I was disappointed (but also rather relieved) to find that Appendix A (which promises to describe the “university‐level metrics of success”) was nowhere to be found in the current draft of the Strategic Plan.

Disappointment struck me first, because I wondered how I ought to comment on an abstract plan (surprisingly abstract, considering that 40% of the document is composed of “Actions”) without knowing the concrete ways by which its success will be judged.

However, I was also quite relieved that the Appendix was missing, because the commercial tone of the entire plan left me certain that money would be the ultimate metric by which all “units” would be judged. Indeed, the document seems to suggest an un-Catholic view of personhood on which money is the cause of better human action and efficiency is the end goal.

I understand that, conventionally, a strategic plan is a hazy blueprint of castles in the air (e.g. “create interdisciplinary Centers of Excellence”) – but I do urge you to consider the pernicious way in which the vapid language the proposal uses produces lackluster goals. The language employed by the writer(s) of the Strategic Plan – hollow phrases borrowed from college brochures, press releases, and Disneyland maps – is unsuited for the important project of discussing what a University should be and determining how to strive for that ideal.

What I’m saying is this: You can’t educate anyone by “creat[ing] innovative programs employing alternative delivery methods that respond to the needs of 21st century graduate students”. Nor can professors “improve advising with [new] tools”. Most importantly, a University ought not endeavor to promote “brand equity” or reach a “target audience” or build “reputational capital”. If you want to sell the University as a product, you’re using all the right phrases. But I thought we were talking about teaching students, not finding customers? We don’t need innovative programs or new delivery methods or new tools to teach and advise students. We need good teachers and good students. Luxuries could include desks and a whiteboard.

Good teachers, by the way, don’t care at all about the “Teacher-Scholar model”. And bad teachers won’t be motivated by it. For that reason, it’s my suggestion that no time be wasted on trying to implement it.

Good students don’t need explicit interdisciplinary courses or “integrated learning experiences”. Rather, through natural talent these students see connections in the various things they are reading and are the better for it. Forcing these students to see explicit connections is bad for their intellectual development. Interdisciplinary classes are an unnecessary fad, and we’d be better to avoid getting involved altogether. And, again: bad students won’t benefit from interdisciplinary courses, because bad students don’t like learning one thing, let alone two things.

One of my greatest regrets is this: Although several pages are devoted to the discussion of internationalism, which will be promoted through “infusions” of “global perspectives” and “marginalized” groups, there is no plan to require foreign language study. I think that language is one of the primary constraints on our rationality, and it is precisely by expanding our ability to use language that we promote better thinking. This means both finding clarity and precision in one’s native language as well as struggling in the structures of another language, where one learns that grammar does not vary between cultures for the sake of frustrating language learners, but because there are strikingly different modes of experience expressed by different languages. “Vor den Wissenden, sich stellen / Sicher ist’s in allen Fällen.” (Facing those who know / is good in every case.) Goethe offers the Steering Committee a great piece of advice: let yourselves be challenged by the wise, both to find ways to improve and to know where you have succeeded.

And a discussion with those who know is what the University needs before it steers off on a course guided primarily by economic motivations. It is clear that no substantial consideration has been given to what a classical Jesuit education entails. “Liberal arts” appears just once in the document. “Writing”, “argument”, “philosophy”, “classics”, “language”, and “ethics” do not appear at all. Most critically, “Professor” does not appear, and although “Teacher” appears 13 times, it is only in the context of a “Teacher-Scholar”, which, as I mentioned above, is an unwarranted dichotomy.

Even a perfunctory glance at the Ratio Studiorum shows that teachers are the most critical part of the Jesuit education model. Thus, more of the focus of goal-setting should reflect a desire to find teachers who train students according to the guidelines set out by the tradition that we are purporting to represent. Following from this, the heirarchy of the University that is revealed in documents like the Strategic Plan – namely, the sense that the administrative captaincy tells the galley-slave professors where to row – is completely wrong. Jesuits would see to it that administration recognizes its role: act as a parliament which selects the most talented teachers as delegates to the students, and then get out of the way. Sailing is a common metaphor when making decisions, and sinking a too-easy likeness of failure. But, well, look at us.

I hope for a reply to my concerns. As a person who probably received the best possible education that LMU could offer, I am troubled to see that institutional changes are threatening to move even further away from a Jesuit education that the contemporary world doesn’t admire, but that human beings need.

Yours,
Dan

That woman filled up her cloud.

“I like to sort of picture it that way,” my mom told me, “Everyone has their own cloud and it’s floating around out there.”

The picture my mom has is intuitive from the perspective of the user: my Gmail address or my Dropbox account is mine, and whatever I put in my little cloud bucket floats up into the sky and follows me around wherever I go. Yet the underlying structure is exactly the opposite: it’s a movement away from personal ownership of data. My data are stored all over the world, so I can access them them wherever I go. So it isn’t that my little cloud follows me around, it’s that things are cloudy no matter where I am.

And here’s what my mom said next: “I don’t really think she needs eight thousand photos of her nephew or her dog with her at all times.” And I think that’s right. But if I think it’s right, why do I have all of my files synched so I can get to them at any time? I’ve never showed anyone a photograph of mine by reaching up to the sky and pulling it down from the cloud.

And what’s more disappointing is that I have never looked at most of the photos I’ve taken. I have 3.2 GB of high resolution photos from a semester I spent traveling around Europe; each city has a folder with dozens of photos and each of those photos is iterated on servers all across the world. I haven’t seen most of them. There’s something about the ease and scale of producing modern, digital memories that makes them almost worthless.

How much shit is in the cloud?

The sheer amount of information available to us: 800,000 petabytes (a million gigabytes per petabyte) in the storage universe and 3.6 zettabytes (a million petabytes per zettabyte) consumed by American homes per day. (Brain Pickings)

And there’s the 12,000 tweets per second during the Super Bowl , the 800 million Facebook accounts, and the 736 pieces of personal information the average internet user gives out every day.

The volume of information available on the internet is unbelievable. (Especially if you’re searching for porn. Is there kissing in porn?) We share frequently while connecting with other people – words made vapid and meaningless through explicit association with an insignificant click: what it means to be friends is that we have clicked accept and what it means to share is that we have clicked update.

But friendship isn’t binary, and existence isn’t incremental.

We’ve all heard it before. We hate Facebook, but what the hell are we going to do? This is how we connect now. This is how we share. It’s convenient.

My fear is that we shape ourselves to be fit for sharing – and overwrought status updates for an audience of hundreds aren’t suited to who we are. Zadie Smith says it better than anyone:

Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind. “Blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

Facebook is the most perverse implementation of that teenage complex that everyone is watching me – perverse because, although it gives the illusion that everyone is paying attention as they scroll their eyes across our thoughts, the result is indeed the same as it always was: very few people care about me quite as much as I do.

And I fear the way I’m looking at other people, too. In what sense are my friends a lot like my photos from Europe? I know how many friends I have, I know some basic trivia about their hobbies and hangouts, I know if they are in a relationship. But I know that the me on Facebook is nothing but a carefully curated sketch. (I think, for instance, of the times when Lily and I fight and my relationship status still says “in a relationship,” reflecting precisely none of that nuance; or my profile picture of me writing in a notebook that I guess I thought would say oh he’s a writer but which says nothing about the mornings I’ve spent angry because I have a novel but I’m not writing it and I’ve lied and told people I’ve already written quite a bit) And my Facebook friends are nothing but their outlines. But how many do I know? Very few.

Maybe the ease of digital friendship spoils the attention to quality just like the digital camera eliminated the concern for consequence. There is no more last shot on the roll, better make it count. Just click, click, click.

On the day I first met the family I now live with, I saw our building from the streetcar. Baroque, cream colored, red accents, steep roof. I thought it was a tall-and-narrow split level home – bedrooms stacked upon bedrooms stacked upon kitchen and living room – similar to what I lived in when I was in Bonn. I never saw the top floor of that home in Bonn – I was told on the first day I lived there not to climb that final staircase, and I never did – and I had quick fantasies about sitting with this new family and playing board games or singing ballads, high above Dresden in our isolated turret.

But on the twisted black fence there is this bronze, square sign: Psychotherapiepraxis Dresden.

In my hometown, houses are separated by fences and yards and hedges, differentiated by that new aqua trim that looks terrible and can you believe they used brick?, and granted to their owners by the grace of Jesus Christ and Jonathan Locke and the Founding Fathers.

