'Lies, damn lies, and statistics'

Whoever coined that headline phrase was certainly right about how data can be manipulated, but perhaps surprised at just how much statistic-twisting is going on in the social media age (and the age of not trusting anyone, from doctors to presidents to insurance companies -- well, that last one is just smart).

The former president claimed that the U.S. has left about $85 billion in military equipment in Afghanistan. Even the quickest analysis of that claim reveals that the U.S. sent $24 billion in equipment to the country we officially left yesterday... since 2002. 

Turns out that much of it is out of commission or soon will be without constant supply replenishment. And much of the weaponry has been demilitarized -- think "blown up" -- by our own troops.

You never know if the ex-president's lies are due to sheer ignorance, evil intent, or hyperbole that excites the mob, but you can be sure that the figure he cited will recur on radical right wing radio and TV for some time.

I was thinking that citing the correct figure of $24 billion might be sufficient to make the point, but in the age of unsupported claims why not go for the biggest conceivable number?

I was also thinking that Covid statistics are very difficult to think clearly about. I have no idea how this number was compiled, but assuming good faith data collection, about 40 million Americans have had Covid. For some diseases, those who have survived a virus are now basically "immune." But the Delta variant (well, not a variant anymore, but you get the idea) seems to zoom right by whatever your white blood cells have built up.

So is spending much time on how many people have gotten sick worth much? 

Lots of Covid tests are administered each week -- 1.3 million last week in the U.S. -- and if you divide those into the tests that came back positive for the virus, you get a percentage. It was about 10 percent across the nation last week. That 10 percent is an average, and the range is all over the place, depending on location.

It would be easy to start thinking that 10 percent of the population has the virus. In fact, it might be a tiny percentage or much larger. It all depends on the number of people bothering to get tested, wouldn't you think? It also seems related to who people voted for in the last presidential election. Correlation or causation? Tough to tell.

Schools in Georgia where students wear face masks (likely a small sample) during classes report about a 34 percent decrease in Covid cases among students and staff. That sounds great, but there could be many things that affect that number (more vaccinated students... ventilation within buildings... changes in scheduling... etc.). 

And if we began with relatively small numbers of infected students, a 34 percent drop might mean that 1-2 fewer students got sick in an entire school. 

Confused yet? Me too. 

Doing well? Here come the critics

The TV series "Ted Lasso" is enough, by itself, for me to seriously consider re-upping as an Apple TV subscriber when our current "free" year expires next summer. I am not alone, but the sudden and massive attention the show has garnered has already led to critics finding reasons to find fault.

Is the second season up to the first season's standards? Is there enough conflict and tension to really drive the second season? Should Ted's "dark side" become the heart of the show?

Here is an example of a critic's conclusion to a snap review of season two:

"Considering what I do for a living, I’ll likely never agree that anything is “just” a TV show, let alone a massively successful beachhead for a relatively new streaming service. But I’d also point out that the ferocity of Ted Lasso’s fandom itself belies the point. People are protective of their comforts, especially in times as harrowing as the past year and change. And they don’t take kindly to the suggestion that their comfort may be cheaply bought, even when the explicit message of the source is to be kind. For now, Ted Lasso is reluctant to let sparks fly. That hasn’t stopped the rest of us from picking up the slack."

A couple of things to note here, considering the fact that a review is one of the most common forms of persuasive writing. First, where does that "us" in the final sentence come from. Are we ALL to think of ourselves as iconoclastic reviewers? Is the writer speaking on behalf of all critics? Is using "us" a way to deflect the outrage that some may feel after reading the review (wimpy, BTW)?

Second, in the penultimate sentence there is a claim that the show is "reluctant to let sparks fly." Were there sparks in the first season (accounting for the show's popularity)? Do all hit shows need to become more "elite" and sophisticated and provocative, no matter how they began? 

I am as far away from a Fox News junkie as you can imagine, but I have started to see more and more evidence of "the elites" swamping most conversations. My own elitism, BTW, is well-earned and you need not question my opinions in this blog. Ha!

Those elite voices come from both ends of the political spectrum and most of those voices just react to news and culture. Few of them are engaged in building culture or making news or becoming politicians. No wonder many people actively hate "elites."

Sigmund Freud supposedly said, "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar," though there is no evidence he ever said those words. But the point of the repeated phrase is that sometimes there is no hidden meaning or symbolism. Sometimes something that happens simply is. 

I have been re-watching "Parks and Recreation" on Peacock lately, and find it just as amusing and intriguing as I did years ago. Critics wanted to make Leslie Knope into a symbol of any number of things, including Hillary Clinton, and maybe they were right. 

But the show doesn't need to be the key to understanding American life, politics, gender issues, obesity, or anything else.

Sometimes a laugh is just a laugh.

13 deaths are a tragedy, but 1,206 are just a statistic

Far be it for me to be skeptical, much less cynical, but this week's suicide bombing by some ISIS fanatics in Kabul is a good reminder of just how illogical the human mind can be.

About 100 died, and a larger number were injured, and seemingly everyone has a decisive opinion on the carnage and who should be blamed. 

A terror attack, with all the included media coverage, horrifying images, heart-rending personal anecdotes, etc., will always make the front page, as it were. That might not always be the case, should terror bombings become a daily event which, thank goodness, they have not. They are just rare enough to shock.

Gun violence in America illustrates this truth. Since our country experiences multiple shootings every day, and mass shooting every week, most of those incidents don't even make the paper unless they happen in the local area. Things that happen regularly are, by definition, not news.

Or look at some fascinating maps of seven-day averages for deaths from Covid, as you can do here. Granting the fact that some states are not reporting hospitalization and death stats daily, a quick glance at the map tells us that the west coast states and the former Confederacy are where people are dying at very high rates.

