Stopping the next Virus before it Starts

 While some people fear the Covid-19 vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna have been rushed to the market and perhaps developed too quickly, it's important to know they were basically designed by mid-January, a little more than a month after the first infection was identified in Wuhan. That's the way that immunology, virology, and medical research works. And we must remember that reality and use that model to plan for the next outbreaks long before they ever happen. That means like right now. 

Basically, we benefited from the research which was begun back in the early 2000s in response to the SARS and MERS outbreaks, which were also coronaviruses, or of a similar background. Unlike the yearly flu vaccines the medical community develops in response to different influenza strains that arise each year, the Covid antidotes don't use weakened or dead viruses but instead rely on the genetic sequence and train our bodies to recognize and nullify the virus whenever encountered. 

And with that concept, the medical community led by the CDC, NIH, and WHO must invest in research to predict future threats and develop vaccines that can be adapted for whatever virus arises. That sort of planning and preparation will of course require coordinated national and international response teams funded by governments, foundations, and pharmaceutical companies. For that to happen we need strong leadership and trust in the medical community. Let's hope that happens.

Losing Weight & Getting in Shape during the Pandemic

I lost weight and improved my fitness during the pandemic, especially during the height of quarantine. And apparently that's an anomaly as I'm learning through reports of Weight Gain & Stress Eating in the Pandemic. The need for comfort food and the isolation and extended downtime we've all experienced since early last March have led to a new phenomenon -- "the pandemic fifteen." But that wasn't my experience, and the key to it was sticking to routines. 

I am truly a creature of habit, and I really depend on my rituals to keep me sane. So, when the quarantine hit, and with it the urge to cocoon with Netflix, booze, and baked goods, I knew I needed to stick to my habits if I was going to avoid weight gain and less fitness. And, that was all the more necessary with the rise of "Zoom Happy Hours," which I joined even when they happened on nights I normally don't drink. I'm mostly a weekend imbiber, so even a glass of wine on a Wednesday or Thursday is usually a sign of giving in to temptation or needing a stress reliever after a tense day. 

So, in quarantine and since then, I have limited adult beverages and sweets to a Thursday-Sunday window. And I start the week with an intermittent fast on Mondays and Tuesday -- so just lunch and dinner. And I ease back into a bit of indulgence by Thursday. By Friday night, all bets are off, though only after I've completed a workout. And working out became a new challenge when the gym and pools closed down. My workouts are my own cross-fit interval training on Tuesday and Wednesday. I take Mondays and Thursdays off, but I always get in 2-3 miles of walking on those days -- another must during quarantine because I was used to get 10-14K steps a day on my 82-acre school campus.

So, the key was routine. I just set a plan and willed myself to it. It actually brought and kept a sense of normalcy in my life, and I ended losing 4-5 pounds and feeling better.

Rita Moreno Writes Opposite-Handed

 In this week's edition of Spry Magazine, an incredibly spry and zestful 89-year-old Rita Moreno offers tips on how she stays so fit and mentally sharp. Beyond playing a lot of games like Scrabble and Rummicube, which I love, she also said:

I do things with my opposite hand as well. I write with my left hand at least three times a week. When I first started it as a brain exercise, it looked like the handwriting of a psychotic person. But I’m very good at it now, and it’s rather pretty handwriting. At least four times a week ...

That activity really intrigued and impressed me, and it's something I want to try and add into my life. For the past year or so, I have been trying to learn the piano, and in the early days, I was amazed at how hard I had to think and concentrate on my fingers. As the movements became more familiar, I could feel my mind changing just a bit. Drawing and painting has had the same effect, especially because I hadn't really done either since elementary school. 

The idea of writing opposite handed reminded me of a goal or desire to improve my normal handwriting, and perhaps even "try my hand" at calligraphy and graphic design. These are all great activities to, of course, stay mentally sharp as we age; but equally importantly they are also ways to enrich our lives. So, I am going to try and remember to do more of this.

