Ghost in the machine

Work pod, 1871 tech incubator at the Merchandise Mart

 
     I won't mourn the workplace. There's enough old people mourning stuff that's changing on Facebook. Having to show up a specific place at a set time, to work under the eye of supervisors ... it was a kind of tyranny. How much more freeing then, to know what you need to do, when you need to do it, and just do it, on your own schedule. Is that not being a professional?
      A kind of tyranny, or so I imagine. To be honest, being a reporter has always allowed one to range far afield. You're supposed to be out there, digging, not hanging around the office looking busy. I remember, I was living in Oak Park, so it had to be almost 30 years ago. It was my day off, in the evening. There was some kind of police action on Harlem Avenue. A chase. The paper phoned and I hurried over. Two things stick in mind: one, realizing I was between a group of cops, guns drawn, charging down the street and someone else fleeing in the opposite direction, and immediately flattening myself against a wall as they hurried past. And the next day, laughing on the telephone to a friend, saying, "Only at the Sun-Times can you be lying in bed, in your underwear, on your day off at 5 p.m. and still end up writing the front page story for the next day." 
      I can do my job anywhere. I can open my eyes in the morning and work through my column in my head, turning the writing of it into more of a transcription job, almost mere typing. I've written the column on airplanes, in ship staterooms. I once conducted an interview while getting a prostate exam. 
      Yet I still routinely make a point of going into the office. I'm not sure why. Nostalgia perhaps. To show I still value my job. An expression of the hope that unexpected encounters might occur, that ideas are exchanged, information shared in a non-virtual way. Things happen. Last Thursday was a good example. I was writing about the cold. I was flipping through books on weather history, and almost thought I should stay home to be close to my materials. It was as cold in Northbrook as in the city. But the most people were downtown,  so I bundled up and went. 
      As it turned out, when I went to work, there was a press conference on the deep freeze at the office of emergency management. So I went to it, and it added a bit to my story. I was glad I took the trouble.
      The online world discourages that. You flip open your laptop and you're there, both everywhere and nowhere. It's the playing field we all compete upon, more or less, more and more.
       Were I doing my job at peak efficiency, I would write column after column about Donald Trump, tweeting them with all my might. I certainly would never waste time going into the office, or traveling to places to talk to people who weren't the president or observe things that had nothing to do with politics. That's so antique—like dipping candles.
       I'm looking at my stats from yesterday's blog. At midnight, I posted a column on the gross anatomy lab at Loyola University's medical school. It was almost a decade old, but few of my readers would have read it. It was reported, from the room with the bodies, talking to the teachers, the students, ruminating on life and death, the grandeur of the human body and the requirements of respect and faith.
       Seven hours later, I woke up, read Donald Trump's jaw-dropping tweet about what a stable genius he, if nobody else, considers himself to be. Aghast, like everybody else, I fired off a cri du coeur reaction, like 100 other agonized cries of thinking liberals. That post quadrupled the traffic of the anatomy class post—four times as many readers.
       Sigh.
       On one hand, you could say, "Why not?" The house is on fire, people want to know where the fire department is, not watch a travelogue to Myanmar. 
       On the other, the house is always burning, so people in the media need to perform a bit of mental gymnastics. Yes, clicks are important—the metric that dictates advertising, which pays everybody, or would, if only there were more of them. But if you focus only on clicks, you're cobbling together memes mocking Donald Trump's hair and glorying over kittens or whatever. And lot of people do that already, vast boiler rooms of them filled with youth chained to laptops, all around the world. 
       Is it wise to compete with that? Technology wins. I know that. And it's a tremendous resource. My co-author and I wrote our last book for four years, in Google Doc and over the telephone, and never met in person until the day before the book launch party. That worked. 
      But we did meet eventually. That was important, to me anyway. The human element is important and, I believe, will always be important. Michael Ferro's dream of some algorithm churning out stories and videos won't be able to bring to journalism what human creators bring to it. It'll always lack a certain something—the human touch, the ghost in the machine. You can fake it, and you can fool some people. But you won't fool everybody. That's my hope, anyway. My plan. It might not be much of a plan, but I'm sticking with it.
      Thus I go into the office, stiff-arming the suspicion that I'm doing so out of some mock heroic notion of work for a newspaper ... whoops, multi-platform storytelling dynamic bitchain synergicity system. 
          I like the picture above because you have the woman isolated in her pod, earbuds screwed in, laptop open. And through the wavy glass, there are people meeting. Not virtually, but physically. I really don't think it will go out of style. I keep thinking about Space Food sticks—we were going to take our nutrition through pills. A dream some nerds keep alive with their Solyent Meal Replacement drinks. But it isn't a trend, it's a quirk, because guess what? People like food. They like making food. They like eating food. Real food. Just because something is possible and convenient doesn't make it desirable. I love the Internet. I love having the choice of grinding out something at home and then reading on the sofa, or girding my loins and plunging out into the clangorous physical world. I'm glad that on most days I choose the latter rather than the former. I think it's the right choice. Err on the side of living.
       
