Marcus' World

Bill Hader on Fresh Air--Life Lessons

This morning I caught some of Bill Hader's Fresh Air interview from last August.  Hader is leaving Saturday Night Live this week, after seven seasons.

Hader joined SNL at the same time as Andy Samberg. They auditioned on the same day.  I laughed out loud when Hader described running into Samberg in the audition area.  Hader had no props, Samberg brought lots of props.  Hader thought to himself, "Oh no...I'm so unprepared! This guy brought props!"  Meanwhile, Samberg was thinking (as he later recounted to Hader), "Oh no! That guy is so much better than me. He doesn't need props!"

In th end they both got the job, props or not. There is no right answer, except this one: to thine own self be true.

Social Media and Established Media: The News from Boston

In 2000, the Supreme Court stopped the Florida recount and awarded the Presidency to George W. Bush. I read the complete text of that decision, in print, in the New York Times.

On September 11, 2001 the Chicago Tribune rushed an evening paper to subscribers, long after the time in which evening papers had become extinct. There was something tactile and substantial about reading a physical paper on such a momentous day.

This Monday, two bombs went off at the Boston Marathon, killing three and maiming almost 200. I learned about this atrocity from NPR, only because I was in Sacramento for work that day and so had access to the car radio. On any other day my first word would have come from Facebook, and then I would have gone to the Times web site.  Since the event I've kept tabs on the investigation via the Times and Politico apps on my phone. I never considered reading the story in print, and I toggled between social media and more established sources.

So, yes, times have changed. Now there is--or should be--a symbiotic relationship between the immediacy of social media (which did not exist in 2000 or 2001) and the in-depth reporting of full-time journalists.  It's not an either/or, zero-sum game, as Molly Redden argues in a great piece in the New Republic.  After Monday's bombing social media sites broke the story first, and then later the Boston Globe and Boston Herald synthesized the flood of data into an understandable whole.

See--that's symbiosis between old and new.  But it takes something like Boston to bring it about.  Usually the established media feels the anxiety of new media nipping at its heels, and new media types crow about demolishing the old with too little regard for what would be lost.

As Frank Rich sagaciously notes in the latest issue of New York, the established media has its own flaws and always has.  We shouldn't romanticize the days of ink and printing presses just because we're annoyed at BuzzFeed.  The media's tectonic plates are shifting, and nobody knows where they will settle. We should ensure that this settling allow for deep investigative reporting, which doesn't have to be printed on paper but does need to be valued.  I love Facebook and I respect Twitter, but that's not enough to understand the news.

Singapore Signage

We arrived home from Malaysia and Singapore Wednesday evening. I'm still working through jet lag, hence the decision to draft this blog post at 5 AM!

In my last note I'd promised this next post would be about Singapore's signage. We were in Singapore for three days of our trip, out of 13 total.  During that time I kept snapping pictures of signs, as I was fascinated by what might seem paternalistic to US eyes but is not perceived this way--I presume--by Singaporeans. 

In particular, the many admonishments to drive safely and courteously struck me. In the US we don't want bad driving, of course...but we also don't make such a point to encourage safe driving.  Pi Wen pointed out that there are similar messages in Malaysia, which I can't read since they are in Malay. Singapore's signs are in English. Pi Wen's cousin Ron, who lives in Singapore, pointed out that the signs are needed because Signaporeans drive crazily.  Maybe so. For my money Singaporean roads are much more orderly than those in Kuala Lumpur, where I always feared for my life even though Pi Wen was driving expertly.

Another segment of Singapore's signs are about the "commonweal" or "public good."  This is related to the road signs, in a way, as the overall thrust is about concern for others. But the road signs are about a specific situation, other signs are about the citizen spirit more generally.

Pi Wen attended the National University of Singapore before coming to the US. She found living in a tiny city-state in which the chief activity was shopping to be "oppressive."  Maybe all this public-minded signage has a downside, a certain micromanaging quality.  Even if so, it is refreshing compared to the "winner take all" ethos of the United States. The grass is always greener, of course, so take this commentary with a grain of salt.

