Archimedes’ Hot Tub

In my current role as an editor at the Boston Globe magazine, I don’t write much. But I did publish this essay on what it feels like to be a white male in the U.S. right now. At least, what it feels like to be this white male right now.

I went to Argonne National Laboratory to write for The Economist about the shift in Big Science in America. I was excited to go in part because I never went during my years at the University of Chicago, which runs the lab (and why would I go, since I didn’t study physics?). Argonne is where the atomic age was whelped, and helped end the second world war, so perhaps fitting that it was named for a copse of trees that evoked the battle that effectively ended World War I and was the major effort by American troops in that war. Argonne was the first of America’s 17 major

national laboratories, and its research focus became nuclear energy. While it ended its nuclear program almost 20 years ago, it remains a bastion of Big Science. It runs the world’s 5th fastest supercomputer, MIRA, and in 2018 will get one that can hit 180 peta flops (180 quadrillion floating point operations per second). It has a synchrotron, the Advanced Photon Source, that runs 1.1 km and produces some of the brightest light on the planet. Researchers pedal adult tricycles around it. The tricycles are lined up along the walls. The U.S.’s strategic effort to build a better battery is here, as is one of the country’s five nanomaterials centers. Still, as it nears 70, Argonne needs a project to sustain its legacy, and so does Big Science.

That project, as I reported for The Economist (see The observer corps), might be a National Brain Observatory. Argonne has given space in its original chemistry lab, Building 200, a stolid red-brick building more school house than Prairie School, to a brain observatory that will include a new scanning electron microscope and Bobby Khasturi, Argonne’s first neuroscientist.

The plan is to run this brain observatory like a telescope, only pointed at the vast unknown regions of the brain. The question remains whether the Department of Energy, which runs America’s national labs, has any business operating brain observatories. I went to Argonne thinking I might see the answer get threshed out, and I mostly did. The scientists are in favor of it. Now they must wait for Congress.

Should schools be teaching kids how to be entrepreneurs? If the brainy folks I listen to at conferences have the future right, yeah, the only people who will be gainfully employed outside of the top 20 or 25  percent of the populace will be artists and people who run their own companies. So we need to start training kids young on how to be entrepreneurs.And the best way to do that is via schools, either as part of the curriculum or as after-school programs. It’s already happening, as this piece I wrote on Teen Titans shows. It highlighted young people raising money for companies after going through after-school programs like Youth CITIES, in-school classes like NFTE, alternate approaches like NuVu Studio, and other efforts. I was focused on the Boston area, or I might have run across this 18-year-old associate at a venture capital firm.
I felt like I was writing about teenage sports or music prodigies, and perhaps I am. Most kids who pursue professions instead of academics don’t make a living at those professions, and I suspect that these young people will mostly not become tycoons. But then, most entrepreneurs fail at least once, so maybe starting young will work out in their favor.

WEB DuBois called the color line the problem of the 20th century, and I’ve been thinking lately about whether it was solved. That I could write this column, A white father afraid for his black sons, says yes, and no. Yes, because I’m too conventional to have crossed the color line to get married if race were still a major societal problem. No, because statistics on single parenthood, levels of income, education and incarceration, unemployment rates and access to capital all say that the problem of the color line remains, and may have worsened.

So is the color line the problem of the 21st century? I think the line has been partially erased, and that lessens the magnitude of the problem in some ways, but makes it worse in others. I may do more writing on this subject.

I brought my 15-year-old son with me to help with my reporting for this story on GM’s Teen Driver Control, which will come out this fall on all but the most basic verion of the 2016 Malibus.

Also cut was a bit at the end where I wrote about my son’s reaction; he was very curious about the car, but once he’d seen it, he thought the whole idea of having one more way for his parents to control his life was a bad idea. My son’s a bit of a Holden Caulfield to begin with, and his comment afterwards was he thought he should put off learning to drive; it was too dangerous.

In the week or so that’s passed since I wrote this, I’ve been less enthusiastic about the idea of getting a report card on his driving. I feel a bit of sympathy for his worries about control, much like the parents in the survey I cite in the story, who didn’t even want to participate in a study about the technology. I initially thought that attitude reflected on when the study was done, in 2009. We live in a much more tech-pervaded world now, and why not use it to make teen driving safer?

But I remembered something that got me thinking. When I was 18 and in my first quarter at college, I went on a chicken run to Leon’s, a hot sauce joint that used to be at 69^th and Stony Island on Chicago’s South Side. I got designated to drive. Bob wanted to come with me, to my dismay. He had been hitting on me since the start of school, and I really didn’t want to deal with his advances on a chicken run.

Bob and I hopped into some crappy Fiat or Ford belonging to one of the guys on our floor, who wanted chicken but didn’t want to stop studying. I had only been driving for a few months, having delayed driver’s ed until after my senior year in high school. I had never driven on anything like Stony Island, which has four lanes each way. To me it felt like a highway, only with occasional stoplights. They interrupted my goggling at the vast glory of Chicago, and it was more annoying that Bob was having to point them out to me.

I kept yokeling along looking at this and that when Bob screamed “look out!” I snapped my head forward to see I was hurtling towards a car stopped at one of those cussed red lights. I slammed on the brakes and yanked the steering wheel to the left. For the first and only time in my life I did a donut. We happened to come to a stop next to the car I had been about to ram. It was filled with young black men. I was hyperventilating from the near miss, but also aware that this neighborhood was not a place white university students were encouraged to go. I glanced over at them.