          

The president believes he is a genius

     I know, I know. It seems both redundant and naive at this point to say that the president has lost his mind.
     Thank you, Captain Obvious!
     But looking at his tweets this morning. O.M.G. The only other individual I know who also calls himself a "genius" spends his days racing around the Southwest, chasing the Road Runner. 
    Yes, to expect modesty from Donald Trump at this point is to be unmoored from reality. And it is well established that he somehow manages to hit rock bottom and keep digging.
    But a genius?
     "And a very stable genius at that!" That has to be a title of one or more of the 500 books someday parsing how a once proud nation could allow itself to be led by this brittle incurious ego-maniac. Assuming, of course, that we're allowed to publish books.
    Who calls himself a genius? The very act is self-indicting. No truly smart person would say that, intelligence being, in part, knowledge of how much a person doesn't know. The point of Wile E. Coyote's claim is, he's not a genius. Putting it on his business cards proves it. He can't even make the damn Acme products work properly. 
     Trump's pathetic bleat of self-love is in reaction to Michael Wolff's caustic new book, which, like the allegations against Harvey Weinstein, isn't saying anything people don't know. Rather, in classic the-emperor-has-no-clothes style, is saying what everyone already knows: the president is an erratic idiot, utterly unsuited to the job.
    Okay, not everybody. Some people, many people, deny it, vigorously. His family, his staff, those with a vested interest in manipulating the government and, not to forget, the masses of the duped, those who put put their faith in Trump and now cannot recognize that they've been defrauded. The money is gone, the Nigerian prince vanished into cyberspace. Easier to cling to the dream than to admit you were deceived. Occasionally I'll encounter somebody on Facebook wondering when Trump's followers figure it out, and I jump in and point out, with conviction: Never. They never figure it out. They're like those peasants in Russia still mooning over Stalin.
     Don't forget Fox News. They make a fortune catering to these people, chewing up the mash of hysteria and fabrication and then vomiting it into their audience's eager baby bird yaps. I watched a few minutes of Sean Hannity last night—the first time—and it was like holding up a naked baby with diarrhea while rushing toward the diaper table. No wonder so many Americans have shit for brains: look at what goes into them. Look at the disgusting pap they feed on.
     I haven't read Wolff's book — I don't plan to. Enough people are ripping through it, sharing whatever gems are found. You can get a contact high just scrolling through Facebook. And besides. Happy is he, as Kierkegaard says, who didn't have to go to Hell to know what the devil looks like.
     And we still have three years to go. Or seven. If you think this circus of dysfunction means Trump can't win in 2020, think again. All the Democrats have to do is to veer into their own version of tribal crazy, and we'll fall right back into the same hole. If you think it isn't possible, you aren't paying attention. 