Below are four pictures of Singaporean signs.  The first is a road sign, "Be considerate/Signal early." It's somewhat blurry, captured by my iPhone on the bridge between the Gardens by the Bay and the Marina Sands (two Singaporean landmarks). The Singapore Flyer, "the world's largest observation wheel," is in the background.

The other three pictures are examples of more general public-spiritedness. I hope you enjoy them all.

Thirty-Six

Greetings from Singapore. I have a particularly strong attachment to this city-state's many forms of signage.  While being driven by Pi Wen's relatives yesterday, we passed an electronic road sign that advised, "Be considerate/Signal early."

Thoughtfulness! Paternalism! Whatever you might think of it, it was not something I've ever seen in the US.  I need to do an entire post on Singaporean signage, which I'll do next week.

Last week I turned thirty-six. The day before we enjoyed a delectable feast at Oakland's own Commis. On the day of, my staff treated me to yummy cupcakes.  On the day after, our anniversary, Pi Wen and I flew to Malaysia. Yesterday we took the bus to Singapore, and will head back to Kuala Lumpur Wednesday.

So it's been busy. Several times on this trip I've been offered a fork and spoon while everyone else just uses chopsticks.  I can handle chopsticks, not in the classical style but enough to get by. Offering me the "Western" implements used to annoy me. I'd fume (to myself at first and later to Pi Wen) about being singled out, set apart, as if my whitness weren't different enough.

During this trip all that's chnaged. I see the gesture as what it's intended to be: thoughtful. Courteous. Maybe a bit paternalistic, ok.  But just like I appreciate that road sign (which would have elicited eye rolls at certain stages of my youth), I now see the upside of the good ol' fork and spoon treatment too. I'll chalk it up to reaching thirty-six, still far from wise but at least less uptight than I used to be.

East of the Mississippi

In spring 2010 I'd lived in the Bay Area for almost three years.  By that point Pi Wen and I were dating and life was looking good again. I was back in Berkeley after one year in San Francisco, and much happier to be in the East Bay.

That May I was still working at UCSF, which was under a period of forced staff furloughs as a budget saving maneuver. (Samuel Merritt started that August, after an interview in early June.) In practice this meant 1.5 days or so--can't remember the details--of unpaid leave per month.  You could roll over that leave, adding it to regular vacation.  By May 2010 I had accrued a lot of leave, of both the paid and unpaid varieties.

That year the Medical Library Association conference was in Washington, DC (my home from 2002-2004). I attended the conference, and built around it a trip that included stops in New York City (home from 2004-2007); Tennessee (my ancestral home); and Ohio (my childhood home.)

All of these places are east of the Mississippi River. That year I developed a new theory of US travel, which is that anything east of the Mississippi is close to each other. 

Logically, this is absurd.  By this reasoning Portland, Maine is close to Mobile, Alabama.

But it's all relative.  Portland, Maine is close to Mobile compared to San Francisco.

In 2007, after moving to Berkeley, I felt displaced from all I'd known.  Culturally New York City was a world away from my hometown of Columbus, Ohio.  But at least it was in the same time zone, and I could get back to Ohio easily in a pinch.  Out here none of that was true anymore.  So, anytime I'm "east of the Mississippi" I must make the most of it.

Three years have passed since this first elaborate voyage.  The Bay Area is home now--the roots are deepening, the ligaments have thickened.  Mom and Bob will be stopping into town next month, because SF is a docking point for a cruise they're taking.  Pi Wen and I will BART into town that morning and show them around.  Easy breezy, piece of cake.  We know this place now (Pi Wen moved here just a few months before me).  If this cruise had taken place in 2008 I would have been a much less knowledgable tour guide.

Building a new home does not mean I never miss the old ones.  "East of the Mississippi" is now a way of life.  In 2011 we did not travel east; that was our wedding year, so people came to us.  In 2012 I added a week in Ohio after a conference in Pennsylvania--this included catching up with relatives I had not seen in years, and going to Athens, OH to visit where Pi Wen had gone to graduate school. 

