Arthritis

So I visited my new primary care physician yesterday, a very nice young woman of South Asian descent. Unfortunately she is -- like all PCPs these days -- harried by the system and pressed for time, which drives home the point that we are all ultimately our own doctors, the managers and guardians of our own health. But in half an hour she did an admirable job in getting up to speed on where I was on a broad range of health issues, despite the fact that my health records had not been updated in her system (I should have had them faxed weeks earlier instead of one week, admittedly my bad).

One thing we did get done was I some xrays of my problem knee, which discovered some arthritis, or " Mild tricompartmental, medial compartment predominant, left knee osteoarthrosis." More precisely even, 

"LEFT knee: No acute fracture or dislocation. Tricompartmental osteophytosis with tibial spine spurring. Mild medial tibiofemoral joint space narrowing. No joint effusion.

RIGHT knee: Limited views of the right knee demonstrate tricompartmental osteophytosis with tibial spine spurring. Minimal medial femorotibial compartment joint space narrowing. No acute fracture or dislocation.

Honestly I'm not sure what it all means or what I do going forward. It sounds less bad than a torn miniscus or patellar tendinitis, AKA "jumper's knee", which is what I thought must be going on. I will have to figure this out talking to friends and neighbors who are doctors. Certainly I must consider myself fortunate to have gone this far in life without an ACL tear.

Two assasinations in one day

Listening to These Truths by Jill Lepore in the car these days, and just as I got home (spoiler alert) John Wilkes Boothe had just shot and killed Lincoln. Then, in the evening, I watched The Crown, and JFK got killed. It was rather odd, and profoundly moving, to experience both within 5 short hours of one another, and a reminder that, come what may, a peaceful of transfer of power between Presidential administrations is the best thing we can hope for.

The Invention of Nature

Just polished off Andrea Wulf's The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World. Alexander von Humboldt was a scientific polymath and force of nature (pun intended) whose life spanned from the late 18th to much of the 19th Century (1769-1859), which ain't chopped liver for back then. I was originally intrigued by this book because Alexander was the brother of Wilhelm von Humboldt, whom I knew as a great philologist from back then, but who it turns out was also a major diplomat and (it turns out) founder of the University of Berlin, which became the model for the western university as we know it.

So Alexander was an impressive and intense figure, whose travels through first South America and later Russia and writings thereupon formed the basis and inspiration for a whole lot of modern science, especially ecology and geology etc., less about physics and chemistry etc. More macro than micro.

But back then there weren't well or clearly defined disciplines, because there weren't institutions (either educational or governmental-policy forming) within which to house and cultivate them. It was pretty much an open field, and it took obsessive, driven dynamos like Alexander von Humboldt (and Darwin) to call them into being with their herculean efforts and promotion of their endeavor. Von Humboldt was apparently a great promoter of other scientists, an institution and discipline-builder himself (reminiscent of what Norman Borlaug did later in Mexico, Pakistan, and India).

Wulf's book won a ton of prizes, and perhaps rightly so for resurrecting a figure largely forgotten in the West (though less so in Latin America. I was reminded of the book in Guanajuato, Mexico in April when I saw a street named after Humboldt. Admittedly, we have Humboldt County, California itself well-known in my day at least for the quality of weed grown there). But ultimately I think it's a good but not quite great book, because she spends a little too much time pumping up Humboldt as the ur-thinker whose ideas ultimately gave rise to our notions of holistic environmentalism. She may be right about that, but she harped on it a little too much. The task of the historian is, I think, only partly to tie the past to the present. It is just important to dwell in the past as such, and I could have used a little more of that.

But I'm glad I read it.

Changing the accents

Every weekday morning, as part of my "transition into the day," I read a short piece by a guy who has been around the wealth management world for many decades and has been writing more or less weekly in various places: newsletters, publications, etc. In so doing he has evolved a rather consistent and reasonable way of thinking about markets, economics, people, etc.

He falls to the right of me on the political spectrum. In what I read today (written in 2003), a piece concerning tax policy and election cycles, he made some snarky reference to the fact that his family makes a lot of money because it works its butt off. Affluent people often talk like this, framing themselves as the victims of tax policy.

But who can blame them, as Democrats (and similar parties worldwide) often frame the need for tax hikes in terms of class struggle? But it would be interesting to see Democrats reframe this in Kennedyesque language ("Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country") or even parable of the talents language ("Of those to whom much is given, much is asked"). Democrats could acknowledge and express gratitude to those who pay a lot in taxes, but not grovel before them, or at least figure out how to walk a middle road.

