Author Archives: susanjustwrites

Exploring the Universe with Two Young Muggles

Posted on February 27, 2017 | 2 comments

Last week, I happily accompanied two young Muggles as we explored the universe together.

The universe?  Universal Studios in Hollywood, California, plus a few other nearby spots.

The young Muggles?  My astonishing granddaughters, both great fans of the series of Harry Potter (HP) books written by J.K. Rowling and the films based on them.  Eleven-year-old Beth has read all of the books at least twice, and nine-year-old Shannon has seen most of the movies.  Four of us grown-up Muggles came along, all conversant with HP except for me. (I’ve seen only the first film.)  According to Rowling, Muggles are people who lack any magical ability and aren’t born in a magical family.  I.e., people like us.

For me, our trip down the coast of California was an exhilarating escape from the concerns assaulting me at home:  dental issues, efforts to get my third novel published, and—of course—the current political scene.  We landed at the very edge of the continent, staying at a newly renovated hotel on Ocean Avenue in Santa Monica, where we literally faced the ocean and walked alongside it every day.

Bookending our fun-filled encounter with Universal Studios were visits to two great art museums.  Coming from San Francisco, a city inhabited by our own array of wonderful art museums and galleries, we didn’t expect to be exceedingly impressed by the museums offered in L.A.  But we were.

On Presidents’ Day, we headed to LACMA, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where a long, long entry line stretched as far as Wilshire Boulevard.  Because of atypically overcast skies on a school/work holiday?  Not entirely.  Admission was free that day (thanks, Target), so lots of folks showed up in search of fee-less exposure to outstanding works of art.

We viewed a lot of excellent art, but when our feet began to ache, we piled back into our rented minivan and went a little way down the road (Fairfax Avenue) to the Original Farmers’ Market.  Sampling food and drink in a farmers’ market dating back to 1934 was great fun.  We also took a quick look at The Grove, an upscale mall adjacent to the F.M., buying a book at Barnes and Noble before heading back to Santa Monica for the evening.

The next day was devoted to Universal Studios, where our first destination was The Wizarding World of Harry Potter.  Here I would at last explore the universe with two young Muggles.  We walked through other Universal attractions, but they didn’t tempt us…not just yet.  The lure of Harry Potter and friends took precedence.

We’d been advised that a must for first-timers was a ride called Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey, so we decided to do that first.  As we approached the ride, we saw Muggles like us everywhere, including swarms of young people garbed in Hogwarts robes and other gear (all for sale at the shops, of course).  As we waited in line for the ride, we entered a castle (constructed to look like Hogwarts), where we were greeted by colorful talking portraits of HP characters hanging on the walls.

Warnings about the ride were ubiquitous.  It would be jarring, unsuitable for those prone to dizziness or motion sickness, and so forth and so on, ad nauseum.  As someone who’s worked as a lawyer, I knew precisely why these warnings were posted.  Universal Studios was trying to avoid any and all legal liability for complaints from ride-goers.

I decided to ignore the warnings and hopped on a fast-moving chair built for 3 people.  I was bumped around a bit against the chair’s hard surfaces, and I closed my eyes during some of the most startling 3-D effects, but I emerged from the ride in one piece and none the worse for wear.  Nine-year-old Shannon, however, was sobbing when we all left the ride together.  Even sitting next to her super-comforting dad hadn’t shielded her from the scariest special effects.

After the ride, we strolled around The Wizarding World, sampling sickeningly sweet Butterbeer, listening to the Frog Choir, and checking out the merchandise at shops like Gladrags Wizardwear and Ollivanders.  Olllivanders featured magic wands by “Makers of Fine Wands since 382 B.C.”  (Prices began at $40 for something that was essentially a wooden stick.)

Overall, we had a splendid time with HP and friends.  But now it was finally time to explore things non-HP.  Our first priority was the Studio Tour.  We piled into trams that set out on a tour of the four-acre backlot of the world’s largest working studio, where movies and TV shows are still filmed every day.  We got a chance to view the Bates Motel (including a live actor portraying creepy Norman Bates), a pretty realistic earthquake, a virtual flood, a plane-crash scene from The War of the Worlds, and two things I could have done without.  One featured King Kong in 3-D (the new Kong movie being heavily promoted at Universal); the other offered 3-D scenes from The Fast and the Furious films—not my cup of tea.  But overall it was a great tour for movie buffs like us.

After the tour, we headed for the fictional town of Springfield, home of the Simpsons family, stars of The Simpsons TV comedy program as well as their own film.  Soon we were surrounded by many of the hilarious Simpsons locations, including the Kwik-E-Mart, Moe’s Tavern, the Duff Brewery Beer Garden, and a sandwich shop featuring the Krusty Burger and the Sideshow Bob Footlong.  Characters like Krusty the Clown, Sideshow Bob, and the Simpsons themselves wandered all around Springfield, providing great fodder for photos.  For anyone who’s ever watched and laughed at The Simpsons, this part of Universal is tons of fun.

The Simpsons ride was terrific, too.  Once again, lots of warnings, lots of getting bumped around, and lots of 3-D effects, but it was worth it.  Maybe because I’ve always liked The Simpsons, even though I’ve hardly watched the TV show in years.

Other notable characters and rides at Universal include the Minions (from the Despicable Me films), Transformers, Jurassic Park, and Shrek.  Some of us sought out a couple of these, but I was happy to take a break, sit on a nearby bench, munch on popcorn, and sip a vanilla milkshake.

When the 6 p.m. closing time loomed, we had to take off.  Once more, we piled into the minivan and headed for an evening together in Santa Monica.  This time we all took in the Lego Batman movie.  I think I missed seeing some of it because, after a long day of exploring the universe, I fell asleep.

On the last day of our trip, we drove to the Getty Center, the lavish art museum located on a hill in Brentwood very close to the place where I got married decades ago.  Thanks to J. Paul Getty, who not only made a fortune in the oil industry but also liked to collect art, the Center features a large permanent collection as well as impressive changing exhibitions.

The six of us wandered through the museum’s five separate buildings, admiring the fabulous art as well as the stunning architecture.  We also lingered outside, relishing the gorgeous views and the brilliant sunshine that had been largely absent since our arrival in LA.  A bite to eat in the crowded café, a short trip to the museum store, and we six Muggles of various ages were off to Santa Monica one last time before driving home to San Francisco.

By the way, at the museum store you can buy a magnet featuring J. Paul Getty’s recipe for success:  “1. Rise early.  2. Work hard.  3. Strike oil.”  It certainly worked for him!

 

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Posted in art galleries, art museums, art, artists,, comedy, driving, family, family road trips, food, Harry Potter, holidays, Hollywood, law, lawyers, Los Angeles, LA, movie stars, movies, Muggles, politics, reading, reading fiction, San Francisco, Santa Monica, sunshine, television, The Original Farmers' Market, TV comedy, Universal Studios, walking, weather

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Random Thoughts

Posted on January 31, 2017 | 3 comments

On truthfulness

Does it bother you when someone lies to you?  It bothers me.  And I just learned astonishing new information about people who repeatedly tell lies.

According to British neuroscientists, brain scans of the amygdala—the area in the brain that responds to unpleasant emotional experiences—show that the brain becomes desensitized with each successive lie.

