Archimedes’ Hot Tub

Almost 20 years ago, in a fiction workshop, one of my stories centered on an artist who had just sold a painting for a million dollars. The other members of the workshop thought that was simply not believable. No artist could make that much on a painting. That critique was a minor reason why I stopped working on the piece (it was clearly going to become a novel, and I didn’t want to write a novel).

I was just reading this piece on Damien Hirst and it looks like I undershot what an artist can make by at least a zero. Maybe I should go back to that story.

I went to see Wild Swans, intrigued at a play about the Cultural Revolution, something I’d like to know more about. Plus, I like seeing world premieres.

Two friends had attended it, and gave it mixed reviews. One thought the language was stilted and awkward, and surmised that they were mimicking the propaganda of the times. The set also bothered her. It varies from a farm in rural China to the urban bustle of Beijing. At one point, the stage becomes a farm complete with dirt for hoeing. Cleaning the farm off the stage provides a natural spot for an intermission, only the play spans five acts in 90 minutes. What we get instead is a relatively long interlude that slows the flow of the play. Perhaps it also reflects something of the pace of Chinese life in the 1940s.

Though she was lukewarm on the play while seeing it, she says it has stuck with her and her husband, so rated it worth a look.

A second friend saw it and loved set and show without reservation.

I thought the set was fine, and sometimes clever, especially in its use of multimedia. The language did not bother me. perhaps it was because the entire cast is Asian, so I was not expecting a traditional American or British play. I don’t think I have ever seen a play that featured more than one Asian actor.

What struck me were the contrasts; in a play about three women, the dominant character is a man, Shou-yu, and one of unyielding principle. He is in that sense much like Sir Thomas More in Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons, struggling against forces larger than he is by drawing a line and saying ‘this is what makes me a man, and without my principles I am nothing.’ Only the line in this case, the cause of communism and an ideal that shared effort means shared reward equally.

Wild Swans, then, like so much of 20th century American literature, pits humans against forces they cannot control, forces that should overwhelm them. Indeed, the Communist party itself cannot control its own destiny, though the middle of the play shows it trying mightily. Each character makes choices about how they will respond to these forces. And you can draw a sense of the frustration that we sometimes see coming out of China, when orderly plans and prediction falter.

In the end, the tension builds as to whether anything can shake Shou-yu’s principles. No spoilers here. But I will note that afterwards, a random theatre-goer told his companion “it should’ve run 10 minutes longer.” Like much modern fiction, it leaves some things unresolved.

One of the real pleasures of being a Nieman Fellow came after I discovered the morning prayer service at Memorial Chapel at Harvard. In 15 minutes I got beautiful singing, a hymn and a homily that almost always opened my mind to something new. I went at least once a week, and continue to do so.

This morning’s speaker was Ted Kennedy’s former chief of staff, Nick Littlefield, who made his points and then made them again, and again (he went on a bit too long). But he seems correct in arguing that the fee-for-service model that now dominates U.S. health care works poorly. To wit: one of my fellow Fellows had a daughter prone to falling. She fell here and she fell in Italy. Both times, she needed four stitches. Here, she went to Children’s Hospital. She was seen by multiple doctors, including a plastic surgeon, who wanted to make sure she got no scars. She received a special numbing treatment, administered by her mom, so she wouldn’t feel any pain while being stitched up. Her stitches were the kind that are invisible and dissolve on their own. She played with an iPad application while she was being stitched up. It took a few hours, but she felt no trauma.  The cost: $5,000, or $1,250 a stitch.

In Italy, she went to a rural doctor. He took a needle and blue thread and went to work. The daughter screamed and cried and felt embarrassed at the blue threads on her forehead, so took to wearing hats until the stitches were removed. It wasn’t pretty, but it only took a few minutes. The cost: free, or $0 per stitch. Not only was it cheaper and faster, but all those experts at Children’s Hospital left a more visible scar than the rural Italian doctor.

Another Fellow, also based in Europe, didn’t take his anti-malarial medicine when in an African country where malaria is rampant. He came back to Cambridge and began displaying all the symptoms of malaria. He didn’t go to the doctor until he was so sick he needed an ambulance to make it the two blocks to the hospital ($1,200). He told them he probably had malaria. They tested him for everything they could think of. Then they tested him for malaria, and treated him. The cost: $8,000, much of it for all the unnecessary tests.

That’s what fee-for-service gets. It works in smaller, insidious ways as well. When my family went to Ecuador, we needed to go to a travel clinic to get some shots. While there, a doctor sat down for 10 or 15 minutes and talked with the four of us. Our insurance initially refused to pay the bills, so we got them. I looked and saw that we were charged for four consultations with that doctor, at $150 each. I called the Mt. Auburn Hospital, where the travel clinic is based, and had a lengthy discussion with a manager in accounting. He refused to tell me why we were billed jitney style for this doctor’s advice. He just kept saying they would submit it to our insurer with a different code, and we would have to pay nothing. This seems to have been true. But our insurer was effectively defrauded of $450.

The speaker this morning made a big point of telling us that the U.S. spends twice as much on health care as any other industrialized nation, with poorer results for the bulk of the population. That point can be argued. But $1,250 stitches, needless tests and jitney charges for consultations should embarrass us.

One of the students in the Sunday school class I teach wrote as part of an exercise that one thing he brings to the congregation is a good additude.  I liked the idea of “additude” so much I asked if he spelled it that way on purpose.  It turns out he misspelled attitude. But I intend to adopt it: Additude (n), How a positive demeanor adds something powerful to a group, or a day.

