Year: 2013

Obituary for Leon Leyson, Youngest Survivor on Schindler’s List

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

Schindler’s List is one of my all-time favourite films. It is worth rewatching after I read an obituary of Leon Leyson, the youngest survivor on Oskar Schindler’s list, in this Los Angeles Times piece.

Leyson, a longtime resident of Fullerton, died Saturday in Whittier after a four-year battle with lymphoma, his daughter Stacy Wilfong said. He was 83.

She said her father was reluctant to talk about the war years because he “didn’t think anybody was interested. He didn’t have public speaking experience. He didn’t think he was going to be any good.”

His reticence may also have been due to his attitude that, having been given a second chance at life, he just wanted to get on with it.

“The truth is, I did not live my life in the shadow of the Holocaust,” he told the Portland Oregonian in 1997. “I did not give my children a legacy of fear. I gave them a legacy of freedom.”

The youngest of five children of a glass factory worker and his wife, Leyson was born Sept. 15, 1929, in Narewka, Poland, a village near the Russian border. He later moved to Krakow with his family.

He was a few weeks shy of his 10th birthday in 1939 when German forces invaded Poland and life as he had known it began to crumble.

Six months after the invasion, Poland’s Jews were ordered into a section of Krakow enclosed by a fence, the tops of which, Leyson often recalled, resembled grave markers. “I don’t think that was an accident,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994. His parents loaded their belongings onto a wagon and were crammed into one bedroom of an apartment in the Jewish ghetto with only a sheet separating them from another family.

Leyson didn’t discount his luck in survival:

“I can recount dozens of times where if I had stepped … to my left I would have been gone, or if I happened to step to my right,” Leyson told The Times. “It wasn’t anything like being smart or clever or anything like that.”

Worth reading the article for the last line alone. So touching.

On Effective Opening Sentences

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

What’s the best way to begin a blog post or an essay? Perhaps not with a question mark.

This great post summarizes useful techniques for a strong opening sentence: 

You can start with a blanket statement. Chapter Nine of Sol Stein’s excellent How to Grow a Novel begins with: “A writer cannot write what he does not read with pleasure.” Chapter Fourteen begins with: “All fiction writers are emigrants from nonfiction.”

Sometimes you can just be stark-blunt about what you intend to do. Chapter Eight of Stein’s book, on “Getting Intimate with the Reader,” starts out: “This is a chapter about opportunities.”

If you’re writing a blog post about unequal pay of women and men, you can start with: “This post is about unfairness.” Just tell the reader what the subject is.

If you’re writing about a difficult subject (for example, rape), you can begin: “Rape is not easy to write about.”

Make an exaggerated statement, then tone it down. “In Prohibition days, alcohol could be purchased illegally on every street corner. Actually, that’s an exaggeration, but in fact it’s true that . . .”

Involve the reader in a bit of conjecture. “Suppose you were faced with the choice of living with cancer every day, or obtaining treatment that may or may not work, at the cost of becoming bankrupt and homeless.”

Sometimes you can start with a statistic. “This year, over two hundred thousand Americans will be diagnosed with lung cancer.”

Summarize the current state of affairs, then tell how it’s changed recently. “Until recently, new MBA graduates could count on getting a job straight out of school. That’s no longer the case.” 

Put up a straw man and knock it down. “The conventional view of [XYZ] is [ABC].” (That’s the straw man.) “But it turns out the conventional view is wrong.” (That’s knocking it down.) Naomi Klein often uses this technique.

Read the entire post here.

Paul Theroux’s Travel Wish List

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Paul Theroux reminisces on his past travels in this piece for The New York Times. It’s a great essay in which he also considers his wish list for places to visit.