Ultimately, and this is something I think about a lot, so I'm sure I've blogged about it recently, we are trying to figure out what's the optimal way of allocating capital towards broadly construed goods: education, health, productivity, happiness. What is the best allocator: state or markets/private citizens? Obviously, the answer differs by the nature of the specific good in question and the specific historic circumstances and culture around it in a time and place, so we never find one answer.

But the constant vilification of a class makes things difficult. In the present, for example, if it comes down to a fight between Zuckerberg and Warren, who do we think wins? The sad truth of the matter is that it may well be Trump.

The Weight of the Crown

Alone amongst my family, I have kept on watching The Crown off and on, in between episodes of things I watch with the rest of them of shows involving more guns and guffaws. The show is indeed slow. Its slowness would seem to derive from the fact that, at base, it has but one theme: the weight of the crown, and what that means for the Queen and her family, but mostly for the Queen herself; the tension of being at once sovereign and human, and at times the added pressure being sovereign and woman.

It does sound boring, and is in fact not long on car chases. One would not think that this theme could be strung out successfully over many episodes, that there were so many facets to it. But there are.

The most recent episode I watched concerned the Edward VIII's desire to return to public life, which coincides in the episode (and presumably in real life) with the discovery that he had been in league with Hitler in a variety of ways. Should Elizabeth forgive him and let him serve the government? At the same time Billy Graham is touring through Britain and giving sermons to stadiums, and Elizabeth, in distinction to most of the rest of the snooty royals, refuses to act as if he is an unwashed commoner. She watches his sermons and hears some of his message. Again, she is at once sovereign and human.

Unlike most people, however, she can just snap her fingers and he'll come visit, which she does, and he does, twice. The second time, it is for advice, as she ponders what to do with her dandy, barely repentant fascist uncle. And Elizabeth says to Graham, basically: "I'm in a tough position, as the head of the church. There's no one between me and God."

So now the stage has shifted, because now she has reframed the issue and it's not about sovereign/human, but about divine/human, and we are back on familiar territory, because we are thinking in not just Christian (God/man) terms but Socratic (ideal/real) or even pre-Socratic (one/many) ones.

But we've really been there the whole time, which is why the show has been more or less relatable from the beginning, because it has foregrounded the fact that Elizabeth, while a clever and earnest girl, was never a rocket scientist. She was a good girl -- Gallant to Margaret's Goofus -- but she also enjoys a romp between the sheets with the dashing if debauched and philandering Phillip and is not above a petty snit now and again. But she tries. Over and over again she wrestles with tough questions as the camera lingers on her -- aided in this act by Claire Foy's good looks.

And in fact, this very ordinariness is the key to her appeal and her power. Although anointed by God and easy on the eye, Elizabeth is not very special. Like Kafka's Josephine the Mouse Singer,* Elizabeth's voice is scarcely distinguishable from that of her subjects, a fact that is ultimately not lost on her, but she labors diligently to justify the attention paid to her.

It must be said The Crown, at least through the first two seasons, is mighty white. The show deals with questions of gender ever so slightly, and class too, and there are allusions to gayness here or there, and there are scenes of Philip and his crew ogling and then bedding African and Polynesian women, which comes back to bite him, and around the time of the Suez crisis there's a pretty frank admission of the UK's dependence on oil seized by force, but by and large the first couple of seasons float in that blissful time before the colonial repressed has returned. So it is easy for things to float along at a high level of abstraction, because these questions of ruler and subject, man and God, one and many are being worked out amongst a bunch of people and supernatural entities who, in their minds' eyes, look like one another. By and large this is the realm of the Masterpiece Theater genre from which The Crown jumps off, a comfortable and scenic world in which affluent, liberal and educated audiences can look at pretty things and consider an issue or two before getting ready for the work week. It will be interesting to see if the upcoming seasons can open up and process more complexity. I ain't saying it's easy.










