The future is always murky

     "I imagine cards will go first," my wife said, giving the card she had just opened several little punctuating shakes as she spoke.

     Wednesday. Her birthday morning. She had opened her card, affixed atop a present, given the requisite ooo's and ah's for its beauty and aptness, then boom, straight to the effect of artificial intelligence on the the communication industry. 
     By "cards will go first" she meant that algorithms will replace the teams of wordsmiths and artists laboring for Hallmark and such. I didn't have to ask for elaboration. Cards have different types — the humorous, the artistic, the poetic, the affectionate. I had opted for the beautiful. The product of humans, but that can change. Scan enough cards in and let the code do the rest. Words and pictures. She didn't add, "With newspaper columns shortly thereafter." She didn't have to.

     The media has been pounding the What-Will-AI-Do? drum furiously for months. I tend to ignore it, because when I roll up my sleeves and read one it turns out, like Gertrude Stein's Oakland, that there is no there there.
     I abandon the cautionary essays unmoved. My take on the AI menace remains the same. It's hard enough to get people to act like people and fulfill their full creative potential. Machines do it wrong, slightly, and when it comes to something like a greeting card — or a newspaper column — even a slight wrong is a lot. It only takes a little spit to spoil the soup.

     Besides, there will be no AI writing newspaper columns because the demand will die long before they get good at it. I haven't yet gotten an email from a reader demanding, "Who ARE you and why are you telling us about your life?" But that moment approaches day by day. Hatters kept trying to make cheaper hats when the problem was that men no longer felt like wearing them.
     That said, I'm reluctant to predict the future, as the guys who called cell phones a fad in 1983. (They might be. When was the last time you talked on the phone? Phones could yet end up like compact discs, a change that showed up, seemed permanent, and then years went by and it wasn't. Which makes sense. Nothing is permanent).
     The model I use is my youth in the 1960s, when the space program carbonized our brains. Tang was big. So were "Space Food Sticks," a sort of bland, mushy Tootsie-Roll-like concoction. Someday we would all enjoy entire meals in the form of a single pill.
     Or not. Turns out people liked preparing real food, or at least eating real food. I ate TV dinners all the time as a child — that pair of hot dogs in their shallow sea of beans. Mmm! Now I never do. If my wife came home and I served her a Hungry Man dinner her reaction would be comparable to if I served a pair of roasted hamsters.
     My hunch is that people want to read cards or stories, view paintings or hear songs created by other people. That readers will never curl up with some book churned out by a robot. Maybe I'm wrong. People do read boilerplate thrillers churned out by anonymous writers pretending to be a certain best-selling author . Maybe AI-created works will be fantastic in some unimaginably wonderful way, and my suggesting otherwise is like scoffing that someone would attend the opera without a top hat. The future is always murky.

Weighing ‘the soul of Chicago’

Photo for the Sun-Times by Ashlee Rezin

     “The soul of Chicago.”
     An easy enough phrase to toss out. It’s emblazoned on Willie Wilson T-shirts: “Restoring the Soul of Chicago.” Only $31.67.
     Brand new mayor Brandon Johnson also invoked the soul of Chicago, in his inauguration address Monday, repeatedly, seriously. So it seems worthy of serious consideration.
     What is the soul of Chicago?
     Johnson began his exploration by suggesting the soul of Chicago is a general human condition, like opposable thumbs. The soul of Chicago, he said, is “alive and well in each and every one of us here today.”
     Unless he meant just the people in the room. I hope he wasn’t implying that the soul of Chicago is a thing possessed only by those who’d go out of their way to see him inaugurated in person. If that’s the case, it’s going to be a long four years.
     Besides, Johnson immediately opened the category up to “the Miami, the Sauk, the Potawatomi, who lived on this land for centuries.”
     Hmmm. I see how mentioning Native Americans helps Johnson check off a box. But the Potawatomi war-danced out of town in 1835. A proud heritage, for certain. But if they are the soul of Chicago, today, then why are all these buildings here? I don’t think Johnson is saying the true heart of Chicago is the dispossessed, the exiled. The city does sometimes seem headed in that direction. I hope the soul of Chicago isn’t something that gets driven to Arizona.