This year a new version of "East" is in the offing.  I have a conference in Evanston, IL (my college town! Go Cats!) the last week of June.  Pi Wen lived in Evanston as well, and she'll join me.  Then it's off to Nashville, Tennessee, where I haven't been since that 2010 trip and Pi Wen has never been. Then...home to Oakland. All these journeys are an homage to my younger self, but I know where I'll grow old.

Guest Blog Post at Superstition Review, "Deepening"

Three years ago I published a personal essay in the Superstition Review. A few weeks ago the kind folks at s [r] asked me to draft a guest blog post.  It appeared today. Please click on over to  "Deepening."

Thanks very much!

The Activist's Calling and the Activist's Curse

"When we're young we think our cause is a sprint, and when we're middle-aged we think is it's a marathon," "But when we're old we think it's a relay race. And Aaron was the one you wanted to hand it off to."--Doc Searls, at the New York City memorial honoring Aaron Swartz, January 2013

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In 2009, the year I got divorced, my favorite author was David Foster Wallace.  Foster Wallace had hanged himself the previous fall, at age 46, in Southern California. I never approached that low during "divorce year," but it was by far the hardest year of my life.  This blog was a lifeline for me back then, as well as immersing myself in the brooding genius of David Foster Wallace.

That summer I carried Infinite Jest around the streets of the Mission like a totem, heedless of any concerns that this made me appear like just another hipster or clinger on at the cult of Foster Wallace. I didn't even carry it in a backpack, just used it as a shield as I walked around town.

Just last month Internet activist Aaron Swartz hanged himself too, at age 26.  Thanks to the amazing reporting of Justin Peters in Slate, I now know that Swartz was working on a detailed plot summary of Infiniet Jest at the time of his death.  This was one of many projects the ever-restless-Swartz had in the hopper at the time of his passing. It seems fitting that one genius related to the work of another.

At the time of his death Swartz was defending himself against government prosecution for downloading 4.8 million articles from the JSTOR database at MIT.  Swartz entered a computer closet to do so, and wired an Acer laptop directly into MIT's servers.  But to Swartz this should have been public domain material available to all, and he was liberating information rather than stealing it. When he killed himself the government was pursuing charges that would have included jail time, even though by then there were gaping holes in the government's case.

Who was right, in the final analysis? Aaron Swartz or the district attorney? As Swartz put it in his Guerilla Open Access Manifesto, written when he was 21 years old:

"Forcing academics to pay money to read the work of their colleagues? Scanning entire libraries but only allowing the folks at Google to read them? Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South? It's outrageous and unacceptable.

"I agree," many say, "but what can we do? The companies hold the copyrights, they make enormous amounts of money by charging for access, and it's perfectly legal—there's nothing we can do to stop them." But there is something we can, something that's already being done: we can fight back.

"Those with access to these resources—students, librarians, scientists—you have been given a privilege. You get to feed at this banquet of knowledge while the rest of the world is locked out. But you need not—indeed, morally, you cannot—keep this privilege for yourselves. You have a duty to share it with the world."

I agree with 21 year old Aaron, as I near 36 years of age myself.  At Samuel Merritt we're forced to maintain proxy servers that keep unauthorized users of the library's collections away (this is the kind of server Swartz hacked into at MIT).  We also maintain the conceit that the peer reviewed article is the one and only means of sharing authoritative scholarly knowledge, even though peer review has many flaws and the digital age opens up exciting new possibilities. Those new possibilities are naturally open, getting us away from this whole proxy server business.

So I'm with Aaron, absolutely and all the way. The difference, though, is that I've lived long enough to appreciate why systems are so hard to change, and have outlived my own phase of righteous shock. I'm still in the fight, while accepting that it's a long-run game that will never be over.

At age 26 I was every bit as zealous as Swartz, while 10 years on I've entered the middle-aged marathon phase so beautifully captured by Doc Searls above.  The "marathon phase" doesn't always bring peace, as Foster Wallace's suicide reveals. But for most of us the enduring victories are those that take the longest to achieve. I wish Aaron had lived long enough to know that this is true.

 

 

Clarifying Copyright

In response to the tragic suicide of Aaron Swartz, this week's Sunday Chronicle has two articles offering opposite interpretations of copyright in our digital age. 