This is important information. Ignore the urge to immediately start making accusations and sharing unresearched theories about why the map looks this way, if you can (or at least for a while). The map I shared seems like raw data to me, which is something the news media needs to share.

I assume that since the map appears on the Washington Post website, some Americans will immediately dismiss it as liberal lies, though that idea seems to ignore the west coast states.

Anyway, the U.S. has averaged 1,206 deaths from Covid per day for the past week. Florida alone has averaged 242 deaths per day. 

Thirteen American military personnel died in the Kabul bombing, along with at least 80 or more people of other nationalities, mostly Afghans.

Death and suffering is always personal for the individuals and families involved. Statistics are never personal. A bombing made for TV packs a punch. A large number of older, unhealthy people (with minorities overly represented) dying a few at a time, spread out in many hospitals, does not make for good TV. Where's the drama? Where's the excitement? Where's the flash?

There is one model that predicts that another 100,000 Americans will die of Covid by the end of 2021 if nothing changes. 

There are 126 days left in the year. If the daily death rate remains at 1,206, we come up with about 150,000 deaths by the end of 2021.

That makes the model predicting "only" 100,000 look optimistic. 

But those deaths will not come close to equaling the "news value" of one suicide bombing that kills Americans.

And so the pain and suffering and protests and finger-pointing continues.

Spending the time to get our syntax just right

Here is a paragraph from today's Washington Post, from a commentary by Robert Kagan:

We live history forward, in the chaos of onrushing events, without a clear guide. But we judge history backward, smugly armed with the knowledge of what did happen and uninterested in what might have happened. This partly explains the oscillation of U.S. foreign policy over the decades between periods of high involvement overseas and periods of withdrawal and retrenchment. In the case of World War I, the recoiling from what came to be regarded as the great error of intervention led to two decades in which Americans so removed themselves from involvement in Europe and East Asia that they unwittingly helped bring about the next great war they would once again be dragged into fighting. One wonders whether this pattern will eventually repeat itself in Afghanistan.

It is not the lead to the story, but it function as something often referred to as the "nut graf," or key theme or statistic or timely motivator, of a news story. The nut graf is where we answer the essential reader question: "Why am I reading this right now?"

The above paragraph alludes to the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, which horrified Americans enough to eventually bring the U.S. into WWI. 

I was struck by the use of "oscillation" as opposed to something like "changing positions" and how that simple diction choice tells a lot about who the writer was imagining reading the article. Oscillation is not an incredibly demanding vocabulary word, and it works perfectly here, indicating movement between two stated policies. 

Our diction choices are about finding just the right word or phrase, of course, but also indicate expectations of our audience. I once argued that including some slightly challenging diction in newspapers and magazines might be considered as opportunities to raise the level of discourse.

Now I wonder about that. Survey after survey point out that many Americans truly despise mainstream media, and I will guess that one reason is writers choosing a somewhat higher level of diction. Perhaps not the main reason, but Americans have always distrusted the educated, the experts, the "elite." There are some good reasons for this mistrust. I just wish needing to look up something on Dictionary.com were not part of the problem.

What I most admired about the paragraph, however, was the way the first two sentences illustrate "oscillation" as a term. Word meaning derived from context is one of our most common ways to puzzle out a word.

Note the parallelism of "we live history forward..." and "we judge history backward," with the clear balance of the phrases and the clear establishment of two situations. When we examine parallelism we are concerned with syntax, or the arrangement of our word choices.

The paragraph would lose its rhetorical power had the writer chosen something like, "when judging history, however, we look backward..." 

The meaning would be the same. The power would be gone.

A reminder about the world being a messy place

Now that the initial shock and often exaggerated angst over the hasty Afghanistan exit is losing some steam, it's time for some analysts and media reporters to pull back a bit from the alarming images at the Kabul airport and move toward news and commentary that acknowledges the "gray" in the situation.

If we are honest with ourselves, we know deep down that there are few situations in life where we can label some action or decision either a) completely good or b) completely evil. President Biden's presidency is NOT completely ruined and his legacy tarnished. By the same token, his early successes are not going to produce some sort of sainthood in the near future. 

In AP Language class, we would discuss the standard prompt for any essay, which amounted to "Defend, refute or qualify your position regarding the following essay or article or chapter..." There were three options: agree completely and fine ways to reinforce the thesis of the writer, disagree with the thesis by bringing in counterarguments, or "qualify" your opinion by discussing BOTH what worked and what didn't work in the thesis. 

The choice almost always was to qualify (the "gray" area), in some way, since arguments that are important enough to warrant published comments and essays always involve issues about which intelligent people might disagree. To qualify our response means that we have given multiple positions some thought and that we are trying to be fair in imagining other views.

A favorite writing assignment early in the term was to ask students to quickly "vote" on what side of a timely argument they favored, and then to assign them to write a persuasive essay that argues from a DIFFERENT point of view. My experience was that students had much more fun and wrote much better when they researched and wrote from that POV they did not share personally.

Student after student told me that they suddenly understood the "gray" a bit more, and most of the top writers in the course quickly learned that life does not neatly sort into "100 percent" right or wrong.

It's related to how many actors find it more energizing to play a villain than the hero, or to act out scenes where their character is nothing like their own personality. In other words: acting.

I read a persuasive piece today that pointed out a logical flaw in the currently popular attacks on Biden and the administration's handling of the Afghanistan exodus and troop withdrawal. The flaw is simple: no commentator can offer the option NOT chosen that would have produced an orderly, logical and safe evacuation of thousands of people. The world is way too complex for that.

The Broncos coach announced the starting quarterback for the season today following a very close competition between two decent athletes. Let the argument begin, of course, but one thing is a sure bet: when Teddy Bridgewater quarterbacks the team in its first loss, many "experts" will immediately scream that Drew Lock would have been the better choice. There will be no way to test that theory, of course, which makes it even more fun (and more futile).