In other words, the more someone lies, the less that person’s brain reacts to it.  And the easier it is for him or her to lie the next time.

These researchers concluded that “little white lies,” usually considered harmless, really aren’t harmless at all because they can lead to big fat falsehoods.  “What begins as small acts of dishonesty can escalate into larger transgressions.”

This study seems terribly relevant right now.  Our political leaders (one in particular, along with some of his cohorts) have often been caught telling lies.   When these leaders set out on a course of telling lies, watch out.  They’re likely to keep doing it.  And it doesn’t bother them a bit.

Let’s hope our free press remains truly free, ferrets out the lies that impact our lives, and points them out to the rest of us whenever they can.

[This study was published in the journal Nature Neuroscience and noted in the January-February 2017 issue of the AARP Bulletin.]

 

On language

When did “waiting for” become “waiting on”?

Am I the only English-speaking person who still says “waiting for”?

I’ve been speaking English my entire life, and the phrase “waiting on” has always meant what waiters or waitresses did.  Likewise, salesclerks in a store.  They “waited on” you.

“Waiting for” was an entirely different act.   In a restaurant, you—the patron—decide to order something from the menu.  Then you begin “waiting for” it to arrive.

Similarly:  Even though you’re ready to go somewhere, don’t you sometimes have to “wait for” someone before you can leave?

Here are three titles you may have come across.  First, did you ever hear of the 1935 Clifford Odets play “Waiting for Lefty”?  (Although it isn’t performed a lot these days, it recently appeared on stage in the Bay Area.)  In Odets’s play, a group of cabdrivers “wait for” someone named Lefty to arrive.  While they wait for him, they debate whether they should go on strike.

Even better known, Samuel Beckett’s play, “Waiting for Godot,” is still alive and well and being performed almost everywhere.  [You can read a little bit about this play—and the two pronunciations of “Godot”—in my blog post, “Crawling through Literature in the Pubs of Dublin, Ireland,” published in April 2016.]  The lead characters in the play are forever waiting for “Godot,” usually acknowledged as a substitute for “God,” who never shows up.

A more recent example is the 1997 film, “Waiting for Guffman.”  The cast of a small-town theater group anxiously waits for a Broadway producer named Guffman to appear, hoping that he’ll like their show.  Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy, who co-wrote and starred in the film, were pretty clearly referring to “Waiting for Godot” when they wrote it.

Can anyone imagine replacing “Waiting for” in these titles with “Waiting on”?

C’mon!

Yet everywhere I go, I constantly hear people say that they’re “waiting on” a friend to show up or “waiting on” something to happen.

This usage has even pervaded Harvard Magazine.  In a recent issue, an article penned by an undergraduate included this language:  “[T]hey aren’t waiting on the dean…to make the changes they want to see.”

Hey, undergrad, I’m not breathlessly waiting for your next piece of writing!  Why?  Because you should have said “waiting for”!

Like many of the changes in English usage I’ve witnessed in recent years, this one sounds very wrong to me.

 

Have you heard this one?

Thanks to scholars at the U. of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and Harvard Business School, I’ve just learned that workers who tell jokes—even bad ones—can boost their chances of being viewed by their co-workers as more confident and more competent.

Joking is a form of humor, and humor is often seen as a sign of intelligence and a good way to get ideas across to others.  But delivering a joke well also demands sensitivity and some regard for the listeners’ emotions.

The researchers, who ran experiments involving 2,300 participants, were trying to gauge responses to joke-tellers. They specifically wanted to assess the impact of joking on an individual’s status at work.

In one example, participants had to rate individuals who explained a service that removed pet waste from customers’ yards.  This example seems ripe for joke-telling, and sure enough, someone made a joke about it.

Result?  The person who told the joke was rated as more competent and higher in status than those who didn’t.

In another example, job-seekers were asked to suggest a creative use for an old tire.  One of them joked, “Someone doing CrossFit could use it for 30 minutes, then tell you about it forever.”  This participant was rated higher in status than two others, who either made an inappropriate joke about a condom or made a serious suggestion (“Make a tire swing out of it.”).

So jokes work—but only if they’re appropriate.

Even jokes that fell flat led participants to rate a joke-teller as highly confident.  But inappropriate or insensitive jokes don’t do a joke-teller any favors because they can have a negative impact.

Common sense tells me that the results of this study also apply in a social setting.  Telling jokes to your friends is almost always a good way to enhance your relationship—as long as you avoid offensive and insensitive jokes.

The take-away:  If you can tell an appropriate joke to your colleagues and friends, they’re likely to see you as confident and competent.

So next time you need to explain something to others, in your workplace or in any another setting, try getting out one of those dusty old joke books and start searching for just the right joke.

[This study, reported in The Wall Street Journal on January 18, 2017, and revisited in the same publication a week later, appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.]

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Posted in brain, co-workers, comedy, Dublin, Ireland, free press, Harvard, human biology, Irish literature, Irish writers, language, literary pub crawl, literature, lying, medical research, movies, neuroscience, politics, psychological research, psychology, pub-crawl, science, social skills, telling jokes, telling lies, The Nobel Prize in Literature, theater, workplace

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Happy Christmas

Posted on December 25, 2016 | 3 comments

Happy Christmas!  That’s what the Brits say, right?  I’m thinking in Brit-speak right now, thanks to recently immersing myself in the world of Victorian London, and I haven’t shaken it off just yet.

The occasion? I showed up at this year’s Great Dickens Christmas Fair & Victorian Holiday Party, held every year at San Francisco’s Cow Palace.

I’ve always associated the Cow Palace with the Republican convention held there in 1964.  The one where Barry Goldwater gave his famous acceptance speech, including the memorable line, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.”  I remember watching him say those words on TV while I was at home with a high fever.  The whole experience seemed like a feverish nightmare.  A candidate for the presidency of the United States saying those words!  To a Democratically-inclined young person in 1964, Goldwater’s words were shocking.  (Fast forward to 2016, when much more inflammatory speech was hurled at the nation almost every day by another candidate for the presidency.  One, unlike Goldwater, who got himself elected.)

Back to the Cow Palace.  It’s an indoor arena known as a venue for dog shows, sporting events, rodeos, and gun shows.  The Beatles appeared there twice in the ‘60s (and U2 at a special event in October 2016).  I’d never been there before.  But there I was, along with my two daughters and two granddaughters, entering the world of Dickens’s London.

Dickens was an early favorite of mine.  During my teen years, I read David Copperfield and Oliver Twist and became totally enamored of the characters and plot development in both.  (I also read, or tried to read, A Tale of Two Cities, during sophomore year, thanks to Mr. Hurley.  Every girl in our class, including me, had a major crush on him, the only good-looking under-40 male teacher at our high school.  But the book was a poor choice, even for the best readers among us, because it demanded a knowledge of history we hadn’t yet acquired.  When I returned to it years later, knowing something about the history of that time, I found it quite wonderful.  Still, it was and is very different from any of Dickens’s other works.)

Later I moved on to reading more and more Dickens. Bleak House, an indictment of the law as practiced in Dickens’s London, was a favorite.  I saw Oliver performed on stage and in the movies and saw countless dramatizations of his other stories, including the perennial A Christmas Carol.  The 1982 BBC mini-series of Nicholas Nickleby, starring Roger Rees, was especially memorable.

