Some people have a hard time paying for college. Thanks for the heads up, New York Times! Love to love you.
The Chronicle Review tackles The Rural Brain Drain, and what to do about it:
The next step is to build better links between high-school and postsecondary education, and map existing opportunities onto regional economic goals. Most of the job growth within Iowa is expected to come from computer, biotech, wind energy, and health care. Matching high-school students not headed for university with vocational or community-college programs, nurturing their interests while in high school through internships and training, will prepare them for the new economic growth areas. Such partnerships require close collaborations among business and civic leaders, elected officials, and secondary and community-college administrators who are accustomed to working in their own bureaucracies. Moreover, the growing distance-learning technology should not cater only to older, returning students. If students are interested in wind technology or nursing, rather than making them take social studies senior year, how about connecting them with a distance-learning class at Iowa Lakes Community College in Introduction to Computers?
Why does it sound like we’ll be returning to the guild system? Because we are?
Thanks to Spencer Ackerman, nuance on usefulness and a 9/11 narrative all in one. He relates his attempts to volunteer during those queasy days in New York following the attacks. (I was there, have never written about that time, and don’t plan to. I listen to Faure’s Requiem instead.) The paragraph below stands out because of “reprimanded.” Fantastic word, reprimanded:
I calmed down, checked myself, located a woman who was directing the effort and asked what I could do. Not much, she replied, but if I waited, maybe they could find something for me. I found a nearby chair-desk, one of the uncomfortable plastic and metal backbreakers they give you in high school, and sat down, useless as a child, feeling somehow reprimanded.
The frustration of not being able to do things you know yourself to be capable of doing is intense. It does feel infantilizing. It’s experienced as a reproach even when, intellectually, we know better. Unfortunately I’ve no idea why this is.
There’s a copy of How to Be Useful on someone’s coffee table, right next to a copy of Breaking In: How 20 Film Directors Got Their Start. We know this thanks to Google and a blog post titled “Being Interesting is Not Enough, which I stumbled across this morning.”
The author’s comments:
Being interesting is still necessary, of course – if you’re trying to create a content-centric business and your content isn’t interesting, you’re in big trouble.
But is being interesting sufficient? In an attention economy, where interesting content is ubiquitous, and what’s truly rare is the users’ attention? In an era where every company is a media company?
In the era of the Assembled Web, where consumers expect to find content, community, and commerce pervasively and persistently throughout their online experience, is it enough to just be interesting?
Of course, this writer’s concerns are different than mine in the book. He’s consulting companies on how to earn customer loyalty; I was interested in people employed by companies, particularly those junior staffers most vulnerable to structural or institutional idiocies. But his broader point about usefulness isn’t far removed from what I attempted — and perhaps didn’t entirely succeed in saying. We’re encouraged to produce and instantaneously communicate vast amounts of information about ourselves, and we’re told this is fun, and holds revolutionary potential, because as “networked” individuals we can…well, it’s not entirely clear what will be accomplished by telling everyone we know from high school that we’ve enjoying amazing $5 gelato RIGHT NOW. (And bringing up tweeting in Iran doesn’t win this argument for the techno-utopians. Tiannenmen Square didn’t require Twitter. Neither did Haymarket, but that brings up more historical content than I can chew right now.)
Usefulness, however, juxtaposed to aimless information, or information that testifies only to one’s cuteness or cleverness, is about completing tasks. On one level, my sense is that most people enjoy getting things done. Accomplishment is inherently gratifying. Completing a task, being able to say, “that’s behind me, on to the next thing,” satisfies some deep primal hunter-gatherer instinct and I don’t know about you, but in me it enables a certain largeness of heart that’s impossible to access when overwhelmed by data and long, involved to-dos that defy my attempts to scratch them off the list. Usefulness is sweet, not sour.
More pragmatically and more cynically, the bare fact of the matter is that our relative usefulness is the standard by which the majority of us are judged. There’s nothing elegant about this truth. But there’s even less elegance in believing that the rules of engagement don’t apply to you. I’ve encountered a few of these dreamers at work and in love. (They’re always people of high principle, oddly enough.) Usually such individuals can coast and plead and wink and dodge until about age 40, and then their lives get really ugly really fast. And they’ve no idea what “just” happened.
“Bootblacks” courtesy the New York Public Library. Are they standing in Union Square? Madison Square Park? Help me here.
Japanese mega-bank Nomura has just signed a deal that gives them 6 rent-free years in the most expensive business district in London, reports the FT. Real estate analysts say the deal shows how desperate developers and landlords are to secure “high-quality, long-term tenants” (the lease is for 20 years). It also scores a quick two points for the “you have to have money to make money” camp.
My only talent is trapping smart friends and instilling a sense of obligation in them, and so, case in point, one of my more erudite correspondents forwards his thoughts on Ted Kennedy’s memorial service:
….what struck me about the memorial service in Boston and the funeral mass was its monarchic cast. Obviously, I agree that political discourse in this country is more and more degraded (whether more so than the 19th century is another matter). But watching George and Laura Bush sitting behind the Kennedy family and Sen. Hatch and Sen. McCain delivering their eulogies (Hatch movingly, McCain rather ungenerously, I thought), my reaction was the extent to which the American ruling class is intact, solid, inviolable. And that ruling class — whatever Limbaugh and Levin’s listeners may imagine — is absolutely bipartisan and despite the inclusion of women and non-whites increasingly oligarchic.
Well, well. Is he talking about oligarhy? No. To a friend who was dinged for making a Chappaquiddick joke, he goes on:
What you did — in, if you’ll forgive me, pointing out the obvious about Ted Kennedy — was to commit what used to be called an act of lese-majeste. And that in our capitalist empire, with its political duopoly dependent on the same sources of money, but which swathes itself in septic sheets of political correctness where the 19th century pieties of small-town America — ‘if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all’ — have fused with the multiculturalism of the upper-middle class information workers and the allergy to controversy of advertisers, is absolutely beyond the pale.
Not unrelated, here’s Salon’s Glenn Greenwald on American royalty. In other words, when I wrote that I wrote HTBU, in part, for the very people who might otherwise spend their entire lives as support staffers granted only two weeks vacation per year because Jenna Bush Hager (who seems a perfectly nice young woman; don’t get me wrong) and Chelsea Clinton and classmates sucked up all the good jobs, I wasn’t kidding.