Read on the Fourth of July

Ah, Independence Day: life, liberty, and the pursuit of the written word.  I know I didn’t actually read 233 articles today (one for each year since the Declaration), but I gave it my best shot….

• “He blanked Joseph Jackson from his life and excised him from his face, but could not forget his father’s exhortation to be ‘a winner, not a loser.‘ ” Where else but The Economist would you expect to find such an pithy, opinionated, and worthwhile obituary of Michael Jackson? No punches pulled here, nor any failure to acknowledge his “real, hard-won achievements.” By putting this together with Bob Herbert in Saturday’s NYT, methinks I am done with Michael for a few months. Or years.
• “It’s not just the statisticians who wonder whether our heroes achieve records more often than coins. Psychologists, and, increasingly, economists, also puzzle over the seemingly discrete worlds of chance and perception.” In The Triumph of the Random in Friday’s WSJ, Leonard Mlodinow of Caltech reminds us that “Extraordinary events, both good and bad, can happen without extraordinary causes, and so it is best to always remember the other factor that is always present—the factor of chance.” (By, er, chance, a couple of hours later I began reading the typescript of a friend’s next book – which at one point moves the analysis of cause-and-effect from the realms of mathematics and probability into that of neuroscience. Yes, I had time to read more than newspapers and magazines!)
• “Swedes believe that consensus is the best way to take long-term decisions that all can live with.” Well, that explains a lot about me, I guess, if you go for nature over nurture.  The Economist again, this time in Charlemagne’s column, Those exceptional Swedes. Oh, and elsewhere, the sensible Swedes who run Ikea get props for suspending investment in Russia due to, ahem, the “unpredictable character of administrative procedures” – read graft and corruption. As Charlemagne pseudonymously puts it, “Sweden, in short, is an exceptional place.”
• Friday at Medill, I had a curriculum meeting in which one of the four participants took part via Skype from Washington, D.C.  Saturday, I returned to the world of Peggy Orenstein, who in March was fretting about Facebook not letting her kids grow up, and now is fretting about Skype screwing up the boundaries she has set for her parents. I dunno. I keep meaning to use Skype on my laptop and even have pre-installed the Skype app on my iPhone, but maybe it’s already time to spend time on something else so I am prepared when Peggy starts fretting about that, too.
• Hmmm, has Peggy written about YouTube much? Virginia Heffernan has, in her column called “The Medium.” Here she is on Susan Boyle, from the same issue of the NYT Magazine: “Perhaps the upsetting of generalized expectations comes from the deft video editing and the judges’ campy expressions of awe. But the effect must also derive from the music itself, from the wonderfully coercive ‘I Dreamed a Dream.’ ” (Full disclosure: I way preferred Paul Potts singing “Nessun dorma” last year. But you’re not surprised, are you?)

So, how to sum up this glorious Fourth of newsprint, glossy and otherwise? Perhaps by cheerfully acknowledging that, with good light and a comfortable chair, you can indeed avoid incremental Sarah Palin stories, incremental Michael Jackson stories, and incremental fireworks stories.

Just be sure that when you do, you take your responsibility to share the best ones very, very seriously.

(BTW, I was reading that typescript on my Kindle.  Way fabulous.  But that’s a whole different kind of serendipity.)