Living Artfully & the Wisdom of Georgia O'Keefe

 For a while now, I have known I would like to have more art in my life, in my consciousness, in the way I view the world. Living artfully has been a goal for a few years now, and to that end I've tried to bring more art into my life and into the world. I'm trying to play piano, I have a sketch book, and (until the pandemic hit last March), I started taking art classes again for the first time since probably elementary school. And looking to and learning about artists is a key to help us see the world like an artist and live artfully. Websites like Artsy are great places for this guidance, such as "How to be an Artist, according to Georgia O'Keefe."

As I look with admiration, awe, reverence, (and yes even a bit of envy), I know its naive to believe the works are in any way effortless. They are a lot of effort, and, as O'Keefe notes, "the notion that you can make [or be] an artist overnight is a fallacy." Great artists don't just happen with a flash of brilliance but instead are created through the school of experience. O'Keefe was a great model, an artist who did it all naturally, yet worked incredibly hard at it. And the best advice she had was open our eyes and observe the world with a passion and intensity.

I've always loved the idea of "seeing the world like an artist," and I always reveled in the fruits of the way artists see the world. 

Math Rock Music - Yep, it's a thing

 I thought I knew quite a bit about rock music, especially in terms of genre (though I'm still looking for a clear difference between country and indie folk music - other than I know it when I hear it). But in terms of music trivia, I can still learn new things, as I did while reading a great piece of Gen X era cultural commentary. Jason Diamond, a pop culture critic in Brooklyn, has written The Sprawl: Reconsidering the Weird American Suburbs, and having grown up in the Chicago suburbs which I know well, he offers an insightful take on something so seemingly innocuous we forget its a thing, except perhaps around election time. 

In the course of looking back on one neighborhood of his youth, specifically the one that coincided with the end of his parents marriage and questions about what could have been, Diamond mentions the 90s indie band American Football as the perfect soundtrack for driving old streets of Buffalo Grove, IL and waxing nostalgic about a time and place that doesn't exist anymore. One of the band's founders was from BG, and the band formed downstate in Urbana, home to the University of Illinois. Recognizing the name, but not being able to place the sound, I looked into the band and ran across the a reference to them as a prime example of the sub-genre "math rock." That was intriguing, and digging into it was fun.

With a strong connection to the 90s sub-genre "emo," math rock is distinctive for its unique rhythms and time signatures. So, rather than the standard four beats per measure, or 4/4 time, math rock might groove on something odd such as 7/8 or even 13/8 time, which is really funky to think about but makes a lot of sense when you listen to some songs. The songs also don't necessary follow the verse-chorus-bridge structure, and listening to it, as the song wanders its way through "rhythmically complex" structures, can be an adventure. For me, the quirky guitar riffs and lyric runs just seem to evoke the 90s.

So, math rock. Yep, it's a thing.

In Parasite, Both Families are Dysfunctional

 Over Thanksgiving Week, we re-watched last year's best film, Bong Joon-ho's absurdist tragi-comedy Parasite, and that led to some pretty deep dinner discussion about our perceptions of the two Korean families and about BJH's thematic intentions. Our family was split on both those issues, with my wife and daughter viewing the Kim's quite negatively while my son and I argued that the Park family is equally flawed, if not more so.

Taking from the title and the entire point of the film: both families are parasites.

It's all too easy to blame the lower class Kims for their crass behavior in using and exploiting the incredibly gullible and uber-wealthy Parks. That's not the point -- the social stratification of Korean society, which is brilliantly portrayed by the high-low living arrangements, is the target of the dark satire and criticism. Yes, the Kims are basically criminals and con artists, exploiting every opportunity from stealing the wi-fi of their upstairs neighbors to conning their way into jobs for the full family in the Park's upper-class world. And their inability to restrain themselves in any way to simply hold down what may be seen as "good jobs they should be thankful for" is terribly sad. Even more tragic is how their choices ultimately lead to the death of their oldest daughter and the virtual imprisonment of the father. They are not completely sympathetic characters -- though, it's worth noting they are the protagonists and clearly set up as anti-heroes. We are not looking for them to fail and lose their jobs. And we can't look away from their incredibly clever but ultimately deceptive and amoral abuse of their opportunities.