'The humanity of our cadavers'; Med students give somber thanks to donors

Fasciculo di medicina, Venice, 1493 (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     I've begun writing another long-form medical story for Mosaic—my fourth. Which always puts me in a good mood. I'm not a medical writer, but find such stories challenging to report, and fun to write. Nothing focuses your attention like a corpse, and if you can't find a way to make such a story interesting, then you're in the wrong business. I've always liked this story, for its juxtaposition of the physicality of the cadavers with the spirituality of the ceremony. Though the heads, flayed apart like ghastly flowers, took some getting used to. 

     The ceremony is in 10 minutes, but the exam is tomorrow. So rather than idly wait to honor the former tenants of the bodies they have been dissecting for the last 10 weeks, 145 first-year students at the Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine are busy, crowding around 18 cadavers in the brightly lit room, poking and prodding, using the remains as fleshy 3D road maps to the densely packed, vastly complex systems of veins, arteries, nerves, ducts, glands, muscles, tendons and other elements that make up the human body.
     "Probably a genioglossus of the tongue," says Andrew Hantel, gently lifting a stringy beige mass of flesh atop the neck of a cadaver, its skull gone, the trisected head peeled back like a banana skin.
     "Where is the horn of hyoid?" asks Wes Barry, referring to a bone that supports the tongue.
     The class is "Structure of the Human Body," better known as gross anatomy, for centuries the cornerstone of a doctor's education (the name has nothing to do with disgust; "gros" is French for "large"). For most of that time, medical students had to use stealth when acquiring bodies to dissect, plundering fresh graves and bribing officials at pauper's hospitals.
     Stritch gets its bodies in a far more direct manner, paying $1,500 apiece to the Anatomical Gift Association of Illinois.
     While books and computers are helpful—entire human bodies can now be explored online —it isn't the same.
     "We have a lot of computer resources," says Dr. Frederick Wezeman, director of gross anatomy at Stritch. "But the actual experience of dissection is elemental to the learning of medicine. Nothing can really replace anatomical dissection by the student."
     Students in olden days had a habit of treating cadavers irreverently, placing them in comic poses—playing cards or smoking pipes—and photographing themselves clowning around with them.
     That's taboo today. The practice at Stritch—and many medical schools worldwide—is to conduct ceremonies of thanksgiving to those who donated their bodies, though the actual beneficiaries are not the donors but the students, who hopefully will become better, more caring doctors when confronted with living patients.
     "We try to keep the students focused on the fact this is a human being, as opposed to just an anatomical specimen," says Dr. Wezeman.
    "The students understand that these cadavers aren't just meat," says the Rev. Jack O'Callaghan, senior chaplain to the medical school, who enters the room just before 8:30 a.m., when the cadavers are covered with white shrouds.

