As promised, I’m back from a mini-retreat from the news, but over the course of the last 16 days a lot of news was published and guess what? My world didn’t collapse. So I’ve decided to ease my way back in over the balance of 2016 and decide, probably somewhere short of my previous deep dive of reading several news sources daily, how much immersion I really want to participate in.

One of the luxuries of not listening to my car radio during my daily 80-minute round-trip commute was that I did listen to several audio books including, Great Expectations, War And Peace and Eight Million Ways To Die. This last, written by one of my favorite authors, Lawrence Block, concerns Matthew Scudder, an alcoholic former police detective now informal private investigator in New York. The title rises from Scudder’s increasing depression from reading about murders and deaths in the city (he should have listened to Thoreau). Scudder tells a fellow alcoholic about how the murders are affecting him and his friend gives him the advice: stop reading the papers.

Sound advice.

That convinced me that when I reached this morning, I would put certain items back on my reading list, but not others. You can check my blogroll, but here’s the basics: I’m adding Mano Singham, Matt Taibbi and Ta-Nehisi Coates (along with two old friends who are blogging again: Jill Miller Zimon, Writes Like She Talks and Adam Harvey, Organic Mechanic) back in, but I’m leaving The Atlantic (online only, I still read my paper copy each month), The Guardian and The Intercept off my reading queue.

I will also be keeping John Oliver’s Last Week Tonight on the list.
We’ll see how this works.

Between now and the morning of 25 November, I’ll be taking a news break. I’ve removed all of my usual news-source links from my blogroll and I won’t be listening to the radio in my car. The only story I intend to follow will be events surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline and I’ll be doing that through a Google alert.

Any pieces by Roldo Bartimole will continue to be published as I receive them and I will be writing non-news related posts as thoughts come to me.

I will be reading my email (and comments), so I’m not disappearing down a rabbit hole, I’m getting my precious brain space back.

Do all you can to make today the best possible day you can.

Cheers!

(First posted on 9 November)

Via Home Made Modern…

So, you know I ditched both Twitter and Facebook more than three years ago, but occasionally I think about returning. Thankfully, on this Thanksgiving, someone writes a post or an article reinforcing my position that all social media (not just Twitter and Facebook) are addictive time sucks designed to be addictive time sucks and, like cigarettes, there is no safe way to use them and I’m saved.

Cal Newport, writing in What I’m Talking About When I Talk About Social Media explains:

On Sunday, I published an op-ed in the New York Times arguing that social media can cause more harm than good for your career.

The core of my argument is that the professional benefits of social media are being overemphasized (I don’t buy this idea that suddenly Twitter and Facebook are the main channels through which talent is recognized and opportunities spread), while the professional costs of social media are being underemphasized.

I was taken how Newport took the feed back from his piece and expanded his thesis to answer questions about: what is social media.

When I’m speaking negatively about “social media,” I’m almost always referring to the major services offered by the major attention economy conglomerates; Twitter, Facebook, etc.

These companies, like any media company, harvest your time and attention and transform it into revenue. This is a lucrative industry, so they invest a large amount of resources into making their services as addictive as possible.

The ideal use case for these companies is that you return persistently to their services throughout most of your waking hours (c.f., Jim Clark talking about a social media panel where a panelist was raving about the growing number of users spending 12+ hours a day on Facebook).

Contrary to some recent strains of thinking, I don’t think these companies are doing anything unethical, much in the same way I wouldn’t condemn a television network for trying to produce the most watchable possible programming.

But a side effect of this addictiveness is that it can cripple your ability to perform deep work, which, as you know, I think could have disastrous consequences for both your professional success and personal fulfillment.

Thankfully, Newport gives blogs (like his own, Have Coffee Will Write and The Writing On The Wal) a pass.

This definition of “social media” is quite narrow. It doesn’t include, for example, individual blogs, or discussion forums, or homegrown sites like Hacker News—as these services haven’t been massively optimized to colonize our cognitive landscape.