And, of course, it's all too easy to see the Parks as simple innocent victims of the Kims' criminality, culminating in the bloody and senseless murder of Mr. Park by the psychotic husband of the former housekeeper who was shamelessly pushed out of her job by the Kims. Yet the Parks are equally morally bankrupt, symbolic of a careless oligarchy which is shamelessly aloof to the pathetic conditions of the working class. Mrs. Park is certainly the "beautiful little fool" that Daisy Buchanan hoped to raise, though her quickly contemptuous judgment of others is not at all flattering. And it's laughable how she falsely claims to value relationships and trusting people she knows when the Kims are able to so quickly win her trust and manipulate her choices. The Parks are basically a Korean version of Fitzgerald's Tom and Daisy Buchanan. Their shallow, self-absorbed egotism and insensitivity are nowhere more blatant than the decision to host a truly ostentatious and completely unnecessary birthday party for their son on the day after a massive rainstorm has left the Kims and thousands of Seoul's most vulnerable homeless, living in a makeshift shelter in a high school gym.

The Kims are tragic figures not only for their poverty and vulnerable status in life, but also because their quick wits and talents of chicanery are wasted by their limited opportunities and their natural inclination to simply pursue short term gains. They are all incredibly smart and talented in some areas, for their guile is truly an admirable business skill. Yet Korean society will never allow them to rise, as evidenced by how the son will never get into a university, despite being as smart and knowledgeable as his friend, and his sister will never use her skills in art, design, and even psychology for anything other than the next con. How sad that her parents can only wonder at how "she'd make a great con artist." Viewers would be naive to try and project educated, upper-middle class "virtues," inclinations, and choices onto people who have not had the benefits and supports to cultivate such prudence. The Kims are, of course, going to simply ride this job opportunity for as long as possible, milking every possible perk, even to the point of excessively drinking the Park's expensive whiskies, because they may never get this chance again, and life has taught them to seize what they can in the moment. That's the lesson of the streets; that's the necessity and survival instinct of people who must scam to get by.

The Parks are by contrast so flawed in their emotional intelligence and basic skills of decision making that viewers have to question and ultimately conclude their status in life can only be seen as a perk of privilege that they were obviously born into. Mrs. Park is a neurotic mess of insecurity, even as she seeks to project the other, and she is a complete failure as a parent, though that would seem to be her only role and responsibility. And Mr. Park is very clear in his rigid adherence to social rules established by birth and career status, noting how he just can't accept people who "cross the lines." The Kims and all the working class people had better know their place, and he is quick to make clear how expendable they are. His attitude toward his previous driver and Mr. Kim expose just how dismissive he is toward people in his employ, even as he pretends to care about them as human beings. His disdainful behavior is nowhere more clear than in the moments before his death when he chats with Mr. Kim about the plan to surprise his son, but then feels the need to passively threaten Mr. Kim with his job for appearing disinterested in playing such games. He is a driver, not a personal servant for the amusement of the Park family, and he is working on his day off, following the complete destruction of his home in the storm. This is to say nothing of Mr. Park hysterically screaming at Kim to come drive his family to safety as Kim's daughter lay there dying. It's the height of tragic absurdity.

Bong Joon-ho crafted a scathingly brilliant jeuvenalian satire of disparities in Korean socio-economic stratification, and his filming of the discrepancies exposes just how far apart yet eerily close these two families are. For even deeper analysis of this dichotomy, check out this explication of the film by writer Chadwick Jenkins for Pop Matters:  Bong Joon-ho's Parasite & the Geometry of Suffering.

Unpacking the Back: What's Really Going on in Schools?

Are American schools failing with students falling further and further behind, or is public education still the great American success story? The answer, of course, is YES.

For as long as we’ve had schools in the United States, we have provided high quality education among the best in the world to many students while at the same time failing to meet the basic educational needs of many others. And we have been criticizing and complaining about those schools for just as long.

