July 26, 2021

Summer Tiny Letter

Echoing the words of an obscure character from The Onion, it's been a long time since I last rapped at ya…I'd suggest this is because of the great weather. It's hard to create even more screen time for myself when I can hop on my bike instead. I've been going on some longer rides lately, 2-3 hrs, and appreciating the small but positive effect it has on mental health. Note that I say mental. Of course it has physical benefits, but some days I think the mental ones are just as great. For the 1,000th time, we are not designed to sit or stand at screens all day. Spending a few hours in movement is much more aligned with what these bodies are supposed to do. I've speculated whether there is some way to capture the pleasure of summer weather, store it, put in hibernation, until winter comes. It would be great, but I know of no such technology.

I continue my separation from social media. I still check Facebook every few weeks, though after reviewing notifications, I realize I have missed nothing. I'm very fortunate that I have built the majority of my friendships off-line, and that sustaining them doesn't require me to be on social media. A few of you are out there on the coast, and we may not talk often, but I'd rather talk occasionally and substantially than be sucked into the social media machine for 30 minutes a day. It's amazing how much time you get back, isn't it?

The anxiety of influencers

Like many folks, I don't like to use the “i-word,” nor even hear it spoken, but this is the title of the article. Normally I don't like to read about shallow teenagers and young adults, because I expended so much effort trying to leave that orbit. But I have sympathy for these young wanna-be stars, and think their challenges are probably quite similar to past teen idols, though we should acknowledge the ridiculous pace of internet culture.

It’s noon in Los Angeles toward the end of the Plague Year, and I’m lounging on the patio of a swanky three-floor mansion, watching a scrum of teenage boys perform trending TikTok dances. Arranged in a tidy delta formation near the jacuzzi and pool, the five boys smile into the glare of a ring light, at the center of which is affixed a smartphone recording their moves. These boys possess a teenybopper cuteness and, because they’re between the ages of eighteen and twenty, they have noisomely strong metabolisms and thus go shirtless pretty much all of the time, displaying either the ectomorphic thinness of trees or greyhounds or, in one boy’s case especially, the sharply delineated musculature of a really big insect. They bite their lower lips, and their expressions are—I’m sorry, there’s no other way to describe them—precoital.

The article is written by a college professor, who smartly acknowledges his snobbery and his own need to attract students to his classes, just as these teens seek to add followers.

The Anxiety of Influencers, by Barrett Swanson

Educating the TikTok generation

The story of swears

I am sure that linguist and cultural critic John McWhorter is a short sleeper. What is a short sleeper, you ask? Some small but significant percentage of people need less sleep than the rest of us. Politicians, Supreme Court justices, some CEOs. Imagine if you could get by on 5-6 hours of sleep per night, not walking around like a zombie, but fully rested. That would allow you to publish umpteen books and appear on seemingly everyone and their brother's podcast, while also serving as a Columbia professor, like John McWhorter. Anyway, his latest book is about the history of swear words. It's a fascinating walk through how words change, grow, and mutate, and how their meanings are far from fixed.

My favorite example is f*ck. (I'm using the asterisk so I don't get flagged by some overzealous spam filter.) In a sentence like, “What the f*ck are you doing,” what role, he asks, is the word serving? Is it a noun, an adjective, a verb? It is none of these. It is simply designed to provide emphasis. Like a verbal exclamation point. Or perhaps more like one of these ?!, which I believe is called an interrobang. In the line above, it's like an exclamatory question.

Also, we should recognize that cursing has grammatical rules. For example, you can say “abso-f*cking-lutely,” but if you say “absolute-f*ck-ingly,” it's incorrect.

Nine Nasty Words is an enjoyable read, even if you are not especially interested in languages.

The Byzantines would be jealous

My friend Jena says that when something doesn't work right, is needlessly complex, or makes people suffer, to follow the money. There's often a good reason why systems don't work, and it's not usually because we lack the capacity to make them work.

Dealing with two annoyingly bureaucratic health related matters, I am reminded of this. The first is called an HSA, a Health Savings Account. You load money up in an account, pair it with a certain class of health insurance policy, and then you can pay for up to $3,500 yearly in services or prescriptions tax-free.

It's not that complicated, but it requires saving receipts, creating reimbursements, and if you change plans in the middle of the year, you have to prorate your contributions. And it means another spreadsheet in your life. Spreadsheets, they're not just for work anymore.

Every minute I spend dealing with it feels like “make work,” a term used for patronage jobs where people are assigned to show up to work, but there really isn't much work to do. They just need to get paid, so they may sit around, or they may simply shuffle a bunch of items from column A to column B and then back again.

On a related note, I got a prescription for a common generic item. I had it sent to my local pharmacy, which is down the block. But the prescribing physician's assistant said I would have to call my health insurance company or pharmacy benefit provider, to find out which of two generic versions of this would be less expensive under my insurance. I called the pharmacy, the pharmacist referred me to my PBM, yet another turning gear in the bureaucracy. I'm not sure they gave me a clear answer either, so I used a website called GoodRx1, which is some weird scheme through which prescriptions are funneled, greatly reducing the cost to the person actually using them. It turns out of the item would be $70 at Walgreens with this bizarro world discount, or $38 a few miles up the road at a different pharmacy.

I figured it was worth a 30 minute round trip bike ride to save $32.

But there's nothing straightforward about this. It is needlessly complex. If you've ever had to order medications from Canada, or abroad, you know that this rabbit hole goes further!