In short, I was—and am—a Dickens fan.

So off I went to the Great Dickens Christmas Fair, not quite sure what to expect.

What I discovered was a whole world of people who turned out to enjoy dancing, music, and theatrical performances inspired by Dickens and the culture of his time.  At least half, possibly more, were dressed in the Victorian fashions they would have worn when meeting Dickens himself.  Perhaps many of these fair-goers like the theatricality of dressing up this way, pretending to be in a different time and place, no doubt escaping the reality of their everyday lives.

A host of vendors offered Victorian-style clothing and hats; many Victorian-clad fair-goers may have purchased theirs at earlier fairs.  Vendors also sold things like second-hand books (some by Dickens), jewelry, vintage photos, and scented items, along with food and drink.  My granddaughters were taken with the stunning dresses, and their mother bought one for each of them on the condition that they wear them as often as possible.

We headed for a few of the performances, including a charming version of traditional Christmas carols (yes, the singers were in Victorian garb), Irish and Scottish dancing, and a typically-British “music hall” comedy.  An over-18 version began after ours and attracted a lot of people waiting in line outside the music hall as we departed (we had two under-18 girls among us).  Finally, we were treated to Mr. Fezziwig’s Ball, where fair-goers could themselves get on the dance floor and twirl to the music of Victorian London.  Just before we left, a beautifully-costumed Queen Victoria showed up, along with her retinue, to wish us all a Happy Christmas and a Good New Year.

The Dickens Fair was tremendous fun.  And it had a bonus:  it reminded me of two special times in my past.  When my husband-to-be Herb and I first began dating, we discovered that we not only lived in the same apartment building near UCLA (where we were working) but we both were also great fans of Charles Dickens.  (In London years later, Herb and I made a beeline for the only house still standing where Dickens lived and wrote.)

Herb somehow garnered tickets for a live performance at UCLA by the British (specifically Welsh) writer and actor Emlyn Williams.  Best known for his plays Night Must Fall and The Corn is Green (both frequently revived on stage and made into notable films), Williams also worked on screenplays for directors like Alfred Hitchcock and acted himself in a number of films.

When we encountered Williams in early 1971, he was touring with his one-man show, in which he portrayed Charles Dickens, bearded and outfitted in Victorian attire, reading excerpts from his famous novels.  (Some say he began the whole genre of one-man and one-woman performances. He appeared in New York as early as 1953 and no doubt appeared in London even earlier. Probably best-known to Americans is Hal Holbrook as Mark Twain.)  Herb and I were entranced by Williams’s stellar performance, and I followed it up by giving Herb a new biography of Dickens as his Valentine’s Day gift.  (Not very romantic, but Herb loved it.)

Ten years later, we learned that Williams-as-Dickens would be performing close to our then-home on the North Shore of Chicago.  At the Northlight Theatre production in Evanston, Illinois, we reveled once again in his zestful reading of Dickens’s writing.

The miserly Ebenezer Scrooge is perhaps Dickens’s most memorable character.  Let’s remember what Dickens wrote toward the end of A Christmas Carol.  When Scrooge discovered the joy of helping others, “His own heart laughed.”

Whether or not you celebrate Christmas, I send you this wish:  May you have a laughing heart today, and every day to come.

 

 

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Posted in Barry Goldwater, Britain, Charles Dickens, Chicago, Emlyn Williams, English literature, fashion, holidays, law, lawyers, literature, London, movies, music, reading fiction, San Francisco, television, travel, UCLA, Victorian London, Wales

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A Day Without a Drug Commercial

Posted on November 30, 2016 | 2 comments

Last night I dreamed there was a day without a drug commercial….

When I woke up, reality stared me in the face.  It couldn’t be true.  Not right now.  Not without revolutionary changes in the drug industry.

Here are some numbers that may surprise you.  Or maybe not.

Six out of ten adults in the U.S. take a prescription medication.  That’s up from five out of ten a decade ago.  (These numbers appeared in a recent study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association.)

Further, nine out of ten people over 65 take at least one drug, and four out of ten take five or more—nearly twice as many as a decade ago.

One more statistic:  insured adults under 65 are twice as likely to take medication as the uninsured.

Are you surprised by any of these numbers?  I’m not.

Until the 1990s, drug companies largely relied on physicians to promote their prescription drugs. But in 1997, the Food and Drug Administration revised its earlier rules on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertising, putting fewer restrictions on the advertising of pharmaceuticals on TV and radio, as well as in print and other media.  We’re one of only two countries–New Zealand is the other one–that permit this kind of advertising.

The Food and Drug Administration is responsible for regulating it and is supposed to take into account ethical and other concerns to prevent the undue influence of DTC advertising on consumer demand.  The fear was that advertising would lead to a demand for medically unnecessary prescription meds.

It’s pretty clear to me that it has.  Do you agree?

Just look at the statistics.  The number of people taking prescription drugs increases every year.  In my view, advertising has encouraged them to seek drugs that may be medically unnecessary.

Of course, many meds are essential to preserve a patient’s life and health.  But have you heard the TV commercials?  Some of them highlight obscure illnesses that affect a small number of TV viewers.  But whether we suffer from these ailments or not, we’re all constantly assaulted by these ads.  And think about it:  If you feel a little under the weather one day, or a bit down in the dumps because of something that happened at work, or just feeling stressed because the neighbor’s dog keeps barking every night, might those ads induce you to call your doc and demand a new drug to deal with it?

The drug commercials appear to target those who watch daytime TV—mostly older folks and the unemployed.  Because I work at home, I sometimes watch TV news while I munch on my peanut butter sandwich.  But if I don’t hit the mute button fast enough, I’m bombarded by annoying ads describing all sorts of horrible diseases.  And the side effects of the drugs?  Hearing them recited (as rapidly as possible) is enough to make me lose my appetite.  One commercial stated some possible side effects:  suicidal thoughts or actions; new or worsening depression; blurry vision; swelling of face, mouth, hands or feet; and trouble breathing.  Good grief!  The side effects sounded worse than the disease.

I’m not the only one annoyed by drug commercials.  In November 2015, the American Medical Association called for a ban on DTC ads of prescription drugs. Physicians cited genuine concerns that a growing proliferation of ads was driving the demand for expensive treatments despite the effectiveness of less costly alternatives.  They also cited concerns that marketing costs were fueling escalating drug prices, noting that advertising dollars spent by drug makers had increased by 30 percent in the previous two years, totaling $4.5 billion.

The World Health Organization has also concluded that DTC ads promote expensive brand-name drugs.  WHO has recommended against allowing DTC ads, noting surveys in the US and New Zealand showing that when patients ask for a specific drug by name, they receive it more often than not.

Senator Bernie Sanders has repeatedly stated that Americans pay the highest prices in the world for prescription drugs.  He and other Senators introduced a bill in 2015 aimed at skyrocketing drug prices, and Sanders went on to rail against them during his 2016 presidential campaign.

Another member of Congress, Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.), has introduced a bill specifically focused on DTC ads.  Calling for a three-year moratorium on advertising new prescription drugs directly to consumers, the bill would freeze these ads, with the aim of holding down health-care costs.