Education News Resources:

Ed-Week

Chalkbeat & Chalkbeat Colorado

The Hechinger Report

Real Clear Education

Education Reporters, Writers, Critics:

Valerie Strauss - The Answer Sheet of the Washington Post

Dana Goldstein

Diane Ravitch

Michael Petrilli of the Fordham Institute

Rick Hess of the American Enterprise Institute

Joanne Jacobs - education blogger - Linking & Thinking on Education

TED Talks

Rita Pierson -- "Every Child Needs a Champion"

Chimamanda Adichie -- "The Danger of a Single Story" 

Mike Rowe -- "Learning from Dirty Jobs"

Sir Ken Robinson -- "Do Schools Kill Creativity?" 

Linda Cliatt-Wayman -- "How to Fix a Broken School: Lead Fearlessly, Love Hard"

Books to Read

Why Johnny Can't Read - Rudolph Flesch

Left Back: A Century of Failed School Reform -- Diane Ravitch

Real Education -- Charles Murray

In Defense of a Liberal Education -- Fareed Zakaria

I Read It, But I Don't Get It -- Cris Tovani

Other Information

Education Levels in the United States

Understanding Poverty's Role in PISA Test Scores

America's Satisfaction Levels with Education

The Shrinking of the Liberal Arts

Baseball Experiment & Background Knowledge in Reading

Family & Environment and Education Achievement

The Importance of Social-Emotional Learning

Racial Bias in Grading and Learning

The Case Against Zero in Grading 

The Importance of Culturally Responsive Education

Jack Kemp: "The Bleeding Heart Conservative"

In the early 1980s, my political coming-of-age coincided with the Reagan Era and the emergence, as well as eventual dominance in the GOP, of supply-side thinking. One of the earliest memories I have of being intrigued by a politician outside my electoral area was a key figure in those two historical events. Jack Kemp was the original compassionate conservative, long before the late 90s led George W Bush to both need and smoothly co-opt the qualifier. And in 1987-88 when I was becoming politically active and ready to participate and vote in my first presidential election, Jack Kemp was the Republican who inspired and intrigued me. Jack Kemp was a man who preached and sought prosperity for all Americans, and truly pursued policies based on that idealistic, albeit somewhat naive, belief and plan. It was never about political power or winning elections or appealing to a segment of the electorate. Kemp was a true evangelist for the American Dream. Everything he did was about pursing the Kemp Doctrine: "upward mobility, economic opportunity, cultural diversity, and racial justice." He was a politician who was "principled, dynamic, positive, cheerful, inclusive, bipartisan, optimistic, unorthodox, disposed to compromise .... interested in ideas and action, not political tactics or personal attacks." Jack Kemp was an American. And we can use another Republican like him.

Oligarchy, Conservatism, & the Fading Sense of Community

Our community is not as strong, I fear, as it once was because our society is becoming less made up of communities. Two interesting columns in my paper this morning caught my eye -- the first was a piece on the economy from progressive writer Fared Manjoo who observes: Even in the Pandemic, the Billionaires are Winning. The sad irony of the contemporary economy is that amidst massive economic and public health losses due to the Covid-19 health crisis, the stock market continues to surge, and investors reap incredible financial gains. The Walmart trio has increased their own personal wealth  by a staggering $47 billion just since March when for most people the world fell apart. The CEO of Zoom has gone from a net worth of $1 billion to nearly $20 billion. And Jeff Bezos, the world's wealthiest man, has increased his fortune to $182 billion. Now, purely based on market forces and valuations, these people have not so radically improved the world, the economy, their product, the lives of millions, the benefits of their workers, or most notably, their communities. 

And that's just rather unseemly to me.

The other column catching my attention aligns with the increasing disappointment and utter bafflement at the workings of the GOP by those of us who might describe ourselves as conservative but not Republican. David Brooks, a never Trumper and a true Burkean conservative, opines about The Rotting of the Republican Mind. Brooks' criticisms, like those of people such as David French and Jay Nordinger, are focused on the moral and ethical capitulation of the contemporary GOP, a condition that writer and commentator of the tech revolution Kurt Anderson would hearken back to the 1980s, but that I would more link to the mid 90s and the rise of Newt Gingrich and Grover Norquist. Basically, the values of Burke and Kirk about the importance of stability in society based on moral principals and a shared sense of community have been abandoned for a political platform that is more around an agenda of "holding on to what's mine."

