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.
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.
I think I need to take this quote from a post here in May and print it out:
“What have you learned from the Grant Study men?”
Vaillant’s response: “That the only thing that really
matters in life are your relationships to other people.”
This may be, both scientifically and emotionally, the best advice I have ever read.
This is a picture of Mykala and myself on Front Street in Old Lahaina Town, Maui. (If you want to get technical, we were standing right in the middle of this map). It was our last night in Hawaii; the last night of our honeymoon. We watched the sun set together, and this was one of the last pictures my camera took before the battery died. The honeymoon was perfect.
A truer picture of the employment crisis emerges when you
combine the number of people who are officially counted
as jobless with those who are working part time because
they can’t find full-time work and those in the so-called
labor market reserve — people who are not actively
looking for work (because they have become discouraged,
for example) but would take a job if one became
available.
The tally from those three categories is a
mind-boggling 30 million Americans — 19 percent of the
overall work force.
This new way of looking at unemployment seems to reveal a rather serious problem in our country — quite literally, there aren’t enough jobs. As Herbert describes, even more insidious is the problem of community cohesion: as jobless rates rise, communities fall apart. As a result, entire neighborhoods, towns, counties, rot from the inside out.
Dr. Oz, on learning to treat patients once you become a doctor:
When I went into medicine, I assumed, by the time I was
done with medical school, I would understand it all. We
think that if we study hard enough, we’ll understand how
the whole body works. Then you go into practice and
someone sits across from you, very sophisticated, smart
person, and they haven’t read the book you have read.
They have symptoms, and problems, and complaints that just
don’t fit what you’ve actually learned seems to be how the
body works. So you have two ways of dealing with that —
you can assume they’re crazy and ignore them, or you can
say “you know what, I think there’s something else going
on out there.” So, now, there are a lot of physicians who
seem to believe there is something to it [acupressure].
I’m not looking forward to not having all the answers, but I am looking forward to figuring out how to be a more effective helper of humans.
There is every reason to believe that the big, grab-bag
metro daily that mixes its news in with comics, advice
columns, obituaries and recipes, and undertakes an
expensive manufacturing and delivery operation each day
to put the product on the street, will pass into history.
Among the problems faced by Tierney and other publishers
is that many of the big thinkers on the periphery of
their industry — academics, Web entrepreneurs, former
journalists with the wisdom of hindsight — have already
moved on. They’re done with paper, ink, trucks, fuel, the
whole era.
In China, records of your schooling and achievements therein are tracked by a single, government-protected file. Sometimes, corrupt officials steal these files from poor, high achieving individuals. They then sell the files or use them for their own advancement. Victims are left with absolutely no recourse. They must find menial jobs far below their training. The article, Files Vanished, Young Chinese Lose the Future, goes on to explain what happened when a group of parents tried to petition for document recovery on their children’s behalf:
The government’s answer, they said, was to reject any
inquiry, place the graduates’ parents under police
surveillance and repeatedly detain them. Last February,
they said, five parents trying to petition the national
government were locked in an unofficial jail in Beijing
for nine days.
This problem is not an isolated incident, rather, it is a symptom of a political system that is profoundly broken. A system which, through the Great Firewall of China, is attempting to censor the entire internet. A system which governs 1.3 billion people. 20% of the Earth.
