The forgetting of authors

After we got back from Houston we discovered that our family had burned through its data allowance in about two weeks. We were using about a gig a day, and Mary and I were the worst offenders. I still haven't been able to figure out what it was. Some combination of podcasts, maps and music for me, for her probably taking all those pictures and storing them in the cloud before immediately throwing them away.

Which tells me that I need to be downloading then jettisoning content more proactively. So I downloaded a book on Audible. I had a few credits for use after the lengthy listening of that dry book on China and also listening to a few podcasts from Acquired.

Before heading out to work one way I went through my list and quickly selected Damsel in Distressed, about a woman who worked in distressed debt at hedge fund Canyon Partners for a couple of decades. So far the book is fine but not great; it would of course be better if she read it herself but I guess she figures her time is too valuable. Frankly thus far I don't think it would be a great book even if I was reading it off the page as it's too full of cliches. 

After listening for several days I knew she was French but I had no idea what her name was. A quick Google tells me it is Dominique Mielle. This is by no means the first time I've forgotten the name of the author of a book I'm listening to. In fact, it's pretty normal. Largely it's a function of the fact that I'm not picking up a physical object with the author's name printed on it each time I am consuming the text.

But I also forget the names of authors of books I read. I even forget their titles, or the fact that I read them at all.

Is this bad? I think as we come through the educational system there's a lot of emphasis on authorship and proper citation. Jenny Jones wrote that on page 16 of Book X. One needs to be able to demonstrate that one has had ideas for oneself and that one hasn't "stolen" them. Also it's because the authorship industry has to have a leg to stand on. If we want people to be able to support themselves as thinkers and writers, they must have some rights and "intellectual property" to defend.

But as consumers and as the decades roll on all that's not really important. The only thing that matters is having wisdom and the seasoning to implement it in life. The primary reason to remember authors' names is that one wants to be able to see them in a used book store and buy their books if there are good discounts. And to honor them when it is merited.

In the penalty box

It appears that I have not mentioned that I am under quasi-quarantine at home, having driven home from RDU on Sunday night a friend and teammate of Graham's who subsequently tested positive for COVID. Sigh.

We are eating outdoors when we can -- though ironically it's pretty cool here for late April -- and Mary is sleeping downstairs in Natalie's bed while I am exiled to the upstairs. Fortunately -- thanks to the addition of the couch in my study and the presence of decent reading chairs in both study and bedroom -- there's plenty of good seating up here so I could go on for some time like this.

Still, it's rather dreary. Also Mary is wearing a mask much of the time downstairs and would prefer that Graham and I do the same. He is not having it, I am complying much but not all of the time. It's a drag. Are we going to go on like this forever, each time a little variant crops up, of however minimal serious threat to our health?

Thank God we're not China, that's all I have to say. A lot of Americans have gotten good vaccines and between that and community spread the broad threat from a variant like BA2 seems minimal. The people of Shanghai and soon -- it would appear -- Beijing are hurting. The WSJ recently published an op-ed by James Freeman about how the US and the West had erroneously imported harsh Chinese measures like strict lockdowns but it's total bullshit. Our lockdowns were never that harsh. Even in the very early days of April 2020, people weren't really forcibly locked in their homes. Though, admittedly, we did err slightly to the side of caution for a brief period while we were figuring things out.    

Musk, Twitter and anonymity

One problem with Elon Musk buying Twitter is that elevates him to Trump-squared or -cubed, and that it extends the paradigm of the biggest, richest guy having the biggest megaphone to say whatever the fuck he wants to. Platform as penis.

I am carried back to my memory of Woolf's To the Lighthouse, in which a female character (the narrator?) listens to a male character blather on about politics or philosophy or something but all she can hear is him saying "I, I, I, I..." Earlier in the blog I classed this masculine tendency to try to stick out, however possible, as "Protuberance."

To counter this tendency myself, I continue to leave this blog pseudonymized. I of course love it when people read the blog, and try to gently promote it here and there in person to person dialog and one-to-one correspondence. Although there is wisdom in Jaron Lanier's idea that we should always speak from our own name on the internet, that is countered by Walter Benjamin's assertion in "The Task of the Translator": "No poem is meant for the reader, no picture for the beholder, no symphony for the audience." It has to be for the work itself, not for the attention it garners.