DeLauro has argued, much like the AMA, that DTC ads can inflate health-care costs if they prompt consumers to seek newer, higher-priced meds.  The Responsibility in Drug Advertising Act would amend the current Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act and is the latest effort to squelch DTC advertising of prescription meds.

The fact that insured adults under 65 are twice as likely to take prescription meds as those who are not insured highlights a couple of things:  That these ads are pretty much about making more and more money for the drug manufacturers.  And that most of the people who can afford them are either insured or in an over-65 program covering many of their medical expenses.  So it’s easy to see that manufacturers can charge inflated prices because these consumers are reimbursed by their insurance companies.  No wonder health insurance costs so much!  And those who are uninsured must struggle to pay the escalating prices or go without the drugs they genuinely need.

Not surprisingly, the drug industry trade group, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, has disputed the argument that DTC ads play “a direct role in the cost of new medicines.”  It claims that most people find these ads useful because they “tell people about new treatments.”  It’s probably true that a few ads may have a public-health benefit.  But I doubt that very many fall into that category.

Hey, Big Pharma:  If I need to learn about a new treatment for a health problem, I’ll consult my physician.  I certainly don’t plan to rely on your irritating TV ads.

But…I fear that less skeptical TV viewers may do just that.

So please, take those ads off the air.  Now.

If you do, you know what?  There just might be a day without a drug commercial….

 

[The Wellness Letter published by the University of California, Berkeley, provided the statistics noted at the beginning of this post.]

 

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Posted in aging, American Medical Association, Big Pharma, Democrats, depression, direct-to-consumer advertising, disease, drug commercials, drug manufacturers, Food and Drug Administration, getting older, health, human biology, law, peanut butter, politics, prescription drugs, president, Representative Rosa DeLauro, science, Senator Bernie Sanders, TV commercials, US Congress, US Senate, World Health Organization

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Feeling Lazy? Blame Evolution

Posted on October 18, 2016 | 1 comment

I’m kind of lazy.  I admit it. I like to walk, ride a bike, and splash around in a pool, but I don’t indulge in a lot of exercise beyond that.

Now a Harvard professor named Daniel Lieberman says I can blame human evolution.  In a recent paper, “Is Exercise Really Medicine? An Evolutionary Perspective,” he explains his ideas.

First, he says (and this is the sentence I really like), “It is natural and normal to be physically lazy.”  Why?  Because human evolution has led us to exercise only as much as we must to survive.

We all know that our ancestors lived as hunter-gatherers and that food was often scarce.  Lieberman adds this idea:  Resting was key to conserving energy for survival and reproduction.  “In other words, humans were born to run—but as little as possible.”

As he points out, “No hunter-gatherer goes out for a jog, just for the sake of it….”  Thus, we evolved “to require stimuli from physical activity.”  For example, muscles become bigger and more powerful with use, and they atrophy when they’re not used.  In the human circulatory system, “vigorous activity stimulates expansion of …circulation,” improves the heart’s ability to pump blood, and increases the elasticity of arteries.  But with less exercise, arteries stiffen, the heart pumps less blood, and metabolism slows.

Lieberman emphasizes that this entire process evolved to conserve energy whenever possible.  Muscles use a lot of calories, making them costly to maintain.  Muscle wasting thus evolved as a way to lower energy consumption when physical activity wasn’t required.

What about now?  Until recently, it was never possible in human history to lead an existence devoid of activity.  The result:  According to Lieberman, the mechanisms humans have always used to reduce energy expenditures in the absence of physical activity now manifest as diseases.

So maladies like heart disease, diabetes, and osteoporosis are now the consequences of adaptations that evolved to trim energy demand, and modern medicine is now stuck with treating the symptoms.

In the past, hunter-gatherers had to exercise because if they didn’t, they had nothing to eat.  Securing food was an enormous incentive.  But today, for most humans there are very few incentives to exercise.

How do we change that?  Although there’s “no silver bullet,” Lieberman thinks we can try to make activity “more fun for more people.”  Maybe making exercise more “social” would help.  Community sports like soccer teams and fun-runs might encourage more people to get active.

Lieberman has another suggestion.  At his own university, students are no longer required to take physical education as part of the curriculum.  Harvard voted its physical-education requirement out of existence in the 1970s, and he thinks it’s time to reinstate it.  He notes surveys that show that very few students who are not athletes on a team get sufficient exercise.  A quarter of Harvard undergraduates have reported being sedentary.

Because “study after study shows that…people who get more physical activity have better concentration, their memories are better, they focus better,” Lieberman argues that the time spent exercising is “returned in spades…not only in the short term, but also in the long term.  Shouldn’t we care about the long-term mental and physical health of our students?”

Lieberman makes a powerful argument for reinstating phys-ed in those colleges and universities that have dropped it.  His argument also makes sense for those of us no longer in school.

Let’s foil what the millennia of evolution have done to our bodies and boost our own level of exercise as much as we can.

Tennis, anyone?

 

[Daniel Lieberman’s paper was the focus of an article in the September-October 2016 issue of Harvard Magazine.  He’s the Lerner professor of biological sciences at Harvard.]

 

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Posted in disease, evolution, exercise, Harvard, health, health benefits of exercise, human biology, long life, medical research, memory, science, walking

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Looking Back…The Election of 1984 (Part II)

I wrote Part I of this blog post in late 1984.  In Part I, I commented on the campaign for president and vice president that had occurred that fall.

Part II, also written in 1984, offered my thoughts at the time about what might take place post-1984.

During the past 32 years, we’ve seen another major political party nominate a woman to be vice president.  In my view, the selection of Sarah Palin as that candidate in 2008 was John McCain’s replication of Walter Mondale’s unhappy selection of Geraldine Ferraro.  It was perhaps even more detrimental to McCain because he probably had a better chance of being elected president than Mondale had in 1984. Palin was even more untested as a political figure than Ferraro, having served only as a suburban mayor and a recently elected governor of a small state.  She soon demonstrated her lack of experience and knowledge of national issues, making her a genuine liability for McCain, who lost the support of many voters who might have otherwise been inclined to vote for him.

In 2016, American voters finally have the opportunity to select a woman as their president.  This time she’s a woman with a great deal of experience in public life and vast knowledge of the issues confronting our nation.  Although, as a candidate, Hillary Clinton hasn’t inspired unbridled enthusiasm, she’s as close to a “woman candidate of national stature” (to use my own words) as we’ve ever had.  In 1984, I predicted that a “woman candidate of national stature” whose position “represents the majority thinking in this country” would be “a realistic candidate,…and she will win.”

Was I right?

Here’s exactly what I wrote in 1984:

 

PART II

How does this leave things for the future?  Putting aside the personal future of Geraldine Ferraro, which is probably bright, what about other women candidates?  And what about the possibility of any woman being nominated and elected to the presidency or vice presidency of this country?  The Mondale-Ferraro defeat should not and must not be read as a defeat for women candidates in general.  Ferraro’s assets, both as a candidate and as a human being, are considerable, but, to be honest, she joined the campaign largely unknown and untested.
Another woman candidate might well fare otherwise.