“You’ve been everywhere,” people say to me, but that’s a laugh. My wish list of places is not only long but, in many cases, blindingly obvious. Yes, I have been to Patagonia and Congo and Sikkim, but I haven’t been to the most scenic American states, never to Alaska, Montana, Idaho or the Dakotas, and I’ve had only the merest glimpse of Kansas and Iowa. I want to see them, not flying in but traveling slowly on the ground, keeping to back roads, and defying the general rule of “Never eat at a place called Mom’s, never play cards with a man called Doc …”

Nothing to me has more excitement in it than the experience of rising early in the morning in my own house and getting into my car and driving away on a long, meandering trip through North America. Not much on earth can beat it in travel for a sense of freedom — no pat-down, no passport, no airport muddle, just revving an engine and then “Eat my dust.” The long, improvisational road trip by car is quintessentially American.

This was my favorite paragraph:

The ultimate travel fantasies are, of course, unattainable. William S. Burroughs said in the 1950s, “What I want for dinner is a bass fished in Lake Huron in 1920.” In that spirit, I’d like to spend a Sunday in the West Medford of 1951, play bocce with my grandfather and eat some of my grandmother Angelina’s tortellini; I want to revisit the jolly bazaars of the Peshawar of 1973, the hopeful Nyasaland of 1964, the bike-riding China of 1980 (no private cars on the empty roads), and while I’m at it, I would like to return to the Borneo of the 1960s and again climb Mount Kinabalu.

I agree with Theroux on this count: a return journey to a place visited in the past can be a wonderful experience. A wonderful read overall.

Woody Allen on Hypochondria

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Woody Allen pens a great (and hilarious!) piece about hypochondria: 

But why should I live in such constant terror? I take great care of myself. I have a personal trainer who has me up to 50 push-ups a month, and combined with my knee bends and situps, I can now press the 100-pound barbell over my head with only minimal tearing of my stomach wall. I never smoke and I watch what I eat, carefully avoiding any foods that give pleasure. (Basically, I adhere to the Mediterranean diet of olive oil, nuts, figs and goat cheese, and except for the occasional impulse to become a rug salesman, it works.) In addition to yearly physicals I get all available vaccines and inoculations, making me immune to everything from Whipple’s disease to the Andromeda strain.

Best line in the op-ed:

Even when the results of my yearly checkup show perfect health, how can I relax knowing that the minute I leave the doctor’s office something may start growing in me and, by the time a full year rolls around, my chest X-ray will look like a Jackson Pollock?

I, too, would classify myself as an alarmist. But an occasional one, not a full-time one like Woody Allen.

Remembering Aaron Swartz

readingbyeugene 2 Comments

It is with great sadness that I learned early this morning of Aaron Swartz’s suicide. I didn’t know Aaron personally, but I came to appreciate much of what Aaron wrote on personal development.

Cory Doctorow pens a worthwhile remembrance of Aaron Swartz at Boing Boing:

I don’t know if it’s productive to speculate about that, but here’s a thing that I do wonder about this morning, and that I hope you’ll think about, too. I don’t know for sure whether Aaron understood that any of us, any of his friends, would have taken a call from him at any hour of the day or night. I don’t know if he understood that wherever he was, there were people who cared about him, who admired him, who would get on a plane or a bus or on a video-call and talk to him.

Because whatever problems Aaron was facing, killing himself didn’t solve them. Whatever problems Aaron was facing, they will go unsolved forever. If he was lonely, he will never again be embraced by his friends. If he was despairing of the fight, he will never again rally his comrades with brilliant strategies and leadership. If he was sorrowing, he will never again be lifted from it.

This is a man that has suffered, at various points in his life, from a number of illnesses. Here are Aaron Swartz’s own words on depression:

You feel worthless. You wonder whether it’s worth going on. Everything you think about seems bleak — the things you’ve done, the things you hope to do, the people around you. You want to lie in bed and keep the lights off. Depressed mood is like that, only it doesn’t come for any reason and it doesn’t go for any either. Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.

I don’t want to speculate on the suicide. But I think one of the best way to remember Aaron Swartz’s life is through the wisdom of his writings. So start by reading his “How To Get a Job Like Mine,” a no-bullshit examination of how he got to where he got. Follow with Aaron’s seven part series titled “Raw Nerve.” (Set aside an hour or two to read the whole series).