Speaking of which, the work day is well underway. Onwards

The price of Clorox

We were driven to the airport in Houston by a guy named Abelardo. Nice guy, a little chatty, which initially seemed like a liability but our conversation was interesting.

Unsurprisingly, we talked about inflation. It seems like it's a problem that's on everybody's mind these days. What did surprise, however, was the data points he called out in support of it. "You used to be able to get Clorox for like $4 a gallon but now it's $9" he shared. He cited some similar point about Lysol. Aside from the fact that each of these dearly beloved household cleaning products had its moment in the headlines over the last couple of years, is either of those prices really meaningful or impactful? I mean, I can understand if people complain about the price of gasoline or bread, that's meaningful. But Clorox and Lysol? Sounded to me like he was listening to a little too much talk radio. But maybe he's just bored and resorts to that because he's driving around Houston trying to make a living. It's all good.

He was unaware that there was a new variant of COVID making the rounds.

He also shared with us what a bummer it was driving drunk people home late at night, how often they puke in his car. I get that. That's no fun at all. He also said that a problem he faced was people putting their unaccompanied kids in the car to go across town to their grandma's or whatever. About how he's afraid he's going to get scammed by somebody claiming child abuse or the like. Seems like there's a lot of scammers out there being consistently creative.

Though he was born in the US and was a citizen, he had spent a couple of decades back in Monterrey, Mexico, his family's hometown. He was glad to be back in the US because he said Mexico was a third-world country, incredibly corrupt because of the need to pay off the cartels, which had made his uncle's business impossible to run profitably. "Mexico is a third-world country," he told us several times.

In the end, I was happy to be a safe fare for him to the airport, easy and low-stress money.

Recap from FIRST Robotics Competition in Houston

The East robotics team had a good time in Houston and learned some valuable life lessons. In the week before, Graham had hinted something like "maybe we could make it to the semis." Uh-uh. This was The Big Dance in robotics and Chapel Hill meant nothing to nobody there. Our robot finished in the lower middle of the pack of about eighty robots in one of six divisions and was not selected for an alliance to compete in the divisional playoffs.

Really that should have been no surprise. Of the two main things a robot could do to score points (shoot and climb), we only did one -- we shot well -- though it was the higher-scoring and more important of the two. But we didn't shoot well under a lot of defensive pressure, and there were bots that did. That got us through NC competitions -- NC is not as competitive as core regions like CA or MI or Israel -- but it didn't take us very far at Worlds. Also, we just weren't well-known. There were teams there who had been at Worlds 11 years running and had been in the Einsteins (think Final Four) for eight years running. They had huge cadres of parents and mentors there and had thought through every aspect of logistics, down to pre-booking a conference room for a celebratory pizza party and having coolers of drinks chilled. We'll get there, if we want to and stay at it.

Our team had some stupid teenager problems that messed them up like running a robot on a half-charged battery (Dooooohhhh!) or forgetting to flip a switch before a match because they were playing video games on the controller laptop. Could those have changed the outcomes at the margins enough to have let the team be picked up on an alliance in playoffs? Probably not, but maybe. If so, the kids can think about it for the rest of their lives, particularly when drafting or implementing design specs or preparing for important presentations in sales or other funding request contexts. It's a low impact context in which to learn a valuable lesson about attention to detail when working under pressure.

Most importantly, the kids had fun. Our coach and mentors (mostly still college students themselves) had done an awesome job thinking through a lot of stuff, like chartering a bus to go to the Johnson Space Center on Sunday. 

Of the eightish NC teams there, the one that did best in the end was the Omegabytes from Spindale (Team 5727). Their ticket to Houston was punched by winning the Chairman's Award for NC, the top award given to a team that best embodies the spirit of FIRST. Spindale is a town of about 4,000, and with about 40 students and 20 parents and mentors participating in the team, it had about 1.5% of the town's population onboard. They were super-inclusive and did a ton of community outreach.

They also had a very solid robot, maybe 6th or 7th in NC at the end of the season. At Worlds theirs outperformed ours and they made it to the semis of their division. Towards the competition's end all the NC teams were down there cheering them on, so per Graham there were about 200 North Carolinians down there cheering against about 150 Israelis. Pretty cool.

Bitch with little robots

As a joint birthday dinner for mom and myself we went to Toro Toro at the Four Seasons, which had some delicious stuff going on. A friend with lots of friends in Houston bought us a bottle of wine and arranged a special birthday dessert by calling ahead, a nice surprise.