*Franz Kafka, "Josephine the Songstress", If, then, if it were to be true that Josephine doesn't sing but just whistles, and indeed, as it seems to me, that her whistling barely exceeds the bounds of the ordinary, that really her powers in whistling don't even extend into the triumphant sort mentioned earlier whereas the whistling of our typical laborer, someone who is quite down to earth and who whistles the whole day long without any particular effort, that this just goes hand in hand with his earthly travails, well, if all of this were to be true then, indeed, Josephine's purported artistry would be refuted-but now, first and foremost, now we'd have to face up to this riddle as to why it is that her performances are so electrifying! And really, when you get right down to it, it's not merely whistling, this is not everything that Josephine exhibits in her performances-you need only place yourself in the back of the auditorium and listen attentively... or, better yet, test this out in the following manner: if Josephine is singing amongst a group of others and if you should give yourself the task of making her voice out from amongst these others then without fail you won't be able to distinguish anything else but a typical, middle-of-the-road sort of whistling that, at the most, is a bit sweeter or somehow softer and this is the only distinguishing characteristic that you might hear.

Political space to breathe

Around 6:15 the other day as I was nudging my way out onto 40 on the way home, I weaseled my way to the left most lane, as I always do, as in the absence of some mishap on the left-hand shoulder of the road, it unclogs and moves most quickly as the 40/Durham Highway interchange processes all the rush-hour volume that gets dumped onto it by RTP feeders. Just soon as I made it into the lane, I saw a black pick-up truck with decorative rims and a pretty aggressive exhaust tuning trying to nudge its way in front of me.

Now, ethically I could have no problem with what the guy was trying to do. He was doing exactly, 100% the same thing I had just done. But culturally it was pretty clear that we were part of different tribes, me in my "ricer" Prius, he in his potential coal-roller truck. Initially, my vestigial northeastern "fuck that guy this is my lane" instinct kicked in, and I was going to adjust my speed to not let the guy in front of me while not making eye contact in classic New Jersey fashion.

Instead, I just let the guy in. And he gunned his engine (just to accelerate) and it gave a throaty growl as he pulled in in front of me, and he gave a friendly wave. Which surprised me.

Time was, this was how things worked across the cultural divide. People from town and country, or from different walks of life, could acknowledge our differences and operate civilly with one another. And by the time we have made eye contact with one another and started talking, should we choose to, it usually goes that way now. But we have to make the eye contact and begin talking.

But I must admit that this might be my white male gentile privilege talking. It is relatively easy for me to shift into this neutral discursive gear, because I'm not really threatened by anything the Right is doing. Far from it, in fact, they are defending my turf for me, though I know in the abstract I don't want them to and it is wrong. They aren't talking about taking away my ability to make birth control decisions. Even global warming: I live inland and have enough money to figure out how to take evasive action from the worst of the initial effects.

So maybe it is just easier for me to dial it back, play nice, and try to see their perspective and engage productively. Perhaps that's the definition of snowflake.

Corporation as State

A couple of days back the Wall Street Journal ran a story about how Google was restricting access to its app store to apps that serve up payday loans with rates in excess of 36%. This is unquestionably a policy goal that I support, and people near and dear to me and many of our readers have fought hard to enact similar laws and put in place regulatory bodies to implement them.

In general I am supportive of investment strategies and corporate initiatives that are aligned with my values. But at the same time I have to admit that it is regrettable that the private sector is being called in to forward what is essentially the promotion of the type of public goods that are more typically thought of as being the domain of government.

Because what about if companies were pursuing "public goods" with which I disagreed? I suppose, in some sense, they often are. Chick Fil A closes on Sundays and their founders support a wide range of Christian charities with which I disagree, Cook Out plays Christian music and has Bible quotes on its soda cups, etc -- but mostly it harms me through its relentless upselling of add ons (charging for slaw, for example). Then there are all the corporate sponsors of the NRA. I guess the difference there is that it's very easy to opt out of those if you don't want to support, whereas Google's App store is pretty much where you go if you want an Android app. Though I doubt that Payday lenders are being cut out of Google search, so one could find them through a browser if not an app.

Would it be preferable if government entities focused on public goods, while private ones tried to advance their own private aims exclusively? I suppose it's hard to legislate the distinction between public and private goals.

Certainly if a company had a true monopoly position it would be questionable to let it have too much power enacting social policies. But we're not quite there yet.

Apologies for the rambling. It happens.

Guy blowing leaves in street

As I was pulling out of my neighborhood this morning there was a guy with big headphones on and a powerful blower, out blowing leaves and pine needles from the street in front of his house. From the street, mind you, not from his yard. I don't know where he thought he was going to blow them to. There weren't many of them to start with, because he doesn't have that many trees in his yard.

His blower, of course, was a two-stroke. I must say, I was kind of appalled. I mean, WTAF. The biomass needs to go somewhere, and the last thing we need is some underemployed yard Rambo out there cleaning the streets with a fine-toothed comb.

