If Amazon’s Fire Phone could tell kale from Swiss chard, if it could recognize trees and birds, I think its polarity would flip entirely, and it would become a powerful ally of humanistic values. As it stands, Firefly adds itself to the forces expanding the commercial sphere, encroaching on public space, insisting that anything interesting must have a price tag. But of course, that’s Amazon: They’re in The Goldfinch detection business, not the goldfinch detection business.If we ever do get a Firefly for all the things without price tags, we’ll probably get it from Google, a company that’s already working hard on computer vision optimized for public space. It’s lovely to imagine one of Google’s self-driving cars roaming around, looking everywhere at once, diligently noting street signs and stop lights… and noting also the trees standing alongside those streets, and the birds perched alongside those lights.
Lovely, but not likely.
Maybe the National Park Service needs to get good at this.
And what does this mean for the habits of mind we cultivate? I return often to the ideas of Jack Miles in this essay—also about generalists and specialists, with a key useful heuristic: that specialists tend to embody all the disposition of farmers, while generalists tend to embody the virtues of hunters. Both are necessary, and both need each other. The careful tending to a field whose needs are more or less known, protected, and nurtured further, on the one hand. And the more landscape-crossing, round-the-next-bend pursuit of the not yet known and its promised nourishment, on the other.I want students to try out and value both operative modes, no matter where their own career paths take them. Knowing that others are also asking valuable questions in different disciplinary ways ideally breeds humility: a sense that what one has to offer could be enriched when conjoined in conversation with others whose expertise may not be immediately legible from within a silo.
And not just humility: I want students in engineering to know that their practices can be both private and public, that their status as citizens can be catalyzed through making things.
Typical rustic folk games involved hundreds of drunken men from rival villages rampaging through streets and fields, trying to drive, say, a casket of beer (the proto-ball) into the crypt of a church (the proto-goal). The schools distilled such testosterone-fuelled rituals into new formats involving smaller teams, sober boys and sodden leather balls. Codified by the Football Association and later disseminated to the world, this style of soccer was never the so-called beautiful game; the original purpose of educators was to instill manly and martial virtues into future imperial soldiers and administrators.
[gallery] Quasiquotes
Writing absorbs me, so I do it in the afternoons, maybe the evenings. But reading, as Parks writes, has to be planned for. I have to wrest my reading time from the come-hither arms of the internet, so I do it in the morning.Here’s how I do it. After I drop off my daughter at school or summer camp, I jump on the subway. I ride the rails for three to four hours. Maybe the F train: out to Coney Island, back through Brooklyn, into Manhattan, out to Forest Hills, and then back. Or if I’m pressed for time, just the Q train: again out to Coney, back through Brooklyn, into Manhattan, out to Astoria, and back. Or if I’m in the mood for a change, the B or the D trains: they ultimately take me to the Bronx and back.
I take nothing with me but my book and a pen. I take notes on the front and back pages of the book. If I run out of pages, I carry a little notebook with me. I never get off the train (except, occasionally, to meet my wife for lunch in Manhattan.) I have an ancient phone, so there’s no internet or desire to text, and I’m mostly underground, so there are no phone calls.
Corey Robin. Robin is responding to this post by Tim Parks, which also received a thoughtful reply by Kathleen Fitzpatrick.
Perhaps modesty should forbid me from noting that I covered these issues quite thoroughly in The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction. However, it does not.
Chronic pain in particular often doesn’t have a discrete material location, or an identifiable cause. “That doesn’t fit into the rubric of what it means to be a Western medical practitioner,” said Daniel Goldberg, a bioethicist at East Carolina University and author of the recent book “The Bioethics of Pain Management.” This leaves its sufferers vulnerable to skepticism, prejudice, and “accusations of malingering,” he said. It doesn’t help that many pain medications are addictive, and some people really do feign pain to scrounge their next prescription.Because pain has such a strong psychological component, finding objective tools to diagnose it is not a simple proposition. Research emerging in the last few years has suggested that certain types of pain create a distinct signature in the brain, and even that sensitivity to pain might be connected to brain structure. But the idea of a practical and affordable tool for measuring all kinds of patient pain is a distant dream at best. And that leaves pain susceptible to doctors’ prejudices, including unconscious ones. What it comes down to is: Do they trust their patient’s account of their own pain?