My favorite section was “Look at Yourself Objectively,” in which Aaron summarized:

Look up, not down. It’s always easy to make yourself look good by finding people even worse than you. Yes, we agree, you’re not the worst person in the world. That’s not the question. The question is whether you can get better — and to do that you need to look at the people who are even better than you.

Criticize yourself. The main reason people don’t tell you what they really think of you is they’re afraid of your reaction. (If they’re right to be afraid, then you need to start by working on that.) But people will feel more comfortable telling you the truth if you start by criticizing yourself, showing them that it’s OK.

Find honest friends. There are some people who are just congenitally honest. For others, it’s possible to build a relationship of honesty over time. Either way, it’s important to find friends who you can trust to tell to tell you the harsh truths about yourself. This is really hard — most people don’t like telling harsh truths. Some people have had success providing an anonymous feedback form for people to submit their candid reactions.

Listen to the criticism. Since it’s so rare to find friends who will honestly criticize you, you need to listen extra-carefully when they do. It’s tempting to check what they say against your other friends. For example, if one friend says the short story you wrote isn’t very good, you might show it to some other friends and ask them what they think. Wow, they all think it’s great! Guess that one friend was just an outlier. But the fact is that most of your friends are going to say it’s great because they’re your friend; by just taking their word for it, you end up ignoring the one person who’s actually being honest with you.

Thank you Aaron Swartz for your brilliance. For your honesty. For your daring.

RIP.

To Build a Death Star? The White House Responds.

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

In November 2012, someone proposed on the White House petition site to start building a Death Star by 2016.

Today, the White House responded. And it is spectacular:

The Administration shares your desire for job creation and a strong national defense, but a Death Star isn’t on the horizon. Here are a few reasons:

  • The construction of the Death Star has been estimated to cost more than $850,000,000,000,000,000. We’re working hard to reduce the deficit, not expand it.
  • The Administration does not support blowing up planets.
  • Why would we spend countless taxpayer dollars on a Death Star with a fundamental flaw that can be exploited by a one-man starship?

However, look carefully (here’s how) and you’ll notice something already floating in the sky — that’s no Moon, it’s a Space Station! Yes, we already have a giant, football field-sized International Space Station in orbit around the Earth that’s helping us learn how humans can live and thrive in space for long durations. The Space Station has six astronauts — American, Russian, and Canadian — living in it right now, conducting research, learning how to live and work in space over long periods of time, routinely welcoming visiting spacecraft and repairing onboard garbage mashers, etc. We’ve also got two robot science labs — one wielding a laser — roving around Mars, looking at whether life ever existed on the Red Planet.

Just had to be clear about this point:

We are living in the future! Enjoy it. Or better yet, help build it by pursuing a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field. The President has held the first-ever White Housescience fairs and Astronomy Night on the South Lawn because he knows these domains are critical to our country’s future, and to ensuring the United States continues leading the world in doing big things.

If you do pursue a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-related field, the Force will be with us! Remember, the Death Star’s power to destroy a planet, or even a whole star system, is insignificant next to the power of the Force.

Worth reading in entirety here.

Kevin Kelly: The Impossible is the New Normal

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

One of the best things I’ve read this week is Kevin Kelly’s take on “the impossible is the new normal”:

Every minute a new impossible thing is uploaded to the internet and that improbable event becomes just one of hundreds of extraordinary events that we’ll see or hear about today. The internet is like a lens which focuses the extraordinary into a beam, and that beam has become our illumination. It compresses the unlikely into a small viewable band of everyday-ness. As long as we are online – which is almost all day many days — we are illuminated by this compressed extraordinariness. It is the new normal.

That light of super-ness changes us. We no longer want mere presentations, we want the best, greatest, the most extraordinary presenters alive, as in TED. We don’t want to watch people playing games, we want to watch the highlights of the highlights, the most amazing moves, catches, runs, shots, and kicks, each one more remarkable and improbable than the other.