Most endings are less than satisfying, it turns out. Everyone gets to speculate on what might have been better, and there is no way to refute hypotheticals.

No one liked the way Seinfeld ended. Or The Sopranos. Or this post.

Personal liberty extremism couldn't care less about the community

It appears that it took a new school year to get the pandemic back to #1 among the worries of Americans, though our frustrating skepticism about vaccines -- which has been around for over 50 years -- should have tipped us off long ago.

Deaths are approaching 1,000 per day in our country, and many of those deaths are senior citizens who have not been vaccinated. Lots of children and middle-aged adults are getting Covid, but relatively few are dying.

Someone told me that the pandemic was actually a "blessing" for many old-timers, imagining them as welcoming death as their faculties diminished and life becomes increasingly tired. That is quite a mixed blessing, as far as I can tell. The rare videos we can find online showing seniors hospitalized, using oxygen masks and clearly in distress, don't look like a smooth transition to the Great Beyond.

I mentioned in yesterday's post the awkward booing of Trump when he recommended getting vaccinated. I've been thinking that this is an example of the beast being unleashed, and of the master not being able to control the beast anymore.

This should not be a surprise. If we teach out children to be critical, independent thinkers, we should not be surprised when they end up with some ideas we parents are not comfortable with. When we create platforms that allow everyone to "publish" their ideas, and that thrive on controversy, which creates more engagement, what did we expect? Puppy videos and nostalgic quizzes about our favorite TV shows from the 1960s?

Last year at this time, we could comfort ourselves with the knowledge that relatively few school children were getting sick and dying of Covid. We rushed the vaccine to seniors, and it turns out many of them are somewhat fatalistic about their health and are downright stubborn. Imagine that: a stubborn 75-year-old who refuses to change a habit or belief!

This fall, seniors are dying -- but no one really cares -- and school kids are getting sick -- and no one really cares -- and business is in danger of dropping off the cliff once again -- and business leaders DO CARE. Hence, the mandates that are just starting to pick up steam.

Betting on Americans to "do the right thing?" That's a sucker's bet.

People don't act without reasons, no matter how valid or not

Americans like arguing, though we are not very good at it if you consider "success" changing anyone's point of view. 

Perhaps our most fundamental "divide" is in trying to establish the correct balance between personal freedom and being part of making society a better place. We see it with vaccines most acutely right now, but the tension between those two "goods" has always been there. Somehow, we basically try to balance "give me liberty or give me death" with "we are the UNITED states" and "we are proud to be Americans."

My view is that anti-vaxxers are essentially saying, "Give me liberty AND give me death." But that ends up not being a convincing argument when people aren't interested in logic and facts, elevating emotions like fear and distrust instead. Most people are not actively courting death.

About 10-15 percent of smokers develop lung cancer, and another 10-20 percent die of heart disease of something related. But a smoker might cite the flip side of those stats and point out that a large percentage of smokers do NOT get cancer or heart disease. And everyone dies sometime of something.

A problem is that there is no accepted way to measure that tension between liberty and community and whether the right balance has been achieved. No one likes to be told what to do -- that is simply part of the human condition -- and that helps explain some of the vaccine controversy. But we are often told exactly what to do, and we do it. Even anti-vaxxers follow certain rules, laws, mandates, and cautions.

I read that the former president held another in-person rally the other day and he made the point that he and his family had been vaccinated, and he advised the crowd to get vaccinated. The crowd booed (even Trump wasn't being "Trumpy" enough) and he immediately backed away from his advice and extolled the benefits of freedom and liberty. But perhaps a few in the crowd heard him and softened their opposition to giving up ANY liberties.

A woman on the news this morning complained about her child being forced to wear a mask, saying, "He doesn't WANT to wear a mask." That strikes me as a weak argument. I can think of dozens of things that schools force students to do during the school day, and if given a chance many students would ignore some or most rules. So schools don't give them a chance.

Students need to be in a classroom when not traveling during approved passing times. There are dress codes, though some are more strict than others. There is one start and stop time for the school day and for each class period (in secondary schools). Seating charts are used by many teachers, to help them keep organized and to keep potential problems separated. Schools are hardly places where students are "in charge."

When a test is assigned, students can't simply opt for another date. They can work the system by feigning illness or simply skipping, but they will need to eventually take the test if they want to progress through the year.

I was thinking about the mother who based her protest against masks in school on her son's opinion. My first thought was that the kid may have simply adopted his mother's opinions. Lots of studies show that high school students basically reflect their parents' political views, for instance. After all, they spend a lot of time with their parents and trust them. 

The longer I taught the more I understood that a lot of student behavior had almost nothing to do with me or my teaching or even with school in general.

Long ago, I was teaching a British Literature course and one junior boy just never turned in any of the assigned essays. It was puzzling, since he always participated in class discussions, clearly was doing the reading, and never missed class. I regularly reminded him of due dates and twice reached out to his parents with updates on his poor marks.

Finally, one day I asked him to hang back for a minute after the class ended and I point-blank said, "I don't understand why you have not completed any of the three essays assigned so far," and said I was concerned that he would be flunking the course. I confessed puzzlement, since he was clearly a bright, engaged student.

He never flinched. "I love this course," he said. "I look forward to it every day. And I do write the papers." He rummaged in his backpack for a minute and pulled out a typed draft of the most recent essay, but didn't hand it to me.

"I don't turn them in to piss off my mother," he said. 

I had no ready response, and I never learned what dynamics were in play there. Later in the term, the boy suddenly began handing in all assigned work, along with the late work. He eventually earned an A (maybe I'm just that much of a push-over). I decided not to penalize him for being late after our discussion, though I know most other students would call that unfair. After all, THEY made their deadlines. But I figured each kid's grade was his or her own. Kids who make their deadlines and are "good students" at all times usually benefit from that discipline. They don't really suffer from a teacher making an exception.