As my Nieman year careens towards completion, one thought that sometimes makes me anxious is ‘now what?’

“Wait,” you might say, “aren’t you still a talented and successful freelance writer? Won’t you go back to that life?”

Oh, right. I’m an award winning journalist, even. To help me remember that, I won another: Outstanding Business and Technology Article from the American Society of Journalists and Authors. I won for a piece on Warner Music Group and its effort to forge a future in the digital world, Take Us to the River. It ran in Fast Company in July of last year and was the last feature I wrote before the Nieman year started.

Kudos also to my friends Barry Yeoman and Jonathan Green. Barry won the Arlene Eisenberg Award for Writing that Makes a Difference, for School of Hard Knocks, his piece on the malign nature of some for-profit colleges. Jon’s book Murder in the High Himalaya won for General Non-fiction.

My new word for the week is ‘chiasmus.’ It means, according to the trusty though ragged Merriam-Webster’s New Collegiate I got when I went to college, “an inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases (as in Goldsmith’s to stop too fearful, and too faint to go).” Or, as it was used this week in my American Novel course, to describe how “Tender Is the Night’s” Dick Diver loses his mental stability as his wife Nicole regains hers.

My invented word is “applaudience,” and came from my son Aedan. He wanted appreciation for having finished a piece. “No applaudience?” he said, plaintively.

Heteroskedasticity is the idea, in statistics, that the variance of the standard errors change. Which means you can’t tell how good your estimates are (unless you start to fiddle with, or ‘transform,’ your variables).

A word that begs for an alternate meaning, like, “a dastardly betrayer of many people.”

The MacArthur Awards were dominated by people from California and the Eastern Seaboard. Of the 23 winners, there were only two from the central time zone, only one other from a state that does not touch an ocean, and one person based outside the U.S. (an Australian). I think good ideas tend to come from the fringes, and it’s odd to me that the narrative of the MacArthur Award skews geographically the way it does. I wish this slide show in the Daily Beast were less of a press kit and said something more about this year’s award winners and what they mean for the country’s creative flow.

Some of the greatest expressions of human creativity come from entrepreneurs. Building even a small business requires acts of ingenuity. Creating a large business is a marvel. I thought that before I got to Harvard, and I think it moreso now, roughly halfway through the Entrepreneurship and Global Capitalism course I’m auditing at Harvard Business School.  The course offers a thrilling tour of modern global capitalism, starting with the men who invented the first wave of global capitalism back in the mid-19th century. (And yes, they’re all men — name me a woman who was a global entrepreneur before World War II and I’ll write about her.)

While we celebrate the achievements of these early global capitalists, the course is tinged with darkness. The narrative arc is clear — these men often built great and enduring enterprises. Some of them encouraged solid institutions and better living standards where they operated. But many of them also created squalor and oppression.  We see people who might have provided the inspiration for Dickens’ Bounderby or the malevolent barons of “The Jungle.” Unable, or unwilling, to look beyond the balance sheet, they made capitalism a dirty word in much of the world.

The truth is that these businessmen, many of them creative geniuses on a par with a Shakespeare or a Mahler, also fomented the rise of socialism, the World Wars, the Cold War, the abject poverty of a quarter of the world’s population and a business-blunting distrust of markets. This narrative is clear-cut (and is reinforced by the Cultural Economics course I’m taking).

What amazes me is that halfway through the class, a vocal contingent of students continue to insist that businesses operate in isolation. They advocate profits, and profits alone, as the sole responsibility of a business.  I don’t want these people anywhere near my water supply, and I really don’t want them near the banking system. Fortunately, most of the class seems to get the challenges that face them in the business world. Indeed, some of these students make remarkable comments. Maybe in the not-so-distant future I’ll be writing about their remaking of capitalism.

The people of Millis face a crucial choice on Tuesday – support a new library and a master plan for the town’s future, or vote against it. The vote centers, for now, on the library. Libraries in the digital era may seem like anachronisms, but public libraries were never about books. They were formed to create access to information for all our populace. Our vote Tuesday measures our civic commitment to the flow of information democracy requires. We fool ourselves if we think the vast resources of the Internet, the spread of electronic readers and the like negate the need for a community information repository. In fact, many Americans lack broadband, and a substantial minority across all demographics remain uninterested in the Internet. Much information remains offline, and much of what is online does not contribute to our civic polity. When we’re awash in information, librarians more than ever provide a valuable community resource, as a way to target truly useful information. More to the point, libraries guard against information being restricted via the costs of Internet service, a computer or other reading device, and various media. Libraries also provide a bulwark of privacy in an era where the information we search online can be used to profile us.

In Millis, we have a library building nearing the end of its useful life, with maintenance costs that will drain future town budgets in unexpected ways. Yes, our town remains in the grip of economic recession, even after our state and the country have begun to turn around.  But we’re only being asked for a few dollars a month, and for long-time residents, these dollars simply replace those they paid for the Clyde F. Brown elementary school. The school investment will continue to pay back the community for some time to come, as will an investment in the library. Schools bolster society. So do libraries. We must guarantee the broad availability of information for all citizens, and the information expertise librarians provide. Public libraries form a cornerstone of American communities, and a pillar of our democracy. I hope on Tuesday people vote to continue our commitment to the library.