Month: July 2013

On Living, Reading without a Sense of Smell

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Rebecca Steinitz is anosmic: she is unable to discern various smells. In a beautiful essay published in The Millions, she writes:

I don’t know what my husband’s shirt smells like. If he died, I wouldn’t think to sleep in it so I could feel that he was with me.
I don’t know what a baby’s head smells like – not my babies, not anyone else’s babies. I couldn’t pick my babies out of a crowd with my eyes closed, and I don’t miss that baby smell when I hug my growing children.
I don’t know the smell of feet, chalk, lilacs, gardenias, sour milk, rain, new cars, Chanel No. 5, Old Spice, greasepaint, or napalm.

I learned smells from books, which made me think they were fictional. I believed that Wilbur’s barn smelled of hay, manure, the perspiration of tired horses, and the sweet breath of patient cows, and that the salty brown smell of frying ham made Almanzo even hungrier. But when real people said That stinks, or I can smell the sea from here, or I can’t stand the smell of cilantro, I thought they were faking. I assumed that, like me, they knew from books that there were smells and things were supposed to have them. Unlike me, I decided, they were willing to pretend those smells existed beyond the page. As I try to write out this logic, it seems tortuous, but it wasn’t something I ever questioned; it was something I knew. I could not smell the things I read in books, so it was impossible that anyone else could, which meant they must be making it up.

She wonders:

Are my memories lesser for lack of olfactory reminders? Does the diminution of my fifth sense altogether diminish my ability to engage with the sensory realm?

The way Rebecca ties it back to books at the of the essay is magical. Highly recommend reading.

###

(hat tip: Steve Silberman)

To Steal a Mockingbird: Harper Lee’s Lawsuit

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird (the only book she’s written), has an outstanding lawsuit. The lawsuit charges that in 2007 her agent, Samuel Pinkus, duped the 80-year-old Lee into assigning him the copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird and took away the royalties.

In “To Steal a Mockingbird?” Mark Seal unveils the details of the lawsuit for Vanity Fair:

Filed in New York District Court, the suit names Pinkus, his wife, former TV-news writer Leigh Ann Winick, and Gerald Posner, a Miami-based attorney and investigative journalist with a questionable reputation, as defendants. It claims that Pinkus “engaged in a scheme to dupe Harper Lee, then 80-years-old with declining hearing and eye sight, into assigning her valuable TKAM [To Kill a Mockingbird] copyright to [Pinkus’s company] for no consideration,” and then created shell companies and bank accounts to which the book’s royalties were funneled. (The defendants are not accused of stealing her royalties.)

As the emerging scandal rocked the publishing world, I flew to Monroeville and stood in its former county courthouse, now a museum devoted to the town’s two literary sensations, Harper Lee and Truman Capote, who were childhood neighbors and lifelong friends. Upstairs in the museum is the courtroom where Lee’s father, Amasa Coleman “A. C.” Lee, tried his cases, and where Harper, as a child, and the character Scout in her novel, watched adoringly from the balcony. Lee thinly disguised Monroeville in the book as Maycomb, “a tired old town…. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with.” She gave her father the name Atticus Finch.

This is a huge lawsuit because To Kill a Mockingbird, 53 years after first publication, still sells some 750,000 copies a year, according to HarperCollins, the publisher. In one typical six-month period alone, ending December 2009, Harper Lee earned $1,688,064.68 in royalties. I read the novel in 9th grade (but never re-read it), and it’s still one of my favorite all-time books.

Read the entire story here.

Atlanta is the Worst Metropolitan City in America for Upward Mobility

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

A troubling new report summarizes the trends for upward mobility in the United States, and is summarized in The New York Times. Atlanta is the largest metropolitan city with the worst upward mobility, both for the black and white population in the city:

The study — based on millions of anonymous earnings records and being released this week by a team of top academic economists — is the first with enough data to compare upward mobility across metropolitan areas. These comparisons provide some of the most powerful evidence so far about the factors that seem to drive people’s chances of rising beyond the station of their birth, including education, family structure and the economic layout of metropolitan areas.

Climbing the income ladder occurs less often in the Southeast and industrial Midwest, the data shows, with the odds notably low in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. By contrast, some of the highest rates occur in the Northeast, Great Plains and West, including in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle and large swaths of California and Minnesota.

Income mobility was also higher in areas with more two-parent households, better elementary schools and high schools, and more civic engagement, including membership in religious and community groups.