'THESE SILENT TEACHERS'
     The ceremony begins with Sister Brenda Eagan, director of the university ministry.
     "The first time you gathered in this anatomy lab, everyone looked nervous," she says. "That was Oct. 12, and you gathered here to bless and thank these silent teachers for offering themselves."
     She is followed by Dr. Wezeman.
     "Someone, some time ago, before you arrived here as a medical student, after thought, prayer, conversation, reflection and emotion but with full intention, made a decision on your behalf," he says. "You thus became a beneficiary of a gift from a total stranger. . . . We hope you will always remain appreciative for this gift."
     The 23rd Psalm—"Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death"—is read, and a pair of students, Mona Patel and Dan Micheller, offer reflections.
     "We must not forget to recognize the real contributors here, which are these respectable bodies before us," says Patel. "Their one altruistic act has changed many things about us. . . . I wonder if they knew that they are gifts that would not only allow us to open a body full of anatomical structures, but a whole new chapter into our personal development. . . . I value that this stranger, whose real name I will never know, has allowed me to examine, palpate and learn from his human body. . . . What I really would have loved to do is hold my cadaver's hand and say a sincere 'Thank you.' "
     "It's been 10 weeks since we first set foot in this anatomy lab," says Micheller. "Ten weeks since formaldehyde became our scent of choice. Ten weeks since the beginning of our remarkable journey. Ten weeks since we unzipped those white plastic bags, lowered the wet sheets and were introduced to our traveling companion and true anatomy teacher. . . . Take a moment to think about the things we get to do every day—from feeling the unique texture of lungs, to peering inside a human heart—things others can only imagine. In this process, it's easy to view the cadaver as a biological specimen, however, at the same time, minor details—bright pink nail polish, whiskers on an old man's cheek—remind us of the humanity of our cadavers."
     While these students avoid the mockery of bygone days, they are still students, and do indulge in a bit of gentle lightheartedness by naming their cadavers—Gertrude, Sally, Mildred—"old people's names," explains one, apt since the majority of donors were elderly.
     As soon as the ceremony concludes, the sheets are drawn back and the students return to studying—in the morning, they'll confront these same bodies, with numbered tags marking structures they will identify—or fail to identify.
     "Where's the inferior laryngeal artery?" asks Drew Benjamin.
     Emil Fernando expresses a sentiment that isn't surprising in students who, having crammed to learn each strand of a human body, are now confronted with the real thing and required to name any given part.
     "Everything looks the same!" he exclaims, gazing hard into the jumble of flesh.

        —Originally published in the Sun-Times, Dec. 23, 2009

You believe your wild improbabilities, I'll believe mine

A Section of the Constellation Cygnus, (August 13, 1885) by Paul Henry (Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Taylor Swift lives in my basement. I saw her. Well, saw a flash of something once out of the corner of my eye on the stairs. But I'm convinced it was her. I've also snapped a photograph — it looks like a murky blotch, because it was dark, but it's definitely her. I know it. Some nights I awake to catch a scurrying sound, which seems like a few faint notes of "Shake It Off" filtering through the walls. It's the only explanation.
     Convinced? Would it help if I point out that I am a professional journalist, for whom honesty and observation are vital skills?
     No? What's the matter? Closed-minded? Hostile to Swift, an intelligent and talented young woman? Can you prove she isn't there?
     If you don't believe Taylor Swift lives in my basement, then why would you — or anybody — ever believe that UFOs are visitors from outer space? A far more incredible claim, incidentally, since there can be no question whatsoever that Taylor Swift exists somewhere. The same could never be said about visiting space aliens.
     Why is this important? As if 2017 hadn't been a carnival of fabrication already, thanks to the current occupant of the Oval Office alone, in mid-December came news of a government program investigating UFO sightings, and Navy pilots' encounter with — something unexplained. Exactly the sort of mixture to add fuel to the fires of uncritical belief: a secret program, a murky video, testimony from Top Gun types.
     The murky photographic evidence — is there ever any other kind? — is of a "white tic tac" that appeared in 2004, supposedly, on the cameras of a U.S. Navy pilot, Cmdr. David Fravor, whose encounter off the coast of San Diego while flying a F/A-18F Super Hornet was enough to immediately convince him that whatever he was seeing was "something not from this Earth."
     That's quite a leap.

To continue reading, click here.

"Be strong, be clean."

 

     When I heard on the radio that Thomas Monson died Tuesday, I immediately knew who he was, even before the newscaster identified him. Not just for the reason many do—he is cited in a line in "I Believe," a song in the wildly-popular 2011 musical "The Book of Mormon"—"And I believe that the current President of the Church, Thomas Monson, speaks directly to God"—but he also has a cameo in "The Quest for Pie," my as-yet unpublished memoir of traveling out West with my boys in 2009. We pull into Salt Lake City and, of course, head directly to the Mormon Temple, where soon we were treated to Monson's take on pornography.