I saw a sign that there was robot practice going on in one of the conference rooms, and we saw it while we were leaving. There was a bunch of South Asian kids sitting on the floor with a nifty little robot, turns out they were from West Windsor, NJ, just across Rte 1 from Princeton. Very nice young fellas.

Then we saw there was robot action going on in a small room with a glass wall so we went over to check it out. This blonde woman who looked like she played rugby came over and started telling us about it. "We're from First Technology Challenge, not First Robotics Challenge. There's a different philosophy in FTC. We're more start-up people, whereas FRC is more like the culture of a Boeing or Lawrence Livermore Labs. You guys have bigger teams and members can get by without knowing anything about technology. All our kids have to get their hands dirty. I myself started three companies. You guys have a short season but we go on all year..." She would have kept blathering on all night about how FTC was better than FRC if we hadn't realized it was time to move the fuck along. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have said "Have a nice life."

She was from Lexington, MA. Hopefully Google leads her to this someday and she'll realize what a pompous biatch she is.

In Houston

We're in Houston for the FIRST World Robotics Championship. Never been here before. From the highway downtown Houston looks like a modern city with lots of high-rise buildings, etc, leading me to expect a city-like environment. And while it is urban, it's not much of a city in its core. Instead, it's more like a dense, highly-centralized office park, with parking decks appended to office buildings and hotels. In lots of places, you can be walking past a window and you turn and look and there are parking spaces behind the glass. That's how valuable street-level retail space is.

For eating, there are lots of expensive steakhouses where one might wine and dine a client but very few places to get, say, a sandwich, a piece of pizza, or a bowl of noodles. Praise the Lord there are food trucks that have come down to where the robot thing is happening and there are some vendors inside the convention center.

Actually, there's a very nice park area next to the convention center. But even that -- as I was told by my college buddy David who is a city councilman here -- used to be a big parking lot. They've done a lot of work to make Houston as inviting as it is. 

To be clear, I'm well aware that there's lots of great stuff and great food around Houston -- David gave us some excellent tips. I hope we are able to go check some of it out. But it ain't downtown.

High-level trust

On the way to work yesterday I was listening to the episode of Acquired (check it out!) about Ethereum and the guys were riffing on something and somewhere back around my amygdala I had a flare-up of fairly acute anxiety, verging on fear. "Omigod" I thought "I have no idea what the fuck they are talking about? How can I make a reasonable decision about this stuff?" I successfully turned onto the onramp to I-40 then merged with traffic while I wrestled my demons to the mat, remembering that of course I don't need to understand everything, I just have to fundamentally trust that people will generally do the right thing.

The guys at Acquired are brilliant and incredibly full of energy and enthusiasm and openness, they are generally trustworthy and totally worth listening to (despite their questionable statement that Taylor Swift's net worth of $500 million is "just not a lot of money" -- though I know what they mean). I'm not worried about them.

More broadly, though, what's important is that we generally trust the direction of the world and the intent of those around us. That is harder these days. Between the hyper-fragmentation of the attention universe from the relatively centralized era of Cronkite to the time of Facebook and YouTube when algorithms are crafted to deliver hyper personalized messaging calculated to move us to do specific things (buy this! vote for that! hate those jackasses!). Things Are Falling Apart.

In some sense, we were lulled to sleep by Obama's dulcet tones. An algorithm could scarcely have generated a more appealing avatar for the sweet comforts of the period of late globalized capital. Then Trumputin shook us from our slumber and we are struggling to reconstitute a center in which most of us can believe and trust. 

The illusion of bounty

I was at the Wegmans on 15-501 today and I scooped up some whole wheat Goldfish -- one of our true pandemic new loves -- which are much cheaper there ($1.79) then at Harris Teeter or Walgreens ($2.49-$2.79 of late, when they are even in stock). I was mildly intrigued to see that when I grabbed the three on the front of the display, that was all there was. On the way out I saw an older gentleman arranging bags of pistachios on the display there in the hallway leading out. He was also arraying them along the front. It was more or less a Potemkin Village of display, intended to create the appearance of plenitude.

We have gotten used to there being shortages of this or that, but still our retailers, bless their hearts, are doing their best to maintain the facade of bounty. What's interesting, actually, was that Wegmans had the staff to do the stocking. Most places are having a difficult time staffing. Given that it was an adult -- a white male no less -- doing the stocking, as opposed to a teenager, I'm guessing that Wegmans provides decent healthcare and other benefits.

