet, despite the odd Impeach Obama sign on a Pennsylvania lawn, and the hoping for a change I heard expressed in a Gettysburg store, we are not at a point where 11 states might secede over the national debt, or immigration or universal health care. I think that would please Lincoln.

My high school produced a Rhodes Scholar, Willie Bogan. At least one CEO of a well-known company, Robert Holland Jr. A prominent professional poker player, Kenna James. A lauded bass guitarist, Bill Laswell. A Nieman Fellow (that would be me).

It won’t be producing anymore. The high school will shut down in September.

They’re going to the high school that was our arch-rival when I was there, about ten miles away in Marshall (and bless them for taking in our student body). Marshall has held up better than Albion in Michigan’s long economic decline.

I’m in a kind of shock. My community’s population started dropping in the late 1960s, going from about 12,000 residents when we moved there in the 1960s to about 8000 now. The district has lost 800 students to other districts under a school choice program. The school district loses budge t money with each one of those students, weakening the school further. Market purists would argue that this is as it should be; people go where they can get the best opportunity. My family talked about sending me to a different high school when I was there, after a tax increase failed and classes were cut.

But schools are supposed to be about something other than markets. They reflect our larger community, our civic will. They also reflect our civic ills. Albion is the only community between Battle Creek and Jackson with a significant minority population, which some suggest is the reason for the flight to other schools. I haven’t been in my high school during the school year for probably 30 years, so I have no idea what the student body is like now, but I would guess it’s no longer 70 percent White. I can safely say that if school choice had been an option when I was there, friends of mine would have gone to other, whiter schools in the area.

Once clumps of students started leaving, network effects would naturally kick in. It was likely a combination of market forces, civic ill and network effects that drove the departure of those 800 children.

My high school was not a great school; it didn’t have Advanced Placement courses or a particular bent towards college prep. About 28 percent of the student body went on to some form of higher education. I went to the University of Chicago, a classmate got into Princeton, a number of others went to good small colleges in Michigan and elsewhere.

After this year, nevermore.

Greeks, Romans and Egyptians appealed to gods who were very powerful and whose actions could be hard to understand, but who weren’t omniscient or omnipresent.

The monotheistic God of the Hebrews offered an upgrade. From a moral basis, an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent God was the sort of God that should make one think twice before certain acts. Yet Genesis was “a soap opera,” as John R. Coats, a former Episcopalian minister, put it in his book “Original Sinners.” Noah gets roaring drunk and passes out naked; Abraham passes his wife off as his sister even though it means she’ll be sleeping with another man; Joseph’s siblings sell their bratty brother into slavery. The rest of the Torah is also pretty juicy, aside from assorted dull digressions into how people ought to be. People turn out to need a lot of reminding. Even after the Red Sea gets parted, an ass-saving miracle of epic proportions, the Hebrews freak out and shape the idolatrous Golden Calf. An outraged Moses smashes the original Ten Commandments.

Jews, Christians, Muslims and Hindus all think God is beyond the human capacity for understanding (Buddhists, technically godless, focus on advancing self-enlightenment). Knowing God in an object sense, knowing God’s properties, as we know those of a tree, a person, an atomic element, is not something religious seekers expect to find. The early 19^th century philosopher Hegel, a Lutheran, said “God does not offer Himself for observation.”

“The idea that humans can study God and come to know about Him is kind of preposterous from a religious point of view,” says Fraser N. Watts, who teaches theology and science at Cambridge University and is an Anglican vicar. “God is not an object, He’s a subject.”

Even referring to God by gender goes too far for Maimonides, a 12^th century rabbi who wrote, “All we understand is the fact that [God] exists…”

In Judaism, practitioners may even avoid spelling G_d. “It would imply undue familiarity,” says Harold Kushner, a Conservative rabbi  and author of bestsellers such as “Why Bad Things Happen To Good People” and “Living a Life That Matters.” Kushner says Judaism is far more concerned with the presence than the properties of God. “Can we understand God? I don’t think that’s possible. That would make us greater than God,” says Kushner. He says theologians who claim to be authorities on God commit a sin.