They were laughing, hysterically. They must have thought I was pulling some stunt in the middle of Stony Island Avenue. My breathing slowed, the light changed, and I kept my interest in the wonders of Chicago in check the rest of the way to Leon’s and the 14 blocks back.

In a gay romance novel, I would’ve kissed Bob, who had probably just saved my life and certainly saved me from wrecking a car that didn’t belong to me, in a neighborhood where the chicken and ribs are served through a slot in a bullet-proof window. All I did was say “thank you” over and over again.

That one would certainly have shown up on my Teen Driver Report Card. I can’t imagine having a constructive conversation about it with my father, though he’s a patient man.

My next car may not have a Teen Driver Report Card. But it will definitely have forward collision alerts.

Writers never actually own what they write, no matter who holds copyright. Once people engage with your material, it becomes theirs, too. That message came home to me recently when I wrote about a business pitch competition in Roxbury. Personally, I wouldn’t call Roxbury a ghetto, but it is about as inner-city as Boston gets, less than 10 percent white, with some of the stereotypical problems we associate with lower-income urban neighborhoods, including higher crime rates than in many of Boston’s other neighborhoods.

This pitch event, then, was a chance to highlight a different side of Roxbury, which has seen new businesses opening and a new kind of civic energy and engagement. The pitch event featured minority entrepreneurs from the area, most from Smarter in the City, a high tech accelerator in Roxbury’s Dudley Square. I wrote a piece that was a bit whimsical, not taking the straight news approach so much as trying to capture its unique aspects. Pitch competitions or demo days happen in many places, of course, but the famous ones are usually in posh offices or at elite business schools. The people in attendance are mostly white and mostly male, and many of them are rich. This one was in Hibernian Hall, a nicely renovated office building in Dudley Square. Most of the attendees were African-Americans. It was organized by the Bay State Banner, a respected black newspaper.

My piece, and the photos I took for it, titled Pitching Startups Roxbury Style: Apps, Bodyguards and More, highlighted some of the things that were different. One thing being that several of the startups were oriented towards the African-American or urban youth markets. Some are skeptical that accelerators can make a difference in these kinds of neighborhoods, though I think looking for markets at the edges of the economy is a stroke of brilliance.
I’m not African-American, so I wanted to be careful not to play to stereotypes, or reinforce them. At least a couple of readers think I failed. They didn’t like my kicker, which focused on a joke made by one of the winners. Perhaps I could have made it clearer that he was joking (he himself told me he didn’t mind what I’d written, though some of his friends weren’t clear that he was  joking). I thought it captured something about his presence of mind and poise. I also got a lecture about referring to things like the bulls-eye logo of one of the companies. While it obviously reinforces a negative stereotype of violence in Black neighborhoods, I pointed out that the judges of the competition raised the same question, which was why it made the story. It is not my job to hide things, I explained, and I think the differences between this event and one at a place like the Cambridge Innovation Center may have something to say about whether these entrepreneurs make a go of it.

The Bay State Banner’s piece certainly played it straighter. Judge for yourself.

In What Reporters Need to Know About Covering Net Neutrality, I highlight some of the arguments around how reporters in any medium should cover hard topics with multiple angles.

As in almost all stories, things were cut from this. One point lost for space involved how the most pointed media coverage was against Net neutrality in 2010. That’s according to research from Zack Stiegler, an associate professor of communications media at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and editor of the book Regulating the Web. He and a colleague examined 16 mainstream media sources in print, radio and broadcast, and coverage was either neutral or characterized Net neutrality as government overreach.

What I didn’t get into much is whether reporters should be advocates. I cite, briefly, a Berkman Center media cloud showing who influenced what when it came to Net Neutrality. Not surprisingly, John Oliver’s now famous (or infamous) takedown of the cable business was the single most influential content produced on Net neutrality last year. He had impact most journalists wish they could have.

For all his influence, I was surprised to see Oliver’s YouTube clip received only 198 links. That seems like a tiny amount for something millions of people watched on YouTube. He had a lot of shares: 21,720 Tweets [see pages 24 and 26 of the report, Score Another One for the Internet]. Oliver’s video had the most links, but was only the fifth most Tweeted item.

Tweets have a lot more scale than links. Only four posts received 100 or more links. The top 10 Tweets all surpassed 10,000 shares. As an aside, I wonder what that suggests about Google’s PageRank algorithm; it doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of linking to work with.

For journalists, the link economy was the only place traditional media stories held their own with advocates and humorists. For tweets and other social media, balanced media stories were not as popular as advocacy journalism like that of The Verge or as the advocacy groups themselves. Official sources like the FCC and the White House were also popular on social media.

But journalism of any sort struggled to be noticed compared to Oliver and his ilk. Notable was The Verge, which had several of the top stories when measured by tweet shares. Then again, The Verge reads like it’s trying to be the Jon Stewart of tech news (or, to be higher-minded, like Lincoln Steffens, the great muckraker who openly provoked readers to advocate against government corruption).

As the report notes,

Parody and satire played a particularly strong role in communicating the issues, in promoting awareness, and in generating interest in a complex and highly technical issue. John Oliver, The Oatmeal, Funny or Die and College Humor were all popular touch points in the outreach campaign.

Must we all become purveyors of faux news to get people to pay attention to us? I’ll be convinced we must if John Oliver is able to make his latest campaign work. This time, he’s out to get people to overturn portions of The Patriot Act. Oliver even goes to Moscow to interview Edward Snowden, in an effort to try to get people to reach out against the renewal of the Patriot Act (things get really interesting around the 29 minute mark). If Oliver can do this, we traditional journalists may have to start working on our stand-up acts.