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Mailbag

     Readers often write in with questions and I do my best to answer them. This is from Ed Perchess:

     Neil, how is it ok for you the Left to say and do all you can against the so called Right but when the Right goes after the Left it is Wrong? It’s called Hypocrisy, which Liberal Regressive Socialists are full of, besides themselves!! Shame on you, ask for a refund from wherever you were brainwashed at. You are nothing but court jesters to entertain your elite.

     I did my best to answer honestly:

     Gosh Ed, none of this is complicated. Let me explain again: Donald Trump is a fascist, doing all he can to pull down America's democratic ideals. He opposes free elections, obviously. He opposes free media. He opposes freedom of religion, in forcing arcane sexual mores on women. Which makes you, forgive me for pointing it out, the dupe of a fascist, either consciously or unconsciously undermining American values in your own small way. Patriotic Democrats can do all we can to oppose you because we love America, in its pure, small "d" democratic form. You do all you can to prop up your sad and ridiculous demagogue because those taken in by shams eventually become invested in the fraud they have fallen for and can't face the truth.
     I hope that clears things up for you.

    Neil

King’s life just won’t stay in the past

     I don’t like to write in books. Even bound galleys — it just feels wrong. Besides, you still have to later find the page where the underlined passage appears. Better to slap a Post-It note by the parts you want to recall later.
     So when I pulled down my advance copy of Jonathan Eig’s “King: A Life,” which comes out Tuesday, I smiled. The pages sprout with magenta and orange notes. It’s been five months since I read it, before the King holiday last January. While I knew the book was interesting, I forgot just how interesting.
     So interesting that I don’t even have to check the citations to immediately remember riveting details, such as that for the first 20 years of his life he went by “Mike King.” That one fact alone might unsettle your entire view of what being Martin Luther King Jr. must have been like. Not the young preacher, waiting for the greatness he knew was coming. But just Mike, just a regular guy, maybe more sensitive than most, who threw himself out of a second floor window when his grandmother died. Twice.
     A man deeply flawed — he bit his nails, liked to play pool, liked to drink. King had a habit of plagiarizing, in school, in speeches and later books. He cheated in writing, and he cheated on his wife.
     Not a particularly flattering portrait of King, except for the civil rights part. Yet one being celebrated as the new standard King biography.
     “Magnificent,” wrote the Economist.
     “The most compelling account of King’s life in a generation” wrote the Washington Post.
     Why? Because life is messy. And those who keep alive King’s dream of a country where people are judged, not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character, know this must be done by facing reality, not concocting self-flattering mythologies.
     “Great men,” Eig writes, quoting Emerson, “have not been boasters and buffoons.”

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Flashback 2012: "Mother's work is never done."

Photo for the Sun-Times by Al Podgorski, used with permission.

     This was an assignment: for Mother's Day, show how hard a mother works. Eleven years later, a couple things stand out in memory. First, it was a an early lesson in the value of Facebook. I put out a Facebook status appeal for anyone who knew a busy mom I could focus on in the newspaper, and the nominations flowed in.

     And second, in our pre-visit conversation, I mentioned to the mom that I wanted to be at her house when her husband left for work — reflecting my own frame of reference — and her explaining there was no husband; her partner is another woman.

     I was already known as someone with more sympathy to the LGBTQ community than is usual, and worried that my boss would think I had sought out this particular subject deliberately, as a political statement. So I mentioned to him that I had put out a call for a  mother with her hands full, the perfect candidate had been presented: a mom with newborn triplets and a toddler.. But that she turned out to be a lesbian. What should I do?

     "You're always saying this is normal," replied city editor Andrew Hermann. "So treat it as if it were normal." So I did.

      One reason I've lasted 36 years at the Sun-Times is because we tend to have very good bosses, a fact that doesn't get mentioned nearly enough.

     Shhh. They’re sleeping. 

     In four cribs nearly filling the small dark back bedroom of a modest brick home on a quiet street in Skokie. Four little daughters: Malynn, the oldest, who turns 3 next month, plus triplets Annette, Samantha and Cecilia. 

     It’s 5:50 a.m. The day is about to begin — well, the sun is coming up. When any given day begins or ends is an arbitrary distinction for a mother of four children under the age of 3. You could just as well say the old day is about to end. 

      “Samantha just went down,” whispers Michelle Baladad-Widd, 38, sitting in her dim living room a few days before Mother’s Day. OK, “living room” is deceptive. Think “nursery.” Much of the floor is interlocking squares of multicolored foam. The entrances are barred by child gates. Scattered toys. A single orange plastic ring speared on a yellow post. A changing table. Three identical red high chairs wait against one wall. 