That junior boy clearly worked out his conflict with mom. It had nothing to do with me. Or maybe he just responded to one teacher paying attention to him and not shrugging him off as a failure. Likely it was a combination of things.

That was when I realized that no matter how odd the behavior, the person fouling up had reasons. I might have thought they were short-sighted or silly, but that student had far more basic conflicts in his life.

I am frustrated by anti-vaxxers and seem to be at least slightly angry about American dysfunction all the time. 

I continue to hope they will turn in their late work. No questions asked.

Building arguments one sentence at a time

One of the many reasons I like to assign shorter but more frequent writing assignments is that analyzing just a few grafs, or even ONE sentence, allows for more depth and more focus.

Here's an outstanding sentence from this New York Times article: “For more than a century, the Picture Collection of the New York Public Library has flourished, gloriously but precariously, as a shape-shifting misfit within a Dewey Decimal grid.”

This sentence comes quite early in the piece, right after a couple examples of how pictures in the collection have been used in the past. It functions as the "news lead," so to speak, or the answer to the question, "Why would I ever want to read this?" The story is not particularly timely -- it's not a big anniversary year -- but falls in the category of newspaper "feature" story. 

I have trouble defining exactly what a feature story is, though I know one when I see it. It's not breaking news, that's for sure.

Choices were made by the writer in terms of sentence structure (syntax) and word choice (diction), not to mention including a figure of speech (personification) and establishing a tone. When I taught AP Language, we often discussed how rhetoric was based on those four tools or devices: diction, syntax, figures of speech, and tone.

In terms of syntax, imagine moving that opening dependent clause somewhere else in the sentence. It might go after the word "flourished," but that puts space between the verb and those paired adverbs, which decreases their impact. You might place it at the very end of the sentence, but that saps the cool figure of speech of power. We might call this a cumulative sentence, BTW, that builds toward that rich ending.

St. Paul wrote about "faith, hope, and love (charity), with love the most important of the three." It's difficult to even imagine that series in a different order at this point, but the key rhetorical point is to place the key word LAST.

That parenthetical "gloriously but precariously," provides what good stories need: a bit of tension or at least a hint of a conflict. Diction was key here. In fact, simply choosing that pairing helps the writer organize the rest of the story. Once we mention those two adverbs, it is logical to make certain each of them is explored.

Finally, there is that provocative and poetic figure of speech that compares the building to a nonconventional human and finishes things off with a reference to the Dewey Decimal system, which most people younger than 50 would have little experience with.

The use of "shape-shifting" helps set readers up for a tale of how the institution's picture collection has changed over time in response to users' needs.

The tone of the piece is subdued but clear: readers are expected to both appreciate the tradition here and wonder a bit about the future. Again, this produces tension, and stories benefit from this. 

The reference to an outdated library cataloguing system seems like a clue to who the writer assumes is reading the story: People over 50.

In other words, there is a lot going on in this sentence, and the writer clearly spent extra time getting the sentence just right.

One question for writers is always "Are we willing to get a single sentence "just right"?

Life is tough without facts we can rely upon

Facebook has begun sharing basic information about its most visited groups and posts, part of an effort to discredit "independent" analysis sites and tools -- one is called "Newswhip." Facebook owns an alternate tool called CrowdTangle.

According to Facebook, an obscure Green Bay Packers alumni page and one from a CBD company rank ahead of mostly conservative/reactionary pages, as independent analysis has found.

I still have a Facebook feed, feeling confident that I can scroll by the wackier posts in favor of some nugget of news about a far-off friend hosting his grandchildren (teaching them cribbage) or about how 'Ted Lasso' is changing the world (it isn't, BTW, but it should).

My point today is to remind us all of the importance of independent journalism that we can trust. 

Having Facebook do its own analysis of its effects on society is similar to asking the Nazi party to analyze how things were going in Germany in the 1930s. There is a lot of potential for truth twisting. Say, did I just snidely compare Facebook to Nazis? Maybe. 

A less provocative comparison might be to asking a young kid how the school day went. No matter the answer, we might suspect that Suzie's response left something out or misstated what actually happened. Perhaps that is why we rarely dig too deeply into Suzie's story. Constant suspicion of our loved ones is exhausting.

Journalism, when done right, is closer to the skepticism of the old newspaper advice: "If your mother says she loves you, check it out." 

My take on that provocative saying has always been that successful arguments -- and everything is an argument of some sort -- need some sort of support, through examples or anecdotes or statistics or recognized experts. 

It's easy to say to someone: I love you. It's much more compelling to demonstrate that love through daily actions and conversation.

We can argue about Facebook all day, but one thing seems clear: without some sort of trustworthy analysis that lets us see what users are actually reading, nothing could possibly change. 

If Facebook says it loves us, check it out.

Some random thoughts about the news

I see this morning that the delta variant of Covid now accounts for over 98 percent of all new infections. I know the "rules" for this are unclear but doesn't it seem like we can return to simply calling the virus Covid? Maybe we can't add the "19" that we began with some 18 months ago, but at some point, when a disease completely takes over from some earlier version, why not just simplify our language. In other words, the governor of Texas has a "breakthrough" infection of Covid. OF COURSE it's the delta "flavor," since the "alpha" has been replaced.

I read that many school districts are claiming that they simply can NOT enforce face mask mandates. Those same school officials don't seem to have any trouble enforcing OTHER dress code mandates, particularly for young women. I would think that an administrator who can quickly decide that some spaghetti straps are too thin could just as quickly notice a mask improperly worn. 