What is my point to all this? There are solid reasons why these Byzantine systems are so. A primary one is because there is money in it for someone. I don't use many prescriptions, but imagine someone who takes three or five or seven medications. Or a whole family of people taking a range of medications. Now multiply the phone calls, listening to the default Cisco hold music (shoutout to my music nerds, you know what I'm talking about), comparing numbers, considering the distance to a pharmacy, and all of this mess by the tens of millions of people who have to deal with it on a regular basis. And for what? What benefit are we getting exactly? Is it patronage for tens of thousands of beleaguered customer service reps? Is it intended to provide fiscal stimulus to the muzak industry? To providers of large commercial phone systems? Full employment for accountants? Who wins in this scenario?

Tech companies often get a bad rap, often deservedly so. But one thing that's great about tech is that when done right, it seeks to simplify, to reduce the friction in a transaction, to make things easier for the user. Think about how quickly you can throw together a Google doc containing images, video, links, tables, and share it with collaborators around the world. That’s reduced friction. Quite the opposite of listening to a painfully distorted little diddy composed on a dollar store keyboard and xylophone, looping every 45 seconds, while you wait for someone in a windowless room to answer your call with fake cheer. What if health insurance “paperwork” worked as smoothly as a Google doc?

'Miraculous' mosquito hack cuts dengue by 77%

Does what it says on the tin. I like sharing stories of science success, and good news.

Dengue fever cases have been cut by 77% in a "groundbreaking" trial that manipulates the mosquitoes that spread it, say scientists.

They used mosquitoes infected with "miraculous" bacteria that reduce the insect's ability to spread dengue.

The trial took place in Yogyakarta city, Indonesia, and is being expanded in the hope of eradicating the virus.

The World Mosquito Programme team says it could be a solution to a virus that has gone around the world.

'Miraculous' mosquito hack cuts dengue by 77% - BBC News

Infecting the mosquitoes with a different bug slams the brakes on dengue fever, trial finds.

Lionel Shriver, the cranky contrarian

This novel, which I have almost finished, is about a misanthropic voiceover artist and her fitness-event-obsessed husband. Having read this excellent New Yorker profile, I was curious about this writer. She is a skeptical, contrarian liberal—maybe that is my favorite kind. The Motion of the Body Through Space also seems to reflect a fair bit of her personal life— I imagine that someone who knows her well would hear her voice on every page.

I often read a brilliant turn of phrase, and wonder just how long the author spent shaping it. Hours? Days? It only takes a few seconds to read, but it is so and concise strong a statement. Following a serious injury in a crowded NYC bike lane, the protagonist reflects:

The pain was disconcertingly private. It seemed inconceivable that she was experiencing something so enormous yet invisible to the hundreds of recreationists coursing this artery. Pain put you in a lonely place, for if you weren't feeling it you didn't believe in it, and if you were feeling it you couldn't really believe in anything else. The state was so separating that it amounted to a form of solitary confinement.

Though I haven't read her other books, I plan to try another one. While this is a pretty good read, I sense it is not her best work.

Trolling gun rights absolutists

In a speech to the James Madison Academy 2021 graduating class, David Keene, a former NRA president and current board member of the gun rights group, called on the teens to fight those looking to implement tighter gun restrictions.

"I’d be willing to bet that many of you will be among those who stand up and prevent those from proceeding," he said, to a Las Vegas stadium of thousands of socially distanced chairs on June 4.

The catch? There is no “James Madison Academy,” it's a fiction. Change the Ref, an organization founded by Manuel and Patricia Oliver, held a fake high school graduation for what they call "The Lost Class" of students, and they persuaded two gun rights absolutists to speak to a sea of empty chairs, then used their speeches against them. This belongs with the “pranks with a purpose” approach of brilliant groups like The Yes Men.

Oh, how I love this type of PR. If only it had the reach of vaccine conspiracy theories and the like.

Speaking of vaccine conspiracy theories…

Moths will not replace us!

…the Maryland biotech company [Novavax] used insect cells to produce the coronavirus’ unique spike protein…

Was I the only one who noticed this?

If you get my ridiculous text messages, this is probably old news. If not, read on. I'm not making this up, it was on the front page of the Washington Post. (FYI, the company that makes this vaccine is not seeking approval in the United States.) Still, I had grand visions of hiring a bunch of out-of-work actors to protest outside the company's headquarters. Can you picture the scene? You know, something like this?

To me, the key question then would be, does this conspiracy theory have legs? Or antennae, as the case may be? Imagine the fun you could have with this. If this became a major news item, I'd have to flag that day as one of the funnest in my life.

This issue’s music recommendation

I really know very little about classical music. I know what I like, generally speaking, but for me, discovering new artists or pieces consists mainly of listening to NPR’s classical station, and using The Goog to identify a piece, then buying the CD later. (The BBC radio app is also very good - no ads!) Classical music is a curious genre, because seemingly 95% of it is by Western white guys from previous eras. Okay, maybe that's not entirely accurate, but that is my perception. I'm sure there is plenty of new classical music, and certainly we hear it in films. But nothing is as familiar as Chopin, Bach, Beethoven, etc. And there is a lot of that, and much of it is very, very good. But there is new classical. I really appreciate this work by Jennifer Higdon, All Things Majestic, which is a reflection on the American landscape, national parks in particular. I have noticed that the Nashville Symphony seems to take on a number of new works, not just hanging out with the familiar forever.

“Those who say it can't be done shouldn't interrupt those doing it.”
- Chinese proverb

Until next time…