Brooks may be old school, but his new book, The Design of Design, offers well-polished, concise essays that even the most egregious multitasker will be able to follow. We talked about some of his ideas in the Q&A, but there’s almost always good stuff that doesn’t make it. The last thing to go in this one were his comments about the state of writing amongst American-born graduate students in computer science:

We still get graduate students who have difficulty writing plain English paragraphs. I get some students with English as a second language who write better than some of my American students.

Writing something other than code still matters for programmers.

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.

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!

I recently interviewed a historian named Mark Valeri, who thinks going back to a time before national grain reserves would be more helpful. His book  Heavenly Merchandize looks at how markets emerged in the pre-Revolutionary America. He shows that markets were created in a time where people were more connected with those around them, and there were expectations that those who made markets would use them not just for their own gain, but with the understanding that they needed to behave in ways that did not damage the broader society, and especially the poor. Valeri shows that it took about 120 years for those ideas to be subsumed and the market came to be seen as having a natural order separate from the personalities of the people within it. Even then, those in the market aimed to behave in ways that were not good only for themselves and accepted what would seem to us like excessive regulation. That ethos sounds quaint.
Or maybe I just have sour grapes. Having sold our house for 22 percent less than we paid for it five years ago, I feel personally poorer for derivative-driven market speculation. I knew, even without knowing about CDOs, that my house wasn’t worth what the market said at the time, and likely wouldn’t be for a long time to come. But I expected we would be in the house for that long time. I didn’t plan on a big new opportunity to arise that would cause me to want to sell the house sooner rather than later. So perhaps I’m feeling a bit sorry for myself, like I transferred wealth to someone at WAMU five years ago, and now can’t get it back. Gads. I’m sounding like I buy into Lester Thurow’s Zero-Sum Society concept, twenty years later. That’s profoundly negative of me. I really should go dig up those stats.

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.