There are parent protests in front of school board offices all over the country, most protesting the "child abuse" of making kids up to age 12 wear masks at school. I'm going to guess that those same parents don't let their kids wander their communities without adults around and that they have spent a significant percentage of their parenting lives making their homes and yards as safe as possible. Better to be safe than sorry, you know? But in this one instance they insist that their children be exposed to a disease that might -- and it's likely a very small percentage who will suffer -- infect their children and cause anything from mere discomfort to hospitalization to death. If that's not love, what is?

Every pundit and politician in the country is jumping on President Biden for overseeing the chaos and fear now overwhelming Afghanistan. On the other hand, over 70 percent of American citizens are in agreement with getting out. Look, we can call our withdrawal a defeat or simply giving up, but all the hand-wringing over the "poor women and girls" and "our loyal allies among the populace" seems like the sort of thing people do to cover up our apathy and ignorance for most of the past 20, much like our revulsion over first graders being murdered in Connecticut. America is officially "short attention span theater."

I read that Oklahoma Senator Jim Imhofe is now claiming that he never called climate change a hoax. But in 2021 he published a book called “The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming Conspiracy Threatens Your Future.” I see that the former president is demanding that Biden resign in disgrace for the messy withdrawal of troops from Afghanistan. He was bragging about the withdrawal deal his administration brokered at one of his rallies as recently as in May. We live in a country where lots and lots of people just don't care about outright lies from leaders. So why would they ever stop with the Big Lies?

When our news is filled with hypocrisy and inconsistencies, does anyone care. Or even notice?

What are we doing this week?

I see that there is a new time management book called, "Four Thousand Weeks," subtitled time management for mortals. The book’s first sentence, which gets repeated for emphasis on the last page, is: “The average human life span is absurdly, terrifyingly, insultingly short.” (About 4,000 weeks, on average; thus the title.)

My rough calculation is that I have been on the planet for 3,697 weeks. Man, time flies. I have been idly wondering a bit about my remaining 303 weeks, if I live an average life span.

One depressing reality is that about 82.5 percent of my life is in the rear view mirror. Yikes! 

A more intriguing fact is that I have spent about 40 years teaching, and school years average about 36 weeks per year, so that's 1,440 total weeks teaching.

Another 468 weeks were spent as a student in my K-12 education career.

I spent about 155 weeks in the Air Force.

This counting of the weeks is a weird and not-all-that-helpful way to measure life.

But here is a surprisingly helpful line from the book (taken from the New York Times review -- I haven't read the book): “The real measure of any time management technique is whether or not it helps you neglect the right things.”

This advice to "neglect the right things" is something I have been advising young high school journalists to consider (in summer critiques examining past work). Once a student embraces the reality that they can't cover everything that happens in a school, they are free to focus on what really matters.

Professional journalists do this all the time. After all, most of what happens in life goes unreported by the media.

The challenge is in finding strategies that can help us do the curating, do the choosing. 

I offer the same basic advice to college essay writers: don't try to "save the world" in one 800-word essay. Trying to cover too much ground always leads to "telling," not showing, and vague, general essays are never persuasive.

The better approach is to do what you can, in some depth, in one essay. There will always be another essay, another issue to address, or another problem to solve.

Just another manic Monday

Today is the sort of day where nearly all the news is both negative and speculative.

For instance:

The Taliban overran the Afghan army so quickly that the whole plan for them to lower the U.S. flag at the Kabul American Embassy on Sept. 11 -- the ultimate troll for them -- just won't be the same.

Some Afghans are so panicked that they were hanging onto a giant cargo plane trying to take off from Kabul airport... and that was not going to end well, even if they managed to hold on for a time.

Armchair experts are already making sweeping pronouncements about Joe Biden's legacy and the looming disaster for women and girls. Why wait for facts and reporting when we can make provocative guesses?

The pandemic rages on, as does ignorance, cultism, cynical politics... in other words, stuff that is now so common that it hardly registers as news.

Thousands are dead after an earthquake in Haiti, a country we only hear about when our dentist volunteers there for a week each summer. Oh, and just a month ago the president of Haiti was assassinated. Oh, and tropical storm Grace is about to drench the suffering country.

Fred is quickly becoming a hurricane as it churns north toward the Florida panhandle, pushing out headlines about how Florida's government has simply given up on even pretending to protect its citizens. 

At least seven states have mandated NOT mandating masks for schools and businesses. So, we hate mandates unless WE are doing the mandating? Huh?

Even a few moments watching news stations will turn up white men and women (exclusively) saying things like, "This is America and no one can tell us what to do. That's the point of America." Wow. Maybe what is REALLY the point of America is to be able to pick and choose your freedoms, as convenient.

California wildfires are spreading and power cuts are coming. And smoke is pouring back into Colorado from fires over 800 miles away after a day or two of reduced haze. 

The Rockies bombed on their latest road trip, though Trevor Story is performing so poorly that there may be no takers when he becomes a free agent. So, mixed news there?

The return of evictions for those far behind on rent and out of work means that animal shelters are becoming overcrowded as people have to give up their "pandemic pets." 

Vaccine opponents continue to get sick and some get hospitalized, and some die. If I were a spiteful person, however, I might enjoy the fact that a reactionary Catholic cardinal who has spoken long and loud against vaccines is now on a ventilator. So, again, mixed news.

The Washington Monument was struck by lightning yesterday and had to be closed for a time. America will not pay attention to the symbolism.

A headline in the Wash Post reads: 'For many students, the prospect of a new year in college is exciting and stressful'

Um, OK. But how can this be news, since this could be the headline for ANY August for the past 50 years or more? 

The reality is that most news is bad news, plus it's Monday. Things couldn't get worse, could they?

Face the facts: most writing is revision

Iowa was never heaven, and pulled away from that comparison even more in the last decade, but the Field of Dreams baseball game last night was a reminder of the power of myth and of longing for something better, something (at least superficially) pure and good.

