Gongol.com Archives: March 2024
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March 1, 2024
To the dedicated observer, human nature barely changes over time. To observe and acknowledge that isn't a matter of fatalism, either: It's hopeful. A staggering amount of time and emotional energy are lost to the illusion that much of anything truly meaningful in life is really new and novel. ■ That matters because, if a person really likes their fellow human beings, they ought not want to see people extend or exacerbate their own unhappiness when there are so many good examples available of other people who have struggled with similar (or even identical) problems before. ■ One can barely look anywhere without seeing commentary about problems like social isolation or despair -- or seeing persuasive real evidence of them. But it seems too easy to convince ourselves that there are institutional answers to those problems. History doesn't bear that out. ■ An epidemic of unwillingness to consult history is in the air. And it's leading at least some people to believe the most extreme interpretation of events. If events seem extreme, then people sense justification in responding in extreme ways. Rarely does that end well. ■ But we should indeed consult history. The Talmud, for instance, offers this advice, many centuries old: "Blessed is he who meekly bears his trials, of which everyone has his share." The "meekly" part may be a religious judgment, but the "everyone has a share" part is merely human nature. ■ People often frame the advice, "You don't know what someone else is going through" as a call to kindness, which one might suppose it is. But even more than that, it's really a call to have humility and a sense of perspective. ■ Kindness mostly faces outward. Humility starts and mostly faces inward. We're all imperfect, and our actions imperfectly work to bring us closer to better things, if we're trying hard enough and with the right sense of goodwill toward the world. People who insist on perfection might put on displays of outward kindness, but if the kindness isn't matched by humility, they might just make themselves (and others) miserable along the way. ■ Everyone is "going through" something. Everyone has always been "going through" something. Embracing that fact gives us license to accept and accommodate human struggles instead of lamenting that the world isn't a utopia.
CDC to roll Covid-19 guidance together with flu and RSV
The respiratory diseases will all be lumped together for most intents and purposes
How warm was February 2024 in Iowa?
Enough so that the mean daily high was at the far tail end of the historical normal distribution for daily highs. In other words, the average day was a statistical outlier.
Nuclear power sector anticipates growth, but can't find workers
One part of the problem? People fail to think of nuclear power as being a "green" industry.
Cybersecurity breach affects 90% of US pharmacies
Ransomware once again on the attack
March 3, 2024
Long before Thorsten Veblen deposited the idea of "conspicuous consumption" into circulation, Benjamin Franklin had already identified the merit in keeping his head down: "In order to secure my credit and character as a tradesman, I took care not only to be in reality industrious and frugal, but to avoid all appearances to the contrary. I drest plainly; I was seen at no places of idle diversion. I never went out a fishing or shooting", he wrote in his autobiography. ■ By any reasonable standard, the basic material standard of living for any middle-class American today would run laps around the standard of living in Franklin's day. Running water, household electricity, fluoridated toothpaste, frozen foods, and flu shots couldn't be purchased at any price in his time. But the value of time hasn't changed one bit. ■ What's strange, though, is how much time and energy are spent on talking about ways to pass time. Aspiring "influencers" covet the profits of the "attention economy" while streaming services try to perfect the science of getting viewers to spend incrementally more minutes with their screens. ■ With our fantastically improved standards of living, one might expect the value of time -- to be "seen at no places of idle diversion" -- to have permeated our culture far more than in the 1700s. And yet it seems time itself is rarely valued. Only the occasional word of advice from someone who's vastly richer than everyone else even breaks through, as when Warren Buffett advised, "I can buy anything I want, basically -- but I can't buy time." ■ Lots of what makes our lives materially better is manifested in time savings, of course (there are countless ways to prepare high-quality family dinners in 30 minutes or less), so perhaps we're also so much "time-wealthier" than our predecessors that there's a temptation to value each minute less than they did. But we should beware the temptation to trivialize time until there is too little of it left.
March 4, 2024
Must everything stem from a diagnosis?