Kushner isn’t alone.

“It’s important to us as believers that we’re continually seeking God,” says David B. Burrell, a Catholic priest who wrote Knowing the Unknowable God back in the mid-1980s. “It’s terribly important for us believers not to pretend that we know God. If we ever think we have comprehended God, then it’s not God.”

Scientists often caution that their experimental results don’t reveal a truth, just provide evidence for an approximation of it.

Evidence for most believers comes from experience – miracles, visions, the direct response of God (or gods) to prayer, the personal experience of a higher power, or witness of another’s experience – these things build faith. A few glorious weeks of interaction with Jesus as a teenager set Mother Theresa on her way, though she never directly experienced Jesus again. Like her, many people hinge their faith on one experience that feels divine. These experiences are real, but can’t be measured, though scientists like Andrew Newberg have tried.

It’s hard to hold belief in something we cannot see or may only experience once in a lifetime. You don’t have to be a scientist to gnash your teeth at the unobservable, unknowable, random experience of God. There’s a fable here, Tolkein’s myth-that’s-true. Having an unknowable God tells us that we are not to assume we know as much as we think we do. We are to know that some things lie beyond us.

Does that make us morally better than we would be with no such concept of God?

Do scientific discoveries make known to us the properties of God?

I was asked recently to write about the moral implications of an unknowable God. I couldn’t fit the piece into my schedule, but I did do some thinking on the topic. It’s the week leading up to Easter, so I’m posting these thoughts in hope.

At first, I thought it was an odd question: for Christians, at least, and Jews, we spend our time trying to know what we can of God, rather than worrying about all the parts we can’t comprehend. There’s a poem called The Truth About God by Anne Carson, which includes these lines: My religion makes no sense/And does not help me/Therefore I pursue it.

I see these lines not as a condemnation of religion but an acknowledgement of its ability to pull us into emotional and spiritual places we don’t understand and may not think we should go. Useful is cunningly prosaic; ATMs are useful, and gas stations, but we would never pursue either. Religion we pursue because it feels like it leads us someplace meaningful, though it is beyond our ability to say why.

Scientists often pursue things that wouldn’t interest their own mothers; a great deal of basic research tells us almost nothing. Yet sometimes huge breakthroughs occur that seem to tell us a good deal about the world around us.

The brilliant physicist Stephen Hawking has talked about being able to know the mind of God. The idea would perplex most religious believers, who would wonder why such a smart guy was bothering with something everybody should know is not knowable. Nonbelievers might wonder why such a smart guy would bother at all.

Hawking probably doesn’t bother. He meant that line (in his book A Brief History of Time, first published in 1988)as metaphor. Scientists are prone to grandiose statements about some new uncovery they’ve made. The genome becomes “the secret of life.” Physicists think they’re smarter than biologists, so Hawking ups the ante, calling a unified theory of physics (one that works for both quantum and classical mechanics) “the mind of God.” The idea behind both is that as we uncover elemental parts of our selves and our world, we get closer to understanding how we came to be, and maybe why. Knowing what was, before, unknowable makes God seem smaller, if we think God needs to set things in motion. Of course, uncovering those basic laws of the universe tell us nothing about God’s mind, anymore than they say something about God’s existence.

Still, as we gain  such knowledge, does it make us gods of ourselves, individuals who can set our own rules, ‘authority’ be damned?

I just finished interviewing the head of a big insurance plan, who told me among other things how much better it will be when we carry around troves of our medical data on our cell phones. I hope she’s right, but the next call I made was to a collection agency that was after me for a payment on routine lab work I had done in June 2012.
I had never seen the bill. It was from a medical center that I don’t visit, but processes lab work for my doctor. After I got off the phone with the collection center, I called the medical center’s accounts payable office. It told me it had sent bills to an address I had moved from almost two years earlier. I was told it had tried to call me “several several several times” at the phone number I had then, a phone number that was no longer mine. Accounts Payable didn’t understand how I could not have known it was trying to find me. “Didn’t you get the statement of benefits?”