      “It was a little rougher night — not too bad,” Michelle says.  Cecilia — Ceci — was up from 1 to 2. Sam got up around 5. Michelle thinks she herself slept from 2 to 4. 

      Did she always want to be a mom? “Did I?” she wonders, as if considering the question for the first time. “I didn’t have that burning desire that a lot of my female friends did to be a mom. I thought it would be cool. But it wasn’t anything that I sought growing up.” 

     Michelle was raised in Wood Dale. Her parents — her father a doctor, her mother a nurse — are from the Philippines. She went to Fenton, then Loyola, and has an MBA and a masters in information system management from Keller. 

     News of triplets “was a shock.” 

     The living room is dim because the electricity is out; it went out the day before. Michelle’s partner, Jennifer Baladad-Widd, 36, returns with coffee. They have been together 17 years, meeting when both were at Sigma Kappa at Loyola. 

     At 7:07 a.m., a sound imperceptible to non-maternal ears sets Michelle to her feet and into the back room. She returns with Ceci — always first out of the blocks. 

    “She’s our wonderful challenge — she’s just much more active,” Michelle says. “She gives us the most run for our money. Being the most active she’s also the most interactive.” 

    One by one the rest awake. Malynn appears, clinging sleepily to Jennifer. Both women busy themselves helping ready the girls. 

      The first diaper of the day is changed. The record is 31, one awful day of triplet diarrhea.  “My mother counted,” says Michelle. 

     “All right ladies, why don’t we get dressed,” Jennifer says at 7:35 a.m. She has the calm command of a public school teacher, reflecting seven years in Chicago schools. 

     Ceci cries and twists away from her clothes as if they hurt. Samantha — Sam — awakens, then Annie. The next half hour is a chaotic ballet. Pajamas are removed, and identical pink-and-white striped T-shirts and gray leggings — Malynn’s choice — are tugged on. The triplets are strapped into their chairs, eventually, and kept occupied with Honey Nut Cheerios while Michelle prepares scrambled eggs. Whatever ends up on the floor doesn’t stay long, thanks to rescue dogs Destiny and Duke. “The clean-up crew,” Michelle says. 

      At 8:10, Jennifer, holding a frozen meal, hurries to the door, late. “OK, momma, I’m heading out,” she says. A substitute after the four-month bed rest required during pregnancy with the triplets, today she is teaching kindergarten.  

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—Originally published in the Sun-Times, May 13, 2012

A cautionary tale

Metropolitan Museum of Art

     "Ouch!" I said, aloud, reaching for a fork at lunch a week ago Friday.
     A stabbing pain on the tip of my left index finger. I knew the reason: my project. Our front steps, replaced more than 20 years ago, are now rotting around the edges. I'd been chiseling rotten wood away, custom-making new pieces of trim, doing lots of sanding, and got a splinter in my fingertip from an old board I'd pulled out of the scrap pile. I yanked the splinter out — I thought — and kept working. But obviously some piece of it remained, embedded.

     This is what is known in literary circles as "foreshadowing."
     No biggie. Finished lunch, upstairs to the bathroom, sterilized a tweezers with rubbing alcohol, and began digging. It was a tenacious little bugger, emphasis on "little" — it was like trying to grab the period at the end of this sentence with ice tongs. I finally invoked a higher power — asked my wife to help me. She took a look, and went to find a needle. Thus inspired, I concentrated my efforts and got it out myself.
     Flash to evening.
     When I went to sleep, my eye was watering. I flushed it with Refresh eye drops, and went to bed. The next day, the problem was there, particularly when I looked at the computer. Tears streamed down my face. Maybe eyestrain, I thought — I am on the computer a lot. The weekend passed, sanding and pressing plastic wood into gaps. Then there was the 3,000-word magazine piece to read, and I read it.

     Monday, my eye was still watering, and my wife suggested maybe the problem was COVID. That's sometimes a symptom. I took one of our stack of tests. No COVID. 

     "You should have an eye doctor see it," my wife said. I phoned an opthamologist we had seen last year for our prescriptions. Her examining room was dusty and her staff shrugged the fact off when my wife pointed it out. So we weren't ever going back. But ... any port in a storm. I talked to her nurse — the next available appointment was in August, she said, recommending Refresh Gel drops to tide me over until then. 