A Twitter user whose profile touts their status as a "neurodivergent blogger/author" submits the observation that "ADHD-ers usually have an interest-based nervous system. Meaning that a task needs either novelty, urgency, competition or interest for them to be motivated or focused. Learning this and adapting boring, everyday tasks to fit into one of these categories can be life-changing." A fine enough observation, perhaps, but what on Earth makes that an observation specific to a clinical diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder? ■ Strip away the para-scientific prelude sentence, and it describes most anyone with consciousness and sentience. Nobody enjoys "boring, everyday tasks" -- by definition! That's the literal purpose of the word "boring". Finding tricks to make boring tasks seem more interesting is probably productive for people with ADHD. It's also probably productive for most people without ADHD, as well. ■ Little passages like this one wouldn't mean much in the grand scheme of things, if it weren't for the insidious way in which they encourage people to think of perfectly normal stimulus responses as being symptoms of "neurodivergence" -- or to think that whatever makes them different also makes them unknowable to others. ■ Worse, it may well give people a permission structure to self-diagnose (and, worryingly, to self-medicate), rather than to pursue a documented opinion from a qualified professional. People are self-medicating with powerful prescription drugs, and the lack of clinical supervision can be dangerous. Even more dangerous is the emergence of black-market drug exchanges accessible via mainstream social-media tools. ■ There's nothing wrong with people offering personal testimony online; authenticity is widely sought, after all. But there are just so many examples of people touting their amateur observations as pseudo-professional claims that they cannot be divorced from the many worrying examples of unqualified, unsupervised, and underaged people convincing themselves that they can self-diagnose rather than getting real help. ■ And with contaminated and counterfeit drugs flooding the market, it's not out of line to call out the hazards early in the chain of events. People of goodwill shouldn't be comfortable with the trivialization of mental wellness into the province of self-appointed influencers.
March 8, 2024
Sweden has joined the NATO alliance, which is a welcome step forward for global security. It's unfortunate that a defensive treaty alliance like NATO remains necessary, especially so long after the original circumstances that brought it into being had changed. The Cold War was over when the USSR threw in the towel in 1991. ■ But the world still contains heavily-armed countries led by unstable autocrats. And the truly regrettable fact is that, no matter how stable and well-ordered we think they will be in the future, the dangers posed by sinister leaders will always be fast-moving. Much too fast-moving for anyone to spin up a thoughtfully-crafted countervailing coalition. ■ NATO doesn't start fights; its existence precludes them. An agreement to come to mutual aid in a time of trouble is also a commitment not to come to blows within the club over matters that can be resolved in more genteel ways. And it quite obviously has the effect of raising the expected cost and difficulty for any external power that tries to do a member wrong. ■ The alliance has always benefitted the United States. That is has never done so exclusively is the dead giveaway that it serves a constraining role in the world, and one worth sustaining unless someone supplies a compelling counter-argument.
March 8, 2024
Sweden has joined the NATO alliance, which is a welcome step forward for global security. NATO doesn't start fights; its existence precludes them.
March 9, 2024
A change of mind could do you good
Abraham Lincoln, the most consequential Republican President of all time, was a Whig longer than he was a Republican. Winston Churchill, who led his country through World War II as leader of the Conservative Party, spent 20 years in the Liberal Party. Ronald Reagan, the patron saint of the 20th Century GOP, was a long-time labor union president and made many self-deprecating jokes about his many years as a Democrat. ■ Wisdom sometimes consists of changing one's mind. New evidence, changed circumstances, and better reasoning can all lead us to better places than where we started. ■ But in the digital age, it's a lot easier to find people who want to put a spotlight on their unwavering consistency than those who are pleased to explain when and why their minds were changed. Social media in particular has driven the phrase "upon further reflection" almost completely out of use, and that's a bad thing -- if we really value intellectual honesty. ■ It isn't always necessary to be the first to make a claim, or the boldest, or the loudest. The temptation to weigh in on every "trending" issue -- or to demand that others do the same or else be accuse of complicity -- eviscerates the ground for people to give matters an oft-needed second thought. ■ It's only useful to admit to a change of mind, though, if the audience is itself intellectually honest enough to appraise the authenticity of a change of heart. Sometimes people really change their minds. Sometimes they're only faking it. Skepticism is fair game. Cynicism, though, is not. ■ Cynicism says that everyone who ever identified with the "other" party is forever in the wrong. Cynicism says that the indiscreet utterances of youth are a permanent stain on character. Cynicism says that 80% agreement is outweighed by 20% disagreement. ■ Minds should be changed from time to time, for reasons imposed by external forces and for inexplicable interior changes of heart. We ought to embrace them publicly and often, not because consistency doesn't also have its place (it surely does), but because a person so consistent that they could just as easily be chiseled in stone is a person whose mind really hasn't been engaged.