Of course. I expected to also get a bill. Accounts Payable explained that the doctor’s office would not give it my new address. Why one of those phone calls to my old number couldn’t go to the doctor’s office to ask it to call me and contact Accounts Payable, I don’t understand.

Another phone call with the collections agency reminded me that this situation mirrors one that happened almost 13 years ago. I had changed jobs and one day about five months later got a call from a collection agency for American Express, after me for a last bill for my former corporate card. Seems no one at my previous job thought to tell me it had come.

That collections agent told me I’d be hit with a $59 charge unless I paid right then, over the phone. So I did. Five years later, applying for a mortgage, it turned out that he hit me with the $59 charge anyway, and never bothered to bill me for it. It was still on my credit report. I ignore every American Express offer I get. It needs to hire a better collection agency.
We can’t get little data right. Big data makes me nervous.

Cities are key to our economic future. They represent the center of economic systems, and they are wear national policy either plays out or disappears. Richard Florida is surely right when he says we need to focus on them. But is he also saying that we need to focus on ly on those that are growing? He does not say this directly, but he could be clearer about what he thinks. Because cities that are not growing will become a drag on our economy, long-term. They need a good boost of ideas that are working in other places. It’s clear from the chart he uses that there is not spillover based on geography: Witness the presence of Houston and Dallas-Forth Worth among the top 11 in a ranking of metro productivity, versus McAllen and Brownsville near the bottom of the chart.

How do we bridge that gap?

A box came yesterday, with a variety of electronics-related accessories in it. Three of them were designed to help clean DVD and BluRay players. They were all made in China. One of the accessories, a screen cleaner, was made in the U.S. of U.S and foreign components. The last was a curious little product called the Nest, designed to help store earbuds so they don’t tangle. This one said simply “Made in USA.”

The company that sent these products is Digital Innovations, based near Chicago. I’m interested in it precisely because it decided to make the Nest, its newest product, in the U.S. That proved to be harder than you might expect for a simple bit of silicone (a story I hope to write soon).

It isn’t the first time I’ve heard this story, of an entrepreneurial company that runs into serious challenges trying to make things here. On election day, I’m thinking about The Nest because it shows a long-term issue with our economy: we can’t make many of the things we create.
That wasn’t supposed to matter, one reason why we’ve blithely let most of our manufacturing centers decline for the last several decades. But 15 percent of the U.S. population remains in what some call “legacy cities.” I grew up in one, and over the last 30 years I’ve seen it go from a factory town with a small college to a college town with a small factory. I watched from Chicago, Boston, San Francisco and Boston again, waiting for the more prosperous future pundits predicted as we shifted to the service economy. The pundits were wrong. The service economy has become, for many people, a servant economy. Servants add little to the overall economy; their jobs aren’t productive and generally don’t pay well.
No matter who wins tonight, I hope politicians of both parties can come together and bring this massive  but overlooked domestic issue to the forefront of policy actions.

Adam Davidson’s piece on Ed Conard, superrich guy and author of the forthcoming book “Unintended Consequences” is worth a read for anyone who thinks about the issue of inequality in the economy. Conard’s arguments remind me why it’s important to make sure economists don’t rule the world.

At Red Herring we used to do a thing called “Fish or Cut Bait,” part restaurant review, part character assassination. We’d take some notable innovator to a fancy dinner, attempt to get them smashed and write about both (my favorite was the one with Apple legend Jean Louis Gassee, who was contemptuous and favored very nice wines). Andreas Kluth, the Economist’s Los Angeles correspondent, just had the same done to him at Zocalo Public Square.

Andreas talked about his work and his new book, Hannibal and Me, over a couple of glasses of Lateral Bordeaux. The picture wasn’t flattering, but Andreas is never dull.

The book is reviewed here and plugged here, and also given a read by the inimitable Mr. Crotchety (I confess I sometimes wonder if Mr. Crotchety is Andreas’ mouthpiece, a la Ben Franklin’s Silence Dogood or Mike Royko’s Slats Grobnik). It’s high on my list, which never seems to get any shorter, a consequence of knowing lots of good writers with valuable things to say.