So I had this big New York City fantasy that somewhere in the world people operated pizza parlors or coin-op laundry stores and lived above them, but I had no conception that Buddhist Germans could live two floors about a psychotherapy practice praised for its fusion of old (i.e. use of electric shock therapy) and new (i.e. dream parsing, cognitive behavioral therapy, bio-feedback) techniques in a hundred year old building that is in one of the only neighborhoods not destroyed in the bombing of Dresden during World War II.

But look, here they are, standing at the top of the stairs on the day I come to meet them and they are all wearing shower caps because everyone has lice and we sit at the table and drink coffee and we’re talking about where I can put my things when the father asks if this is a done deal, says he needs a day to think about it and maybe I do too.

So they thought about it and I did too and it’s funny because the psychotherapy practice didn’t enter into my mind again for a while. It became routine as quickly as it had surprised me.

The family that lives below us is either always at home or never at home – I don’t know. But the result is the same: I never see them in the stairwell. Thus, the people that I see coming and going are either People Who Live With Me or People Who Don’t Live With Me. And the people who don’t live with me are deliverymen, doctors, and patients. And I haven’t seen a doctor in six months. Just that bamboo plant, and that pasty fluorescent light.

Whenever I come back home and there’s a patient coming down the stairs, I take out the key for the mailbox and open it up. There’s nothing in there. But now it’s apparent that I live here. I’m not here for therapy.

I’m not sure why I go out of my way to show that.

One time I was on the landing outside the second story door and someone came out. I was pre-emptively nodding to greet him at the same moment he asked “Are you going inside?” He took my nod as a yes and he held the door open for me. And then, with some kind of strange smile, I said “Nein, nein. I’m not going inside.”

I reached out for the handle, pulled the door shut, and kept going up the stairs to our apartment.

Another time I saw a teenage boy coming out of the office and I wondered if he was as curious about what is upstairs and I am about the lives of those for whom the building may as well be two stories tall.

I imagined that boy standing on the second story landing and peeking up like I did in the house in Bonn. What the hell is up there?

But in my dream he’s courageous and he walks up the stairs, passes the third story where there is no doormat and comes around the corner where our little stretch of stairwell is covered in plants and statues and things that can only be described by the grab bag term knickknacks.

He passes our door that has tattered decorations from the last three international holidays and sees our shoe rack that’s a few heads taller than me and serves the dual purpose of a functional space to store shoes suitable for the current season (bottom two rows) and a chronicle of every other pair of shoes the family has ever worn (top six rows).

And then he opens the secret door that leads to the cellar.

He sees our laundry, but he also sees the ladder that leads to the roof. He climbs up, opens the hatch, and he’s at what’s considered a “high place” in a city whose only high places are steeples. And he can see everything from up there. And he looks down.

On New Year’s Eve, I stood on that same spot and watched as a sea of fireworks took over the sky. In every direction there were joyful screams, raucous whomps, and brilliant gleaming fading falling stars. Who could dream of dying? Who could dream of never having lived?

I went downstairs early on a Saturday morning to talk a walk along the Elbe.

The door to the second story office was open. Someone was vacuuming. I walked slowly and I heard the vacuum dragging across the floor, staples banging around inside the metal tube.

I remembered being home alone when I was younger, when every sound made me fear someone was coming in to the house to kill me. For some reason, my first thought was always how can I get to the kitchen to grab a knife? and my second thought was I wonder if I should keep a knife in my room for situations like this. But there was no one there. And there was no fire when I’d get up in the middle of night and smell phantom smoke and check every room in the house and see my parents sleeping.

Inside the office is a desk and next to the desk is a rack of brochures. I don’t know all of the German words for mental illness, but I know I’ve read those brochures in English, with comforting American idioms and bullet-pointed platitudes.

While I’m staring inside the door, the woman who is cleaning sees me and turns off the vacuum.

“Sorry,” I say.

“Sorry,” she says.

“Sorry?” I say. I don’t know why she’s sorry.

“The office is closed on Saturday.”

I don’t want to say that I’m not there for an appointment.

“Oh,” I say, “I’ll come back later.”

“Good luck,” she says.

And she turns the vacuum back on, smiles.

We make the pizza ourselves and then bring some furniture to the living room to complement the small sofa that the two kids garrison with blankets and pillows and a baby doll named Nora, who eats and pees and poops and vomits, authenticity overriding affability in the current fashion of playthings.

I sit on a wicker chair by the bookshelf, Clemens leans back on a rolly desk chair on the other side of the sofa, and Julia sometimes sits on the floor by the coffee table, sometimes sits straight-backed against the child-sized barstool, whose short seat and questionable construction forces its user to contort herself into an awfully healthy – which is to say uncomfortable – posture.

Everyone gets their own uniquely deficient view of the small television set. The one working speaker mumbles the dubbed German dialogue and sighs some pale, orchestral refrain that begs us to laugh, laugh, laugh! at the lighthearted shopping montage.

The first Friday night I was living with the family, the parents had to work. They made two big pizzas and set them on the table along with three glasses, a bottle of sparking water, and a big roll of paper towels.

“Last one in the room closes the door,” Liv said. She looked over at me.

I got up and closed it, and I sat back down.

“And turns off the light,” she said.

I did that, too.

“And we also need plates.”

Stand up, lights on, door open, grab some plates, come back, close the door, turn off the light, hand out the plates, sit down.

So then it was just me, Liv, Lennart, and Willi und die Wunder dieser Welt, a playful travel documentary for kids. Willi’s main goal is to take some of his friend’s ashes to her favorite dune in the Sahara Desert, but he doesn’t let that required story arc get in the way of swimming with crocodiles in the rainforest or sumo wrestling in Japan.

But I was having a really hard time hearing the television, so I whispered to Liv: “Can you turn up the volume?” Lennart then hit me in the head and told me to be quiet.

A few minutes later, Lennart asked me to cut him a slice of pizza. I wondered if lightly hitting him on the head and telling him to be quiet would teach him a valuable lesson. I figured it would just mean I had to leave my new room four days after I moved in to it, so I let the total unfairness of the apparent pediarchy go.

So, Lennart asked for the slice.

“Give me a slice of Hawaii,” he said.

“Hawaii?” I asked. After all, Hawaii is a noun, an island. And its slices were already claimed by the United States in 1959.

“Just give it,” he demanded. I gave him the slice of Hawaiian pizza and as we watched the film the kids quoted the funny lines immediately after they occurred and I said nothing at all.

The first few weeks I felt like an intruder, and the kids helped support that feeling.

Lennart, whose hunger is insatiable, was always concerned that I was eating his food.

“Did you eat an apple yesterday?” Lennart asked.

“Yes, and I told Clemens so he’d know to buy more,” I said.

“Dad, I found the thief!”

And Liv, the ten-year-old domestic wunderkind, fretted about cleaning supplies.

“Are you allowed to use our laundry soap?” she would ask.

It was not possible to declare that I was now a part of we simply because I’d handed over some cash – you can’t buy acceptance (except in cults, hotel casinos, and fraternities).

So the kids would turn on the stereo and climb up on my bed and throw pillows at me and yell, “You only rented the room, not all the furniture. This is ours!”

But I sat around on that furniture that wasn’t mine for a long time and it started to smell like me and little by little we just get used to the things that are around us – though it’s always hard to believe that things were once different and may change again (Was I ever not alive? I can’t remember.) – and last week Liv snuck up on me while I was writing (she always does that) and she was crying and she grabbed my ankle and whimpered: “Please don’t go back to California.”

I love the kids. I love the fleeting seriousness of their problems: missing hair accessories, stupid jackets, dumb lunchboxes, mealy-tasting yogurt, wiggly teeth, too many toys, pajamas, bedtime, he-poked-me-but-she-hit-me-first-but-he-tried-to-show-me-his-willy.

I love that Lennart sings all of his thoughts at dinner each night: “I don’t know what I should eat!/I’m going to spread some butter on this roll!/Maybe salami, maybe fish, maybe poo-poo!/I don’t know what to eat!” Or how he wants to become mayor and occasionally dresses up in a suit and practices speeches in front of the big mirror by the front door.

I love that Liv corrects me about everything, like when I use u (yoo) instead of ü (ew), or when I accidentally roll my r’s when I say an English word because I practice so much to improve my German accent, or when I tap my foot at the dinner table (“Our neighbor’s baby is trying to sleep!”) – and then she explodes because Lennart ate the last tomato and suddenly she’s on the floor screaming and crying and hurling her enormous hair in every direction like some horrifying prototype for an anthropomorphic Swiffer Wet Jet.