March 10, 2024
The most predictable aspect about coverage of the Academy Awards is the commentary about which films and performers were snubbed for well-deserved Oscars. Sometimes the criticisms are nothing more than matters of taste. Sometimes they are justifiable critiques of double standards. ■ Almost every industry has institutions that confer awards. And those awards matter in proportion to the amount they are taken seriously by the industry at large, and by the amount they matter to the recipients. Sally Field's unconventional Oscar acceptance speech in 1985 remains one of the finest examples of the latter. ■ It ought to be a lesson to such a public-facing industry as Hollywood that it still so often appears to miss the mark on the former count -- or, perhaps more precisely, that its own internal sense of worthiness still so frequently falls short of standards that seem patently obvious to so many members of the public. ■ Regardless of the merit of the final award-winners, the pipeline to some of the highest-profile awards still seems altogether too narrow. That's an upstream problem for the film industry, probably in much greater measure than it is downstream (at awards season). ■ The public has a say in those industry awards, in the same sense that the people have a say under an absolute monarchy: Nobody counts their votes, but at some point or another, they can withdraw their consent and de-legitimize the institution. Nobody forces America to watch the red-carpet coverage. The People's Choice Awards, for instance, could be more prestigious than the Oscars, should it emerge that the newer awards mean more to the recipients -- and the industry -- than the older. ■ If the criticism of the latest awards lands anywhere, it ought to first land with scriptwriters who need to commit energy and creativity to imagining stories that look like America as it is today, rather than its past or an alternate reality. And, of course, the stories have to be put into motion by producers who can appreciate the vision. That's a necessary, though far from sufficient, condition for ensuring that the awards handed out today continue to mean something tomorrow.
March 12, 2024
Saving the wisdom of grandmothers
Grandmothers occupy an iconic place in many, if not most, of the world's cultures. It's a role often revered for its care and warmth. But we also ought to consider whether it's a role that has gone under-appreciated as a source of wisdom, too. ■ It's no secret that men's voices have occupied much more than half of the space in recorded history: There are just three books of the Bible named for women out of dozens, no matter which canon you use. Well-educated people can name dozens of Founding Fathers and ancient Greek philosophers, but almost none of those names will belong to women. ■ This presents a giant gap in civilization's knowledge of itself. Backfilling the parts from the ancient past is next to impossible -- aside from some rare exceptions like the letters of Abigail Adams (who served an outsized role as a grandmother), we don't have much primary source material to recover from the grandmothers of the past. ■ But that should compel us now to re-assess and value the wisdom of grandmothers living today. The "tend and befriend" theory suggests that women may live longer than men because they often take a different approach to stress than the "fight or flight" reactions so often associated with males. ■ Maternal grandmothers, especially, have an especially strong anthropological connection to their grandchildren: A very small (but non-zero) number of men unwittingly raise children who aren't genetically their own. But a biological mother knows for certain who mothered her children, and she knows without a doubt who mothered her daughter's children, as well. ■ This is almost certainly why maternal grandmothers tend to exhibit bias favoring their grandchildren, and why proximity to grandmothers has evolutionary effects. This actually confers a sort of unique biological imperative for grandmothers to see the best survival advice make its way to their descendants. Some of the advice will be bad, and some grandmothers are fools. But far too little of their judgment has been intentionally preserved over the centuries. ■ If the median age of an American mother at the birth of her first child is 27.3 years, then it's probably fair to assume that age 55 is a reasonably close guess at the median age of a first-time American grandmother. Based upon average remaining life expectancy for a woman of that age, average grandmother-hood should last around 28 years for the women who follow that path in life. ■ That's a lot of time over which to cultivate "grandmotherly wisdom". And it's also a lot of time over which to capture and record it. Grandmothers should be more than a source of cookbooks. We have more capacity than ever to record, document, and disseminate what grandmas know. Civilization would be stronger if we'd set about doing it.
March 14, 2024
For Americans, the go-to question for making small talk is "What do you do?", as in, "What is your occupation?". It's generally inoffensive, and it's common enough that everyone has a ready answer (including, most of the time, some means of gently pivoting the question to another subject). ■ We might be a more interesting culture, though, if we asked a less obvious question, but one with much richer potential: "What is your art?" Humans are far from being the only animals who make art: There have been some famous examples of animals creating art in captivity, but there are even examples of birds and fish apparently creating aesthetic works intentionally and with no evidence of meaningful reward other than internal satisfaction. ■ Every well-rounded person is at least a consumer of some form of art, if not also a producer. Some collect paintings, others attend concerts, and still others become movie buffs. But, particularly with the recent -- and in some ways stunning -- emergence of computer-aided art, it's almost difficult to avoid creating some kind of art from time to time. ■ Commercial interests are encouraging people to explore in ways that go far beyond selling paint-by-numbers kits. Samsung is touting smartphone photos taken from the edge of space. Lego sells user-generated portraits as brick mosaics. Event spaces where people gather to drink and paint with friends are franchised nationwide. ■ And given the rapidly-improving capabilities of artificial intelligence tools to make original music and create lavish digital images from words, it's almost impossible to escape the impression that we are on the verge of being immersed in literally as much art as we can handle. Just buy a dual-use television set/picture frame and the family room becomes an art gallery. ■ None of this displaces old ways of creating art, either; anyone can still make analog art from needlepoint to elaborate baked goods. Perhaps, then, it is past time to begin assuming that the art we create (or simply appreciate) is a better starting point for conversation than what we are paid to do.