Myths can help energize and support society moving forward and myths can slow down progress as people pine for something that never really was.

I wrote a few days ago about how pop culture references can lose their power as the audience for the references loses shared memories of the TV show or movie line or song title (or comedy bit). My favorite blogger, Seth Godin, wrote about this today and added the power of a memorable metaphor as he discussed the "half life" of such references.

Man, I wish I had thought of that term for what I was thinking about. I'm not certain as to how Mr. Godin came up with that take on the "half life of pop culture" phenomenon -- he might have picked it up from another source or he may have just had that apt phrase pop into his head -- but it was a great reminder that there is power in finding "just the right" word or phrase instead of getting close, but not quite there.

Writers who wish to rise above the norm must accept the need to rewrite and rethink until all the words are "just right." 

As most professional writers counsel: write fast and edit slow. Don't worry too much about that hurried first draft -- don't go back and spell "studnet" correctly if you are on a roll -- and accept the need to write a second draft (or many more). NOTE: "studnet" is my personal most common typo. I don't know why and I notice it immediately when typing. The good news is that I realize I make this typo consistently. The typos that kill us are when we don't even know we made a typo in the first place.

I don't want to get into sexual politics in this morning's post, but my latest encounter with "write fast and edit slow" involves a readers theater script I am developing for a local performing group, which is the basic 1974 movie script for "Young Frankenstein" plus a few lines from the original Gene Wilder play and from the later musical version of the show.

It's not writing a script. It's editing and splicing and spending considerable time thinking about whether the audience will be able to follow along without the sight gags of the movie.

My latest challenge is to rewrite what might be called "the rape turns to romance" scene, where Madelyn Kahn's character is conquered by a large penis, initially against her will. Her performance is a comedic classic, and comedy certainly can make some of us uncomfortable and must also be contextualized within its time and place.

But a rape scene played for laughs -- and let's stipulate that YF is not Shakespeare -- is not OK. It never really was.

So, in the next week my task will be to reimagine that scene, and depart from the original is a clear way while maintaining some laughs and some character development. I don't know where to go with the implied sex -- and there are many typical "consensual" sex jokes in the film -- but the uncomfortable feelings I had about the offending scene have been gnawing at me for a couple months.

I'm so glad I had a timeline for this project that allowed for some "think time."

My "first draft," as it were, was me downloading a PDF of the film script (everything is online). I shrugged off copyright law since the performance will involve no ticket sales and the (forgive me) Frankenstein monster of a script will not be published and I will receive no money for my efforts.

My second draft was mostly formatting and cleaning up typos. My third was to fold in some lines from my two other main source documents. My fourth was to add narration needed to help the readers theater audience know we had changed scenes or that something had happened off stage.

The fifth major draft will add a few more ideas derived from the musical version, plus some heavy rewrites of the rape scene.

The point of my quick review of this project: each draft involved more focus and took more time. Each draft also made the script better, for the audience and for the performers.

The final script is not due until Sept. 29, in time for auditions. Any bets on whether there will be a sixth draft? And any bets on some final changes following our first table read?

Save your money. More drafts are coming. 

It's tough to be satisfied, even in good times

A useful paradox to consider right now is "The better things are, the worse they feel."

The gist of this paradox is that we all tend to be impatient and that impatience is actually accelerated when we are close to attaining our goal.

So, the delta variant and the chaotic flow of information about it leaves most of us quite anxious, despite the overwhelmingly good news about vaccines and their efficacy.

Things may seem worse today in terms of racial injustice. It is quite natural to wonder why we have not yet "solved" our racial problems and atoned for past sins. Our brains may tell us that clear progress has been made over the past half-century plus, but our hearts leave us frustrated and angry.

Sexism and males misusing power are in the news, as usual, this time with the Cuomo resignation, and we again find ourselves bemoaning how little many things have changed. Of course, many things HAVE changed, and we are slowly doing better as a society. It's fitful and glacial in some places, but...

This paradox helps explain why revolutions are almost always led by upper middle class people with education and not by the lowliest and most put upon slaves and servants. The slaves (or destitute) are so far from progress, so far from hope, that they can't even conceive of trying, and the "masters" do all they can to maintain that suppressed status.

For a writer, the space that is created when SOME progress has been made is full of opportunities. That is where more precise arguments and proposals thrive.

One last example of this paradox at work: the farther we advance in education, the less comfortable we tend to be. In early elementary years, almost everything is fascinating and our minds vacuum up facts and ideas in large quantities. By the time we are finishing a Masters degree in some focused discipline, the knowledge is more difficult to attain and understand, the frustrations are immense.

On that note: welcome to a new school year. I chose today only because we have two granddaughters whose first day of the new year is today. They attend a top-notch school, surrounded by talented teachers and fellow students, supported unconditionally by parents and (duh!) grandparents.

I look forward to hearing their complaints and ideas on how it all could be even better.

Remembering that most news is quite unusual

Traveling and blogging do not go together very well, but I'm back in Highlands Ranch -- it's Wednesday, so the lawn mowing a trimming provides the summer soundtrack all morning -- and turning my attention to the looming fall semester. Our granddaughters are back this Thursday at Arapahoe HS, but both CSU and Metro don't start until Aug. 23. So I'm not in panic mode or anything.

I was thinking about how writers use -- and sometimes misuse -- statistics. Journalists are infamous for having only a loose grasp of stats and math and trends, which seems weird considering how often journalists must rely on those stats and mathematics. 

Here's an excerpt from a recent Poynter Institute blog encouraging the media to stick to facts in reporting on the pandemic that helps illustrate some challenges:

“More than 99.99% of fully vaccinated people have not had a severe breakthrough case of Covid-19, according to a CNN analysis of CDC data as of August 2nd.”

Read that again — 99.99%.