And kids really do say the darndest things.

A few weeks ago, we were cleaning the house to get ready for the holidays. Liv started to iron a tablecloth while Lennart and I were sweeping the stairs outside the front door. We come back inside and Lennart is furious.

“I wanted to iron!” he yells and rolls on the floor in the position that supposedly helps if you’re on fire.

“Don’t worry,” Julia says, “I’ll give you a very special job.”

“Make sure it’s more special than Liv’s job!” Lennart insists.

“I don’t even want a special job,” Liv says, “I just want to iron.”

A few days later, on Christmas, Lennart answers the phone and it’s a distant family member. Julia mumbles to me that she doesn’t really feel like chatting.

So Lennart says: “Sorry, mommy doesn’t feel like talking to you today.” And he hangs up.

After Christmas, Lennart wants to play the board game that I got him, Forbidden Island. I explain the rules to him and I notice he seems a little anxious.

“Is it too complicated?” I ask him.

“No,” he says, “it’s just… why are we going to the island if it’s forbidden?”

Yesterday Liv came into my room and sat down next to me on the sofa. She watched me read for a few minutes before she put her hand over the book, looked at me gravely, and asked: “Are you happy you’re a grown-up?”

“Yeah,” I say, “yeah.”

She nods.

“Do you want to grow up?” I ask her.

“I haven’t decided yet,” she says.

Last Friday I missed pizza night. I was on my way back from a short trip to Hamburg, where I saw things as diverse as the Reeperbahn and Miniatur Wunderland.

When I came in the whole apartment was dark, so I set my bag down in my room and went to check if anyone else was home. I found the kids in the living room, near the end of watching the final Harry Potter film for the sixth or seventh time.

Lennart ran to the kitchen and came back with a glass, which Liv then filled with water. Liv made some place for me on the sofa and I sit down, but Lennart stayed standing up and said, “Sorry, we don’t have much left, but do you want the last slice of Hawaii?”

I can’t believe I have to wait until next year to go to the dentist! Did you know we won’t see each other until next year? I promise, God, I won’t drink beer again until next year!

Either that, or they have been making lists. Lists recounting this year’s occurrences or lists trying to shape dreams into next year’s possibilities.

I like lists.

Are annual ‘best of’ lists arbitrary? Yeah, probably. But so are most temporal distinctions – that shouldn’t stop us from sharing some good things that human beings make. And this list includes things from before 2011, so it’s pushing boundaries and that sort of thing.

So here are a few.

Articles

• The first large group of people who were diagnosed on the autism spectrum are now young adults, and are facing adult problems in very particular ways. Two New York Times articles, the first about autism and romance and the second about autism and work are both fantastic. (Bonus: an excellent article about how the evolution of psychiatry has distorted our ideas about mental illness and its treatments.)
• Two stories about being lost at sea: the first about a Japanese man who lived on his roof in the middle of the ocean for days after being swept away by the tsunami, the second about some teenagers stranded without supplies for fifty-one days after stealing a boat.
• A story about the mind of an octopus. And love.
• The most damning article about Scientology ever written.
• And, finally: another year has passed since David Foster Wallace died. He would’ve cringed at most of the articles written about him since his death, but two this year were incredible: a look into David Foster Wallace’s self-help library and an honest review of The Pale King.

Music

Five albums, arbitarily listed and with no accompanying information.

• Girls – Father, Son, Holy Ghost (Amazon | Spotify)
• The Antlers – Burst Apart (Amazon | Spotify)
• Okkervil River – I Am Very Far (Amazon | Spotify)
• Blind Pilot – We Are The Tide (Amazon | Spotify)
• Bon Iver – Bon Iver (Amazon | Spotify)

And: DJ Earworm’s 2011 United States of Pop mash-up, which means that in just five minutes you can recognize every popular song of 2011 without actually having to listen to each individually.

Movies

I didn’t see too many films in 2011, but I really like The New Yorker’s list. Here are the best films I saw this year:

• The Tree of Life
• Certified Copy
• Metropolitan
• Terri
• Moneyball
• Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Websites & Webstuff

The internet, thanks to its democratization and Web 2.0-ness and so on, is mostly drivel. Some excellent websites help track down the good stuff, one of which is Longreads: It is committed to finding pieces that are “not just for scanning but for reading, savoring and digesting.”

I don’t always want to read something I come across right away, which is why Instapaper is the best thing ever created. A simple read-it-later button sits in my browser and collects all of the content I want to read and saves it for when I have the time. It syncs automatically with iPhones and iPads. It sends all new articles directly to a Kindle. It’s free. Anyone with a commute or a desire not to try and remember everything they want to read would benefit from signing up for Instapaper.

This year, my love of Dropbox has really blossomed. Dropbox is free storage ‘in the cloud’, which doesn’t mean anything until you need a document that’s on a USB stick five hundred miles away. Then it means that all you have to do is log on to Dropbox from any device connected to the internet and the file is there waiting for you. Every document I write and every photo I take is automatically synchronized with Dropbox, and available anywhere in the world. If you do sign up, using my referral link will get us both extra storage.

Finally, it’s been a good year for music on the internet. Spotify, which freely and legally streams thirteen million songs, was released in the United States. It’s akin to a client like iTunes, but instead of hitting “Buy”, all you have to do is press “Play”. Another great music service is Turntable.fm. Earlier this year I wrote a story about Turntable, which is like those creepy AOL chat rooms from the 1990s with less predators and more music.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed the last few months of Yabot the Robot. I’ve written some of my favorite pieces here in 2011, and 2012 will bring either improvement or deterioration. Who knows.

I’ll see you all next year.

There are nine tiles with colored edges. Each edge is either red, green, blue, or yellow. The goal is to make a 3×3 square such that each edge is touching a same-colored edge.

Liv lays down a piece and then connects two red edges. She connects blue edges, green, blue, red, red, then yellow. The last piece is in her hand, but it doesn’t fit in the last empty space. So she shuffles the deck and tries again. Lay a piece, connect connect connect connect and so on until the last piece doesn’t fit.

Shuffle again, lay the pieces out, wrong again.

She tries to solve the puzzle like this eight times. Then she’s bored.

“Let’s playing something other than this stupid game.”

So she pulls out a box and takes out a fake needle and says: “I’m the doctor. You look sick.”

The puzzle is still sitting on the table. With her all-or-nothing approach, Liv had exhausted 8 of more than 350,000 possible ways to lay 9 tiles in a 3×3 box.

Recently I came across one of David Kendal’s blog posts, which requests that someone start a blog for beginners in philosophy.

I’ve had a passing interest in areas of philosophy for a long time, but never really known what to do about making it a more serious pursuit. The realm of philosophy seems so big; where should one begin? With the Ancients? The Renaissance? The philosophers of the modern day?

So I would enjoy a blog offering regular reading recommendations for philosophy, and a guide to the perspectives of the philosophers whose work it recommends.

When I was was starting Yabot the Robot, I considered writing occasional articles that distilled the thought of philosophers I have read into simple, readable prose. I found myself with two major problems:

1. I am not knowledgeable enough for such an undertaking, and I think if the blog that David describes were to be created, it would need a team of authors – perhaps even a different author for each post.
2. It is very hard to simplify challenging ideas.

This second point I know well. I started my philosophy thesis presentation with the goal that my mother would understand it. I even looked right at her at the beginning and said: “I’m going to try to make this so that you can understand it.” And then I started talking about infinite substance and synecdochic properties and ethical edification.

But maybe philosophy ought not be simplified.

I think of struggling with a philosophical text very much like reading a difficult novel. Which is to say: it takes time, and the experience of being uncomfortable is essential. And just like reading the plot summary of Moby Dick will only give you a mere glimpse of what is actually in the novel, reading a blog post about A Critique of Pure Reason will not give you knowledge about the arguments and ideas it contains.

In fact, it is usually harmful to prepare to read a philosophical text by reading a summary because you rob yourself of the challenge of following an argument. And this is another way that reading philosophy is like reading a novel: it’s not the goal to just get to the end or figure it out; the real intellectual joy is being right in the middle of some harsh desert or tropical jungle. (1)

Kendal’s post led me to an essay by Paul Graham called “How To Do Philosophy”, which may have been more aptly titled “How To Do Something Fairly Unlike Philosophy”. In his essay, which is an attack on the way in which philosophy is a “sea of words”, Graham sets sail for distant shores with confused ideas and polemical cannons as cargo.