March 15, 2024
A team is trying to raise $500,000 in pledges by the end of March to underwrite a smartphone with an e-ink screen and a physical QWERTY keyboard. They're calling it "Minimal", and they've made it to the prototype stage, with a pitch centering mainly on the human advantages of the phone's inherent limitations -- it's not for streaming video or scrolling through TikTok. ■ It's supposed to be clean, quick, and non-addictive. It's not meant to be a dumb phone (like a flip phone); it's supposed to be smart but constrained. ■ Whether this particular product takes off will depend upon a lot of factors. But the tactile QWERTY keyboard is a feature that really needs to make a comeback, and the use of e-ink is promising: It's what makes looking at a Kindle e-reader much easier on the eyes than looking at a computer screen. ■ The pitch seems oriented towards people who are looking for a way to moderate their own smartphone usage, but the real market is likely to be with users who would carry it as a second phone, probably as a primary work phone to be carried beside a personal phone with the usual bells and whistles. The tactile keyboard and minimalist interface seem like they are under-appreciated sources of value for people who need mostly to communicate messages rather than to consume content. ■ Some product like this is destined to catch on sooner or later. Particularly as security consciousness is either developed organically or is thrust upon us (probably by some pretty bad events), people are going to be forced to assess the need for multiple devices. The mixing of personal and business devices with lots of capacity and countless ways to be compromised by malicious outsiders has put an unbelievable number of vital systems at risk. CISA has hinted at just how many ways millions of American enterprises are falling short. ■ If the Minimal Co. really can deliver a utilitarian smartphone for power users at a $350 price point, then that might be just the right device at just the right time. Security may well be a much more valuable selling point than self-control.
An unconscionable waste of life in a completely immoral war
The Economist: "The data suggest that more than 1% of all Russian men aged between 20 and 50 could have either been killed or severely wounded in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale war."
A local government legitimacy crisis with global implications
Until good governance comes to the West Bank and Gaza, it's hard to conceive of a peaceful future
Learning from the skies over Ukraine
The United States has held on to a well-earned reputation for air power supremacy since World War II. Control of the skies has proven itself again and again to be a necessary (though not always sufficient) condition for victory in combat. In Dwight Eisenhower's words, "[W]hile air power alone might not win a victory, no great victory is possible without air superiority." ■ But what was good enough up until less than a decade ago may well be dangerously inadequate now, having been rendered obsolete by the extremely fast evolution of fighting conditions in Ukraine, where large volumes of relatively low-cost drones have redefined what "control of the skies" really means. ■ The space the drones occupy has been dubbed the "air littoral" -- derived from the name used for waters that transition into seashore. The air littoral is in the sky, but not very far -- mostly below the space where combat aircraft with human pilots aboard dominate the sky. ■ In the air littoral, high performance is less important than persistence and scale. What has always mattered in air warfare is the capacity to inflict damage upon the enemy and to guarantee the security of allies below. Again, in the words of Eisenhower, "For the delivery, in a single blow, of a vast tonnage of explosives upon a given area, the power of the air force is unique." ■ What has changed -- seemingly overnight -- is that drones have become sufficiently precise at very low relative cost to become effective weapons. It takes a long time to train a professional pilot. It takes far less to train someone to pilot a drone, especially with the help of autonomous flight tools. And when those drones fly both figuratively and literally under the radar, it becomes extremely difficult to stop them. ■ Whether the United States is ready, willing, and able to pivot quickly enough to match the changes being wrought by the war in Ukraine is an extremely important question. The lessons being learned there won't stay within tidy national boundaries -- they're coming at full speed for the very next armed conflict. Surrendering the air dominance characteristics of the past would be imprudent, but we can't take the risk of failing to adapt to the new rules, either.
Iowa is the #11 state for honey production
North Dakota, of all places, comes in first -- and it's not even close, with 28% of the entire national output. Meanwhile, Utah, which has a beehive on its state flag, doesn't even produce enough to show up in the USDA reports.