Why study Russian?

A friend and fellow Slavist on Facebook recently expressed despondency over the need to respond to the question: "Why it's important to study Russian now?" This follows on a question from Niklaus some years ago, probably around Putin's invasion of Ukraine or some particularly egregious bit of anti-gay legislation or action in Russia or the assassination of an opponent like Boris Nemtsov or... Niklaus basically asked, what the fuck is up with the Russians, do they have any redeeming features?

Reasonable questions all, and I was reflecting on them while running in the woods yesterday. Aside from the obvious national security imperative, which fell away following the seeming end of the Cold War but which has been thrust back in our faces all too urgently of late, there are lots of reasons.

The thing that came back to me while running is the intensity and purity of the intellectual tradition of the resisting Russian intelligentsia. Just look at Navalny and his team today. They aren't fucking around. Some of them will end up dying for their beliefs but they don't care. They are incredibly smart and industrious and maniacally dedicated to the cause of freedom and better governance. And they are the heirs of a long tradition going back to the 19th century of intellectuals putting themselves in the way of harm for the greater good.

Moreover, there is deep kinship between American and Russian intellectuals. Just read Emerson's 1837 "The American Scholar" and Piotr Chaadaev's 1826-1831 Philosophical Letters next to one another and the parallels are obvious: both America and Russian intellectuals found themselves in a servile position before European thought. Each had to figure out a way to become its own. America went broad with commerce, Russia went deep with the novel and associated forms. 

Lastly, we need to care about Russia for the same reason we care about the people of China, India, Africa and everywhere else in the world. If we honestly believe that liberal democracy and capitalism checked by the state offer the best context for aggregate human flourishing, we have to work to make it happen. Our system of higher education exists as it does to facilitate a fine-grained division of labor across a web of complex global value chains striving to help more humans live better lives. Nobody said it would be easy.

56

It's my 56th birthday, so mostly I've been taking it fairly easy. I did go to work, mind you, and did the things that I needed to do, but I didn't work that hard. We got lunch from Ideal Sandwich in East Durham which, if you haven't been to, you should. Top tier Italian-style sandwich shop which bakes its own bread and so on. It also has prepared foods, cookies, etc. It's open 20 hours a week now. I had heard that there was always a line so I got there ten minutes before opening and I was the first person there, but not by more than a minute. It was a smart move. There were 10-15 people in some stage of waiting by the time my order was ready at 12:10.

Then I had to figure out how to get myself some coconut cake. They had none at New Hope Market on 86, but my second call -- to 9th Street Bakery -- bore fruit. As it were.

Somewhere in there I got a second booster shot to get ready to go to Houston. I see that the BA2 variant is rising not just in the Northeast but also here in Orange County, so it feels like the right thing to do. Also it's time to mask back up in stores and eat outdoors for a little while.

Now I am back at home, read my book, had a little nap here on the couch in my study and should probably walk or run before dinner.

BTW, it occurred to me that I had never published a photo of my new couch, my most prized possession, so there she is. Mary is honestly not all that enamored of the color but she doesn't spend her time in this room and it's fine with me. It is comfy and it is here. I can ride out several more pandemics.

Costs

Maybe for the first time ever, I am seeing clients start to freak out over various aspects of their financial lives: tax surprises, the costs of meals, flights, what have you. Certainly the unexpected return of inflation is scary.

Unquestionably many of us have had our lifestyles floated on the rising tide of markets and government largesse for a long time and have become accustomed to not considering or making tradeoffs in a disciplined fashion on a consistent basis. For the short term, at least, it would appear that we will not be accorded that luxury by the universe. Frankly, I think we need to embrace it and accept it as a new flavor of adulting. It ain't easy, but it is what it is.

To Campbell and back

Most of the weekend was spent at Campbell University so, a few words. As a creature of fancier schools, it is tempting to harsh on the place. It has a nice little campus, but it's nothing special and is ringed with parking lots. It's not very selective and doesn't exude much scholarliness or anything. It is mostly surrounded by chain restaurants and even a place that claims to have hot dogs, burgers and fries, but didn't have them when I went in there. I have a client who used to work in the law school who said the management was pretty durned Baptist (all meetings began with prayers).