I am the first to admit that he is engaged in an order-imposing behavior akin to my own driveway sweeping and roof-cleaning, so recently documented. But I don't use a super loud, high emissions blower, and I use my electric one very sparingly, out of consideration for my neighbors eardrums.

I did not, however, accost him, much though I would have liked to.

A little "progress"

Yesterday between my beloved post-prandial Saturday nap and Maeda Galinsky's memorial service I spent some time in the driveway raking and sweeping up leaves in advance of the much-anticipated rain we are finally getting today. Afterwards, as the sun was going down and I was sitting at my desk not doing much of anything, I bucked up and headed for the roof. As I said some months ago, Marvin had given me the idea that the only way we were going to get the damned thing clean was with a bucket of diluted "outdoor bleach" and rags.

But of course, a metal roof is hot as fuck in the summer. So I wasn't doing it then. And now is the time of year when, even as the weather moderates, the days grow shorter by the day -- a minute a day, quoth Sergei and Larry. So daylight is precious.

Nevertheless, up I went with rag and bucket. As you would suspect, it's not quite as glamorous as it sounds, and requires some careful dancing. You have to plan carefully not to step on an area you just washed (I could go on)... in short, it was hard, and it was very difficult to get much done.

But I made a meaningful if incomplete dent in the really dirtiest area and, objectively, I got a lot of dirt off the roof. Intrinsically, therefore, I made progress, if not a ton. My arms were tired. And I figured out that, while this probably isn't the absolute best approach to cleaning a metal roof, it is, like democracy, the worst approach except for the alternatives. Plus it's always nice to be up on the roof to look down the hill at the lake.

At the end of the day, I felt good for having done a little something, and slept well.

Narrow and wide

All too many of Natalie's courses seem interdisciplinary in nature (history, literature, art, sociology...) and based upon themes ("Race, Politics, and the Law," "The African Encounter with Colonialism"). A couple of caveats:

1. As an area studies (Russian and East European Studies) major, I participated in this and
2. The students do work awfully hard and read a lot of books by people I've never heard of -- which indicates to me that they're digging deep -- and
3. Natalie is objectively better educated than I was at her age, meaning she and the system are doing a lot of things right

I nonetheless wonder if the relative lack of single-author or more narrowly focused classes (I took classes with titles like Pushkin, Wittgenstein, Augustine, Russian Symbolism, Dostoevskii and Tolstoi, Russian History to 1796) etc. means that the pendulum has swung a little too far towards professors presenting their own pre-baked theses, leaving a little too little space for students to do their own thinking. Certainly Natalie has already run into trouble in one course where she disagrees with the professors and they gave her a crappy grade on a paper, she thinks mostly because they don't agree with her.

As an example of something I've seen in my own learning about a topic along these lines. I've complained here on the blog about the slowness of Ezra Vogel's bio of Deng, and how it seems stuck in interminable discussions of how China worked through Mao's legacy and its own ideological direction following Mao's death. I pined for tales of what was actually happening in the street. So I stated listening to Weijian Shan's book about exile to the Gobi in the Cultural Revolution, and there I learned just how intense and real the ideological discussions were all up and down China during this period, and also during the preceding and arguably crazier Great Leap Forward of the late 50s-early 60s. The absolute seeming insanity of what the Chinese would do on the basis of fine points of ideology. Kill all the sparrows. Try to scale up steel production by building millions of tiny forges in backyards and melt down pots, pans, knives, bicycles....

Fast forward to today and look at the conflict between Houston Rockets owner Darryl Morley and his little tweet about the Hong Kong protester, and Alibaba #2 and Brooklyn Nets owner (also Branford College '87, so a guy I knew in college) Joe Tsai's response characterizing what is happening in HK as a "separatist movement", seeming to toe the Beijing party line. But then he explains that in fact it's not just the party line, but that because of the Opium Wars and also the Japanese occupation prior to and during WWII, Chinese are extremely sensitive to perceived intervention. It's complex.

My point is that perhaps the best way to grasp the complexity of being is to dig deep in specific places and do your own spelunking.

Also, who are we to say the Chinese go overboard about fine points of ideology, we a nation of people who allow the proliferation of hundreds of millions of guns and very high rates of gun-related violence because of a romantic view of our "right to bear arms." And other stuff too. Liberals also do crazy shit because of very fine parsing of sacred ideas. But now it's time for work.

Elegant density

Beth and Kevin have this knife block that is very low slung and fits very neatly within the drawer to the left of the stove. Or perhaps it's more accurate to say Beth has it, because I can tell you fo sho Kevin didn't find it. It's not his thing.