March 17, 2024
The third meaning of "Closing Time"
The song "Closing Time" has been a familiar anthem for more than 25 years, used countless times since it was released in 1998 to shut down bars and clubs with the familiar refrain, "You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here". It's a cheery but firm reminder to move along. ■ The song even contains a second meaning; the songwriter intentionally incorporated a birth metaphor ("This room won't be open till your brothers or your sisters come" really was a reference to leaving the womb). Yet it's another line that deserves a second meaning, even if we haven't granted it over all these years. ■ "I know who I want to take me home" has the obvious overtures of finding romance on a night out. And taken with the writer's intended double meaning, it's about parents taking a newborn home. ■ But a third meaning altogether could easily belong to the simple idea that more youthful nights out than not end up going home in the company of friends. Friends are vital to any well-rounded life, and they're especially crucial to formative years of early adulthood. A survey of the cohort of students currently in college found that "nearly one in three students spends no time weekly on extracurriculars and campus events". Unsurprisingly, those disengaged students also had radically lower satisfaction with their school experiences than their peers. ■ The problem of social isolation -- even among the age group one might naturally expect to be socializing the most -- is such that the Surgeon General went on a college campus speaking tour, effectively begging students to make friends with one another. (There's even a deck of cards that tries to describe how to improve the practice of being with friends.) ■ Having friends is a self-evident good throughout all of life, and it's conclusively advantageous in an educational context. Everyone needs friends upon whom one can count to "take me home", in Semisonic's words, neither out of the obligations of family nor the desires of romance, but out of the entirely necessary condition of being a human being freely making connections with other human beings. It ought to hold our attention that so many people living in America today -- especially young ones -- seem to be struggling with the process. Friends are indispensable to health, wellness, and well-being.
March 19, 2024
For more than a century, pockets of America's political left wing have been restlessly agitated with the Constitution. Woodrow Wilson resented its constraints. Franklin Roosevelt famously bent the rules to get the New Deal he wanted. Today, no small number of people can be found making "progressive" arguments to jettison everything from the Electoral College to lifetime appointments on the Supreme Court. ■ Critics from the left today often discount the Constitution on the basis of identity politics. There should be no doubt whatsoever that the Constitutional Convention (and politics of the time more broadly) ought to have included people other than men of exclusively European ancestry. ■ But civilization is always constructed from the "crooked timber" of humanity: Whether an organization, institution, philosophy, or other framework has been assembled by a wholly diverse committee or by a single person working alone, the merit of the outcome depends upon the quality of the underlying ideas on which it was built, not the immutable features of its authors. ■ When a self-described "Constitutional equality enthusiast" today denounces the relative youth of Founders like James Madison and uses that youth as the foundation for a critique like, "The [C]onstitution was basically a Reddit post", it's not rigorous enough to deserve respect. The Constitution could have been drafted by a room full of octogenerians or by the Revolutionary Era equivalent of a high school debate team. What would matter is the validity of the work, not the ages of the people involved. ■ In particular, though, this argument that youth ought to be a disqualification of the authors is patently non-credible. Sometimes age brings wisdom. Sometimes it just brings calcification. Sometimes youth brings vitality. Sometimes youth merely brings fanatical obliviousness. ■ The Constitution is imperfect, and it has always been imperfect. Where it may be most perfect is in its embrace of a process for amendment: The forthright acknowledgment by its authors that they got things wrong, and those things might only be revealed by time and unfortunate experience. ■ Implicitly, the Constitution says, "Please revise and resubmit as often as necessary". But it says that as a substitute for disorder, violence, and revolution. ■ Its flaws aren't veiled behind a purported divine right of kings or the all-consuming power of a Politburo. They are written down, out in the open, with a process for correction built clearly into the original. All it asks in return is a thoughtful, incremental process of reform and correction which depends upon persuading not just some of the country, but an overwhelming majority of it. ■ Neither left nor right should discount the contributions of youth nor of old age to political decisions. We have assessed that, under the law, a person is an adult upon reaching the age of 18 -- free to enjoy adult freedoms, and accountable to adult consequences. ■ Voting is one of those freedoms, and elections have consequences. Every election is itself a referendum on keeping the Constitution. Those whose patience with it runs thin ought to remind themselves that only four full Presidential cycles pass between a person's birth and their first eligibility to vote. Changes can come fast if persuasion is applied early and well to the task.