Twenty-five years ago [i.e., in 1959], Margaret Chase Smith, a well-known and respected Republican U.S. Senator from Maine, announced her candidacy for the presidency.  She never had a realistic shot at it in that benighted era, but she might have had one in the 1980s.  She had established herself through a number of terms in the House of Representatives and the Senate, had climbed up the ladder in the Senate to committee chairmanships, and had become a recognized and admired figure on the national political scene.  A woman presenting similar credentials in the 1980s would bring a credibility to a national ticket that Ferraro, as a relative newcomer to the political arena, could not.  For this reason it’s important that women continue to run for political office on the state and local level, building political careers that will lead to the White House after they have achieved national stature—not before.

In all of the fuss made over Ferraro’s candidacy, something important was forgotten.  It’s not desirable for any political party to nominate a candidate solely or even primarily because that candidate is a woman or a black or a Hispanic—or a white Anglo male, for that matter.  The selection process must be based on the totality of what any given candidate will bring to the office.  The Democrats were wrong to select a woman candidate largely because she was a woman (those who said that a man with Ferraro’s credentials would never have been considered were—however painful it is to admit—correct).  They were wrong because Americans do not, and should not, vote for “symbols.”  When it became clear that Jesse Jackson wasn’t a candidate with a broad-based constituency but had become a “black” candidate and nothing more, that was the death knell for any realistic chance he had of winning the nomination.  But saying that is not saying that no black candidate can ever win.

Women candidates and candidates who are members of minority groups have run for office and won broad-based electoral support where they have been viewed as representing the best interests of a majority of the electorate.  But women and others who are viewed as “symbols,” representing only that segment of the electorate from which they came, will never win that sort of broad-based support.  On the contrary, their candidacies may serve only to polarize voters, leading to strife and bitterness among the electorate, and probable if not certain defeat at the ballot box.

When Mondale chose Ferraro, he already had the votes of the politically aware women for whom Ferraro became a symbol by virtue of his position on such issues as the ERA [the Equal Rights Amendment] and [the issue of] comparable worth.  He would not have lost the votes of those women no matter what else he did.  Likewise, Reagan didn’t have the votes of those women and wouldn’t have had them no matter what he did.  Even in the unimaginable event that Reagan had selected a woman running-mate, she would have had to be a woman whose thinking was compatible with his, and if she had endorsed Reagan’s views on the ERA (á la Phyllis Schlafly), feminists wouldn’t have been any more likely to vote for Reagan-Schlafly than Reagan-Bush.  It shouldn’t therefore be terribly difficult to understand why women who were otherwise happy with Reagan weren’t inclined to switch to Mondale simply because of Ferraro.

In sum, women voters are really not very different from men voters, and Democratic strategists who thought otherwise were proved wrong in 1984.  Women vote their interests, and these do not necessarily coincide with what is popularly perceived as “women’s” interests.  Women, like men, are concerned about the economy, our country’s status in the world, and a host of other matters along with the particular concerns they may have as women.

When a woman candidate of national stature emerges whose position on these interests represents the majority thinking in the country, she will be a realistic candidate for the vice presidency or the presidency, and she will win.

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Posted on September 27, 2016 in Alaska, Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Margaret Chase Smith, opinion pieces, politics, president, sarah palin, the election of 1984, US Congress, US Senate, vice president, Walter Mondale, women, women"s interests

Looking Back…The Election of 1984

Posted on August 22, 2016 | Leave a comment

If you’ve followed politics for as long as I have, you probably remember the election of 1984.  In the race for U.S. president, Ronald Reagan was the Republican incumbent, first elected in 1980, and seeking to be re-elected in 1984.  Most observers predicted that he would succeed.

Opposing him was the Democratic nominee, Walter Mondale.

I found the campaign for president so absorbing that shortly after Mondale lost, I wrote a piece of commentary on the election.  Somewhat astoundingly, I recently came across that long-lost piece of writing.

Regrettably, I never submitted it for publication.  Why?  In 1984 I was active in local politics (the New Trier Democratic Organization, to be specific), and I was apprehensive about the reaction my comments might inspire in my fellow Democrats.

Reviewing it now, I wish I’d submitted it for publication.

On June 11th of this year, after Hillary Clinton appeared to be the Democratic nominee for president, The New York Times published a front-page story by Alison Mitchell, “To Understand Clinton’s Moment, Consider That It Came 32 Years After Ferraro’s.”  Mitchell’s article is a brilliant review of what happened in 1984 and during the 32 years since.  My commentary is different because it was actually written in 1984, and it presents the thinking of a longstanding political observer and a lifelong Democrat at that point in time.

Here’s the commentary I wrote just after the election in November 1984.  It was typed on an Apple IIe computer (thanks, Steve Wozniak) and printed on a flimsy dot-matrix printer.  It’s almost exactly what I wrote back then, minimally edited, mostly to use contractions and omit completely unnecessary words.  I’ve divided it into two parts because of its length.

 

PART I

Although Walter Mondale conducted a vigorous and courageous campaign, perhaps nothing he did or did not do would have altered the ultimate result.  But his fate was probably sealed last July when he made two costly political mistakes.  He chose to tell the American people that he’d increase taxes, and he chose Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate.

Savvy political observers have always known that talk of increased taxes is the kiss of death for any candidate.  One wonders what made Walter Mondale forget this truism and instead decide to impress the electorate with his honesty by telling them what they had to know (or, rather, what he thought they had to know) about the deficit.  By making the deficit—a highly intangible concept to the average American voter—a cornerstone of his campaign, Mondale committed the political gaffe of the decade.  One can imagine the glee in the White House the night Mondale gave his acceptance speech and tipped his hand.  The most popular theme of the Reagan campaign became identifying Mondale with the idea of “tax, tax, tax; spend, spend, spend,” a theme that had spelled doom for Jimmy Carter and came to do the same for his Vice President.

Mondale’s choice of Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate was surely not a gaffe of the magnitude of his promise to increase taxes, but as a political judgment it was almost equally unwise.  Mondale faced a popular incumbent president.  All the signposts, even back in July, indicated that the American people were largely satisfied with Reagan and willing to give him another term.  To unseat a popular sitting president, Mondale—who’d been through a bloody primary campaign and emerged considerably damaged—had to strengthen his ticket by choosing a running mate with virtually no liabilities.  He simply couldn’t afford them.

Some of the best advice Mondale got all year was George McGovern’s suggestion that he choose Gary Hart for his vice president.  In one stroke, Mondale could have won the support of those backing his most formidable opponent, many of whom had threatened to go over to Reagan if their candidate wasn’t nominated.  Like Reagan in 1980, Mondale could have solidified much of the divided loyalty of his party behind him by choosing the opponent who’d come closest in arousing voters’ enthusiasm.  Instead he chose to pass over Hart and several other likely candidates and to select a largely unknown three-term congresswoman from New York City.

It pains me, as a feminist and an ardent supporter of women’s rights, to say this, but it must be said:  Mondale’s choice of Ferraro, however admirable, was a political mistake.  When the pressure from NOW and others to choose a woman candidate arose and gradually began to build, I felt uneasy.  When Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder (for whom I have otherwise unlimited respect) announced that if Mondale didn’t choose Hart, he had to choose a woman, my uneasiness increased.  And when Mondale at last announced his choice of Ferraro, my heart sank.  I was personally thrilled that a woman was at last on a national ticket, but I knew immediately that the election was lost, and that everything a Mondale administration might have accomplished in terms of real gains for women had been wiped out by his choice of a woman running-mate.