I know many people who are dismayed about how much time they spend checking Facebook, but (to my secret disappointment) I’ve never met someone whose claimed the same about Study Hacks.

In other words: I like the Internet and I like its potential to connect, energize, and inform people (while also recognizing, of course, its scary potential to misinform and divide on a mass scale). But I’m wary of the small number of services that have conquered our culture by claiming to be synonymous with these goals while in reality plotting to squeeze every last cent of value out of our scarce attention.

Once again I’m saved from the abyss.

The Paris Review: “The Art Of Fiction No. 11” with Nelson Algren:

INTERVIEWER: Did you have any trouble getting The Man with the Golden Arm published?

NELSON ALGREN: No, no. Nothing was easier, because I got paid before I wrote it. It got a very lucky deal because they had an awful lot of money, the publishers did, during the war. Doubleday had a big backlog. I was working for Harper’s—that is, I’d done one novel. Under the way they operate—well, it’s a very literary house; I mean, they’d give you, oh, maybe a five-hundred-dollar advance and then you’re on your own. And then if the book goes on two years—well, but I mean, you take the risk.

They pay in literary prestige, they have an editor who once edited something by Thomas Wolfe or something; they figure that way. And I didn’t see it, just didn’t know what the score was, you see. So a guy from Doubleday came along, and I said what I wanted was enough to live on by the week for a year. And he said, “what do you call enough to live on?” and I said, “Fifty dollars,” which seemed like a lot to me then—and he said, “Well, how about sixty dollars for two years?” [Emphasis mine, JH]

He raised it himself, see; I mean, they were author-stealing, of course, and ah—well, I had a very bad contract at Harper’s anyhow. So they gave me that sixty-a-week deal for two years, which was very generous then, and—I told them I was going to write a war novel. But it turned out to be this Golden Arm thing. I mean, the war kind of slipped away, and these people with the hypos came along—and that was it. But they had so much money it was fantastic. It’s very hard to get out of the habit of thinking you’re going to kill them if you ask for fifty a week.

So, $50 a week in 1955 translates to $451 in 2016 and $60 to $541. Granted, we’re talking about New York city here, but I think I could live frugally on $26,000 a year as a writer in New York.

Found in my electronic chapbook…

Since last August I’ve been following Scott Adams’ Master Persuader theme concerning the inevitable (Adam’s called the election on 13 August of LAST YEAR) and no matter how much you hate our president-elect, you owe yourself the time to read Adam’s analysis, if for no other reason than to be best equipped to deal with the challenges of the next four years.

Keef Knight’s cartoon today is the first (there probably are others but I’m not aware of them) return fire to Adam’s in the comics. Jill Miller Zimon wrote today about Flamewars, could this be the start of the funny pages version?

Previously…

So, I’ve been a devotee of Julia Cameron’s morning pages from her 1992 book, The Artist’s Way, since the mid-90s when I began writing my first (yet unpublished) novel Cold Silence. My morning writing routine consisted of: Step 1—complete my morning pages, Step 2—read a Lawrence Block article from his collections of Writing Fiction columns for Writer’s Digest, and Step 3—begin writing.

That discipline has served me well over the years and gotten me through four completed works and keeps me going on my current in-progress novel.

This morning, continuing my reading of Oliver Burkeman’s This Column Will Change Your Life pieces for The Guardian, I came across Burkeman’s own take on Morning Pages. I can’t recall one of his columns with so many links. This is a shit-load of information in the links so I won’t attempt to excerpt them here. I’ll just commend them to you and wish you happy reading.

Enjoy!

So, about two years ago Oliver Burkeman wrote in This column will change your life: false reasons for The Guardian, about how people convince us to elect them to public office. That column now, in retrospect, seems a template for the past 15 months.