March 20, 2024
Times of rapid technological and cultural developments have always been disorienting. Imagine being around for the first few decades of the 20th Century in America and witnessing the arrival of automobiles, powered flight, radio, and women's suffrage -- with a world war, to boot. We are naive if we think that our own experience with the whirlwind is entirely novel. ■ It is worth noting, though, that the last few decades have brought about a certain tempo of change that is unusual. The adoption curves for tools like smartphones and the dramatic realignment of public consensus on some once-contentious issues are much faster than their predecessors. The tempo of these changes is not self-evidently bad, but it is not inconsequential, either -- especially if it gives the appearance that more things are changing than truly is the case. ■ Perhaps we haven't reasoned yet with the consequences of our perpetual immersion in a culture awash in ephemeral things. Apps can appear or disappear from a phone without notice. Favorite television shows vanish from streaming services. Songs are pulled off of platforms when artists and licensees run into conflict. Amid planned obsolescence, value engineering, and tightening standards and regulations, even household appliances can end up changing almost as quickly as fashion apparel. ■ When circumstances seem so fleeting, it becomes harder for people to internalize the idea that choices have consequences. If it perpetually feels like even yesterday is a fleeting moment likely to be erased, then the long arc of history doesn't have much of a seat at the table. We see the evidence of how this mass amnesia creates bad incentives as voters and politicians decide to act on what feels good in the moment -- "vibes", some call it -- rather than acting on concepts like duty. ■ Abraham Lincoln implored Congress in 1862 to realize that "In times like the present men should utter nothing for which they would not willingly be responsible through time and in eternity." That's a weighty expectation -- but is it wrong, even now?
March 22, 2024
Boeing CFO admits to an institutional process problem
In an admission related to some troubling and massively embarrassing incidents, Boeing's CFO told an investing conference, "For years, we prioritized the movement of the airplane through the factory over getting it done right. That's got to change." ■ What he says ought to get the attention of his own company, but it's an admission with some broader ripples, too. One of the most important geopolitical factors now and in the coming years is a nation's ability to have a full roster of highly competent firms that are each capable of building complex systems. ■ The systems themselves -- not the products they put out, but the processes of making them -- have to be both designed and maintained. They have to be profitable and they have to be innovative. The US really pioneered the field of complex systems design (see "Rescuing Prometheus", by the great historian Thomas P. Hughes), but maintenance has been a weakness. And what isn't maintained almost always falls into decay. ■ It takes more than just engineering expertise to build things like aircraft carriers, nuclear power plants, and commercial airliners. It takes really strong management, too, by people who can see the whole chessboard at once. ■ When you see China's efforts to build their own carriers, their own nuclear plants, and their own large passenger jets, look past the products themselves. Look at the learning taking place and the refining of the skills required to build complex systems. ■ America, we need to get our act together. We're really good at the innovation part of complex system-building (our private-sector space race is a great illustration), but we chronically underperform our potential at maintaining those complex systems. Our economy has no real peers for dynamism. But we need to get better at holding on to our phenomenal gains for the long haul.
March 23, 2024
A 42-year-old woman with three young children at home has been diagnosed with cancer and faces a period of recovery ahead. It is, objectively, an unpleasant and unwelcome development that still happens too often, despite many advances in oncology over recent decades. ■ But the 42-year-old woman in question is Catherine, Britain's Princess of Wales, and that means her condition has been the cause of tabloid speculation for weeks and will remain fodder for a considerable time to come. ■ Every person who gets a cancer diagnosis deserves to bring that news forward on their own terms. But being open about it early in the process, rather than late, should be the default strategy for anyone who hasn't intentionally embraced a different path for good reason. ■ In the case of a cancer diagnosis, the patient needs to know that a story will almost certainly be told about them, so it is usually best to grasp the lead in forming that narrative. It helps especially to have an oncologist who will treat you with respect for your intelligence and autonomy and who will engage you as part of your own medical team. ■ Sharing the news with friends enlists them in carrying some of the burden along the way. The problem for the woman set to become the next queen consort of England is that her condition is a matter of inordinate attention even in good times. ■ Oliver Carroll, a correspondent for The Economist, puts it wisely: "I have no right to know this information. I have never had any right to know any of this information. But like all normal people am hoping for her swift and full recovery." ■ Monarchies are problematic like that: They turn entire families into casts of characters in mass-market dramas, and that's really no way for anyone to live. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing social structure, in no small part because the cockamamie theory of the divine right of kings specifically placed monarchs (and their immediate families) in a place not all that different from demigods. (Alas, it is dehumanizing to call other human beings "subjects", too.) ■ By right as a human being, the news of Catherine's cancer diagnosis should be hers to share with whom she wants, when she wants. But that cannot be the case for someone whose life is invariably on center stage and in the spotlight. The physical diagnosis is sad, but the social pathology at play is harmful, too.
March 24, 2024
Was Tetris keeping America sane?
Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is credited with defining the state of "flow", in which the individual is so engaged in a task -- challenging but not overwhelming -- that they effectively become lost in the moment. "Flow" is a state of elevated concentration where the act becomes the reward unto itself. ■ Coloring books for adults are only among the latest tools to have been pitched for achieving "mindfulness" and sedating anxiety, but they're really not all that novel: People have been using hobbies, particularly ones that involve repetitive physical motion, to achieve meditative states practically forever -- long before labels like "mindfulness" or "flow" ever came along. ■ Winston Churchill was a prolific painter. Thomas Jefferson was a lifelong violinist. Warren Buffett has played countless games of bridge. ■ It's often hard, though, for people to pick up new hobbies. There's usually an initial phase of embarrassing incompetence, and acquiring a skill often requires attending classes that can compete with precious family time that adults may be (rationally) unwilling to sacrifice. ■ Some computer games, though, offer low barriers to entry -- intuitive enough to learn, easy enough to pick up and put down anytime, and randomized enough that the experience always feels new. ■ Grand champions of the genre include Space Invaders, Pac-Man, and Tetris. It's worth wondering: Games like those fell out of favor as desktop computers, and then smartphones, became capable of delivering much richer graphical experiences. Early cellular phones had simple-but-engrossing "Snake". And then it was eclipsed by games that offered better pictures, but a lot less "flow". ■ The decline of that class of games -- and their subsequent revival (as, notably, the New York Times is betting on the attraction of flow games to keep people spending time and money with them) causes one to wonder: If America really did lose its mind sometime around 2012 (as the pop theory goes), was it because easy access to flow had quickly disappeared from millions of computer screens? Was Tetris keeping America sane after all?
March 25, 2024
If you can worry when others do as well
Rudyard Kipling's famous poem "If" begins with the words, "If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you", and ends with "Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it, / And -- which is more -- you'll be a Man, my son!". It's been parodied for almost a century, which is probably as much a testimony to its enduring value as anything else. ■ But there is a missing corollary to the virtue of keeping calm, which in Kipling's style might go something like "If you can heed a righteous alarm when all around you / Are content to look away in blissful ignorance", then that too will make you a good adult and citizen. ■ In testimony to the House Armed Services Committee, Admiral John Aquilino, the US Navy's Indo-Pacific Commander, sounded just such an alarm. In bold and italic print, he submitted the advice that "[W]e MUST move faster to reduce the risk of conflict in the near and mid-term", because the environment under his command is "the most dangerous I've seen in 40 years in uniform". ■ It is a sobering but unsurprising assessment. The navy under the command of the Chinese Communist Party "has increasingly employed coercive tactics" and isn't just threatening Taiwan, but also countries like the Philippines and Japan, too. The Pacific is very, very big, and power projection takes a lot of effort and consumes a lot of resources. ■ Assistant Secretary of Defense Ely Ratner testified as well, with a concurring alert: "Today, the PRC [China] is pursuing its revisionist goals with increasingly coercive activities in the Taiwan Strait [and] the South and East China seas along the Line of Actual Control with India and beyond". ■ We are free to look away and discount the gravity of the situation only insofar as we are willing to accept the consequences. Inaction, disengagement, and disinterest in the problems of places that seem far away ultimately have costs. It's nothing new; Dwight Eisenhower warned that "[W]eakness will alarm our friends, earn the contempt of others, and virtually eliminate any influence of ours toward peaceful adjustment of world problems." And that was some 75 years ago. ■ When people whose careers have depended upon rationality and temperate judgment use valedictory moments in the spotlight to sound alarms, then it takes good citizens to heed the warning.
March 26, 2024
Cloaking evil intent in a costume of law
In poker, many a player has been betrayed by a "tell" -- some kind of involuntary reflex that reveals the truth despite the player's concerted effort to hide it. Tells aren't limited to gambling, though: One of the chronic tells within a morally rotten system of government is the attempt to put a costume of words that sound like law over motivations that are nothing but hollow exercises in power. ■ Consider the words of the man who holds Hong Kong's title of Secretary for Justice. Speaking about the government's new "security" law, which severely escalates the penalties for a range of offenses that are sufficiently ambiguous that they make for an all-purpose toolkit for striking down opposition groups. ■ In a television interview, the Secretary for Justice declared, "Let's say in extreme situations, if someone repeatedly reposted [overseas criticism] online and showed agreement -- and that they added comments simply to incite other people's hatred towards the Hong Kong and the central government -- then, of course, there would be risk". ■ Words like "extreme situations" and "simply to incite" do a lot of work here, accounting for both a great deal of goalpost-moving and imputation of intent. It sounds like law, but it's really Calvinball. ■ It would be easier to say, "If we are criticized in any way, the critic risks going to prison." But the tell here is that, deep down, even the authoritarians know that what they're doing is fundamentally repugnant. They know that their claim to power is immoral. They know that history will someday eviscerate their memory. ■ But in the short run, they cloak their evil in a costume of law because they're hoping to evade detection. Power that tries to quash criticism instead of adapting to it is ultimately doomed to failure. When it bluffs about its true intentions, nobody should give it a pass.