There was no flaw in Ferraro herself that ensured the defeat of the Mondale-Ferraro ticket.  She’s an extremely bright, attractive, competent congresswoman and proved herself to be a gifted and inspiring V.P. candidate.  She has, by accepting the nomination, carved out a secure place for herself in the history books and maybe a significant role in national politics for decades to come.  She deserves all this and perhaps more.  But one must wonder whether even Ferraro in her own secret thoughts pondered the political wisdom of her choice as Mondale’s running mate.  If she is as good a politician as I think she is, I can’t help thinking that she herself must have wondered, “Why me, when he could have anyone else?  Will I really help the ticket? Well, what the hell, I’ll give it a shot!  It just might work.”

And it just might—someday.  But in 1984, up against a “Teflon President,” Mondale needed much more.  Reagan was playing it safe, and Mondale wasn’t.  Some observers applauded his choice of Ferraro as the kind of bold, courageous act he needed to bring excitement to a dull, plodding campaign.  But American voters weren’t looking for bold and courageous acts.  They wanted a President who didn’t rock the boat–a boat with which they were largely satisfied.  They might have been willing to throw out the current occupant of the White House if Mondale had been able to seize upon some popular themes and use them to his advantage.  Instead, the Reagan administration seized upon the tax-and-spend issue and the relatively good status of the economy to ride to victory while Mondale was still groping for a theme that might do the same for him.  And all the while he had a running mate with a liability:  a woman who had no national political stature and who turned out to have considerable problems of her own (notably, a messy financial situation).

Mondale’s choice of Ferraro was compared by Reagan to his appointment of Sandra Day O’Connor to the U.S. Supreme Court.  In the sense that both men selected highly capable but little-known women and in one stroke catapulted them to the top of their professions, Reagan was right.  But Reagan’s choice was very different and politically much smarter.  A V.P. candidate must be judged by the entire American electorate; a Supreme Court nominee is judged only by the U.S. Senate.  A vice president must stand alone, the metaphorical heartbeat away from the presidency; a Supreme Court justice is only one of nine judges on a court where most issues are not decided 5 to 4.  [We all recognize that this description of the Court in 1984 no longer fits in 2016.  But a single justice on the Court is still only one of nine.]

Let’s face it:  the notion of a woman V.P. (and the concomitant possibility of a woman president) is one that some Americans are clearly not yet comfortable with.  Although 16 percent of the voters polled by one organization said that they were more inclined to vote for Mondale because of Ferraro, 26 percent said they were less likely to.  It doesn’t take a mathematical whiz to grasp that 26 is more than 16.  These statistics also assume that the 55 percent who said that Ferraro’s sex was not a factor either way were being absolutely candid, which is doubtful.  Many men and women who are subconsciously uncomfortable with the idea of a woman president are understandably reluctant to admit it, to themselves perhaps as much as to others.

 

 

 

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Posted in American history, Democrats, gender equality, Geraldine Ferraro, Hillary Clinton, House of Representatives, president, raising taxes, Ronald Reagan, the election of 1984, US Senate, vice president, Walter Mondale, women, women"s interests

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The Charm of San Miguel de Allende

Posted on July 27, 2016 | 2 comments

 

Light rain was falling when I arrived at the airport in Leon, Mexico, searching for the shuttle that would take me to San Miguel de Allende.  A sign listing all the passengers on my shuttle made clear it would be crowded.

I jumped on board, taking a seat near the door. Not a great choice.  Passengers departing before me carelessly left the door open too long, and raindrops pelted me every time.  Even more annoying was the man behind me who talked incessantly, telling another passenger everything to do and see in San Miguel.  I wished he’d shut up.  I wanted to discover all of it for myself.

The shuttle driver finally located the house on Calle del Castillo belonging to Merrily and Paul, my great friends since college, and they welcomed me warmly, ushering me inside.  The house was a wonderful surprise, modern and comfortable, and I felt very lucky to be in their sheltering arms.

For the next few days, the three of us set out together every day, covering a host of sites in and around this charming city set in Mexico’s central highlands.

Why go to San Miguel?  First, it’s a UNESCO World Heritage site, an extremely beautiful city filled with historic and architecturally-astounding buildings.  Next, although parts of Mexico have sadly seen a measure of violent crime in recent years, San Miguel is still a peaceful sanctuary where one feels totally safe.  And although it’s perhaps best known in the U.S. as a city inundated with American ex-pats, the overwhelming majority of the population is made up of warm and friendly mexicanos.  Unlike the Mexican resort cities like Puerto Vallarta (my favorite) and Acapulco, San Miguel is a much more authentically Mexican city.  You may want to spend a vacation of a few days there, or linger much, much longer.  Or, like Merrily and Paul, you may even want to move there, joining the five thousand or so ex-pats who have made San Miguel their home.

In case you’re wondering how the lengthy name of the city came about, here’s a brief history lesson:  When the Spaniards arrived in this part of Mexico during the 16th century and established a colony, many of the indigenous inhabitants fled.  A Franciscan friar took advantage of their departure and founded a Spanish settlement that evolved in the 17th century into a beautiful town called San Miguel el Grande.

During the next hundred years, when many people who by now considered themselves Mexicans rose up against Spanish rule, Ignacio Allende was a prominent local leader.  He was executed by the Spanish, but he was not forgotten.  After the Mexican army defeated the Spanish in their War of Independence, the city was renamed San Miguel de Allende to honor him.

Today’s city has the Spanish to thank for many of its striking buildings, constructed during the colonial period.  The most magnificent is the Parroquia de San Miguel Arcángel, a pink-hued Neo-Gothic cathedral dominating the Centro Histórico, the historic center of town, directly across from the leafy park, El Jardin.  Originally built in the 16th century, a local architect did a smashing renovation about 300 years later.  Its pink sandstone towers present a facade unlike that of any other church I’ve ever seen, resembling a set right out of a Disney fairytale, and when it’s illuminated at night, it has a truly magical vibe.

The city contains a host of other remarkable sights.  Instead of listing all of them, I’ll highlight just a few.  One of the must-sees is El Jardin (pronounced har-deen), the leafy green park in the center of the city.  It’s a vibrant gathering place, filled with both locals and tourists.  Groups of mariachi musicians play there every evening, and all around its perimeter are vendors featuring kids’ toys, balloons, and lots of food, including some pretty wild varieties of ice cream (helado), including elote (corn), queso (cheese), and guayaba (guava).

El Jardin is also the place where tours of the city center begin.  These tours, organized by a local children’s charity called Patronato de Ninos, are offered at 9:45 a.m. three times a week.   They’re led by a diverse group of cheerful and knowledgeable guides (mine was an American ex-pat wearing an exquisite locally-embroidered dress).

Another highlight is the Fábrica de Aurora, a former textile factory whose machinery has been preserved and can be viewed through large glass windows.  It’s been totally renovated and now houses a wide range of art galleries, craft studios, and delightful places to eat and drink.  A bit north of the city, it’s well worth the trip.