Regions with larger black populations had lower upward-mobility rates. But the researchers’ analysis suggested that this was not primarily because of their race. Both white and black residents of Atlanta have low upward mobility, for instance.

The authors emphasize that their data allowed them to identify only correlation, not causation. Other economists said that future studies will be important for sorting through the patterns in this new data.

Still, earlier studies have already found that education and family structure have a large effect on the chances that children escape poverty. Other researchers, including the political scientist Robert D. Putnam, author of “Bowling Alone,” have previously argued that social connections play an important role in a community’s success. Income mobility has become one of the hottest topics in economics, as both liberals and conservatives have grown worried about diminished opportunities following more than a decade of disappointing economic growth. After years of focusing more on inequality at a moment in time, economists have more recently turned their attention to people’s paths over their lifetimes.

A child who grows up in a family making $50,000 annually (42nd percentile ) is likely to end up, on average, in the 43rd percentile of income at working age of 30. Click through the article and play with the data set in the middle of the article to see how your city compares.

How Hewlett-Packard Has Revived the Silk Road

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Few people know this, but I used to live along the historic Silk Road.

This famous 4,000 mile route connected Asia and Europe for many centuries, before fading in importance in the 1400s. Now, the giant corporation Hewlett-Packard has revived the route as a faster, overland alternative to shipping electronics from China to Europe versus doing so by sea. The New York Times goes along for the ride via photos and brief videos in this fantastic photo/video essay:

silk_road2

silk_road1

See the rest here.

Philip Roth on Getting People Wrong

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

This week, I had a deep, liberating, and humbling conversation with someone whose intentions I got completely wrong. The signals, signs, body language: I’ve misread everything.

And so: I am reminded of this quote from Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, on getting people wrong. It’s one of my all-time favorite quotes:

You get them wrong before you meet them: you get them wrong while you’re with them and then you get home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we are alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.

So, thank you, Mr. Roth for this reminder. I am wrong because I am alive. I am alive, and so I’m wrong.

Carolyn Hopkins and Jack Fox: The Voices at 110 Airports and the NYC Subway

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Carolyn Hopkins and Jack Fox are two cheerful retirees who also happen to be longtime buddies and the (mildly authoritative) public announcement voices heard at 110 airports and the New York City subway. The Verge has a great article profiling the two friends:

Conspiracy theorists will probably be delighted to learn that a smallish, 100 person company out of Louisville controls the announcement systems in just about every important public space in the United States. They do it for 110 airports including JFK, LAX, and Chicago O’Hare, all 26 buildings at the Capitol, the Mayo Clinic, the Kennedy Space Center, and the New York City subway system, just to name a handful. (The NYC MTA has a host of other voices for specific platform announcements; for instance, Charlie Pellett says, “stand clear of the closing doors.”) They also work worldwide, from China to Iceland and everywhere in between.

The company responsible for the voices, IED, short for Innovative Electronic Designs, is the preeminent supplier of what’s known as an automated paging system: networked, computer-controlled equipment that controls audio notifications for big complexes. Though competitors exist — Biamp, and QSC, for instance — IED is the main US player in this specialized sector. The company was founded in 1978, but its genesis really occurred in tandem with the birth of rock ‘n’ roll.

Hopkins’ voice isn’t what you’d expect from a paging system. It’s neither robotic, nor elegant and actressy, but rather, mirthful and folksy.

“They said, ‘Can you do a certain voice?’” Hopkins, now 64, remembers. “They wanted a veryhappy smiling voice! And I tried it.” The gig continued, and Hopkins was called back every time they created a new system.

Definitely click through the article and hear the two interviews with Carolyn and Jack embedded in the article.

On Skinny Dipping in New York City

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

A fun and interesting piece about what people have to do to go skinny-dipping in the New York City area:

But skinny-dipping is something different, its acolytes say. A term coined in the late 1940s, it connotes both quickness — a dip — and transgression, a departure from the old painted scenes of bathing in rivers. (The skinny part, linguists have argued, most likely refers to skin, not thinness.)

“It’s about spontaneity and freedom in the moment,” said Lauren Christianson, 23, who along with two partners is working on a guide to skinny-dipping around the city for their Web site, The Skinny Dipping Report. “You can’t go in the East River or the Gowanus Canal. You have to find these secret spots.”

One spot eyed for the list, a hot tub at the New York Loft Hostel in Bushwick, may need to be reconsidered. The hot tub was taken out last year, a receptionist there said, after becoming an occasional clothing-optional hangout. The removal was “very possibly for that reason,” she said.