Then again, they've worked hard to build the place over the years and have done a pretty good job. The newer health sciences buildings look rather nice. They take good care of the place. I have a former colleague who is an alum and has been successful and I see out on LinkedIn that he (and I'm sure others) continue to work hard to raise money for the place and improve it further. I remember walking with my client to lunch in Raleigh (where the law school is) one day and running into an enthusiastic young Black student whom my client praised to the skies. Honestly, we should be celebrating and encouraging all of our small colleges and universities. They do a great job hosting the state robotics competition. There is, I was told, an independent coffee shop that was perfectly decent in an adjacent strip mall. Certainly it is much better that they are there than it would be if they weren't there. 

The drive down there took us through Holly Springs, where subdivisions are clawing there way through a formerly bucolic landscape, with all the attendant tradeoffs. As the Northeast replants itself down here, we need to be careful not to replicate its mistakes, but I see that's not really happening.

Robotics in Buies Creek

The FIRST NC State District Robotics Championship went down at Campbell University this weekend and it was a nail-biter. Graham's team (East Chapel Hill) got aligned with its cross-town rival and my alma mater Chapel Hill High in the playoff rounds, so we formed one big cheering block. This was particularly excellent because the East and CHHS teams had collaborated in the weeks leading up to the competition, with East sharing some of the magic behind its first class shooting mechanism (there is debate between just how much IP was shared...) while the Tigers let the Wildcats use their practice space -- a pretty big one in the swanky new building -- and offered some guidance on a climbing mechanism.

They got paired up with a team out of Hillsborough (which had also graciously let East use its practice space) and one out of Greensboro -- each of which had more years of experience and more championship banners between them than our teams. As the alliance formation process happened, I had a sense that the years of experience could prove meaningful.

It was. In the first game of the final, the East robot got trapped into committing a foul by a very astute play by the Greensboro bot. By the second of the two matches, the CHHS bot was visibly overheating and wasn't able to shoot well. In the end, the raw capability of the robots themselves proved less determinative than how the players were able to make the robots play the game.

Still, it was awesome. Neither East nor CHHS had ever gone this far. The CHHS robot was by far the most improved over the course of the season. East is headed to Houston for worlds and I think my Tigers are too. The only thing that was missing was Carrboro High to fill out an alliance. Next year.

Return of the Devil

Last night there was a fundraiser for Josh and I ate too much. How was I to know that the first table of food was just appetizers which was to be supplemented by more food, in this case some delicious banh mi type things. That was after going out for a team dinner the night before where we went to Osteria Georgi and we ordered more things than we needed, which were then piled onto by the wait staff who brought us extra stuff because Denis is friends with the owner and goes there a lot. Of course I ate the stuff.

My weight -- which may briefly have bottomed out around 167 (for a dehydrated instant, to be sure) in summer 2020 -- has gone back to 180. Yet another indication of how hard it is to maintain discipline.

Then again, I guess it's no news that discipline is hard. If that weren't the case, why would we call it discipline? No reason to wallow in my failures, in fact there's every reason not to. It's the wallowing that is the problem. Much better to press on and keep marking things off my task list, doing the right thing, and pushing through the day with good energy.

Male merge

A couple of weeks ago the night before the robotics tournament Graham was printing some things in my office and was running late. I saw that he was inserting the same number into spots in a couple of separate documents then printing them, one at a time. "You should use a mail merge for that" I said. Of course he had never heard of such a thing, I never had till I got out into the working world.

At any rate as we're approaching the upcoming state championships Graham needed to do the same thing and -- in a show of solid organization -- reminded me about it a couple of days beforehand. Excellent. Turns out to run a mail merge in Google Office you need to write a script, so it seemed the best thing to do was port it over to Word, which of course kids don't have on their computers.

So it was to be a father-son project or, as Graham so famously said once, a "son-father" project. Fair enough. 

Graham got home from practice last night around 9:30 and he came up to my office and we knocked it out. In fairness, it was mostly me doing the work, though I showed him the basic concept so he at least knows the term and knows some of the steps it takes, which is half the struggle. After that you just need to Google and trust yourself to figure it out.

It was nice to have a little project like that with Graham in the evening. It's lovely to teach your kids stuff.

The streets of Russia

I was messaging with a friend from grad school who has basically relocated to Moscow: "This is my home now" was a recent statement. She definitely does not support Russia's war effort but... Russia is a place that has made her happy after some disappointments in the US. 