Everyone knows politics is a cynical game: to last a week in office, you need to compromise, tell half-truths, bribe voters and have a friends-with-benefits relationship to your principles. (People who deny this tend to end up offering further evidence for it: “I reject the cynical view that politics is inevitably or even usually a dirty business,” said—well, it was Richard Nixon.) So there was palpable surprise among political scientists the other day when two of them, David Broockman and Daniel Butler, published a heartening study: one good way for politicians to win converts, it concluded, is for them to state their beliefs honestly. And this was no artificial lab-based experiment. It involved real American voters and politicians. First, voters were surveyed by phone; then they got a letter from an elected official, supporting a policy the voter disagreed with. The result wasn’t a hardening of views. Instead, voters grew a bit more likely to hold that view themselves, and their overall opinion of the politician didn’t change for the worse.

It’s the sort of finding to restore your faith in humanity: just be honest, don’t pander, and you’ll get a fair hearing. Democracy works!

Or not. We don’t know yet. Why did Trump voters vote for him and not Hillary? That’s easy: in the privacy of the voting booth they liked him more than her. The reasons for those likes are myriad and there is no one answer, but from where I’m standing, the perception that Trump was a straight shooter and Clinton was not, had to have played a major role.

Then Burkeman drops the other shoe:

There’s a more jaded way to read the results. Voters actually received one of two different letters: one made a detailed argument for a politician’s stance; the other, a glib and vague one. (The policy was good because “it would have a positive impact”. Right, thanks.) In a rational world, you’d expect the detailed argument to carry more force. But no: the vague non-argument proved just as effective. You can persuade voters a policy’s good, apparently, by “explaining” that it’s good because it’s good.

Which has to be the political version your parents’: Because I said so. I kept reading and then the fireworks went off when I read:

The lesson often drawn here is that we’re mindless automata: Robert Cialdini, the leading psychologist of persuasion, compares humans to female turkeys, who’ll bestow affection on stuffed polecats, if they’ve been wired to make the “cheep-cheep” noises of chicks.

No, this has nothing to do with Thanksgiving. What lit the fuse for me was the name Robert Cialdini. See, I’ve been reading a lot about Cialdini lately because Scott Adams has referred to him as Godzilla, the man who transformed—too late we now know—the Clinton campaign.

Anyone who wants to understand the next four years, and how we got here, should start with a reading list of Cialdini’s books. Once you’re through those tombs, you might consider Adams’ wider reading list on the topic of persuasion.

We are royally fucked only if we allow our own prejudices to blind us.

I saw a lot of faces, that I haven’t seen in too many years at the memorial service for George Nemeth held at the Millard Fillmore Presidential Library in Collinwood last evening. I stayed about twice as long as I had intended and got to catch up people who were around in the beginning of Cleveland’s blogosphere.

One of the faces I didn’t see was that of Adam Harvey, our Organic Mechanic. Checking in on Adam this morning I find that there is good news from Cleveland’s west side. Adam, posting in 7 Years of Political Silence, writes:

I’ve spent 7 years with my lips zipped—which is not an easy thing for me to do. I’ve tried to be as non-partisan as possible in my dealings with everyone. Going along to get along. I’ve avoided engaging in anything that might be politicized, but what isn’t these days? Ain’t nobody playing for low stakes.

I can continue to kibitz, or I can throw my two cents on the pile & see if anything shifts.

Mainly, though, I’m tired of keeping my mouth shut.

That is indeed news worth celebrating. Welcome back Adam.

So, who else should be in my Havin’ A Laugh rotation?

Yesterday I wrote that the barricades will crumble unless there are people standing behind them, adding to their strength against the barbarians at our gates. The Cuyahoga County Progressive Caucus could be your barricade.

You can’t have a revolution if you don’t show up.

CCPC Political Director Steve Holecko emails:

As the sobering impact of a Trump presidency sets in something else is also happening here and around the country—an exploding interest in progressive activism. We now have 821 members (200 added since the election). Welcome aboard new members! While our mission of continuing the Political Revolution in Northeast Ohio remains the same it is becoming clear that our work is even more important as part of the Trump Resistance Movement. As Trump continues to select advisers and fill Cabinet positions it is becoming clear that draconian far-right wing policy and legislation will be enacted soon after the inauguration. CCPC’s role then will then be to minimize the damage as much as possible at the local level and to move forward wherever we can on issues like The Fight for 15 campaign in Cleveland.