     “Let’s get started,” said Sister Cross, a missionary from Australia, a tall, handsome, broad-shouldered woman with reddish brown hair who looked like an Olympic swimmer.
     “Welcome to Temple Square,” chimed in Sister Sarah, a missionary from Japan, petite and dark-haired. Both wore long skirts, short-sleeved white blouses under sweater vests, kind of a demure 1950s schoolgirl look.
     We had arrived at downtown Salt Lake City perhaps an hour before.
     The young woman behind the desk at the Peery—and wow, these Utah gals are good-looking—tapped at her computer, and happily welcomed us a day early. The boys got their own suite—I had one a floor above. Suddenly, everything was gravy. The car was safely parked—on the street across from the hotel, no parking problems here, apparently—we decided to walk to the Mormon Temple, the lone point on our agenda. Because really, what else is here?
     We walked the six blocks from the hotel—pure blue skies ahead, the streets wide and completely empty of pedestrians. Walking must be an exotic practice in Salt Lake City. Lots of construction going on, cranes everywhere. Kent, charmingly, thought the Mormons were a brand of Jews, since they had a temple, which I only realized after he pointed out a large Jewish star worked into the architecture. I did my best to explain what Mormonism is—a funky outshoot of Christianity, with golden plates and Joseph Smith. Many people consider them strange, but in my view they are only unfamiliar. All religions other than your own are strange when you first learn about them, and it is one of those tragic ironies of human nature that a person can cleave to the most rococo faith, jammed with the most elaborate rigmarole and hushed mystery hoo-ha, which of course are believed sincerely as merely the ineffable will of the Lord God Almighty made manifest, and that person can nevertheless turn with a snarl to mock someone else for belonging to a bizarre cult.
     That’s a big reason religious conservatives are often so hostile to other faiths—not because they’re so different, but because they’re so similar, and it’s a short leap from seeing how ridiculous other beliefs seem to beginning to suspect how ridiculous your own are, too. Thus other faiths must be ignored or trivialized or suppressed because respecting them will, eventually, cast doubt upon the One True Way. It’s easier to burn others than to question yourself.
     Our guides engaged us—a strategy to draw the marks in. What, Sister Cross asked the boys, did they know about Mormonism? I stepped in, offering that I had tried to explain Mormonism to them in the car on the way over.
     She smiled, indulgently.
     "What did you tell them?" she asked.
     I told her I had said that, in the same way Catholicism is Christianity with an overlay of distinctive Catholic trappings—the pope, the Holy Trinity, transubstantiation and such—so Mormonism takes a base of Jesus-worship and festoons it with the specifics of Mormon history: Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, the Angel Moroni, golden plates, a genealogy fixation. . . .
      She said nice try, but no cigar. The key aspect of Mormonism, she said, is that unlike other religions, it has a living prophet, still, to this day, Thomas S. Monson, the 16th living prophet, who traces his ancestry directly back to Jesus Christ and is in regular communication with God.
     The Visitors Center at the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City dwarfs the one in Los Angeles, and is filled with large painted murals from moments in Mormon history and idealized depictions of life—“Our Heavenly Father’s Plan For Families” — with happy white people sowing grain, marrying, teaching their children, their faces awash in joy and light, frozen in ecstasy. It reminded me of North Korean propaganda. Even the occasional black or Asian or Hispanic person thrown in for minimal racial balance looked bled white in this setting. The boys and I delicately picked our way over the place—beautifully designed, Smithsonian quality, with maps and mannequins, artifacts, videos, tableaus, models—then signed up for the tour.
     Sisters Cross and Sarah explained to us how God had led Brigham Young to the present location in the 1840s, where he stuck his cane in the ground and decreed this was the spot where he would build his church.
     We were walked through the enormous hall where the Mormon Tabernacle Choir performs. Music has always been an important part of Mormonism and, given the chilly reception the idea of Mormonism gets in the rest of the country, the choir is something of a goodwill ambassador, or was when I was growing up. Now they don’t seem as big a deal, or perhaps its presence is just overwhelmed by the rising din of society.
     Kent admired the scale model of Jerusalem—Mormons tend to like Jews, even more, it sometimes seems, than Jews like Jews. Ross—who always pays close attention at museums—strayed from the group, going into the little glassed-in booths off to the side where snippets of taped lectures from Monson, the latest prophet in an unbroken line from Young, were being played on TV screens.
     “Be strong, be clean around such degrading and destructive content at all costs,” Monson was saying, in a talk entitled, “Be Clean.” “I add particularly to the young people, my beloved friends, under no circumstances permit yourself to be trapped by the viewing of pornography.”
     “Of all Christianity, this is my favorite faction,” said Ross.
     The missionaries were obviously poised for us to express interest in Mormonism—maybe whisk us off to a special chamber for further instruction, or that baptism I had waved off in Los Angeles. Yeah right, I thought, that’s going to happen. It’s an insult, really, how these folk expect you to readily drop whatever dogma you’ve believed all your life, and your forebears before you, and accept their faith based on some murals and a few lines of ballyhoo. But I suppose it does happen. Soft-willed visitors must sign up on the spot. I wondered if it goes the other way, wondered how many guys try to corrupt the missionary spokeswomen—that must happen too. At least the attempt must happen; I doubt many missionaries are led astray, though you never know. Not the sort of thing I would attempt, though it was entertaining to ponder the concept—they seem to feel entitled to pressure you into considering their way of life, why shouldn’t turnabout be fair play? Maybe God wants you to do whatever the heck you want.

