Read This Now - On Academic Careers, Teaching, & Opportunities

If you haven't guessed yet, I'm working my way through a back list of articles from earlier this year that I read and enjoyed either when they first hit the interwebs or that I finally had time to get to now (being under-employed has some advantages I suppose).

The latest in this series is a great little story from David Eisenbach about his (mostly) failed career as an academic and how seizing the opportunity to work with Larry Flynt (yes, The Larry Flynt) let him succeed as a teacher in a whole new and exciting way...

Next we moved on to a packed theater for a discussion about the book. For an hour, Flynt and I entertained more than 1,000 people with our stories. Afterward, during the book signing, a middle-aged woman said something that I'll always remember: "If only my teachers taught history like you just did, I would have been a history major." That was my career goal all along—to be a great teacher who turned people on to history. In a strange way, my failures in the academic world had helped me achieve that goal on a bigger stage.

Read the whole thing, it'll be 10 minutes of fun added to your day.

Read This Now - Moving Medicine Forward

This isn't the first time I've told you to go read something from Atul Gawande and it certainly won't be the last (I'm pretty sure I'm on the record somewhere saying that everyone should read everything he writes).

This particular nugget was his commencement address at Harvard Med School this spring covering why medicine needs to look to pit crews...

We’re all specialists now—even primary-care doctors. A structure that prioritizes the independence of all those specialists will have enormous difficulty achieving great care.

We don’t have to look far for evidence. Two million patients pick up infections in American hospitals, most because someone didn’t follow basic antiseptic precautions. Forty per cent of coronary-disease patients and sixty per cent of asthma patients receive incomplete or inappropriate care. And half of major surgical complications are avoidable with existing knowledge. It’s like no one’s in charge—because no one is. The public’s experience is that we have amazing clinicians and technologies but little consistent sense that they come together to provide an actual system of care, from start to finish, for people. We train, hire, and pay doctors to be cowboys. But it’s pit crews people need.

Gawande also hits on how health care costs are adversely affecting our education system and the necessary skills they don't cover in med school.  

Go read the whole thing, it won't take you too long and you'll be glad that you did.

Gawande is also on twitter now (see that note above about reading everything he writes)

Read This Now - Roid Rage

This piece is from last winter but it's point is still extremely valid and timely and as baseball's regular season draws to a close I'm wrapping back to say you should take a look and think about how we talk and think about the steroid era in the big leagues.

Craig Calcaterra links to a Matthew Artus piece on why we can't have an intelligent discussion about the topic.  Artus's point is that all the vilification going on means that there is no incentive for players to open up about the steroid era and we may never get around to figuring out how to think about baseball during this period, we lack a contest to discuss the players of this era as compared to all time greats (this becomes more important as we get in to the HoF candidacies of steroid era players).

I think Calcaterra makes an even more important and interesting argument in pointing out that MLB has led the way in making the main issue of the steroid era who used and who didn't and the press has just followed along.  No one has been willing to ask or answer the more interesting questions about what steroids mean or meant and how they effected the game.  He makes the damning point that MLB and the press are just sticking with the approach they took while steroid use ran rampant through the league in the 90's, lets sort of ignore it and then sweep it under the rug sums it up pretty well.  The Mitchell Report, in this light, was nothing more than an attempt to close the door on the subject and move along.

Like the Mitchell Report, the current take by most of the baseball press on steroids is lazy, misleading and close to useless.

It will only take you a few minutes to read the piece and it'll be worth the time, maybe it will even make you think a little bit.

Best Thing I've Seen All Week

Who cares that it's only Monday, this is great...

 

 

Pretty much sums up the feeling I get every time I read the good doctor's column.

(via BDL)

Talk About A Train Wreck

It's really early in the cycle but there is no mistaking that the 2012 Presidential Election season is upon us, especially given the amount of coverage the media has been devoting to the early Republican debates.

I only really catch what NPR has to say about them in the mornings, and last night's debate seems to have been quite the debacle at times.  The level of discourse and the adherence to facts displayed by the candidates are astonishingly low (not that I was expecting much).  The coup de grace was definitely delivered (if you can call it that) when Rick Perry stumbled his way through what I think was supposed to be an attack on Mitt Romney as a flip-flopper...

I think Americans just don't know sometimes which Mitt Romney they're dealing with. Is it the Mitt Romney that was on the side of — against the Second Amendment before he was for the Second Amendment? Was it — was before — he was before the social programs from the standpoint of — he was for standing up for Roe versus Wade before he was against first — Roe versus Wade? Him — he was for Race to the Top. He's for "Obamacare" and now he's against it. I mean, we'll wait until tomorrow and — and — and see which Mitt Romney we're really talking to tonight.

Unbelievably that transcript makes it sound better than it was, you can listen to the sequence here (it starts about the 2:40 mark) and somewhere there is sure to be video but I haven't looked for it.  The transcript comes from this NPR blog piece.

Also worth noting (as others have) that the crowds at these Republican debates have been cheering and jeering for some pretty embarrassing things; cheering executions and letting the uninsured die, and booing an active duty soldier in Iraq (just wow on that last one).  Not that everyone who is a Republican agrees with the folks doing the yelling but it's still ugly and at the very least it means that this nastiness is a piece of what the Republican party base believes in these days.

It's gonna be a looong election cycle...

Update:
Prompted by Greg Sargent, I want to add that the real problem and travesty isn't the way the crowds (or individuals in them) have been acting but the ways in which the candidates have reacted.

Sesame Street Gets After Glee

I don't remember Sesame Street being quite so into spoofs and/or rip offs when I was growing up, then again it isn't like you remember everything that happens when you're a kindergartener so who knows if this is a new thing or not.

Which is all just to say that I really enjoyed the Sesame Streets sponsorship by the Letter G the other day...



It helps that I've been sucked into the Glee vortex so I get all of the references and know who the characters are, which lets me say this is really spot on, right down to the jokes about the teacher's use of hair product.

It has to go way over the heads of the majority of Sesame Street's viewers and target audience though (doesn't it?).  I suppose it's nice to be able to have some actual learning about the letter g and the sounds that makes wrapped up in some nods to an older audience who is probably watching along.

(via SE)

Looking Back At The Wire

I'm far from the only person who has called The Wire one of, if not the, best things to ever grace a TV screen (even if I thought the last season drifted past credibility at times).  I think that this interview with David Simon conducted via email by Nick Hornby for The Believer back in 2007 does the best job of capturing why so many people have felt so strongly about The Wire.

Tim Carmody, who pointed to the interview while sitting in for Kottke this past spring, did a really nice job of expanding on the Greek Tragedy aspect that Simon brings up in regard to Omar Little.

If you enjoyed the show, or even if you haven't seen it and wonder where all the hype comes from, or even if you don't care about The Wire or TV at all but are interested in the art of writing and story telling you need to read this interview.  Simon's take on how The Wire is different and what it takes to tell a story the right way are fascinating. 

My favorite bit made it into the pull quote to lead off the piece...

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

Which also led to an exposition on Simon's shows as travelouges and the issues that smart people have with most TV.

Just go read the whole thing already!