March 28, 2024
Astronomically, spring doesn't begin until the spring equinox (generally March 19th or 20th), but that's a fairly unsatisfactory definition in meteorological terms. Signs of spring in the Northern Hemisphere usually pick up early enough in the month that meteorological spring begins March 1st. There are often still late-season winter storms, though, that can make the Great Plains look like the tundra, so "spring" has a nebulous definition at best. ■ The English language could use a definition for a very particular season within spring: The time when green becomes evident in the fields, forests, and yards. It's a very short time, but it can be a delightful one. It's when human instincts tell us that the season has changed for the better, no matter what might be falling from the sky. ■ A good name for it might be "Emeralding Season", for the bright green color it evokes, as well as for the subtle nod to Ireland, the Emerald Isle, whose most famous national holiday conveniently falls on March 17th. ■ Names help fix important concepts in our minds, and given the variability in both spring weather and the range over which Easter (the other "spring" holiday) migrates around the calendar, giving a name to the greening period would be a pleasant idea. Let autumn have pumpkin spice season and Oktoberfest. Spring's most visible sign of renewal deserves its due.
March 29, 2024
To mark the first anniversary of Russia's detention of reporter Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal published a special cover page, consisting mostly of blank space under the headline "His Story Should Be Here". It's a testament to the power of good design, and a statement about the awfulness of authoritarianism. ■ The use of arbitrary imprisonment is one of the sinister ways in which a bad government can impose its will on people: When the rules are ambiguous and the punishments severe, it's natural for rational people to begin to withhold from even approaching them. It's a method of keeping a domestic population subjugated, but it's also used to keep the truth from being reported abroad. ■ Gershkovich has the State Department working for his freedom, and the vocal support of his employer, one of the world's flagship newspapers. It's still an appalling situation, and another American has been held even longer. The attention the Wall Street Journal can devote is significant. ■ The Page One feature also stands out as a lesson in editorial judgment. Every decision to publish or not, to consult sources or not, or to place a story here or there in the running order of a publication or a broadcast, is an editorial decision. It's a choice. A journalistic outlet can always strive for fairness and for balance, but true impartiality is impossible: Whether reporters and editors find a subject worth covering, for how long, to what extent, and in what ways, all matter. ■ Unfortunately, the tools of digital publishing tend to flatten the coverage, leaving everything disordered, as coverage of all stories from vital local news to the latest rehashing of red-carpet highlights is flattened into an undifferentiated stream. ■ But some things still matter more than others, and indeed we hope they will receive different types of attention. "Let facts be submitted to a candid world", in the words of the Declaration of Independence. ■ The dreadful state of human rights in a country that could have been one of the world's great civilizations is high on that list. Russia could be contributing to the world's scientific knowledge, its technological progress, and its cultural growth. In its present form, it does little of that. And the mistreatment of a single American reporter, for now, stands as some of the most indisputable testimony to that failure.
March 30, 2024
Every year, legions of "Easter Catholics" attend Masses across America on Easter Sunday morning. Easter and Christmas are, like the High Holy Days of Judaism, the times when people who may have lower theological attachment to their religious faith still respond to their feelings of cultural attachment. ■ Religious attendance in the United States has been in long-term decline, and the share of adults with no religious affiliation is now more than 1 in 4. And no small number are former Catholics: 13% of American adults, or about 1 in 8, are ex-Catholics. ■ Outreach to former, lapsed, disaffected, or merely disengaged Catholics -- and to those who identify with that ambiguous identity of "spiritual but not religious" -- would seem to be the most fruitful kind of evangelism the Catholic Church could do. It would require a different approach than traditionalism or ritualism, and it would probably require reaching out via people other than conventional clerics. ■ Yet, at a time when the Pope has been diversifying the highest echelons of church leadership (and has even made some initial moves to elevate women into influential roles), it seems peculiar that the church hasn't responded more directly to the rise of "spiritual but not religious" as a social identity. ■ Even if specific religious affiliation is in retreat, the search for meaning shows no signs of abating. That quest for meaning is a fundamental part of human nature, and someone, somewhere, will fill the voids people feel. Some have observed the rise of political fervor as a substitute for religion, and others note the quasi-religious (or even cult-like) attachment some people feel to the wide range of self-help gurus found today. The problem is that many of these alternative expressions of religious energy end up having unholy consequences. ■ Catholicism is already a church of many spiritual styles; different religious orders emphasize considerably different practices, just for example, and the influence of syncretism has been applied for centuries to harmonize the Roman Catholic church with local customs. How might it look if the church were to treat those "cultural Catholics" (and their friends) as if they were an existing civilization all their own, previously untouched by missionaries and now being contacted for the first time?