We are also exposed to the greatest range of human experience, the heaviest person, shortest midgets, longest mustache — the entire universe of superlatives! Superlatives were once rare — by definition — but now we see multiple videos of superlatives all day long, and they seem normal. Humans have always treasured drawings and photos of the weird extremes of humanity (early National Geographics), but there is an intimacy about watching these extremities on video on our phones while we wait at the dentist. They are now much realer, and they fill our heads.

My only lament is how Mr. Kelly chose to present the extraordinary with a poor statistical anecdote:

To the uninformed, the increased prevalence of improbable events will make it easier to believe in impossible things. A steady diet of coincidences makes it easy to believe they are more than just coincidences, right? But to the informed, a slew of improbably events make it clear that the unlikely sequence, the outlier, the black swan event, must be part of the story. After all, in 100 flips of the penny you are just as likely to get 100 heads in a row as any other sequence. But in both cases, when improbable events dominate our view — when we see an internet river streaming nothing but 100 heads in a row — it makes the improbable more intimate, nearer.

Sure. But it would have made more sense to discuss the probability of getting 100 heads in a row versus various other distributions (for example: probability of getting between 45 and 55 heads in 100 tosses of a fair coin).

KK is the author of What Technology Wants, which I recommend reading (I read it near the end of 2010).

Liu Qianping: Fashionable Chinese Grandpa

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

The Wall Street Journal profiles Liu Qianping, a 72-year-old grandfather who has taken the Internet by storm by modeling clothes:

He owes his star turn to his granddaughter, Lu Ting, a clothier who struggled for months to find a model who could boost her online store without breaking the bank. “He’s just so slender,” Ms. Lu says of her 110-pound grandfather. She notes that he looks great in crimson dresses and credits him for more than quadrupling her sales in recent weeks.

Mr. Liu’s ascent in the modeling realm speaks volumes about shifting cultural mores in a fast-aging society. The waif of a man, who goes about in a three-piece suit and a bow-tie when he isn’t clad in pink satin, is among a cadre of Chinese seniors who are all too familiar with cultural upheaval. Their lives have been marked by unimaginable change—from surviving famine to the advent of fast food. Along the way, many have adopted a devil-may-care approach that flies in the face of stereotypes about conservative Asian elders.

model_1

model_2

Thank you, Internet, for helping breaking all kinds of stereotypes. Read the entire story here.

On Friends Without Benefits

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

One of the most heartbreaking Modern Love stories I’ve ever read is in this week’s New York Times:

He wanted nothing, and I wanted the world. I lay in bed with my phone cradled to my ear, taking the news as one might receive a diagnosis of cancer. I stayed there all weekend, unable to move, paralyzed by the knowledge that now it was over. Even our friendship was too damaged to repair. This is what happens, I learned, when happily ever after does not happen.

I moved to New York City that spring. He met another girl he loved, one that probably knew him a little less well. They married two years ago, but I wasn’t invited. When I saw him after the fact, he told me not to take it personally, but we both knew that with another twist of fate, it could have been us up there at the altar.

I couldn’t help but take it personally; it’s always personal.

Sigh.

Some would find the ending a triumph; I found it devastating.

On Israel’s Flourishing Russian Culture

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Israel has the third-largest Russian-speaking population outside of Russia, after the United States and Germany. 

The New York Times Lens blog looks into how Russians have assimilated into Israel culture, via photographs by Oled Balilty:

Mr. Balilty’s journey started a year ago, at a large Russian New Year’s Eve celebration. In Israel, most people celebrate the Jewish lunar new year, Rosh Hashana. Mr. Balilty said that he can appreciate continuing one’s culture, as his parents had emigrated from Morocco to Israel.

“The Russians are totally Israeli. They work like everyone else, often in high-tech jobs, but at night they can live in a different world,” Mr. Balilty, 33, said. “They came here with a beautiful culture, but the culture didn’t open to the Israeli people. I hope someday that Israel will be able to fully experience it.”

See the photographs here.