Graham’s main argument is that pretty much all the work done so far in philosophy is incoherent:

When things are hard to understand, people who suspect they’re nonsense generally keep quiet. There’s no way to prove a text is meaningless. The closest you can get is to show that the official judges of some class of texts can’t distinguish them from placebos.

And the reason that Graham is the first one to profess this truth is because the other people who noticed it just didn’t bother.

And so instead of denouncing philosophy, most people who suspected it was a waste of time just studied other things. That alone is fairly damning evidence, considering philosophy’s claims. It’s supposed to be about the ultimate truths. Surely all smart people would be interested in it, if it delivered on that promise.

Those people who went to find ultimate truth elsewhere also knew everything Wittgenstein knew, they just thought it’d be a waste of effort to say it.

Wittgenstein is popularly credited with the idea that most philosophical controversies are due to confusions over language. I’m not sure how much credit to give him. I suspect a lot of people realized this, but reacted simply by not studying philosophy, rather than becoming philosophy professors.

Look, there’s a lot of ways I could go about criticizing the flaws in Graham’s essay. But it wouldn’t be worthwhile, because he repeatedly demonstrates in the piece that he’s made of straw.

He’s uncertain about how arguments function.

I took several classes in logic. I don’t know if I learned anything from them.

He’s unaware of a thousand-year period in the history of philosophy.

In the intervening years an unfortunate idea took hold: that it was not only acceptable to produce works like the Metaphysics, but that it was a particularly prestigious line of work, done by a class of people called philosophers. No one thought to go back and debug Aristotle’s motivating argument.

And he holds kitschy philosophical stereotypes – the sort of things that one unlearns in the course of bceoming educated – as the very ideas that he somehow learned by studying philosophy.

There are things I know I learned from studying philosophy. The most dramatic I learned immediately, in the first semester of freshman year, in a class taught by Sydney Shoemaker. I learned that I don’t exist.

Alas, I can confirm that he does exist and has subsequently produced an essay filled with dubious claims.

But for me, what is more troubling than his misunderstandings is the conclusion that he makes from them: that philosophy needs to be more practical. If those silly ideas did something, maybe asking fundamental questions would be worthwhile.

The proof of how useless some of their answers turned out to be is how little effect they have. No one after reading Aristotle’s Metaphysics does anything differently as a result.

The reason Aristotle didn’t get anywhere in the Metaphysics was partly that he set off with contradictory aims: to explore the most abstract ideas, guided by the assumption that they were useless.

The test of utility I propose is whether we cause people who read what we’ve written to do anything differently afterward.

Graham thinks that Aristotle is acting out a contradiction by exploring abstract ideas and assuming abstract ideas are useless, but he’s wrong in two different, important ways:

• Aristotle is only performing a contradiction if we take it that the goal of human action is efficiency. It isn’t.

And more pertinent:

• It isn’t true that Aristotle thinks that abstract knowledge is useless, it’s just that usefulness isn’t the aim. And because Graham repeatedly assails Aristotle but never quotes him, I will:

Evidently they were pursuing science in order to know, and not for any utilitarian end… So we pursue this as the only free science, for it alone exists for its own sake. (Book 1, Metaphysics)

The last line is important: where Graham says useless, Aristotle says free. And why free? Because perfect knowledge is not bound by circumstance; it is not bound by anything at all.

Aristotle is after the truth. He’s not seeking it because it will help him build a better mousetrap – though it may very well be helpful in that endeavor – but because he is curious.

And I guess that how I feel about philosophy and its relationship to human beings is pretty simple: I’m curious. Aren’t you?

We need to eat and sleep, it’s useful that we have roads and gadgets, and it’s nice to have a collection of cardigans or shoes – but: What can we know? What ought we do? What can we hope for?(2) No one tells us to ask these questions. And when we consider them, it’s not because we’re thinking of some practical benefit. We’re responding to a need.

Which is why I’m so baffled that philosopher lecturer Lee McIntyre recently published an article declaring that we need to “make philosophy matter—or else”.

The profession of philosophy has had ages to make itself more relevant…We need to show our students that—when it is done right—philosophy can help them to be better, more critical thinkers and communicators in their jobs. It can teach them to be skeptical of political rhetoric and advertising. It can help them to consider what is worth caring about and so perhaps to begin to make the world a better place…But what seems problematic is the widespread philosopher’s prejudice that we are somehow sullying our discipline any time we try to make a real-world connection.

The individual statements McIntyre makes are not wrong: studying philosophy does foster critical thinking and those skills can be used to make the “real-world” a better place.

On the subject of relevance, however, I disagree with McIntyre. I don’t think philosophy needs to be made relevant. Just as you don’t need to list your hopes on an index card to remember them, you don’t need to be convinced that considering difficult questions about your existence is important. It just occurs to you.

Knowing that those questions are important doesn’t mean that you’ll devote your whole life to them – the real-world is shiny and fun and distracting, after all.

And this is why Graham’s test of utility – “whether we cause people who read what we’ve written to do anything differently afterward” – doesn’t make any sense. There are all sorts of reasons why someone could intensely study philosophy and still lead an awful life. Shiny ardent zeal helps us “follow the worse” though we “see the better”.(3) I don’t think that makes philosophy a worthless pursuit.

An action can be judged by its efficacy or by its worth, but Graham only considers the former.

I think of it this way: I spend fifteen hours a week teaching German kids how to speak English, and most of the stuff I teach they forget. It may turn out that my teaching is ineffective, but it’s undoubtedly worthwhile.

And when I break down on that big blue bridge and I think and I think about my thinking and I dance that meta-dance ad infinitum as my anxiety rattles sixteenth notes on the hihat to accompany my slow glance downward – it’s a long way down – and those Big Questions occur to me, then it’s easy to see: philosophy is undoubtedly necessary; it needs no justification.

After a while, Liv says I’m now healthy, no doubt thanks to her toy medicine kit filled with fake pills that look like wooden peas, which were originally made when eastern Germany was East Germany and were later sold at a flea market along banks of the Elbe at a price that only nostalgia could afford.

So I sit down with the puzzle and I set the nine pieces down and look at each one, and then look at them all.

The puzzle, I notice, is already almost finished. I turn one piece and swap two others and it’s done.

Liv comes back but doesn’t notice that the puzzle is solved. She just says, “Hey you little pimple, do you want to play Twister or are you going to read like you always do?”

I don’t remember what it’s called, though it’s probably something dramatic like “Dragon’s Breath” or “Scales of Danger”. There is no graphical interface, rather, the game is presented entirely as text. At the beginning of the game a few words appear, something like: “You have begun a dangerous journey, and you carry only a slingshot with you. What is your name, hero?”

And here my dorky twenty-year-old dad gets a choice: fantasy name or funny name. A name like Gandalf or Strider has benefits, but there’s also the latent desire to name the hero Penis or Captain Ovary. A name like that provides unending humor throughout the course of the game when it declares: “After traveling through the forest for a few days, Penis was exhausted and began to forage for food.”

By entering simple, intuitive sentences – “Go North” “Unsheath Sword” “Attack goblin” – my father navigated the textual landscape. He grew in power, collected loot, and impressed attractive elf women throughout the land — maybe. The part of the story my dad always tells me is the part I know he’s most proud of, which is the ending.

The hero reaches a cave where an awful dragon lives, but he only has a torch with him. A small torch is probably no match for a dragon, my dad must have thought. The game’s description confirms my dad’s fear: “A dragon is in front of you – it looks like you are no match for him.”  Then the game presented my dad just one option: “With only your torch, your only choice is to run.”

My dad, however, was no coward. He quickly entered the word that would earn his glory: “Attack.”

He risked the life of his hero, he risked the entire journey that he had undertaken, he risked everything, and it paid off: “You strike the dragon suddenly with your torch, and you have found his weak spot!  The dragon is slain!  Congratulations!”  The game ends as quickly as it began, and a once-unknown hero is thrust into the highest realm of greatness, thanks to a single foolish decision.

That hero is my dad.

I like to tell stories about my life, and those are the primary focus of this blog. There are a lot of great blogs that are primarily repositories for collected content – check out Bookshelf Porn, for instance. That isn’t what I want to do here. However: I bounce around other corners of the internet, and I come across a lot of great work. I want to share some of that with you.