Swartz believed in maximizing access to information, and released JSTOR articles from MIT's servers (many of those articles had been publicly funded).  JSTOR sued but settled; the government pressed the case. Swartz decided not to fight that battle anymore, taking his own life a few weeks ago at the age of 26.

Today Pamela Samuelson, law professor at UC Berkeley, unpacks Swartz's motivations. Her argument will be very familar to those of us who have followed the open access movement for years.  But it still bears repeating: scholars work to increase the store of knowledge; they are not directly paid to publish research articles or produce other scholarly artifacts; in fact, they often receive taxpayer supported grants to complete their research; therefore, this research should be available to everyone. 

I completely agree.  At Samuel Merritt we maintain a proxy server that locks out unauthorized readers of our online journal collections, a fact about which I feel guilty every day I go to work.

But it's the law, son. We must obey copyright.

The US Copyright Clause states, "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries" [bold mine]. To the extent that copyright law thwarts the progress of science, there is a conflict between means and ends.  And the ends are losing.  Samuelson: "There was a time when access to knowledge was promoted through grants of copyrights to authors who typically transferred them to publishers. Now copyright has become the single most serious impediment to access to knowledge."

After reading Samuelson I read Sally Lehrman's piece. The Chronicle presented their pieces as a debate, but that is not true.  Lehrman is talking about the independent artist or journalist who makes a direct living from their labor. If copyright protections are removed for the work of people like this, Lehrman argues, they will go into another line of work and the public square will shrink.  After all, we can't expect anyone to do work that won't allow them to put food on their table.

I agree. And, I suspect, so would Pam Samuelson.  For we are talking about two different groups of creators: 1. scholars who are paid by a university and receive government grants; 2. independent contractors whose income derives from the direct sale of their work.  Copyright as currently applied is a tragedy for group 1; and a very necessary incentive for group 2.

So what's to be done? We should bifurcate the blanket term "copyright" into a more accurate and responsive conception of how knowledge is shared today.  One size does not fit all.  Nobody wants to deny an intrepid investigative journalist her daily bread.  But the cost of that bread should not include the denial of scholarly knowledge to people who could use it.

Rules for the Road

1. Almost all of what seems important at any given moment will not matter 5 years, 5 months, 5 days or sometimes even 5 minutes from now.

2. This is 99% of life. Attach no ego or energy to these things.

3. When you are not able to do this--which will happen often--forgive yourself and move on.

4. Meanwhile, there's that 1% that does matter today, tomorrow, 5 years from now, for as long as you live.

5. Figure out what that 1% is for you.  This is your passion, your calling.

6. Recognize that what most matters to you will clash with with what most matters to others.

7. Conflict is inevitable.

8. Hold your ground.

9. But do it gracefully.

10. Because humility and conviction will carry the day.

Downton Abbey

We bought our TV almost a year ago, after several years in which both of us did not own one (from before we were engaged to after we were married).  We still fret about whether the cable bill is worth it, and who knows what will happen in the long run? So far we've integated it into our lives without becoming couch potatoes, and I suspect that will continue.

One reason I wanted a TV was to watch Downton Abbey on PBS (which doesn't require cable, I know--but that's not true of Mad Men, Louie, or Northwestern football games.)  I'd seen all the rage on Facebook and wanted to get in on the action.

Growing up, I enjoyed watching Are You Being Served? on my local PBS affiliate.  And I enjoyed watching the British Prime Minister's question time in the House of Commons, and answering questions by stating, "I refer the gentleman to the answer I gave some moments ago." Perhaps I had an undiagnosed tinge of Anglophilia.

So there we were last night, indulging that Anglophilia for the season 3 premiere of Downton Abbey.  Very enjoyable, even if it is cliche-heavy.  I appreciated the upstairs/downstairs dynamics, the generational conflicts, the poor investment decisions, and the continued exploration of the things we do for love.  All the good stuff, set on a preposterously large estate in 1920 as Britain recovers from the trauma of war. never change, even if individually we become more temperate and more kind.  Downton Abbey, keep up the good work.