So after asking her where she lived I found myself poking around the streets of Moscow on Google Maps to see how it has changed in the quarter century since I was last there. The answer: a lot. It looks a lot better, much more like a fancy European city.

The questions, then, as I've posed them before, is how deep the transformation goes and what explains it? The stability Putin has brought, the interaction with the outside world?

My guess is that the transformation doesn't run that deep, though certainly those living in the larger provincial cities have benefited at least to a limited extent. For example, of IKEAs 17 stores in Russia, 8 were in either Moscow or St Petersburg, while the rest were further flung in places like Ufa, Rostov-on-Don, and Omsk. So at least those living near to regional capitals were experiencing the benefits of Russia's integration into the world. Not so much anymore.

Which memories are we preserving?

I've been going through old videos from the early days of our kids' lives and I came across one of Mary Lee and George Sr, mostly the latter, with Natalie shortly after she was born, it must have been autumn 2000, in our house on Wilton St. As an aside, in the video we discussed that the camera itself costed $900 (we let my mom and Mary's parents buy it for us). Compare that to the cost of a phone today and it gives you a sense of the progress of technology just in the intervening years.

In the video George Sr starts talking about how it's the right time of life to get such a camera so we can preserve the memories of the kids when they are little. And I've got plenty of that, especially of Natalie, who is dramatically better documented than Graham is in certain ways just because when your first is born one enters into an entirely new dimension of life, parenthood, and that's what we're capturing as much as anything. Yes the child, but also the sensation of having created new life, the possibility of a different kind of futuricity, the understanding that your life will never be the same.

But what is really rare in the video is not the footage of Natalie, but of George Sr. It's striking and moving to see him there doing his thing, making faces at the baby, being a regular guy. And, also, footage of Mary. Here and there I let the camera linger on her and she senses it and looks at me and is annoyed, seemingly gesturing towards Natalie: "Get the baby!". Mary criticizes me alternately for not taking enough pictures of her and of taking pictures of her when her hair looks crappy, the light is unflattering, from a bad angle, etc. I'm glad I have some. I'm hoping I find more video of her.

Well well

As I'm sure I've written before, a large part growing into adulting for me has been learning to operate at a certain emotional distance from UNC basketball. When we win, I can be happy. When we lose, I don't let it bother me.

This has allowed me to stay largely functional over the years through some trying years, but it also lays me open to claims of being a fair-weather fan. Such is life.

Last night, a small group of Tar Heels logged gruelling minutes due to a shallow bench and braved foul trouble and an absurd number of turnovers in which we just threw the ball right into the hands of Blue Devils. No matter. We prevailed and had the great joy of sending Coach K packing not once but twice in the space of weeks.

Even better, I was able to bring Graham, in the throes of deciding between UNC and maybe Lafayette or perhaps even Case Western Reserve (though he's never been to Cleveland and there are no kin nearby, he has left it on his list because it's "prestigious", sigh) up to watch the game. Graham has watched UNC games with me before and once with a friend at a pizza place, but the enthusiasm has never really taken in an enduring way.

Last night he seemed to kind of enjoy the enthusiasm, and then we walked from Alan Haig's new Franklin St pied-a-terre up to the temporary center of the universe at Franklin and Columbia. He is not fully immersed in the whole thing, but he has seen it and not rejected it, so it's not all bad.

As for me, I am still caught up in the excitement of it all. How could I not be?

Challenged

By now I am having trouble making it through this book about Holocaust survivor Siggi Wilzig. Not because he wasn't an impressive guy, he clearly was. I'm sure he could and would have run circles around me in almost any context, or just outlasted me. But it's kind of a shitty book. Because he admires Siggi so, the author, Joshua Greene, heaps golly-gee-shucks praise on him for business practices which, viewed objectively, would be worthy of considerable eyebrow-raising if not more, like browbeating and intimidating clients into giving him more business. Basically the whole book suffers from the author's lack of objectivity and the rose-tinted corneas.

But is has been worth the price of admission just to read the story of Wilzig's experience in Auschwitz. It is all too easy to forget what happened there. If anything it reminds me that I should probably make sure my kids have seen at least Nacht und Nebel (which I'm pretty sure we watched at Seawell) if not Shoah (which I never watched in its entirety). We need to remember what has happened and could happen if we're not careful.

Wilzig was instrumental in the founding of the Holocaust Museum in DC. For that reason alone I should probably continue to pick my way through his bio, despite its failings as a book.