I hope to provide you with an occasional spoonful of the best few things I find in this vast black hole of porn and vanity. Enjoy.

1. I love hockey, and I have always enjoyed the fights. I’m pretty docile, but a bare-handed duel gets me pumped up to the point that I’d be inclined to say, “I’m so pumped!” Hockey is a dangerous sport – I knew that – but somehow it never occurred to me that fighting was especially dangerous. The story of NHL enforcer Derek Boogaard was released this week by the New York Times as a poignant series of videos. Boogaard died this past summer from a lethal mix of alcohol and pain killers – of which he took thousands to deal with the effects of repeated concussion. He was 28.
2. Ken Jennings wrote an excellent piece today called “Globes in the age of Google Maps”, which served as my dose of needed nostalgia for the day.
3. Finally, as a follow-up to the piece I wrote about making sacrifices, I want to tell you about a great website I found this week called 52×52. Organized by Jessica Hische, the site asks its users to make a pledge to donate a certain amount each week for a year. Each week the website features a cause that uses its donations well.

GRUFF MAN: We have to get our hands on those files. It’s imperative.

NAIVE RECRUIT: But why, sir? What’s in the files?

GRUFF MAN: Did you hear me, kid? Finding those files is imperative.

A MacGuffin is a plot device that’s easy to recognize: it’s that thing that somebody wants. It could be a briefcase full of cash or it could be a sled. It doesn’t matter, as long as it starts the action.

And one of three things happens to a MacGuffin by the end of a story:

1. The MacGuffin is completely forgotten.
2. The MacGuffin is found (and acquired or destroyed or, in the case of that horrible film with the crystal skull, launches ancient ruins into space.)
3. The MacGuffin is better explained or put into context.

The best case for a MacGuffin is the third one.

What I want to do here is put a MacGuffin into context, but not one from a work of fiction. Rather, I want to talk about that currently despised MacGuffin known as “The One Percent.”

You know: the one percent of Americans who are horrible and greedy. The rest of us average Americans live on Main Street and hate pepper spray and stand proudly with those just outside the top one percent who only earn $593,000 per year.

The One Percent was a good device to get us talking about inequality. It served the traditional MacGuffin role: starting the action.

Now, however, we are in the middle of things and we have to figure out what we are really after. We are not looking for a maltese falcon, but rather justice for human beings.

That’s what this article is about.

I have no practical knowledge of economics or business or law, and so my discussion here will largely ignore those angles. Instead, I will focus on the things that I am good at: telling stories about people and making strong demands with ethical arguments.

A couple of weeks ago I was at the bus stop chatting with a policeman. It was a Sunday and the bus only comes twice each hour. Talking is a nice way to forget that it’s freezing.

In the middle of our conversation, the policeman walked a few yards away toward a pile of patio furniture in front of a closed cafe. He unfolded a large umbrella and found a man sleeping inside. The guy was wearing ripped jeans, a T-shirt, and a Cleveland Indians baseball cap. He had a two liter juice container filled with whiskey that he held under his left arm like a stuffed animal.

“You got a home?” the policeman asked him, setting the man up on a bench and gently taking the whiskey out from under his arm.

“I don’t know, man.”

He didn’t know if he had a home.

In one of my classes during my first year of college we were talking about hospitals.

“Who works there?” the professor asks.

Everyone sighs. Who works there? Come on, professor. We all know this crap already. A guy named Rob raises his hand, says, “Doctors. Nurses. You know.”

He’s right, he’s right. But, wait.

“And who else?”

Oh – we didn’t know we were supposed to be exhaustive. So now it’s a competition to think of the most obscure thing one can be employed to do in a hospital.

Janitor! Water Fountain Tester! Technical Support Guy! Sanitary Napkin Stocker! Vending Machine Operator! Dirty Laundry Collector!

And, Rob again:

“The guy who collects the dead bodies for research.”

Laughter, laughter. Dead bodies. Research. Zing.

Then the professor calmly asks us: “Which job is the most important?”

Rob is ready.

“We’re back to the beginning again now. The doctors, the nurses. They have the most important job.”

It seemed like he was right – the doctors and nurses have the knowledge and skills needed to promote health. And that’s what a hospital is for.

Except the question is intentionally misleading.

What we really have to acknowledge is that all of those jobs are important – in fact, all of them are essential. If the computers are not functioning, the doctors cannot access important records that they need to make decisions. Even jobs that we take to be menial – like taking out the trash, mopping the floors – are immensely valuable: how well is a hospital going to function if it’s unclean?

No job is the most important.

And if we’re going to condemn The One Percent – i.e. doctors, lawyers, politicians, bankers, CEOs – we have to remember that our intuitive thinking is that they are the most important. Yet there’s no influential politician who doesn’t have hundreds of human beings supporting him, no successful CEO who doesn’t have specialists translating his ideas into actualities, no doctor who doesn’t have someone to clean up the shit and blood.

And traditionally the reason why The One Percent earn the most money is because we think that they should. We think that large amounts of money are the best way to motivate individuals to do jobs that require a lot of skill.

But that’s not true. The good people doing far-reaching jobs are doing what they want to do, what they’re suited to do. I’m thinking here of someone like Steve Jobs, whose yearly salary at Apple was one dollar and who worked the day before he died. No one works the day before they die because they want to increase their net worth.

And I’m not advocating the implementation of some sort of socialist experiment: Pay everyone the same and let’s see what happens!

Rather, I think we need to unwind our thinking a bit before we can properly address the problem of wealth inequality, because currently we are reprimanding the wealthiest for doing exactly what our default position mandates: do a job that is Very Important and you can take home the big bucks; do a job that Well Somebody Has To Do It and you’re pretty much a failure.

If we agree that every job makes necessary contributions, our view of earnings should reflect that by becoming more moderate.

In other words:

1. The highest earners should be making less, because their current wages are based on a false notion that they perform in isolation.
2. The lowest earners should be making more, because the work that they do is vital.

And we should all strive to do those things that we are most suited for. I could never be an architect or a X-Ray technician or a carpenter because what I do well is write – but all of us have a role and we should never look down on someone who is doing any sort of hard work.

It all needs to get done.

It was an icy eighteen degrees outside the night that man slept in an umbrella. The same night, six thousand miles away in Egypt, a two-week old baby died in his mother’s arms having never been inside a building and having never felt water on his skin.

The philosopher Peter Singer wrote an article called Famine, Affluence, and Morality, which discusses the duty the rich have to the poor.

The impetus for Singer writing the article was a 1971 famine in East Bengal, but the situation today is no less dire. Some human beings have the luxury of playing Angry Birds all day and their greatest problems (“First World Problems”) are, for example, only having $100 bills when they want to buy a pack of gum. Other human beings are homeless and starving, abused by their own government and neglected by wealthy countries.

Singer’s assumptions are hard to disagree with:

• “Death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care is bad.”
• “It makes no moral difference whether the person I can help is a neighbor’s child ten yards from me or a Bengali whose name I shall never know, ten thousand miles away.”

And his argument is quite simple:

If it is in our power to prevent something bad from happening, without thereby sacrificing anything of comparable moral importance, we ought, morally, to do it.

What ultimately follows is this: Those of us who have more than we need ought to give things away until we reach the point where giving up more would cause more suffering than it prevents.

When you consider that giving up trivial objects can relieve someone from great suffering, it’s hard to imagine that collecting such objects is very important.

I don’t want this post to resemble those sensationalist commercials where a man with a beard walks down a street covered with glass and hubcaps and picks up a famished baby and says, “Zandra here hasn’t eaten for two weeks. For just ten cents a day…” – and yet, isn’t it true?

Those of us lucky enough to be affluent in the year 2011 live more comfortable lives than the royalty in any other century in history.

And it is luck that I am here and now and not there and now.

I remember when we read Singer’s article in a philosophy class in college and the typical reaction was: “I earn the money that I have, so Singer is overstepping his bounds to say that I have a duty to give it away to the poor. I can decide to do that, but I can also decide to do whatever else I want with it.”

It’s true that middle class Americans earn the money they make – the same applies, of course, to The One Percent – but what they didn’t earn is what very few people have, namely, the opportunity to be born in that place at that time.

That’s just luck.

We need to remember that: there’s nothing fundamentally different about how a starving Somalian landed on this ramshackle planet – she just landed in a different place. A place that’s harder than any I’ve known.

After a few minutes a police car came to take the homeless man away, wrapped in a blanket. He never stopped looking back at the nearly empty container of whiskey that had been tipped over by the wind.