In any case, it is rather ingenious and is an example of the marvelously efficient ways that city dwellers use space, which is something I first really saw when I started coming to New York regularly in the 80s, at Mark's family's apartment at 91st and Park but more particularly at Hilary's at 89th and Madison. His family was a little more affluent than hers, which meant, frankly, that her place was smaller and therefore more thought was put into it, and it was more homey.

There were bookcases in the narrow hallway outside of Hilary and Ellen's room, lots of bookcases generally. Not built in, for the most part. I remember as well a display of Medallia d'Oro coffee tins in the kitchen atop the cabinets, a decorative flourish and therefore not the most efficient use of space, but it was way up there and none of them was Sheryl Swoopes, so it wasn't really usable space. But to a North Carolina boy it was a lovely touch, urban and urbane.

But overall the place did have this quality of making a warm and hospitable home out of a small space, which is one of the magical things about city dwelling. And now I have come to the fourth paragraph, and the alarm bell in my head signals that it's time to stop blogging and move on with the business of the day, a day much less intense than yesterday's 5 meetings. Which I can live with.

Ditmars

Staying at Beth and Kevin's new place in Ditmars, Astoria, Queens. To get there had to hop the M60 bus from 125th St because the N wasn't running. Which seemed like a pain in the ass initially, but proved to be a lovely introduction to the nabe. From the bus stop just off 278 at 31st St I saw a Maltese cultural center, and then a few blocks up 31st, just to the West, was the Cheski Dom (Czech House) and a Bohemian Beer Garden, which, in Halloween stylie mode, was done up as the Bohemian Fear Garden.

Astoria is awesome, very reminiscent of Flatbush in the 80s, or probably the 90s, as the hipster/gentrification process is well underway. Is that good or bad? It's a tough call. On the one hand, some of the lower income people will in fact get pushed out, even without Amazon's HQ2. It's just happening. On the other had, money will flow into the neighborhood and the physical plant will be renewed and there will be opportunities for owners to exit and move to places with more space and yards and, frankly, better schools. It is bittersweet but not all evil.

In Manhattan now, one conference call down, waiting for meeting 1 of 4 to arrive. Here she is!

Digging deep

I started off this post with an enumeration of the ills that are weighing on me right now, but you don't want to read that, and I don't want to read it 20 years from now when I come back to check out my blog.

Hmmm.

In the afternoon yesterday an Indian couple in their 50s came in to talk to me. They have twin boys who are applying for college now, and they have very specific questions about making concrete decisions right now about where their sons will apply and the financial implications of it. Basically, if one of them gets in Duke Early Action and has to commit to going there, no matter what. Even if Duke doesn't offer them enough $.

The fact of the matter is that they are making this decision right as their backs are up against the wall of a deadline, when they should have been thinking it through months in advance. They came to my seminar in April, and could have been educating themselves about it a long time ago.

Of course, they are to some degree subject to the whims of a couple of 18-year olds.

I feel some guilt about not being able to answer their questions right off the top of my head, but that's being too hard on myself. I haven't guided people through this specific decision just like this, at this point in time in the decision cycle.

What this really is is an opportunity to dig deep, gain some knowledge, and better equip myself to serve people in the future. Gotta run with that.

Change up

In my ever-changing quest for an early morning routine that starts my day off right, my most recent iteration has involved: up around 645, start coffee, feed cats, meditate, crunches, push ups, then read with coffee. The reading has been "spiritual" in nature, for a long time Al Anon books, then I've moved on to stoics, Jewish thinkers, most recently Buddhists. Not thinking that anybody was going to have the answer, mind you, just looking for daily deposits in the bank of tranquility before I head off into the day.

The blog has been pushed back to later in the morning, after reading the paper and checking email, futures, etc. Which is a delicate place for it to be. Sometimes it happens, sometimes my attention gets sidetracked. In fact, my attention is always at issue. For a while the novelty of meditating was good enough to offer me a bit of a buzz.

For today at least, I'm slipping the blog in early, just to mix things up a bit.

I will grant that the book I am not reading today, Chogyam Trungpa's Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, has a decent point, namely that people are chasing after spiritualism in a materialistic way, looking to conquer tranquility and/or notch up scalps on a path to it. Is that me? Kinda? Maybe?

Still, I have struggled reading the book to fully groove on it. I know in truth that the answer is likely to be that need to strive less, but that is hard to do.