Granted, in a free, or more accurately, mixed-market capitalist system, the opportunity for the investor class to amass such wealth is certainly within their rights, so to speak. That doesn't, however, mean that they should with little regard to the system as a whole. I still hearken back to the Kempian idea of enterprise zones that would in theory help all boats rise. The current financial structure doesn't support that, and it exposes the flaw in Kemp's supply-side faith. He actually believed the suppliers would invest in the idea of broadening the prosperity and increasing the size of the pie. But that has not happened, and our communities have become increasingly stratified as wealth and power become increasingly concentrated in a oligarchic plutocracy.

What to do? You can’t argue people out of paranoia. If you try to point out factual errors, you only entrench false belief. The only solution is to reduce the distrust and anxiety that is the seedbed of this thinking. That can only be done first by contact, reducing the social chasm between the members of the epistemic regime and those who feel so alienated from it. And second, it can be done by policy, by making life more secure for those without a college degree.

Rebuilding trust is, obviously, the work of a generation.

Running is Good for your Knees

I've never understood or agreed with people who don't run because it "hurts the knees." Or worse, they don't run anymore because being a runner in high school and/or college "ruined their knees." If running hurts your knees, it's likely you're just doing it wrong. The "heel strike" is the primary cause of pain. Runners, true runners, run on the balls of their feet, and it's the quads and calf muscles that absorb the shock. Thus, the knee is not the target of force in running. Knees should have little to do with it. And, these days there is an ever-growing body of research that supports the idea that running is actually good for your knees. Gretchen Reynolds of the New York Times spotlights the research that speculates running not only won't ruin your knees but is actually good for them, including the idea that it may prompt cartilage self repair.

Could running actually be good for your knees?

That idea is at the heart of a fascinating new study of the differing effects of running and walking on the knee joint. Using motion capture and sophisticated computer modeling, the study confirms that running pummels knees more than walking does. But in the process, the authors conclude, running likely also fortifies and bulks up the cartilage, the rubbery tissue that cushions the ends of bones. The findings raise the beguiling possibility that, instead of harming knees, running might fortify them and help to stave off knee arthritis.

A Wonderful Little Piano Memoir

Sometimes reading about someone else's passion can be just the key to discovering your own. In what Publisher's Weekly calls "a warmhearted insight into a private Paris" an American expat writer Thad Carhart shares his rediscovery of the piano later in life and also provides a window on a side of Paris few outsiders will ever know. A year ago I purchased a keyboard after years of appreciating from afar the beauty of the only instrument that can also serve as a piece of fine art furnishing. Having grown up with a piano in the house but never having learned to play, I decided that as part of a desire to live more artfully, I wanted to learn to play. The piano instructor at my school gave me a few tips, handing me the introductory manual for his beginners piano class, and for the past year for maybe an hour a week, I have fooled around on the piano. Thad Carhart's beautiful gem of a memoir The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: Discovering a Forgotten Passion in a Paris Atelier has inspired me to continue my practice with the hopes of someday being able to fill my house with something approaching music. I really loved this little book as a meditation on art and life.

Somewhere Else & Back

In the summer after my college graduation, I interviewed for a teaching job at my former high school in the small town of Alton, IL, and then I promptly moved eight thousand miles across the world to teach English at a buxiban, or “cram school,” in Taipei, Taiwan. It was one of the boldest moves I ever took, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. Of course, I had help in the choice, specifically because the young woman I was slowly falling in love with was heading to Taiwan to teach, and I didn’t really have any other plans. It was 1992, and English teaching jobs weren’t exactly falling into my lap, not that I was searching too diligently. The ‘91 recession and state spending cuts didn’t help either. And my wife’s former roommate, who was Taiwanese, was returning home to live with her parents and mentioned the idea of us teaching there. So, after a visit to the Educational Placement Office of the University of Illinois, where we found a rather basic flyer offering teaching positions in Taipei at the Hess Language School, Julie and I bought our tickets and boarded a plane. 