The police officer said goodbye to me, said that that guy would be back again some day.

“He fucked up his life,” he told me.

But still – he needs help.

The same week I saw the man at the bus stop, a young guy in New York City was getting prepared to leave the temporary housing where my girlfriend Lily works – his time there was almost up. And where the hell do you go when you don’t know how to find a job and everyone thinks that you messed your own life up, that you’re causing yourself to suffer?

I have no idea.

Just yesterday Lily told me about another guy who came to her and asked if there was some way he could move back into the building. There is not. All she could do was offer him some advice on other places to try.

And I’ll tell you: Lily is tremendously empathetic and must have felt that guy’s despair. She earns no money for the work she does, but I wish she did, because she’d know what to do with it.

And I wish that I was empathetic in the same way that she is, because I think it is that ability to look at someone and really believe that could be me that the world needs.

It is so difficult to get out of my own perspective – every experience I have reinforces the fact that I am at the center of it all! – but it’s something resembling objectivity that helps human beings act ethically.

We have to try to get out of ourselves, because if we don’t then the only suffering we know is our own. And we’ll forget that the man sleeping in an umbrella is us in a different battle, us in another scene, us weeping and dreaming and asking, “Why?”

Our life is not a movie or maybe in the opening sequence you are chasing after some Mr. MacGuffin, but it’s just acting after all so you go to the director to ask what your motivation is and hanging on the wall behind him is one index card for every actor in the film, that is, one index card for every human being that was/is/will be – it’s a big production, a big wall – and according to the cards some of the actors play generals and some play presidents and some lovers and some farmers and some builders, some die in burning houses and some get out in time, some ford the river and some die of cholera, some nights some sleep and some nights some don’t, some live and some die and then the some that live die too, and you, you’re supposed to kill that son of a bitch Mr. MacGuffin but you can’t find the guy anywhere, he doesn’t hang out with everyone else, he doesn’t even have an index card, so one day in the middle of shooting you pick up that damn camera and you sell it to the guy who plays a pawn shop broker and he gives you two thousand bucks for it and you give it all away and when the tape runs out some metal needle spinning in a deep dug well worn groove tells you that you got him, you did the right thing.

When I passed him, he was sitting in a lawn chair behind the guard rail nodding at every car that drove by. Just a little polite nick of a nod. In quick succession he nod nod nods at three cars going from his right to his left.

Just before I saw Samuel, I thought to myself: I wonder if a human being controls this stoplight.

I was driving on some horrible mountain road: the kind whose upkeep consists of putting up signs to warn drivers of everything that will never get repaired. The kind of road whose curves are so curvy, whose loops are so loopy, that you get out Roget’s and wonder if maybe the road is coiling or even undulating.

And suddenly I’m stopped. We’re all stopped. Why are we all stopped here?

A stoplight.

Here above clouds on a road where no road should be but is there’s a stoplight set up like a joke or a prop.

Just beyond the stoplight, there’s a narrow hairpin turn, and titan cars are careening around it and toward me. They’ve got a green light somewhere around that turn assuring them: Go on! Go! No one is coming!

And I thought to myself: I wonder if a human being controls this stoplight.

We’re waiting, they’re driving – but what if someone sent us all hurtling around that corner at once for love of fireworks and mayhem? Why am I thinking about that? Does that mean I’m that sort of person? Would I do that? I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t. I could never do that, but someone could, right?

Someone could kill us.

Green light and I make the turn slowly. And that’s when I see Samuel, sitting on his chair. He’s wearing an orange vest and basketball shorts. As he gives me that routine nod, he leans back a little bit and keeps himself from falling backward by curling his toes around the bottom of the guard rail, one small segment of which looks new.

Then I see his thumb making circles.

He holds his thumb just above the little widget that controls the stoplights. It looks like a TV remote and in the middle is something that is not quite a button and not quite a lever – it’s some kind of switch that no one ever found a name for. Or maybe switch just seemed okay.

I finish the turn but I can’t stop looking in the mirror at Samuel and that one section of the rail that’s newer, brighter than the others. I wonder how Samuel gets there in the morning. I wonder if someone works the night shift.

I wonder and wonder and wonder, but not in succession – no one wonders in succession – and when all those sensations subside I notice that Samuel flips the switch with that wandering thumb and shit I think he’s trying to kill me so I look forward quickly and hit the brake then hit the accelerator because who knows which one you’re supposed to push anyway.

But I notice that I am already passed the stoplight, passed the cars and the people in the cars who are wondering: I wonder if a human being controls this damned stoplight. Samuel wasn’t trying to kill me.

Samuel was just flipping that switch at the right moment, nod nod nodding at everyone who streaks past him and never notices that he could kill them but doesn’t.

In fact, no one has died there since Samuel set up those stoplights nine years ago, the day after he was barreling around that turn and some condemned family smashed through a sedan-sized section of the guard rail to avoid hitting him and then sailed off toward some wintery sun, the luggage in the back and the voice on the radio beamed over landscapes looming larger and larger in the windshield that disappeared in a puff of smoke as the kid in the backseat woke up and said, “I’ve got it!”

I met him a couple of years ago when I was on a dig in Israel.

I’d been in Mickey’s little store for just a few minutes when he took me across the way and introduced us to his friend, who made us lunch. Mickey didn’t lock up the store, said it was no problem.

We ate schwarma and watched a bit of a World Cup match between Germany and Serbia. We talked about my dig at Tel Megiddo, where the battle that begins Armageddon is supposed to take place.

I told Mickey that a guy I had met a few days before, Ben, lost part of his ring finger on the first day of the dig. Ben lost his footing trying to hang on to a twenty pound rock, but rather than drop it back down on the rest of us who had just passed it up a hill, he let it fall on his own hand.

Ben was training to become a soldier, and the next day he walked up to me, waved with his still-complete index finger and said: “I’ve still got my trigger finger, so it’s okay.” Then he smiled and sat down to read a Vonnegut book I’d lent him.

After I told this story to Mickey, he ran across to his store and came back with a counterfeit scarab, which is a small, inscribed Egyptian amulet carved out of wood. He gave it to me.

“When he starts digging again, drop this in his plot. No one’s ever found one at Megiddo, so he’ll be a hero.”

He was joking, of course, but I kept the scarab anyway.

The next day I went back to Mickey’s shop after leaving a note in the Wailing Wall that read: “Good fences make…”

Mickey gave me a hug and sat down with me at a table covered in small stones that he was using to make necklaces.

“I spent one year in Lansing, Michigan, to be near my son. He didn’t want me near him, you know, but I hadn’t seen him for fifteen years. I moved my whole store to Lansing.”

The store, he told me, was one of those carts that are usually used to serve hot dogs or sell magazines on city corners.

His was filled with souvenirs from a city that was five-thousand miles away.

But still, he did pretty well. He slept on his son’s couch each night, parked his cart each morning at six o’clock at a busy shopping center, and took a two-hour lunch break each day at the Kosher deli, where the owner gave him a free sandwich to hear stories about life in Jerusalem.

Just three weeks after starting, though, something happened.

“I always left the cart open,” Mickey said, “because I leave the store open here and that’s just what I’m like, I left it open. I came back from lunch one day and an entire box of scarabs was empty.”

Each scarab was sold for two dollars, and the box should have had a hundred scarabs inside.

“Two-hundred dollars,” Mickey said. “I thought to myself: ‘I see these Americans spending so much money every day. They have so much money. Why would you steal my scarabs?’ In that moment, I decided Americans were wicked people, and I decided to leave.”

Hearing Mickey tell the story, it was clear that he didn’t decide to leave because he was afraid of being stolen from again. Rather, he simply couldn’t stand the idea of living among greedy people who were capable of robbing the poorest in their community. Mickey is emotional and hyperbolic – he admits that – but he’s also honest and simple and hard-working, and he expects that of everyone else.

But Mickey didn’t end up leaving.

After he noticed the lost scarabs, he went over to the deli and said he was leaving without saying why. Then he returned to his cart to pack everything up.

“Everything was packed up except the empty box of scarabs. I looked at it for a few minutes and I don’t know why.”

When he finally picked up the box, there was something underneath: two-hundred dollars and a note that said, “These are beautiful.”

After he told me that part of the story, Mickey just said: “And then I decided to stay.”

I went to Mickey for the last time the next day, and as soon as he saw me he noticed that I had gotten sick.