Farther outside the city (about eight miles from downtown San Miguel) is the town of Atontonilco.  Its centerpiece is another World Heritage Site, an astonishing church called the Santuario de Jesus Nazareno de Atononilco.  The church’s walls and ceilings are covered with paintings of religious stories and figures, a remarkable achievement by an artist who spent 30 years of his life creating this result.

We arrived on a Saturday and encountered not just one but two weddings being held in the church.  While the first wedding was being celebrated, the second wedding party lined up outside, awaiting its turn.  On the city streets outside the church, friendly locals offered items for sale, most notably whips of various sizes.  Whips?  Yes, whips–mainly of the “cat-o’-nine-tails” variety.  Why?  Because the sanctuary has a long history as a Catholic-pilgrimage destination, and that history includes self-flagellation by some of the pilgrims.  For kicks, you might want to buy a souvenir whip while you’re there.

Speaking of shopping:  If that pursuit interests you, San Miguel offers a wide range of possibilities.  Merrily and Paul first guided me to a largely low-rent and authentic option (my choice).  Descending to a small alleyway, we found the Mercado de Artesanía, a distinctly non-posh assortment of stands tended by local artisans and their families.  There I purchased trivets and other items made of pewter, earrings made of silver and abalone shell, and colorful embroidered blouses and pillow covers.  Besides admiring their wares, I relished meeting the artisans and speaking with them in my high-school-level Spanish (Merrily helped).

We then went on to some actual shops, like Martha’s shoe store, where she sells the famous “San Miguel” shoes in many different colors; delightful candy shops; and the highly unusual “oil cloth” store, where the brawny young proprietor makes useful items—like tote bags and luggage tags—out of a variety of bright oil cloth patterns.  (I hadn’t seen so much oil cloth since I was a kid in Mom’s postwar kitchen!)  I later sought out stores offering artisanal products like ceramics and jewelry.  My favorite purchases were the ceramic trees-of-life I bought for both of my daughters.

If the art scene is your thing, be sure to check out Bellas Artes, an art school and cultural center in downtown San Miguel.  Stroll through the arcades surrounding its beautiful courtyard and view exhibits by local artists.  As for art galleries, they’re everywhere you look.  Many of the ex-pats living in San Miguel are part of a well-established artists’ colony, and anyone interested in art will have no problem finding the kind of artwork he or she prefers.

And then there are the fiestas.  Mexico has a huge number of outdoor fiestas and religious celebrations, all observed with great exuberance.  I was extremely lucky to be in San Miguel during one of its notable events, the celebration called the Fiesta del Seňor de la Conquista.  I won’t elaborate on its history and religious connotations.  But I was blown away by what I saw and heard.

When we entered the area surrounding El Jardin, we saw crowds gathered in and around it to watch a multitude of dancers garbed in wild costumes, many with brightly colored feathers, masks, and most notably, shells artfully attached to their legs.  As they danced, the shells vibrated, making a wonderful and raucous noise.  The dancing, accompanied by music, went on all day Friday and continued on Saturday.

Combining indigenous traditions with Catholic ones, this fiesta struck me as extraordinary.  But it’s just one in a long list of festivals like it.  In fact, if you happen to be in San Miguel around Easter, you’ll witness an even more spectacular celebration—two full weeks of processions and pageantry.

Here’s one more thing about San Miguel:  Great food and drink are available everywhere.  (Just avoid local tap water.)  For recommendations, check a recent guidebook or ask locals like Merrily and Paul.  The food is delicious and prices are remarkably low.

And just in case you long for familiar surroundings, there’s a busy Starbucks in the center of town and, believe it or not, a place called the Bagel Café!

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Posted in art galleries, art, artists,, Mexico, San Miguel de Allende, Uncategorized

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Punting on the Cam

Posted on June 23, 2016 | 7 comments

The keys to my front door reside on a key ring I bought in Cambridge, England, on a magical day in September 1986.  It’s one of the souvenir key rings you used to find in Britain (and maybe still can, though I didn’t see any during a visit in 2012).  They were fashioned in leather and emblazoned in gold leaf with the name and design of a notable site.

During trips to London and elsewhere in Britain during the 1980s and ‘90s, I acquired a host of these key rings. One of my favorites was a bright red one purchased at Cardiff Castle in Wales in 1995.  I would carry one of them in my purse until the gold design wore off and the leather became so worn that it began to fall apart.

Until recently, I thought I had used every one of these leather key rings.  But recently, in a bag filled with souvenir key rings, I came across the one I bought in Cambridge in 1986.  There it was, in all of its splendor:  Black leather emblazoned with the gold-leaf crest of King’s College, Cambridge.

I began using it right away, and the gold design is already fading.  But my memories of that day in Cambridge will never fade.

My husband Herb had gone off to Germany to attend a math conference while I remained at home with our two young daughters.  But we excitedly planned to rendezvous in London, one of our favorite cities, when his conference was over.

Happily for us, Grandma agreed to stay with our daughters while I traveled to meet Herb, and on a rainy September morning I arrived in London and checked into our Bloomsbury hotel.  Soon I set off in the rain to find theater tickets for that evening, and in Leicester Square I bought half-price tickets for a comedy I knew nothing about, “Lend Me a Tenor.”  Stopping afterwards for tea at Fortnum and Mason’s eased the pain of trekking through the rain.

When Herb and I finally met up, we dined at an Italian restaurant and headed for the theater. “Lend Me a Tenor” was hilarious and set the tone for a wonderful week together.

We covered a lot of ground in London that week, including a visit to Carlyle’s house in Chelsea, a sunny boat trip to Greenwich, viewing notable Brits on the walls of the National Portrait Gallery, tramping around Bloomsbury and Hampstead, and lunching with a British lawyer (a law-school friend) at The Temple, an Inn of Court made famous by our favorite TV barrister, Rumpole (of the Bailey), whose chambers were allegedly in The Temple.

Other highlights were our evenings at the theater. Thanks to advice from my sister, who’d just been in London, we ordered tickets before leaving home for the new smash musical, “Les Miserables” (which hadn’t yet hit Broadway). It was worth every penny of the $75 we paid per ticket (a pricey sum in 1986) to see Colm Wilkinson portray Jean Valjean on the stage of the Palace Theatre.  We also loved seeing a fresh interpretation of “The Merry Wives of Windsor” at the Barbican and Alan Ayckbourn’s poignant comedy “A Chorus of Disapproval” at the Lyric.  Although “Mutiny!”–a musical based on “Mutiny on the Bounty”–was disappointing, we relished a concert at South Bank’s Royal Festival Hall, where I kept expecting the Queen to enter and unceremoniously plop herself down in one of the hall’s many boxes.

But it was our day trip to Cambridge that was the centerpiece of our week.  On Friday, September 19th, we set out by train from King’s Cross Station and arrived at Cambridge in just over an hour.  We immediately reveled in the array of beautiful sites leaping out at us on the university campus nestled along the Cam River.  Our first stop was Queens’ College and its remarkable Mathematical Bridge.  The college spans both sides of the river (students jokingly refer to the newer half as the “light side” and the older half as the “dark side”), and the world-famous bridge connects the two.  The legend goes that the bridge was designed and built by Cambridge scholar Sir Isaac Newton without the use of nuts or bolts. But in fact it was built with nuts and bolts in 1749, 22 years after Newton died, and rebuilt in 1905.

