Archimedes’ Hot Tub

I’m a month into classes at Harvard as part of my Nieman fellowship. I meant to write about course-shopping from the get-go. It’s time.

Course shopping is Harvard’s version of musical chairs. In the first week, students stream in and out of courses in an effort to sample as broadly as possible from the wonderful intellectual cornucopia that is the Harvard course catalog.
I didn’t do much shopping. I walked out of one class partway through, mostly because I was pretty sure that I would pick a different course for that time slot, and the prof had started to read through her syllabus, which I could do on my own.
Because I wasn’t hopping from class to class, I found the week odd — in my experience, many professors don’t really teach anything, given their fickle audience. A number of the classes I took featured a kind of broad overview or a standard introductory lecture. Michael Parzen turned Statistics 104 into a stand-up routine, part of his promise that statistics will not be the course you hate the most while at Harvard. In my case, he may be wrong, but it won’t be his fault.
I’m interested in behavioral economics, but didn’t think I was quite up for the graduate level Psychology and Economics seminar taught by Andrei Shleifer and two others (I dearly want to take a course with Shleifer, but he’s teaching a less mathematically intense version of the course in the spring term, and that seemed to me to make more sense). So I opted for Cultural Econmics, Alberto Alesina’s look into how culture shapes economic behavior. I also wanted to read some Shakespeare, so I went to Stephen Greenblatt’s class on Shakespeare’s Tragedies (that class had the weirdest moment of course-shopping week — Greenblatt is a famous Shakespearean scholar, and yet the hall where he was lecturing was perhaps half full when he started. A lone student blundered in about 2 minutes later, and muttered ‘there’s a bunch of people outside.’ Greenblatt sent a teaching assistant out, and for the next five minutes, undergraduates poured into the hall, filling the place. So far, this makes for the only time I have questioned the intellectual abilities of Harvard undergraduates.)Harvard Business School doesn’t have the same kind of vibe during course shopping. But then, once you’ve crossed the River, you’ve entered a different world. Harvard starts all classes at 7 minutes past their official start time, so you can get from your course that ends at 11 to your course that starts at 11 without missing anything. The Business School starts on time. The Business School also plunges right into coursework. No introductory lectures here — you’d better have read your case study on day one and be prepared to answer questions.

Maybe it was the bracing bite of real intellectual engagement, but I loved the class at the Business School, Entrepreneurialism and Global Capitalism. It provides an excellent look at the first wave of globalization back in the 19th century, and how its events shaped the modern economy.
The business school also respects the calendar — the first day of classes, Wednesday September 1st, was indeed Wednesday. Not so on the other side of the Charles, where Wednesday was Monday. The last class I wanted to take meets only on Wednesdays, but didn’t meet on the 1st, since in Harvard land Wednesday was not Wednesday but Monday. (This apparently was done because the following Monday was Labor Day, and classes that meet only on Mondays would not have met for the first time until the second full week of classes).   That class is a graduate-level seminar on Gravity’s Rainbow, taught by the polymathic Peter Galison. The Pynchon novel is very dense,  but the course description was captivating. I can say that I’m already gaining a deeper appreciation for the novel (but I’m not recommending it; it says something when one needs an entire course to appreciate a novel).

I’m really delighted at the opportunity to be here.

Richard Morgan has this great post on his freelance life, Seven Years as a Freelance Writer, or, How to Make Vitamin Soup. Wise, warm and witty, it offers a cautionary look at the ups, downs and maddening misbehavior by editors and supposed friends that freelancers face.

Morgan is interviewed by Nieman Storyboard editor Andrea Pitzer (I found out about it from a talk Pitzer gave to us incoming Nieman Fellows last week). One salient exercpt:

There’s a part of The Awl piece where I describe it as “choosy begging.” People emphasize the choosy part when they fantasize about being a freelancer, and not the begging part. But there’s so much freelancing you have to do that’s just 300-word stories.

Current freelancers will get knowing grimaces — and grins — from Morgan. Aspiring freelancers should read him closely — he’s telling it like it is.

The Nieman class of 2011 (sans one, who was navigating treacherous visa waters).

We are a diverse group geographically, of course, and also professionally. Newspapers employ 15 of us, television five of us, radio one, two of us work in multiple media, one of us mostly writes books, and one of us is a photojournalist. Eight of us are freelance or independent.

I haven’t posted in more than a month. I spent all that time selling a house in the exurbs and moving to an apartment in Cambridge. Economists grouse that people aren’t willing to move to where jobs are, but they discount the sheer human cost moving extracts from us. Between working and moving, I have had no time and less energy to do anything like post even a small item here on this blog.
The sale underscores why housing sales matter so much to the economy: for almost everyone, a house represents the  most expensive thing we’ll ever buy or sell. Both buyer and seller write a lot of checks; as sellers, we spent thousands of dollars on landscaping, handyman services and painting, all to make the place look the best it could in a tough market (and it did look good).  We also spent hundreds more on things like lawyer fees, various taxes and fees for things like changing our auto registration, our licenses, proving that our septic tank was still up to snuff (and getting it cleaned out). The excise tax at the end of the process was a couple of grand.  The realtors, of course, split five percent of the sale price, a healthy fee even in the current economy, and our broker paid for advertising and other services as part of the selling process.