A minor offense most often classified as either “exposure of a person” (a violation) or public lewdness (a misdemeanor), it is not the sort of crime that makes the blotter in New York, as it might elsewhere. Faced with a boisterous bunch of naked swimmers, many officers just shake their heads. “Move along” is more likely to be heard than “You’re under arrest.”

I guess you can consider the officers assigned to give out summons/tickets for this behavior as a sort of mild hazing?

“Usually a junior guy will get stuck with that assignment,” said Sgt. Grant Arthur of the United States Park Police, which patrols the area. “They’ll just come right up and start talking, get real close, telling the officer how good he looks in uniform. Nothing bad — it’s kind of funny. We put the new guys down there, and it’ll kind of catch them off guard.”

A Desert, a Smiling Dog, and a Revelation

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

A hasty engagement and subsequent marriage turned into anguish for Liesl Schillinger, who realized she was incompatible with her husband. So she goes off to the desert in New Mexico and has a revelatory experience:

I continue amending my idea of fulfillment as I go. I have no regrets except for one: I am not allowed to own a dog in my apartment building. I travel too much to have a dog, anyway. Out of curiosity, though, I sent the photo of the big white dog to a breeder, who told me what kind it was: a Samoyed.

The breed, also known as “the smiling dog,” is famous for its friendly temperament. The dog I met in Taos would have shared its good mood with any creature it happened to encounter on its run. I’m so glad I was that creature.

I wish I still had the picture, but I will never lose the impression bestowed upon me by that generous, exultant animal on that long-ago day, when I most needed to be reminded that happiness is not an intellectual choice, it’s an instinct, and a good in itself.

A beautiful conclusion in this Modern Love story.

On Luck, J.K. Rowling, and the Chamber of Literary Fame

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

I had a conversation today at lunch with a lady about the role of luck in her career. We both agreed that we shouldn’t underestimate chance encounters and how certain circumstances bring us opportunities. Too often we attribute success to diligence and/or hard work, while we (strongly) discount the role of luck that played in our successes.

In this spirit, I thought this was an excellent piece by Duncan J. Watts on the discovery of J.K. Rowling’s pseudonymously published novel, The Cuckoo’s Calling:

In the real world, of course, it’s impossible to travel back in time and start over, so it’s much harder to argue that someone who is incredibly successful may owe their success to a combination of luck and cumulative advantage rather than superior talent. But by writing under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, an otherwise anonymous name, Rowling came pretty close to recreating our experiment, starting over again as an unknown author and publishing a book that would have to succeed or fail on its own merits, just as Harry Potter had to 16 years ago — before anyone knew who Rowling was.

Rowling made a bold move and, no doubt, is feeling vindicated by the critical acclaim the book has received.

But there’s a catch: Until the news leaked about the author’s real identity, this critically acclaimed book had sold somewhere between 500 and 1,500 copies, depending on which report you read. As they say in the U.K., that’s rubbish! What’s more, had the author actually been Robert Galbraith, the book would almost certainly have continued to languish in obscurity, probably forever.

“The Cuckoo’s Calling” will now have a happy ending, and its success will only perpetuate the myth that talent is ultimately rewarded with success. What Rowling’s little experiment has actually demonstrated, however, is that quality and success are even more unrelated than we found in our experiment. It might be hard for a book to become a runaway bestseller if it’s unreadably bad (although one might argue that the Twilight series and “Fifty Shades of Grey” challenge this constraint), but it is also clear that being good, or even excellent, isn’t enough. As one of the hapless editors who turned down the Galbraith manuscript put it, “When the book came in, I thought it was perfectly good — it was certainly well-written — but it didn’t stand out.”

I highly recommend reading the entire thing where the author discusses a social experiment about the discovery of music by unknown artists.

###

Recommended related reading: Nassim Taleb on the role of luck.

Pandoraviruses: Largest Viruses Ever Discovered

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Scientists have discovered the biggest virus ever, called a pandoravirus. National Geographic has the details on this “alien” virus:

Each about one micron—a thousandth of a millimeter—in length, the newfound genus Pandoravirus dwarfs other viruses, which range in size from about 50 nanometers up to 100 nanometers. A genus is a taxonomic ranking between species and family.

In addition to being huge, pandoraviruses have supersize DNA: 2,500 genes as compared with 10 genes in many viruses. 

The most interesting part, perhaps, was that a pandoravirus was possibly discovered as far back as 13 years ago. However, because anything on the 1 micron scale is of the bacterium size, scientists were dismissive.