Our next must-see site was King’s College.  During my college years at Washington University in St. Louis, I learned that Graham Chapel, our strikingly beautiful chapel–built in 1909 and the site of many exhilarating lectures and concerts (in which I often sang)–shared its design with that of King’s College, Cambridge.  So we headed right for it.  (Graham Chapel’s architect never maintained that it was an exact copy but was only partly modeled after King’s College Chapel, which is far larger.)

Entering the huge and impressive Cambridge version, we were suitably awed by its magnificence.  Begun by King Henry VI in 1446, it features the largest “fan vault” in the world and astonishingly beautiful medieval stained glass.  (A fan vault? It’s a Gothic vault in which the ribs are all curved the same and spaced evenly, resembling a fan.)

As we left the chapel, still reeling from all the stunning places we’d just seen, we noticed signs pointing us in the direction of punts available for a ride on the Cam.  The idea of “punting on the Cam”—riding down the river on one of the flat-bottomed boats that have been around since 1902–sounded wonderful.  We didn’t hesitate to pay the fare and immediately seated ourselves in one of the boats.

The river was serene, with only a few other boats floating nearby, and our punter, a charming young man in a straw boater hat, provided intelligent narration as we floated past the campus buildings stretched out along the river.  He propelled the boat by pushing against the river bed with a long pole.  His charm and good looks enhanced our ride enormously.

The boat wasn’t crowded.  An older British couple sat directly across from us, and we chatted amiably about Britain and the United States, finding commonality where we could.

The sun was shining, and the 70-degree temperature was perfect.  Beautiful old trees dotted the riverbanks, providing shade as we floated by, admiring the exquisite college buildings.

What’s punting like?  Ideally, it’s a calm, soothing boat ride on a river like the Cam.  Something like riding in a gondola in Venice, except that gondolas are propelled by oars instead of poles. (I rush to add that the gondola I rode in Venice had a much less attractive and charming oarsman.)

An article in the Wall Street Journal in November described recent problems caused by punting’s growing popularity.  Increased congestion in the Cam has led to safety rules and regulations never needed in the past.  According to the Journal, “punt wars” have divided the city of Cambridge, with traditional boats required to follow the new rules while upstart self-hire boats, which have created most of the problems, are not.

But luckily for Herb and me, problems like those didn’t exist in 1986.  Not at all.  Back then, floating along the river with my adored husband by my side was an idyllic experience that has a special place in my memory.

I don’t recall where I bought my leather key ring.  Perhaps in a small shop somewhere in Cambridge.  But no matter where I bought it, it remains a happy reminder of a truly extraordinary day.

 

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Posted in Bloomsbury, Britain, Broadway musicals, Cambridge, England, Cardiff, comedy, criminal defense lawyers, dining, law, lawyers, London, London theatres, mathematicians, punting, shopping, The Cam River, travel, University of Cambridge, Washington University in St. Louis

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Hamilton, Hamilton…Who Was He Anyway?

Posted on May 4, 2016 | 4 comments

Broadway megahit “Hamilton” has brought the Founding Parent (okay, Founding Father) into a spotlight unknown since his own era.

Let’s face it.  The Ron Chernow biography, turned into a smash Broadway musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda, has made Alexander Hamilton into the icon he hasn’t been–or maybe never was–in a century or two. Just this week, the hip-hop musical “Hamilton” received a record-breaking 16 Tony Award nominations.

His new-found celebrity has even influenced his modern-day successor, current Treasury Secretary Jack Lew, leading Lew to reverse his earlier plan to remove Hamilton from the $10 bill and replace him with the image of an American woman.

Instead, Hamilton will remain on the front of that bill, with a group representing suffragette leaders in 1913 appearing on the back, while Harriet Tubman will replace no-longer-revered and now-reviled President Andrew Jackson on the front of the $20 bill.  We’ll see other changes to our paper currency during the next five years.

But an intriguing question remains:  How many Americans—putting aside those caught up in the frenzy on Broadway, where theatergoers are forking over $300 and $400 to see “Hamilton” on stage—know who Hamilton really was?

A recent study done by memory researchers at Washington University in St. Louis has confirmed that most Americans are confident that Hamilton was once president of the United States.

According to Henry L. Roediger III, a human memory expert at Wash U, “Our findings from a recent survey suggest that about 71 percent of Americans are fairly certain that [Hamilton] is among our nation’s past presidents.  I had predicted that Benjamin Franklin would be the person most falsely recognized as a president, but Hamilton beat him by a mile.”

Roediger (whose official academic title is the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Arts & Sciences) has been testing undergrad college students since 1973, when he first administered a test while he was himself a psychology grad student at Yale. His 2014 study, published in the journal Science, suggested that we as a nation do fairly well at naming the first few and the last few presidents.  But less than 20 percent can remember more than the last 8 or 9 presidents in order.

Roediger’s more recent study is a bit different because its goal was to gauge how well Americans simply recognize the names of past presidents.  Name-recognition should be much less difficult than recalling names from memory and listing them on a blank sheet of paper, which was the challenge in 2014.

The 2016 study, published in February in the journal Psychological Science, asked participants to identify past presidents, using a list of names that included actual presidents as well as famous non-presidents like Hamilton and Franklin.  Other familiar names from U.S. history, and non-famous but common names, were also included.

Participants were asked to indicate their level of certainty on a scale from zero to 100, where 100 was absolutely certain.

What happened?  The rate for correctly recognizing the names of past presidents was 88 percent overall, although laggards Franklin Pierce and Chester Arthur rated less than 60 percent.

Hamilton was more frequently identified as president (with 71 percent thinking that he was) than several actual presidents, and people were very confident (83 on the 100-point scale) that he had been president.

More than a quarter of the participants incorrectly recognized others, notably Franklin, Hubert Humphrey, and John Calhoun, as past presidents.  Roediger thinks that probably happened because people are aware that these were important figures in American history without really knowing what their actual roles were.

Roediger and his co-author, K. Andrew DeSoto, suggest that our ability to recognize the names of famous people hinges on their names appearing in a context related to the source of their fame.  “Elvis Presley was famous, but he would never be recognized as a past president,” Roediger says.   It’s not enough to have a familiar name.  It must be “a familiar name in the right context.”

This study is part of an emerging line of research focusing on how people remember history.  The recent studies reveal that the ability to remember the names of presidents follows consistent and reliable patterns.  “No matter how we test it—in the same experiment, with different people, across generations, in the laboratory, with online studies, with different types of tests—there are clear patterns in how the presidents are remembered and how they are forgotten,” DeSoto says.

While decades-old theories about memory can explain the results to some extent, these findings are sparking new ideas about fame and just how human memory-function treats those who achieve it.

As Roediger notes, “knowledge of American presidents is imperfect….”  False fame can arise from “contextual familiarity.”  And “even the most famous person in America may be forgotten in as short a time as 50 years.”

So…how will Alexander Hamilton’s new-found celebrity hold up?  Judging from the astounding success of the hip-hop musical focusing on him and his cohorts, one can predict with some confidence that his memory will endure far longer than it otherwise might have.

This time, he may even be remembered as our first Secretary of the Treasury, not as the president he never was.

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