Archimedes’ Hot Tub

T.S. Eliot loads his Four Quartets with paradoxes. “In my beginning is my end.” “Our only health is the disease” “Never and always.” Even the name is something of a paradox, at least to me. There are four poems, but isn’t that one quartet?

There are beautiful things in the poems, and as usual with Eliot, much going on underneath the surface. At this first reading, I found these lines stayed with me:

For most of us, there is only the unattended

Moment, the moment in and out of time,

The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight,

The wild thyme unseen, or the winter lightning

Or the waterfall, or music heard so deeply

That it is not heard at all, but you are the music

While the music lasts. These are only hints and guesses,

Hints followed by guesses; and the rest

Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.

I like them both for their contrast with what comes before in the poem, a dismayed commentary on his culture, and for their brutal, basic truth about life.

I like poetry that speaks to the ordinary as well as the sublime. T.S. Eliot’s ‘Burnt Norton’ starts off with

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

Heady stuff indeed (and surprising — I thought Eliot would say all time is redeemable). But later Eliot writes

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children

Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.

And I remember yesterday, when the laughter of my children and their friends pealed from under fallen leaves.

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.”

Paul Steiger, editor of the well-funded investigative journalism non-profit ProPublica, came by Lippmann House recently to talk to us Niemans. These sessions are all off the record, but I can note that I listened to him with ambivalence. I admire the work ProPublica is doing, but I find its very existence depressing. Why should such good work be done for free? I also really dislike that I have to compete with it for space in major magazines. Let’s say I was working on a reasonably equivalent story and could get the attention of a magazine like the Atlantic or the New York Times Magazine. To do the same story, those publications would have to pay me a substantial amount of money. They don’t have to pay ProPublica for the writing. The magazine would have to edit and then copy edit my piece, which ProPublica will already have done (though of course there will be more editing and tweaking to cater for the individual tastes of the magazine). My wife says the solution would be for me to go work for ProPublica or something like it. Perhaps she’s right. No less a literary figure than Samuel Johnson made a living not from his words but from patronage. In some ways, patronage offers a better model for writers than the one I built as a freelancer. But really, I think ProPublica should publish its own stuff, and show the market that money can be made from investigative journalism, just as 60 Minutes showed that television news can pay for itself.

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.

The word ‘charm’ etched onto a cornice caught my eye recently on Harvard’s campus. Who carves such a light-hearted word into stone? The Harvard music department, as it happens. The full inscription is “To charm, to strengthen and to teach — these are the three great chords of might.”

The phrase comes from a Longfellow poem called “The Singers.” Apt place for it. I wonder if the musical setting plays in the lobby when one opens the door.

Only at Harvard: you attend a random cocktail party where someone says, “oh, my friend hosted Stephen Hawking last summer. It took Hawking the entire weekend to write a sentence. He can’t possibly have written that book!”

At another cocktail party, someone’s computer science professor had both Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg in class, and he said “Zuckerberg was an asshole. Gates was much nicer.”

Walking out of Shakespeare class, I literally bumped into Tracy Kidder, and had a nice chat with him about why neither of us much like Othello (though we both confess neither of us could write anything as good as it).

I thought this week would see me get out in front of a couple of class projects. It looked like a relatively light week, since the Statistics mid-term meant there was no class Monday and not enough new material to warrant homework. Meanwhile, the business school at Harvard shuts down for this week, as its students vie for summer jobs (plum banking jobs, from what I hear). So I have no class there this week. But things never go as planned. In Cultural Economics we’re reading six papers on various aspects on what affects social trust, and those just take a lot of time. I realized I was behind on my Statistics reading (always light). There was supplemental material on Hamlet. Plus, we had our last class on Gravity’s Rainbow, and my group had to present its final thoughts on how it deals with theology. And I was writing something that was assigned in March, but not due until now. Ugh. It all added up to no huge blocks of time with nothing to do but read and write. I’ll have to get through that extra work somehow (or remember that I’m an auditor and technically not responsible for everything).

Darcy Frey gave a great Sounding on Monday, so good it made me stop and think, ‘wait a minute, how did I get to be a Nieman along with him?’ A good seminar this afternoon, built around the new edition of “From Slavery to Freedom.” Tomorrow, we get to have Seymour Hersh as our lunch guest. I can’t complain too much about time, with stuff like that going on.

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.

Nieman Fellows spend a good chunk of our time on extra-curricular activities; to a degree, what happens outside of the classroom matters more than what happens in it. Some of our activities transcend the mere extra-curricular, including what we’re doing right now, as we discuss what journalist should get the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism.

As an American journalist who has spent little time reporting from foreign countries, I find this process eye-opening. Journalists don’t get a lot of respect in America, but at worst I might get hazed, or on a good day screamed at by an angry corporate mouthpiece. Elsewhere, journalists get shot at, blown up, jailed, deprived of basic civil rights. I was aware of this in an abstract way before I became a Nieman Fellow; I spent some time a few years ago trying to help with the U.S. transition for an African journalist who was driven from his country because of his reporting.  But actually going through example after example of journalists under attack for doing their jobs shatters my abstract ideas of what it really means to be a journalist. We are sifting through data about journalists and bloggers in Azerbaijan, Burma/Myanmar, China, Colombia, Iran, Mexico and Somalia. Several of them are in jail for their reporting, some are in exile or banned from working, some still alive by what amounts to a minor miracle. It’s a stunning list, every one an intrepid human being. It’s no less enlightening to hear colleagues here at Nieman put it in context from their own experience — what happens when you’re threatened with death in a country where the government actually would be glad to see you dead? What happens when you know your phone and email are monitored, as well as all your personal interactions?

Something for me to reflect on when somebody flames me for not kowtowing to their perspective.