He went to the back closet of the store and came back with a small vial of clear liquid. At that moment, I began to construct in my head a list of dangerous colorless liquids that I could still remember from high school biology. Hydrogen cyanide, diethyl ether, acetone, chloroform.

“It’s rose water,” Mickey said. He poured the vial into a glass of water. “It cures everything.”

That’s almost certainly not true, but I drank the entire glass in one gulp without hesitation. It does taste good at the very least.

Mickey gave me another vial to take with me, which is now in a box in California, sitting with a scarab, two little objects that are either a meaningless arrangement of atoms or a symbol of a chance friendship that is as necessary and elegant and beautiful as holy spectacles and natural wonders, that is on fire with something that you can’t quite put out and don’t really want to put out anyway.

“The total area of the United States is nine thousand… no, wait – nine million… eight two six – eh – eight two six thousand, six hundred seventy five, kilometers… what’s this little two?”

Among my four sections of fourth graders, this statement about the exact area of the United States was repeated fourteen times. I stressed to them that it is important to know that America is big, but knowing its exact size is trivial. (1)

“Germany,” I told them, “has an area of about 350,000 square kilometers. But what does your family eat for supper?”

Despite my plea for more substantial cultural facts, the kids continued the barrage of numbing numerical nuggets, like population and median income.

One kid started to list the dates of office for every American President until we stopped him at Madison. Another listed the average temperature for every month of the year in Los Angeles (Spoiler Alert: it’s pleasant except for August and July, and then, tragically, you have to go to the beach).

This stout kid, Moritz, is pretty bright, but he didn’t know what a Table of Contents was, so he started reading it aloud: “1, Geography and environment, 1.1 Political Divisons, 2, History, 2.1 Native American and European settlement…”

The kids know New York and San Francisco and that the Golden Gate Bridge is in one of them. (2) They know that movies come from Hollywood and that Barack Obama is a good President because their parents hate him less than that other guy who came before him. They know that the Statue of Liberty and the White House exist somewhere. They know what the flag looks like and that there’s either 50 or 51 states – it’s not easy to remember.

They know a bit, but they have a lot of questions.

Most importantly: “Dan, how many celebrities do you know?” But other questions, too.

Most of the questions start with “Is it true that…” – as if they can’t quite believe that things in other parts of the world are actually unlike Germany. Is it true that people drive cars everywhere? Is it true that people eat plain cereal for breakfast? Is it true that everyone carries a gun in New York?

At the end of one class, this demure girl, looking alarmed, asked, : “Is it really true that Americans drink water out of the tap?”

The room I’m renting in Dresden belongs to the family’s oldest child, Carmen, a sixteen year old girl who is spending a year abroad in a small town in Ohio.

She lives there with an Ohioan family and has had to adjust to American high school, which is markedly different from the German equivalent, Gymnasium.

Socially, high school is a blast for Carmen – and a total mystery for her parents here in Dresden.

“Carmen said she has a dance coming up,” the parents tell me. “It’s called… Homecoming?”

After speaking with Carmen, they were confused why the dance seemed charged with the sort of razzmatazz that normally accompanies more important ceremonies, like, say, a wedding. Over-the-top proposals. Tacky matching of various articles of clothing. Luxurious dinner. And who is coming home, anyway?

Why do we do those things?

I found my attempts to describe Homecoming difficult – and not just because I only attended once and spent most of the dance trying to hide from the girl I liked. (Such is the dating strategy of overwrought sixteen-year-old males.)

The reason why it is so hard to explain Homecoming is because it can’t be defined in isolation. Homecoming is not an event, it’s a nexus, embedded in assumptions and traditions and questions and images.

Football games. Alumni reunions. Last minute corsages. Boy asks girl. New dress – maybe return it after the dance. Olive Garden. Alcohol. Grinding. Sex. Or no alcohol, no grinding, no sex. That one slow song. Who pays for the tickets? Are we boyfriend and girlfriend? Do you love that song? I love that song. That song plays. Dress shoes. Bare feet. Chairs. Stage. Sweat. Chaperones. Mike just got kicked out for being drunk. That’s so Mike. Do you want to… dance? Those silly lights. Getting tired. Last song. No driver’s license – parents pick you up. How was the dance? Fine. Fine. It was fine.

It’s a cultural perspective I understand because I’ve always had it. I explained what it was like to Clemens and Julia as best I could, but Carmen did a better job when she simply said: “It’s really crazy!”

When I discuss the peculiarities of American life with Clemens and Julia, I’m reminded of a great benefit of living in a foreign country, a benefit that can easily be taken for a cliché: I get to see things from a new perspective. I get to look at America through German eyes. I get to look over there from over here.

And sometimes I’m embarrassed.

Like when Carmen talked about how no one in her town wore a coat during winter, because they’re only outside for two brief periods: between the house’s front door and the car, then between the car and some other front door.

Or when she describes how everyone heats up some food in the microwave and eats it in front of the television without talking to anyone.

Or when I explained Black Friday, and how someone will inevitably get trampled not long from now, running fast and arms stretched out in pursuit of a television or a toaster or some other green light, on some fine morning. (3)

But most of the time, I love America.

Last year, I took a class on Walt Whitman.

It took a long time, but I read all of his wonderful work, Leaves of Grass.

Whitman first published the volume in 1855 and re-published it seven times, continuing to work on it until the day he died.

He was fascinated with printing and said that he wrote with attention to how his words would look on the page. The title of Leaves of Grass is a printer’s pun: leaves are the sheets of paper, and grass is what printers called the long works that were printed and assembled slowly, a contrast to the short newsletters that had a quick turnaround and an immediate payoff.

And here’s where I get to use my favorite literary term: synecdoche: a part is made to represent the whole, or vice versa.

So you see, Leaves of Grass is stunning synecdoche: the slow construction of Whitman’s poem is a reflection of the gradual development of a human life, but – on an even grander scale, where the or vice versa comes in – Whitman says that “the United States themselves are essentially the greatest poem.”

A poem revealing a life.

A tapestry of lives expressing a poem.

And Walt Whitman, wearing his commonest clothes in his diminuitive frontispiece, can say what I love about America a hell of a lot better than I can.

The genius of the United States is not best or most in its executives or legislatures, nor in its ambassadors or authors or colleges or churches or parlors, nor even in its newspapers or inventors … but always most in the common people. Their manners, speech, dress, friendship—the freshness and candor of their physiognomy—the picturesque looseness of their carriage … their deathless attachment to freedom—their aversion to anything indecorous or soft or mean—the practical acknowledgment of the citizens of one state by the citizens of all other states—the fierceness of their roused resentment—their curiosity and welcome of novelty—their self-esteem and wonderful sympathy—their susceptibility to a slight—the air they have of persons who never knew how it felt to stand in the presence of superiors—the fluency of their speech—their delight in music, the sure symptom of manly tenderness and native elegance of soul … their good temper and open handedness—the terrible significance of their elections—the President’s taking off his hat to them, not they to him—these too are unrhymed poetry. It awaits the gigantic and generous treatment worthy of it.

And that last sentence, that forward-looking sentiment, is why I’m hopeful.

America is built and being built, working through the contradictions and the expectations and the disappointments. (4)

I can’t say much more than that, though I try to when I teach my classes. I try to explain Native Americans, the Civil War, September 11th.

I try to get them to imagine what it actually means that America is a place where people from every other place in the world live. I don’t know what it means myself, but who could?

Every person is a universe and every universe a poem, and we’re all winging across this Arcadia in matchbox cars with pale, tarnished paint.

The bed’s unmade and the trash can is full and we’re building a bridge to nowhere yet known and my head is under the bathroom faucet guzzling chilly water.

But by that age, I was already pretty comfortable with adults and understood how to be charming in their presence. “What do you want to drink, Daniel?” Georgia asks me. “Just a beer,” I say. Laughter commences. “Or water, if you have it,” I add.

Mirth, merriment. What an agreeable lad.

Meanwhile I’m thinking: I wonder if somehow the oven is still on. I need to check the oven. It’s probably off. What if it’s on? I’ll just go check it out. No harm in checking. Lots of harm in not checking. Totally rational terror.

But then I get pulled away from my fearful self-questioning and invited to play a board game that was described to me as “not Monopoly.” It was Settlers of Catan.

Four of us sit down in the den: Bradley (the younger), Bradley (the older), my father, and I. Before we open the box, young Bradley gives us a speech that I now recall like this:

European-style board games… luck and skill… philosophically… Ameritrash… cooperative competitiveness…. 1995… you’ll see what I mean.