The buyers have to write lots of checks, too. Both of us will have to move, paying for moving boxes, movers and in our case storage for things we didn’t bring, but don’t want to have to pay to replace when we move to someplace bigger than our apartment. We paid for paint for the apartment (never mind why) and also asked for, and got, the washer and dryer replaced (why the previous tenants had tolerated a washer with a broken drum is beyond me). There are always unexpected expenses, too — somehow, my blue suit did not make the move.  I’ll have to replace that; a man can’t be without a blue suit. Home sales touch wide swaths of the economy.
I’ll try to post more regularly again. I started my Nieman Fellowship today, and a year at Harvard may prove equally as time-consuming (I’m already doing homework and the school year hasn’t started yet). I met my fellow Fellows today, and am humbled to be among their number. What an incredible group of journalists!

The Harvard Crimson’s Cici Yu has a good write-through on the Hollman Morris visa fiasco. Nieman curator Bob Giles has some good points about how the U.S. should want this guy here.  The Obama administration look like dupes; they’re okay with Morris in 2008, and now he’s a terrorist?

People in positions of power probably think to themselves that journalists are basically terrorists, even if they won’t go so far as Richard Perle, a prominent Republican official who applied the term publicly to Seymour Hersh. But Colombian journalist Hollman Morris Rincon had his visa denied by the U.S. government, as this piece by the Nieman Lab’s Joshua Benton outlines apparently because he is considered a terrorist. Morris is, like me, a 2011 Nieman Fellow at Harvard, though his status now stands in jeopardy. The visa situation perplexes me. It’s not just Nieman-related people who wonder what’s going on. This blog post at IJ Central, U.S. denies visa to human rights journalist, [which borrows a little too liberally from the Associated Press piece on Morris] delves into why a prominent journalist who has received many international awards might get placed on a U.S. terrorism list, and also says Morris has been given documents allegedly from Colombian security about a campaign to smear him. Among its goals: get Morris’s visa revoked.
I don’t understand Spanish, so I can only speculate here. It looks like Morris was critical enough of both sides to be seen as an honest broker. At one point that was useful to the Colombian government, but with FARC in retreat, it no longer cares. Yes, Morris may possibly have become a proxy for the FARC guerrillas, as Colombian politicians reportedly say. But that belies FARC’s lengthy history of human rights violations. See, for instance, this line from a 2005 report issued by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner of Human Rights:

The illegal armed groups, particularly the FARC-EP and the paramilitaries, continued to commit serious and numerous breaches such as attacks on the civilian population, indiscriminate attacks, homicides, massacres, hostage-taking, acts of terrorism, forced displacements, use of antipersonnel mines, recruitment of minors, slavery, and attacks on the personal integrity and dignity of women and girls in the context of acts of sexual violence.

It seems unlikely that a human rights journalist would suddenly take sides with such an organization while continuing to expose the similar ill deeds of government-approved paramilitaries.

Governments, however, grab opportunities to damage opponents and critics. Latin America is rife with current examples, but Americans should avoid feeling smug; our internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II and the McCarthy-era blacklists are egregious examples of similar behavior. Colombia’s political establishment has a history of targeting human rights defenders. The UN Human Rights Commission this March issued a report on Colombia’s human rights situation that highlighted a multi-year campaign by the Colombian government to discredit journalists and others who pointed out human rights violations. Morris doesn’t even rank as the first Colombian journalist to be denied a visa on grounds of consorting with terrorists.

The Commission noted that Colombia’s president and other officials routinely accuse people who defend human rights in Colombia of being terrorists.

[its actual language: “The Special Rapporteur was shown video footage of public statements made by the President of Colombia in which human rights defenders were portrayed as colluding with terrorists or guerilla members. In addition, in early 2008, a presidential advisor, José Obdulio Gaviria, publicly accused human rights defenders who were taking part in a peaceful demonstration of supporting FARC. The judicial police, the army and regional units of the Attorney-General’s Office reportedly made similar statements.”]

The UN’s March report, which was written well before Morris was named a Nieman, also noted that the government appeared to be hounding him, and that he has previously had to flee Colombia because of death threats.
Morris may well have become expendable to a government that felt it had quelled FARC. Or he may simply have published one too many stories exposing the ties of Colombian politicians to paramilitary organizations that behave as brutally as FARC. For this, we deny him a visa? We should be offering him asylum.

This being so close to the Fourth of July, I re-read the Declaration of Independence. What’s happening to Morris makes me wonder whether we Americans elect people who give more than lip service to the political ideals espoused in it. In this case, it seems more like our country is committing acts defining a Tyrant.

The official Nieman Fellows announcement came two weeks ago. I was traveling and used my mobile phone to post something on Facebook, then tweeted it the next day. That I’ve not used this blog to post about it had me fretting that I no longer can form posts that run longer than 140 characters. In fact, I’ve barely done even that. I haven’t had time. The fellowship doesn’t start until late August, but I’m already dedicating about half my working time (and most of my waking time) on it, getting the house ready to sell and looking for a place in Cambridge, as well as arranging all the related logistics (what do you mean, Gentle Giant, that I get my estimate by filling out a form listing all my moving requirements? You aren’t going to send someone to do this for me?). I didn’t know about Al and Tipper or Helen Thomas for days following their news.

Meanwhile, all the other members of the 73rd class of Nieman Fellows apparently were too busy to even post on Twitter (in truth, only one other member of my Nieman class, Helen Branswell, appears to be on Twitter).

I thought I would muse about my likely experience, but most of it appears to take place off screen. One of this year’s fellows wrote about her year as a Nieman. Another, Jeff Howe, chronicled how classes get picked at Harvard. 

I’ll try to do better, when the time comes.