"Fallen Leaves"

Not to be confused with
"Autumn Leaves" (Prévert)

I actually learned about "Fallen Leaves" from a 2015 NYT obituary about the owner of a Pakistani bookstore. It begins as follows:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — After his father died, Ahmad Saeed took over the office on the ground floor of the family's storied bookstore here, Saeed Book Bank. Then the elderly men started visiting, seeking to settle old debts.

"They all apologized and said they had tried to see my father while he was alive but his office was always too crowded and they were embarrassed," Mr. Saeed said.

Five times such men arrived, hat in hand, not just to pay their respects to the son and family, but also to say they wanted to pay for books they had shoplifted as children. Mr. Saeed said his father, Saeed Jan Qureshi, who died of heart failure in September, would have been amused: He had always regarded book theft by children as an investment in a future where people still read, and thus become his customers.

In the article, it becomes apparent that "Fallen Leaves" was one of Saeed's favorite works. Since a recommendation from such a wise-seeming person carries extra weight, I put the book on my list and finally read it earlier this year.

Opiod crisis, health care, false certainty

The New York Times published a thought-provoking article today about the opioid crisis and the healthcare industry's evolving response to it, but also about second chances and human nature.

Injecting Drugs Can Ruin a Heart. How Many Second Chances Should a User Get?

By Abby Goodnough, April 29, 2018

OAK RIDGE, Tenn. — Jerika Whitefield's memories of the infection that almost killed her are muddled, except for a few. Her young children peering at her in the hospital bed. Her stepfather wrapping her limp arms around the baby. Her whispered appeal to a skeptical nurse: "Please don't let me die. I promise, I won't ever do it again."

Ms. Whitefield, 28, had developed endocarditis, an infection of the heart valves caused by bacteria that entered her blood when she injected methamphetamine one morning in 2016. Doctors saved her life with open-heart surgery, but before operating, they gave her a jolting warning: If she continued shooting up and got reinfected, they would not operate again.

With meth resurgent and the opioid crisis showing no sign of abating, a growing number of people are getting endocarditis from injecting the drugs — sometimes repeatedly if they continue shooting up. Many are uninsured, and the care they need is expensive, intensive and often lasts months. All of this has doctors grappling with an ethically fraught question: Is a heart ever not worth fixing?

I highly recommend reading the full article. A few thoughts below.

"Gratitude"

The cover art looks
like a stylized sunset.

Last February, beloved neurologist and author Oliver Sacks wrote a New York Times op-ed ("My own life") about his thoughts upon being diagnosed with metastatic melanoma and learning that he could expect to live for only a few more months. "Gratitude" is a collection of this and three other essays on aging, the search for meaning, and dying with grace.

Future historians, rock & roll, narratives

The record that just might go gold galactically

The New York Times magazine recently published a fun article about which iconic rock artists might still be remembered 300 years hence, but also about how it's not facts but narratives that shape history. Here's an excerpt for flavor:

I have no data on this, but I would assert that if we were to ask the entire population of the United States to name every composer of marching music they could think of, 98 percent of the populace would name either one person ([John Philip] Sousa) or no one at all. There’s just no separation between the awareness of this person and the awareness of this music, and it’s hard to believe that will ever change.

Now, the reason this happened — or at least the explanation we’ve decided to accept — is that Sousa was simply the best at this art. He composed 136 marches over a span of six decades and is regularly described as the most famous musician of his era. The story of his life and career has been shoehorned into the U.S. education curriculum at a fundamental level. (I first learned of Sousa in fourth grade, a year before we memorized the state capitals.) And this, it seems, is how mainstream musical memory works. As the timeline moves forward, tangential artists in any field fade from the collective radar, until only one person remains; the significance of that individual is then exaggerated, until the genre and the person become interchangeable.

I'd say it doesn't stop with musical memory, though: this is how almost all memory works.

"Use of Weapons"

Fun with typesetting: "Banks" is
the author's last name, not the title.

"Use of Weapons" made it onto my reading list thanks to a series of mini-articles published by the New York Times debating what science fiction movie or novel seems most prescient today¹. Brad DeLong's essay caught my attention:

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of "Star Trek," picked up that ball and ran with it to make a moral point about the limits of understanding and action, about how we should not mess with things that we don't understand. We, as Americans, have a bad history of following the Pottery Barn rule: We break things, and neglect to fix them or own them.

In "Use of Weapons," Iain M. Banks seeks to make a different point. He loads the dice. His civilization, the Culture, and its special action executive arm, Special Circumstances, has the knowledge and foresight that America’s best and brightest did not. They use their weapons for the utilitarian good.

Nonetheless, they use their weapons and they use them up. And their weapons are people.

Minor spoilers below.

Google, the perfect team, and internet comments

The New York Times published What Google Learned From Its Quest to Build the Perfect Team earlier this week, and it's worth a read. My favorite part:

What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.

The article reinforces some of the things I've been mulling over, but what I actually want to talk about are the most common reactions other people have had to the article, based on its comment section.