Here’s more. CNN’s Deidre McPhillips writes, “As of Aug. 2, more than 164 million people in the United States were fully vaccinated against Covid-19, according to the CDC. Fewer than 0.001% of those individuals — 1,507 people — died and fewer than 0.005% — 7,101 people — were hospitalized with Covid-19. … About three-quarters (74%) of all reported breakthrough cases were among seniors age 65 or older. Of the roughly 1,500 people who died, one in five passed away from something other than Covid-19 even though they had a breakthrough case of the virus, according to the CDC.”

There is a lot of attention on vaccine deniers, but focusing on who is not vaccinated is clearly a choice the media makes. It's also caused by the basic truth of news, which is that most news is bad news. 

If one high schools student dies in a tragic auto accident on the first day of school, that will most certainly be news. If that does not happen, and let's hope for this, there will most certainly NOT be a story in any media basically proclaiming the good news that everyone who intended to arrive at school safely actually did so.

It sounds so normal as we think about this truth, but when the truly "bad news" affects only 0.01 percent of some population, or even 0.001 percent) well, that is clearly not very helpful for the 99.99 percent. 

It's a vain hope to look to a future where everyone is a strong reader and that everyone can work through the logical implications of the news, of statistics and of how science progresses. 

That leaves it up to the media to repeat what can only be described as "good news," over and over. Until mandates change the dynamics of the delta variation, the media MIGHT be the force that slowly (so frustratingly slowly) provides the nudge to a significant portion of hesitators.

But the media will likely be unable to resist that ONE dramatic story of the 25-year-old who is fully vaccinated but dies anyway. 

We don't know how to use or create media any other way.

And you can’t make me!

Missed a post last Friday due to traveling to Seattle for a quick visit. It has proven impossible to resist mentioning mask wearing in DIA.

My roughest estimate is that about 10 percent of white males were not wearing masks correctly and a small percentage of white females were equally unwilling to cover both mouth and nose.

I did not see one person of color flouting the rules. Yes, it was a small sample but the behavior made me think, not for the first time: what the heck is wrong with white males?

There is a good argument against my conclusion that places more blame on white men for several problems. Small sample size. Just one location. Is 10 percent noncompliance all that bad?

In SEATAC. there were zero “rule flouters.” Different culture? Different politics? Different experiences?

I started feeling something like road rage as I passed the arrogant refuseniks in the airport. But I did not confront any of them. I held my tongue.

And thought of how one-sided behavior is becoming in America with progressives holding back and radical retrograde a never even considering just moving on, not making a comment, etc.

Why must I be the adult? Why must I pretend to sympathize with vaccine deniers dying in overcrowded hospitals?

Oops. The truth just slipped out. But “pretending” is one of the best tools for people to use to keep society civil.

Finding stories in the midst of chaos

I missed Ernie Pyle Day, which was Tuesday, Aug. 3. A reporter and writer like Ernie Pyle is just too important to only be remembered once a year, and I have referred to him for many years to so many students.

So better a couple days late than never to point out his influence.

Ernie Pyle is the pride of Indiana, the first person to receive an honorary doctorate from IU (1944), and an acclaimed author. He may be best known as the inspiration for "GI Joe," which was a movie released in 1945 that relied heavily on Pyle's columns from the Battle of Kasserine Pass, which was a chaotic defeat in the Italy campaign.

Pyle was killed two months after the movie premiered during the invasion of Okinawa.

Most war reporters of the time concentrated on generals and headquarters, but Pyle placed himself right alongside the infantrymen (GI Joe).

His columns resonated with readers who could relate to the "regular guys" who did the dangerous and often frustrating work of actually fighting the war.

Ernie Pyle once wrote: "If you want to tell the story of a war, tell the story of one soldier." He understood that there was grand strategy and that important decisions were often made far from the front, but the foot soldiers were more compelling. And who else would tell their stories?

My version of Pyle's reporting advice to high school journalists has long been: "If you want to tell the story of a high school, tell the story of one student."

I am sure the basic advice to radically tighten our focus in most writing projects could apply to a long list of occupations and situations. Want to tell the story of x group of people? Choose one person from that group and really explore THAT story.

There is certainly a place for the "wide screen" perspectives that historians and journalists can provide, but those articles and columns and reports must be a bit general, a bit sweeping.

Want to tell the story of Covid hospitalizations? Tell the story of one person clinging to life in a hospital.

Once you do that, pick another person and do it again. 

The overall truth I eventually learned was that we can't get it all done in one news article or one essay or one book or one film. But all those focused stories can add up.

We get as many chances as we choose.

Tyranny of the minority once again

There is a new poll out that says the majority of those refusing the Covid vaccine say they fear the vaccine more than the virus. No logical argument can convince them that their fears are misplaced. No testimony from hospital beds or Republican legislators and governors will change their minds.

I'm not suggesting the nation simply shrug and join some sort of weird death cult that fervently believes a certain amount of suffering and death is a price worth paying. This approach is basically what humans were stuck with for most of our existence as a species. No one knew what to do, so societies just needed to "ride out" plagues, bemoaning huge death tolls and suffering. But they had no choice.

Then came vaccines.

Side note: It's ironic to think of this "survival of the fittest" philosophy coming from people who are not too certain about evolution. Of course, this "weeding out" of the physically and/or mentally weak lies at the very heart of evolution. In my darker moments I try to calculate how many Republican voters may be lost due to Covid deaths vs. Democratic. It's petty and I am trying not to imagine revenge scenarios.

Some red state governors and legislators have been forced to confront the all-too-predictable rise of the virus in their own states, sensing that allowing needless suffering among their own supporters may not produce a smooth path to reelection. Or perhaps they have reached the point where morality and ethics overcomes political gamesmanship. 

But, really, isn't that too little, too late?

