Maira Kalman started a blog about “American democracy” in January at the New York Times. Intriguingly, it is an illustrated blog. Mykala and I both enjoyed her August entry: ‘I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door’. A quote:
“Think small” is my new motto. It helps me handle the complicated too-muchness of it all.
I like this blogging style.
Mykala learned that you can produce an ice cream substitute using just a banana and a blender. The frozen delicacy apparently feels quite similar to ice cream in one’s mouth. She puréed an entire banana down to a surprisingly small amount of brown sludge… probably 2 tablespoons. So, Mykala’s first attempt went like so:
“Alex!”
“What?”
“I think I did this backwards.”
“Did what backwards?”
“The banana smoothie. You’re supposed to purée the banana after you freeze it.”
Mykala is currently carving the brown frozen banana ice-sludge from the depths of the purée container. I think the next attempt will yield significantly more edible results.
I’m a lucky, lucky, lucky man. Dinner: homemade potato salad featuring farmer’s market fresh potatoes, stoneground organic mustard, organic sour cream, and Mykala’s special blend of herbs/spices. Fresh organic eggs in a tasty Rudi’s sandwich. All prepared by my lovely wife.
And all after an hour-long bike ride along the Mississippi, past the Guthrie Theater, along the waterfront, and back… through perfect weather.
While riding the best birthday present ever, a carbon-fiber and aluminum Specialized 2009 Allez Double road bike:
And late in the evening, after talking for hours, the two of us retire to bed, listening to the sound of crickets, in a wonderful peaceful home, on a wonderfully peaceful evening.
One must demonstrate the proper “hanging off” technique of extreme motorcycle center of gravity-altering cornering at any opportunity.
Imogen Heap’s First Train Home is a completely different song when heard through headphones. Holy cow.
I would recommend a balanced, closed, circumaural headphone. If you have the means, I highly recommend the AKG K 271 MK II. I… don’t have the means.
Regardless, go on, have a listen with your favorite pair of ‘phones. You’ll be happy you did.
In the healthcare article of the year, Dr. Atul Gawande has done some outstanding reporting: he has described the core problems of the United States’ healthcare system. He has also pointed out beacons for reform to pursue — the foremost being the Mayo Clinic right here in Rochester, Minnesota:
“It’s not easy,” he said. But decades ago Mayo recognized that the first thing it needed to do was eliminate the financial barriers. It pooled all the money the doctors and the hospital system received and began paying everyone a salary, so that the doctors’ goal in patient care couldn’t be increasing their income. Mayo promoted leaders who focussed first on what was best for patients, and then on how to make this financially possible.
That bolded statement (emphasis mine) gets to the core of the article: costs stem from doctors making decisions day in and day out. In the right circumstances, those doctors can pursue financial gain and justify it (falsely) in terms of patient care. Keep honest people honest, and your care costs drop precipitously.
Whom do we want in charge of managing the full complexity of medical care? We can turn to insurers (whether public or private), which have proved repeatedly that they can’t do it. Or we can turn to the local medical communities, which have proved that they can. But we have to choose someone—because, in much of the country, no one is in charge. And the result is the most wasteful and the least sustainable health-care system in the world.
If you want to be a responsible, informed healthcare consumer, Dr. Gawande’s article is VERY MUCH worth your time.
Merlin Mann has some great ideas about taking back control of your life. He emphasizes not seizing control, but constructively yielding to the unknown and managing the interplay between urgent and important tasks. Now I’ve gone and made it sound boring. AU CONTRAIRE! Merlin is endlessly entertaining! In this hilarious video, he talks about some of the ideas in the book he is writing, “Inbox Zero”:
You discover instead that you were scared of something that’s really easy to be scared of and not really that threatening. Once you get good at that [applying Inbox Zero], you discover there are much bigger things to be scared of — which is the extent to which you used to really rely on things like email to distract you from what you really should be doing.
I believe that — if you don’t believe that, I can’t help you. But if you think that might be true, if you think there might be times that you get much more involved in the thing that has got its hooks into you, rather than the thing that you really need to be doing… I really really believe that.
I also really believe in the lizard brain. I really believe — I don’t know if it’s the amygdala, I don’t know if it’s some part of the limbic system (I’ve not done research on this yet), but I do know that there’s an omnipresent voice in most of our heads that gives us terrible advice about how to avoid pain in the short term. And it’s almost always exactly the opposite of the advice we really need to get better at what we do. And so we obsess about “systems,” we obsess about this kind of tactical level of control stuff.
It’s one reason, to be honest, that Getting Things Done has started to drive me crazy, is the extent to which you have to know and control everything. Inbox Zero, I think, isn’t just about email — at the heart of it, Inbox Zero is about the amount of unknown, ambiguous, and incomplete items that you can tolerate in every part of your life. It’s not a system for smashing all of that down — it could be, I guess — but ultimately, I think Inbox Zero is about understanding what you can tolerate.
So what does that have to do with email?
If your sense of the unknown — if you can’t stand not knowing what’s in your inbox for more than 5 minutes, then that hook is into you — and you’re going to respond not to what you need to do with that stuff, but you’re going to be responding almost solely to that need to know the unknown. But then, once you know the unknown, you also generate the ambiguous, because you haven’t decided what to do with it. And if you’re really good and you figure out how to clarify the ambiguous, you still have to complete the incomplete.
And if all that stuff, the unknown, and the ambiguous, and the incomplete, all live in this same inbox — how is that not a recipe for insanity?
…
But I really believe it’s about learning to iterate between the effective use of your time and the effective application of your attention.
Apropos of none of the above concepts: if I could make my hair like his, I don’t think I would ever wear it any other way.
The 3 key parts of news stories you usually don’t get at Newsless.org makes so much sense to me. I always thought that I didn’t understand a lot of current events reporting because I wasn’t rabidly following every minor detail — that the onus was on me to put the article in context. In the aforelinked article, Matt Thompson argues that news becomes more engaging, more useful, better, when put into context. Thompson uses a recent, spectacular Atul Gawande article in the New Yorker as an example of journalism done right:
What Gawande did was to structure his search for truth as a quest narrative. Instead of hiding the details about how he comes by his information, he makes that the very focus. Along the way, he makes us apprentices in his quest for truth. We finish the article with a highly refined sense of how Gawande has acquired and verified the information he presents, as well as a framework for further inquiry of our own.
We get a lot more out of this type of reporting, in other words, than the vast majority of news stories, which leave these details out.
Readers want to be taken along on fact-gathering missions, not given a desiccated outline of the current facts. This change in journalistic style necessitates a certain liquidity of article length — the internet is the perfect medium in which to indulge journalist’s desire for a higher word count. Disseminate the present facts in the daily paper, then put those facts in context using the newspaper’s website.
How did we manage this one? “The United States is alone among developed nations with the absence of a universal health care system.”
90 percent of U.S. bills carry traces of cocaine:
Research presented this weekend reinforced previous findings that 90 percent of paper money circulating in U.S. cities contains traces of cocaine.
“When I was a young kid, my mom told me the dirtiest thing in the world is money,” said the researcher, Yuegang Zuo, professor of chemistry and biochemistry at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. “Mom is always right.”
The cocaine spreads from the money processing equipment at banks and binds to the green ink in our bills.
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