-->

Kokoraleis already free to wander back into mind, bringing his horror

Human Head Cake Box Murder, by Weegee
(Metropolitan Museum of Art)

     Violent crime is down, yet we don't feel safer.

     Homicides dropped 15 percent in Chicago in 2017; shootings down too.
     Doesn't help.
     Why? Many reasons. First, our murder rate is still very high — 664 people killed in Chicago last year, more than in New York and Los Angeles combined.
     Second, Chicago has become a punching bag, our crime problem as a presidential punchline.
     Third, the media is more attuned to crime. Racism used to prompt the mainstream press to ignore entire neighborhoods, places it now tries to do a better job of noticing.
     Fourth, crime is so awful it resonates, echoing in ways that have nothing to do with statistics. If there were one shooting in Chicago last year, that would be a lot if the person shot were you. Were there just one murder, the world would still become a tragic and dangerous place for hundreds of friends and loved ones of the victim.
     Lastly, not only do we have this last year's crimes to ruffle our sense of security, but crimes from the past have a way of wandering back to disturb us anew.
     "They're letting Kokoraleis out," I said grimly to my wife over the breakfast table.
    "Who?" she replied. Because she never worked at a newspaper. Never, as I have, filled in for the beat reporter at the Cook County Criminal Court, 26th and California. Never sat in the grubby press room, at a little metal desk. Never idly pulled open a drawer and noticed a manila folder labeled "Kokoraleis." Never flipped the folder open and began to read.

To continue reading, click here.

I'll take two semaphore flags and a 16X Powered Riser Adapter Card

     Once, the challenge was writing the new year on your checks.
     A few days into 1994 you'd still be writing 1993.
     Darn this relentless change!
     Ah, hahahahaha.
     Now we've got new devices and concepts flung at us like overripe tomatoes while the stalwarts crumble.
     I had one of those moments last week when you can almost feel the howling winds of change.
     Friday night, a friend asked my wife and me to stop over for dessert.
     Tea. Christmas cookies. Doesn't sound like the prelude to challenging your concept of the monetary system, does it?
     So we're sipping tea, nibbling cookies. Enter the son, back from college. Up from the basement where he's . . . doing what? Guess! Running a train set? No. Mining crypto-currency? Yes. All the kids are doing it. We adults troop downstairs to watch.
     A metal shelf. And a dozen or so black slabs of video cards, electronics. Glowing red lights. A flat screen spitting strings of numbers.
   
To continue reading, click here.