I see that the FDC may remove the "emergency" as part of the Pfizer vaccine designation in about one month. One month is a long time in virus evolution time, but there is a weak but at least logical argument to be made that "emergencies" often cause unanticipated problems and that it is usually better in life to not make big decisions in a stressful, emergency situation. Removing that one word carries immense potential weight. Early September can't come soon enough.

I was both happy and a bit disheartened to see that Denver's mayor has announced a mandate on all city employees to be vaccinated. I'm happy because that poll reinforces my opinion that only vaccine mandates can turn the tide. I'm disheartened because Denver is an overwhelmingly Democrat city, with a 70 percent vaccination rate for ages 12 and older, and is STILL feeling pressure from increased hospitalizations and deaths. 

That stubborn 30 percent, and the much higher rates of vaccination avoidance among those who live in the suburbs but often travel into Denver for work or recreation, combine to make me (and the mayor?) crazy. 

I have no idea if this will be part of the mayor's order, but my hope is that the economic "nudge" of vaccine-refuseniks being forced to pay for weekly Covid tests out of their own pockets might be just enough to get most of the laggards to begrudgingly get the shots. 

The vaccine is free. The tests for those refusing the cure must not be paid by government. I maintain this because when government pays, I am paying, even if just a miniscule percentage. Also, the "nudge" loses power if the reality ends up being essentially free.

Bottom line: We can have 30 percent of Americans ticked off by feeling forced to get the vaccine, or we can have 70 percent of Americans ticked off by a minority of their neighbors keeping the pandemic alive.

I keep hoping that even politicians can see where the advantage lies.

We never really get out of high school

When frustration with poor choices among adults gets to a certain point, I tend to throw up my hands and favor mandates. It's not a scientific formula, but if enough otherwise typical adults refuse to take some action that helps society overall, there is some point when it feel fine to say the equivalent of, "Fine. If you won't listen to reason and you insist on your right to choose, no matter what, then I will make it more and more uncomfortable for you."

That ratcheting up of discomfort is where the U.S. is right now, as even Republican governors are forced to confront the irrefutable high hospitalization rates in their states. They won't go so far as to issue mandates, of course. That would bring out the crazies and the crazies would go after those governors. 

As a classroom teacher I often found myself creating "rules" that put pressure on students to at least come closer to what I thought was good performance. One such rule that has merit but that often brings its own problems is for new journalism students. The rule is that a news story MUST include at least three different sources, either quoted or paraphrased. 

The idea is to nudge students to NOT settle for one or two quick interviews and to speak with enough sources that we could feel more confident that we weren't missing something important. Any time a teacher sets a minimum for anything, the odds are that some percentage of students will think of that "basement" as enough. In truth, most stories worth reporting deserve more than three sources.

The same logic goes for the old essay requirements to write FIVE paragraphs for a persuasive essay. The idea was to provide some sort of structure for the writing, with an introduction and conclusion that sandwiched THREE claims (and support for each). Again, there's nothing inherently wrong with that structure, but many students clutched that formula and forced all their writing to fit that five-paragraph formula.

Classroom teachers embrace all sorts of rules, from when and how to use phones in class to how much time is allotted for a quiz to the need to raise a hand to ask a question. We can argue about how important or effective rules can be, but they at least keep the chaos at bay.

Americans are not big fans of rules, and they learned to be skeptical of rules in school, where many "rules" turned out to be preferences and conveniences for those in authority.

The government is now in the role of classroom teacher, and Americans are unlikely to suddenly become model students.

Many will protest and whine and threaten everything from civil disobedience to lawsuits to violence, but just as in their school days, most eventually comply with the "rules," grumbling all the way.

No one ever thanks teachers for imposing rules, no matter how logical and helpful those rules might be.

No one will be thanking mayors and governors and presidents for imposing rules about vaccines.

Teachers and politicians who avoid setting standards, making reasonable rules, and creating rewards and sanctions are doing no one any favors.

When I hear people claiming that all we can do as a nation is depend on individual responsibility, I wonder if those people ever attended school.

Today's name calling rhetoric would be at home in the 1950s

The latest ad hominem attack in the news comes from, who else?, the former president of the U.S., who called the four Capitol police officers who testified about the horrifying Jan. 6 attack "pussies."

I guess that thin blue line just got a bit thinner, at least in the minds of our deranged former chief executive and his unthinking cult followers. Hold on. I guess I am engaging in some personal attacks, as well. But at least my choices of adjectives could be supported in a persuasive essay, while the term used to characterize those officers is clearly rooted in sexism.

"Deranged" means mentally unsound or crazy, and a senior citizen spouting inane comments at people he has never met is just a version of "Get off my lawn!" "Unthinking" is easier to defend, though not thinking things through after gathering information is not limited to the Republican base. And a "cult" is made up of followers so devoted to one person or idea that those followers are beyond reason or arguments.

The former president doesn't possess a huge inventory of insults -- he mostly repeats the same tired dozen or so, depending on the gender or race of his targets -- but his latest epithet is telling.

After all, what could be worse for a male authority figure than to be likened to a woman? And what could be more predictable than an old man defaulting to an insult that has been common for 70 years or more?

I would guess that attacking men by comparing them to women will be one of the last vestiges of misogyny to disappear from American discourse. I vividly remember coaches disparaging male athletes with similar terms, or simply shouting, "You throw like a girl." I was told numerous times to "man up" or act like a man. 

If you have watched any of the female athletes in the Olympics in Tokyo this past week, "like a girl" has to ring a bit differently in your head. The many strong, determined, and smart female athletes, from an astonishing range of nations, continue to shine, to empower, and to inspire.

The sexism of insulting males by calling them some version of the female anatomy is made clear when you start to imagine how effective calling a female cop a "dick" would be in diminishing her. 

Not much.