     So off to Walgreens to get the high octane, $21 gel eye drops. They helped. The problem seemed to be going away. Then it didn't. Tuesday I phoned my primary care doctor, Dr. Gregory Wallman. His nurse was aghast when I told her about the "See you in August" reaction from the dusty optometrist's office. 

     "A doctor needs to look at that eye!" she said in a tone that made me listen to her. She gave me the name of a glaucoma center in Glenview. I phoned. It was a FAX line. It whirred, and I figured, don't bother. That was Wednesday.
     Thursday I was I was stretched out on the couch, and pressed on my eye. It hurt. That couldn't be good. I found the actual number for the Glencoe eye care center — a digit off from the FAX line. I phoned. They'd see me in two hours.
     I arrived. Lots of questions. First a form. Then a quick eye exam with a technician. I waited for nearly an hour, flipping idly through old copies of Rolling Stone. I don't know any musical celebrities anymore. This ... is a waste of time, I thought.
     Right up until the moment the opthamologist had me put my chin on a device and looked in eye. The examination took all of three seconds.
     "You have a foreign body impacted in your eye," she said, matter-of-factly. The information arrived like a fire bell.
     Oh. In all candor, some weisenheimer subsystem considered making a play on words with "foreign body." But I thought better of it. She numbed my eye and showed me a little hair's thickness cannula she intended to flick the piece of grit or splinter of whatever it was out. If that didn't work — and she didn't seem optimitic — we'd have to consider sterner measures.

     I told her I'd probably be babbling the whole time she did it — I tend to talk when medical procedures are being done to me. She said it might work better if we both were silent, and I took her hint.
     Removing the splinter took another three seconds. Done. I expressed my deep gratitude for her and went directly to Walgreens to get the two types of antibiotic drops she prescribed. Friday I stayed off the computer and gardened and the eye felt better.
     Which leads us to the moral of the story. Check stuff out. Don't wait. And be your own medical advocate. Don't spend nearly a week with a splinter in your eye. If I had been discouraged by the first opthamologist who'd have me wait until August I'd still have that crap in my eye, with scar tissue already forming around it, the doctor who actually saw me said. So all hail Dr. Wallman's nurse, whose tone in that "A doctor needs to look at that eye!" was the kick in the ass that propelled me forward. And all hail my wife, who told me to make the call. Several times. Those of us who have access to health care ought to use it when we need it, and everyone should have access to health care. It's astounding that we live in a society where they don't. And where there are people who do have both access and need but are still too inert and stupid to use it as quickly as they ought to.

Wait, what did you say about ‘well-regulated’?

     Traditionally, columnists ran letters from readers as a way to take the day off. You never see those anymore — anyone lucky enough to still have a newspaper column is also smart enough to write it themselves.
     However. This reader makes an excellent point and, rather than just take his suggestion and repackage it as a genius divination of my own, I thought it made more sense for me to just let him say it. The only edits are where he starts citing case law, which I thought was going into the weeds for the average reader.
     Our current irresponsible, almost insane gun situation is not part of the fabric of this country, but a recent interpretation of those who hate the idea of government and authority. They shout louder, but that doesn’t mean softer, more sensible voices can’t also have their say:

Mr. Steinberg:
     I am a digital subscriber to the Sun-Times and read your column regularly. Since I read your thoughts, I decided to share a thought I had about the right to bear arms with you.
     As I am sure you are aware the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution states:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

     People who cite the Second Amendment ignore the first part that refers to a well-regulated Militia. The Amendment should be interpreted in context. This means that the right to bear arms is linked to a well-regulated Militia. Just as the state can regulate the practice of medicine it can regulate the militia, or as it is now constituted, the National Guard.
     A person seeking to obtain a weapon, especially a weapon such as an AR-15, should be registered for possible call-up and service in the National Guard. This would allow tracking of these individuals and subject them to being regulated by the authorities. Also, as a potential member of the National Guard they could be subject to a medical examination, which would include a mental health examination. If they fail the physical or mental health portion of the medical examination, they would not be eligible to be a member of the National Guard. This would take them outside the context of the Second Amendment.
     While the Second Amendment states that the right to bear arms shall not be infringed it does not define what an infringement would be. The wording of this amendment also contrasts with the First Amendment to the United States Constitution that states that Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
     Even though “Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech,” a person is not allowed to yell “fire” in a theatre.

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