Join CCPC and become part of the Trump Resistance Movement.

Now more than ever we need your help! Our staff is all volunteer and we can only pay our office rent and buy office supplies with your help. Please help.

Friday evening’s Love Trump’s Hate Protest was a great success! Several hundred people were at the event on Public Square including about 100 CCPC members. Special thanks to our CCPC volunteers who circulated through the crowd to recruit 81 new members! Thanks also to all of you who came out Friday and to those of you who came out Tuesday for the Keep Wayne Wild event in front of Rob Portman’s office. Photo’s and video’s of these and other CCPC events can be found on our Facebook page here.

A Few Things You Can Do At Home

Want to see Keith Ellison become DNC Chairman? If so, sign the petition giving your personal support, and then click here to find the names and contact information of the 11 Ohio DNC Executive Committee Members who will vote on Continue Reading »

Yes, I understand that this posting violates my no news rule until after Thanksgiving, but I trust Ralph Nader far more than the usual crew and he’s offering his unfiltered opinion on events, not news, so deal.

Optimists are hoping for a Trump makeover. They cling to his brief victory remarks suggesting that he wants to be the “president of all the people.” In his 60 Minutes interview following the election Trump said that the protestors were out in the streets because “they do not know me.” They recall his statement some months ago that he had to say outlandish things in order to get greater media attention and reach more people than his Republican primary competitors.

Character and personality are not prone to change in most people. Especially in the case of Trump, who sees these campaign tactics as reasons for his “successes.” However, the assumption to exalted, higher offices of public trust and power sometimes brings out the better angels.

So far, though, the signs are foreboding. Trump values loyalty, and people like Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich stuck with him at his lowest points earlier this year. Trump knows very little about the awesome job given him by that Continue Reading »

I first came across Alfie Kohn’s work fifteen years, or so, ago when I read Punished By Rewards. The basic idea is that punishment and rewards are equally bad for a student’s education because the central message of both tactics is that the task at hand really sucks and that no one in their right mind would ever willing engage in that particular activity.

Fair enough.

Teachers shouldn’t pour learning into the empty skulls (which seems easy enough), rather they must light fires of curiosity under their students (which is very hard).

Oliver Burkeman, writing in Why rewards can backfire for The Guardian, revisits the idea:

Psychologists have studied [the idea that rewards can backfire] for years, and call it the “overjustification effect”. The traditional assumption was always that people worked essentially like BF Skinner’s lab rats: dangle an incentive, and you’ll train them to do what you want. But for humans, in certain conditions, the reward simply reinforces the belief that the task can’t be worth doing for itself. It locates all the pleasure in the future, when the reward will be bestowed, turning the present-moment doing into a grind. From this perspective, rewards aren’t the opposite of punishments, but basically the same thing: a way of pressuring people into performing activities you can’t rely on them wanting to do.

This effect gets much discussed in the context of parenting and teaching (beware of giving your kids treats for doing chores, or awarding gold stars for work well done); and also sometimes personal habits (think twice before adopting a policy of rewarding yourself for going to the gym or writing the next page of your novel). But it applies more widely than that. The latest evidence, a study published in Psychological Science, suggests charity fundraisers bring in less money, and come across as less sincere, when they’re being paid – even if they started off genuinely committed to the cause. Come to think of it, since most of us are obliged to work for money, maybe the overjustification effect is built into the economy. Does the very fact we’re paid for what we do mean we could never extract the maximum meaning from it?

I think so. I don’t get paid for the writing I’m doing—I’ve never made a penny off of either Have Coffee Will Write or The Writing On The Wal—yet I keep writing. I do a lot of extra, unpaid work, for my day job as a tutor, yet I keep doing the work. Getting paid is nice, freezing or starving suck, but that’s not why I do what I do.

Expecting the carrot or the stick to inspire people to do their best work is just silly.