I didn’t know at that time that eight years later I’d regularly give the same enlightened account of board games mixing luck and skill, attempting to convince friends to play.

Like I said, though: we never played the game.

We set up the board, which consists of nineteen hexagonal tiles that are arranged differently every time the game is played. We learned about resources, roads, trading, armies, victory points, settlements, cities, and the robber and all these other nuances that I didn’t know were even possible in a board game.

The only board games I had experienced at that point had a track and the goal was to get to the end. Sometimes there was a cool bubble that you popped to roll and sometimes another pawn landed on your head and SORRY! you have to start over, chum. But basically they were all the same.

And then it was dinner time.

We left the game sitting there, our initial settlements built and roads leading out from those settlements to areas that would never be explored. After dinner, young Bradley needed to leave and he took the game with him.

Then several years passed, and lots of things happened to lots of people.

It was almost time for Christmas a few years ago and I had no idea what to get anyone.

I did know, however, what our dog, Bandit, should get the family. Every year Bandit buys us a board game, and I had recently read a magazine article describing these two guys playing a game called Ticket to Ride.

The article was co-written by the two players. They explained that the game is about building train lines across the United States to complete particular routes. Then they narrated each turn, discussing their strategy and their frustration with not getting the right colored cards to show up in the deck.

Skill. Luck.

I thought that combination would be good for my family. We’d always played games together, but our history was thorny. For instance:

• Every game of Pictionary ended in a fight, probably because whoever won “had cheated.” You know, by drawing well or something.
• We’d play Clue with my dad, who’d only get a few cards to start and would still handily beat my sister and I. We would then challenge him to another game and this time he gets one less card than last time.
• My dad beat me in about a hundred straight games of Chess.
• We still play Spades, same teams as always: mom and sister against dad and I. Every hand is scrutinized and debated, and comments like “A card laid is a card played” are said with equal parts derision and playfulness. As I get older, the desire to lose is almost as great as the desire to win, because then at least no one will be mad at me.

So skill and luck sounded really good: it appeals to my family’s nature to plan and analyze, but also takes the edge off our Lutheran self-scrutiny, because if the cards aren’t coming, it’s not your fault and it’s no one else’s either.

And it was great. We played Ticket to Ride a bunch over the next few days. We collected colored cards, drank our hot cocoa, and laid down our plastic trains to form an intricate train network across the great American idyll.

It was a great gift from our dog Bandit.

And then eight years after the night that I almost played Settlers of Catan, I finally got a chance to play a whole game. Two hours of harvesting and building and settling later, I was in love with a hexagonally-formed island.

Since then, I’ve developed a vast appreciation for this style of board game, usually referred to as German- or European-style board games. They vary in theme, but several design principles are fundamental:

Instead of direct conflict, German-style games tend to let players win without having to undercut or destroy their friends. This keeps the game fun, even for those who eventually fall behind… German games also tend to be fast, requiring anywhere from 15 minutes to a little more than an hour to complete. They are balanced, preventing one person from running away with the game while the others painfully play out their eventual defeat. And the best ones stay fresh and interesting game after game. Full article at Wired.com

These board games are great, offering depth for strategy lovers and simplicity for people who like chat and sip on lemonade while playing. I’ve played board games with friends and professors and strangers, in airplanes and basements and on a dig in Israel.

There’s something wonderful about the structure of a small microcosm, a board game that says: “This is my world, there’s only a few components and all of the rules are self-contained and understanable. Enjoy.”

It’s a nice contrast to the mystery of our own world, but it’s also an escape from the mundane. How often do you get the opportunity to save the world from the simultaneous outbreak of four deadly diseases? Or work with a crew to complete scanning missions in dangerous parts of the galaxy?

Just a few nights ago, I met a couple other teaching assistants here in Dresden at a bar that has a collection of 400 board games.

We joked about German bureaucracy and giggled about Glühwein and then we checked out the games, finally deciding on The Settlers of Catan: Germany.

We built roads and cities and erected great monuments, making the most of our ore, wood, wool, clay, and sheep.

And I thought about that first night I played Settlers with Kevin and Amanda and Nathan, when we finally finished at two in the morning and I almost dared to ask if everyone wanted to play again, and now I wish I had because who knows when I’ll see them all again.

And I can hardly imagine a better night than my girlfriend and I grilling some fish and asparagus and pineapple slices and sitting down in front of the fireplace on some pillows and pulling out some long forgotten board game and rolling the dice, shuffling the cards, and traipsing into a world that folds up and fits neatly inside a box.

Note: Most of the links in this post are to the excellent board game website, BoardGameGeek.com. I’m an active dork on that website, and if you have any interest in broadening your board gaming horizons, that’s the place to go.

Well, history buffs, it’s time to rejoice. A 24-year-old graduate student at Oxford has embarked on a new historical project that mixes social media and historical research. Alwyn Collinson will be spending the next six years chronicling the day-by-day events of World War II.

Under the handle @RealTimeWWII, Collinson began tweeting on August 31, which, 72 years ago, was the eve of Germany’s invasion of Poland. Since then, he’s been updating the timeline to reflect the events of the second World War up to the hour, sometimes sending as many as 40 tweets a day.

As I write this, Collinson has just posted a translation of a leaked report detailing German military secrets. An excellent use of Twitter.

And the drunks always sit at the four seats right by the back window.

I was heading to my German class. Normally I would bike, but I’ve had a dizzying cold. I took the #12 streetcar instead.

The only seat open was right near the back, facing backward. I sat down and looked out the window right away. For short trips I look out the window; for long trips I read a book. When it’s dark outside and the window is a mirror, I look at my feet or close my eyes.

“That’s Harry Potter,” I heard someone say from the back.

I knew he was talking about me. My resemblance to Harry Potter is similar in certain regards: I’m a male who wears glasses and has a face. (That is to say: we don’t look similar.) But I’ve gotten the Harry Potter comparison before, and I knew he was talking about me. It was nine-thirty in the morning and they were still drunk from the night before and they were taunting me, yelling at me.

But the dictates of public transportation decorum say: everybody just ignore them.

So I kept looking out the window – circus tent, big glass building, girl who looks cold – determined not to let my face show recognition or embarassment.

“It’s his doppelgänger or it’s him. So?”

“Doppelgänger.”

“Him. It’s him.”

“Shit, I just don’t know. Cast a spell you shit!”

One of them isn’t quite as drunk as the other two. He whispers: “Let him be now. Let Harry Potter be.”

And they murmur about Greece – “those lazy bastards” – and everyone in the streetcar nods without nodding. Why should we give them our money that we earned? We forget sometimes that our luck runs out, too.

We’re getting off at the same stop, me and the dementors. The Director chose this scene and we must act it out.

I sense that they’re following me, though I haven’t heard them since the one guy said that “Harry Potter’s getting off here too.”

And I’m struck by that fear that almost everyone has walking down a narrow street at night, when you’re at exactly the middlepoint of that damned alleyway you have to take if you don’t want to walk the extra quarter mile up to Wilcox and of course that’s when the guy comes around the corner, but hey, he’s probably nice, right? and you’re not worried – he’s probably more afraid of me than I am of him, like coyotes and bumblebees – and you just look right past him because he’s not going to knife you (I hope please don’t my girlfriend’s at home with the dog and my novel’s not finished is my bed unmade?) or maybe I could just turn around here, if I look in my bag I can pretend I forgot something and oh crap he’s passing me right now look ahead because that’s where I’m headed and if he does knife me I don’t want to see myself die anyway.

But then I’m overwhelmed by a sudden feeling of cinema: diegetic music and mise en scène in the form of a cacophonous horn and a careening auto. What’s my line? Are those ragamuffins still following me?

They’re not.

Intoxicated, they stopped to wait for the pedestrian light to change.

Daydreaming, I didn’t.

And the car almost hits me but doesn’t but who knows why.

A guy I hardly knew died in a car crash a few weeks ago, his jeep thrown so high into the air that it slammed into the traffic signal that had told him it was safe to go, green, green, green, and his girlfriend was at home watching a movie and some kids that call him coach were waiting, waiting, waiting – why isn’t he here yet? This isn’t like him.

“Harry!” the quietest one yells, and I turn around. “The boy who lived.”

His friends laugh, I smile at them, and the director yells cut and the scene is over, they got the shot they needed, let’s take a short break.