Since that time in Southeast Asia, the idea of moving abroad has been one of the most consistent pieces of advice and encouragement I give my students: go somewhere else for a little while. Take leave of your comfort zone and flee the familiar. Get out of your country; even if you love, leave it. This leap of faith may simply be a semester abroad during school, or it could be a work-study program or a job-swap. It might be a single gig for your company or a one-year appointment. Whatever it is, when the opportunity to travel is available, take it. My wife and I ended up staying in Taiwan for nearly five years, teaching and traveling the world. We went to Honk Kong for weekends, lived a month in a bungalow on the Greek isle of Paros, spent a week surfing and lounging on Bali, and got engaged in the botanical garden of Rome. Eventually, we moved back to the United States and lived a couple years in the city of Chicago, where she worked as a pastry chef and I taught middle school. Moving home after time abroad was so refreshing, and the Midwest became new again.

When we moved to Taiwan, one of the first books I read was Peter Mayle’s best-selling memoir A Year in Provence, in which he recounts moving to the south of France in his fifties. It was the perfect complement to our journey, a bemused and whimsical reflection on his decision to uproot himself and purchase an old house in the south of France. And about that time I was learning of others my age who were willing to travel for work and adventure. An old friend took a job out of college driving one of the Oscar Meyer Weiner-mobiles around the country, a year-long gig she parlayed into a job as entertainment guide and travel writer on a luxury cruise ship. She introduced me to a twenty-three old coworker who just happened to have “the greatest job ever” as the ship’s golf pro, which basically consisted of living for free while giving golf lessons at the ship's simulator and accompanying wealthy retirees for rounds at exclusive exotic resorts around the world. That gig might only be bested by news of an old fraternity buddy who took a job as a scuba instructor on a private resort island owned by a huge cruise ship company. Some friends spent summers working for the forestry industry planting saplings in Canada, and others camped and hiked around Alaska, supporting themselves in the salmon canneries. You can imagine which of these jobs was the least fulfilling but most memorable by smell alone. Last year I spent a couple weeks in Australia, exploring Sydney and the Gold Coast, visiting a friend who’d also said yes when his tech company asked him to move his family “Down Under” for a short-term assignment. In all, the people willing to take a chance on going somewhere else have almost always returned home with wonderful memories and few regrets about their decision to go somewhere else.

In an essay from his first book All I Need to Know about Life I Learned in Kindergarten, Robert Fulghum wrote about lessons he’s learned from a lifetime on the move, having lived thirty-seven places in fifty-one years. In one of his many reflections, he described picking up a couple hitchhikers who were holding a sign “Somewhere Else and Back,” a slight twist on the discontented sign “Anywhere But Here” mentality he recalled from the Sixties. They told him they actually liked their home, but they just wanted to be “somewhere else for a while.” It’s not an uncommon feeling, Fulghum notes, for people throughout history. The nomadic itch has always been part of man’s collective DNA. For much of his later adult life, Fulghum and his wife have divided their time between a houseboat in Seattle and the island of Crete, and both places are equally home to him, albeit in different ways.

Granted, I know many of the stories I share seem to come with a bit of privilege. Many young people simply don’t have the option, opportunity, or luxury of uprooting themselves for a year or more of adventure. However, looking outside our comfort zone for opportunities is rarely bad advice, even if most people aren’t willing or able to take the chance. I grew up in southern Illinois on the banks of the Mississippi, and I knew of people who had never crossed the river into St. Louis. I’ve also lived for years in Denver, and I know of people who have never ventured the forty-minutes west into the Rocky Mountains. In reality, most Americans settle within twenty miles of where they grew up. And the idea of having roots and “staying put” as Scott Russell Sanders wrote is an admirable and perhaps even preferable mindset to the endless migration of people who Salman Rushdie said “root themselves in ideas rather than places” and who Pico Iyer called “global souls.” Certainly, settling down is a goal for most, for that’s how a house becomes a home, and our homes become communities. That said, I will still always recommend to my students the simple idea of “somewhere else” as a worthwhile destination.