Osler's Razor

It seems like, at least in my lifetime, August can be the most surprising month. Things happen out of the blue more in August than in other months, it seems.

Of course, this whole year has been a little too much that way, hasn't it?

So let's haiku about August-- what we expect, what might surprise us, and what we wonder. Here, I will go first:

No Osler Island
This year- the border is closed.
So, wander instead?

Now it is your turn! Just use the 5/7/5 syllable pattern and have some fun!

What we hope is true is conflicting pretty strongly right now with what we know is true.

We hope that we won't have to suffer the effects of coronavirus anymore. We hope that we can send kids back to school and watch football and just have things be friggin' normal again.

We know, if we care to, that COVID is still raging in this country, with deaths edging over 1,000 a day and new cases plateauing at a high level-- around 60,0000 a day. 

We are going to have to choose between what we know is true and what we hope is true. We aren't always so good at that-- and that dilemma has subverted our efforts so far.

I want there to be school next month. As a teacher, I do not want to go back to teaching a bunch of postage-stamp pictures on a screen! But... reality is going to intervene, whether we want it or not. 

I've been devoting Wednesdays to profiles of my classmates in the Yale Law class of 1990. I was hoping this would be a great lead-up to our reunion this fall, but (like so many other things) that has been cancelled. Nevertheless, it has been a fascinating endeavor!

Robert Schapiro seemed like a law professor when we were all law students. He was super-smart and able to engage in an intellectual badinage with the instructors that put to shame the mumbling and pointing that I did. He just seemed to get a concept and move immediately into critique, which is a remarkable ability.

He came to Yale Law from a Phi Beta Kappa academic career at Yale College and a Masters degree in history from Stanford. The history background, of course, gave him insights into much of what we were learning.

He was the editor-in-chief of the Law Journal, and then moved on to clerkships in the Southern District of New York and the Supreme Court, with Justice Stevens.

He did a year at a big firm and then became the professor he always had kind of been. He has been at Emory Law School since 1995, and served as Dean from 2012 to 2017.

His academic specialty is federalism, a topic that is always relevant as the American experience constantly shifts power between the states and the federal government.  He's written a book and a slew of articles on the subject, showing an admirable focus. (In contrast, when people ask what I write about, I sound like a complete dabbler: sentencing, death penalty, narcotics policy, clemency, theater, etc. etc. etc.).

Here is discussing his area of expertise:

The President is pushing for schools to re-open next month in the middle of the coronavirus epidemic. This is probably a bad idea. Have you been to a high school lately? I have-- it's pretty much impossible to enforce any semblance of safe conduct in a pandemic. Kids are everywhere, jammed in the halls, running around, etc.

So, we got a pretty good preview of this in Major League Baseball. MLB decided to have an abbreviated season with limited travel.  They got four days into it before the pandemic came for them-- the Miami Marlins reported that (already!) 12 of their 30 players and two staff members had tested positive for coronavirus.

MLB has tremendous resources and a small group of people, and they could not pull it off. Why do people imagine that their local public high school will do better?

I'm not sure how much it had to do with "Summer Games"-- the theme of last week's haiku Friday-- but DDR zeroed right in on the statement above in writing this:

Person, Man, Woman,
Camera, TV-- That's Trump's
Recipe for fun!

{or porn}

Meanwhile, Jill Scoggins was right on target:

Building sandcastles
drip by drip with 3 year old
grandchild. Perfect bliss.

And my dad's read true:

Horseshoes in the sun
is fun but a cold beer in
the shade is better.

But the Medievalist painted the picture that really appealed to me:

Cold beer, a hot grill,
Monarchs play in the flowers,
Good conversation.

Several months ago, back in March, I mused that the COVID epidemic might create a fascinating artistic moment-- a wave of creativity driven by dislocation and the uniqueness of this time.

I'm not sure that I was right. Yesterday I posted about the new Taylor Swift album, which is definitely a creature of quarantine, and is really good. But is there more, from less bland corners of our culture?

It could be that we don't know yet; that the nature of the pandemic is that the fruits of creativity won't be revealed until that veil is lifted.

Or, it could be that I was wrong. Something I failed to consider was the connection between creators and the audience; some art forms are not meant for isolation. The thought made me miss my friend Greg Tishar (who I remembered here). Greg taught me how to be part of that audience-- how to engage with passion and emotion, and that it was ok to loathe and to love what you were seeing or hearing. I miss that. Not having that makes me lonely in a way, a very specific way, that makes life less colorful.

A year ago, I went to Detroit to see a show that my dad had up at a gallery. It was magical to walk among crowds pointing and talking about the work, about what people liked and did not like. It was like watching the paintings come alive, the people in them walking with us, laughing.

Do we need that? I don't know. But I need that.

It's up-to-the-minute Taylor Swift news!

Well, not really. But she did release an album yesterday-- supposedly of things she wrote and recorded during the pandemic-- and it is supposed to be pretty good. Here is the first video:

It's summer. All kinds of outdoor games-- bocce, horseshoes, jarts-- take over the lawns, and even some of the indoor games come outside (see illustration).

Let's haiku about some of those this week. Here, I will go first (regarding said illustration, taken a week ago in Northern Michigan):

Social distancing
Can sometimes include moments
Of elegant joy.

Now it is your turn! Just use the 5/7/5 syllable formula, and have some fun!

On Tuesday, over 1100 people died of COVID in one day for the first time in a month and a half. It was inevitable that deaths would go up after total infections did, but it is a dispiriting reality.

Now the choices become harder.

If kids go back to high school and college kids return to their universities, there will be  another spike in infections-- at this point, that is simple math, given the inability for social distancing in those settings and the likelihood that mask use will be limited by the patience of teenagers.

But if school doesn't start, there will be a real personal and economic cost for many families and the nation. Workers will be unable to go back to work because their kids are at home, and even those who try to work from home while the kids are there will lose efficiency (as we have seen for months).

Plus, as the weather gets colder, the chance of doing things outside-- which turns out to be much less conducive to the spread of COVID-- will become more limited.

In Texas, there is much hand-wringing because the football season has been pushed back for some high schools.  Of course, it is a terrible idea to have a football season at all. "It should be ok, if kids are willing to take the risk," some coaches say. Right-- because kids are so great at cost-benefit analysis and delayed gratification for abstract outcomes, huh? And, of course, the kids might be ok. It's their grandparents who will die.

Many of us hoped this would be over by now. We are having to face the cruel reality that it just is not done. I hope we do, in fact, face that reality.

I am devoting Wednesdays to profiling my classmates in the Yale Law Class of 1990, which has turned into a pretty fascinating task!

Richard M. Lucas came to Yale Law fresh from getting a business degree at Georgetown University. I think he was pretty rare in that-- you would have expected more people to come from business school but we were mostly a bunch of History, Philosophy, and English majors.

After school, he didn't mess around; he went straight to one of the nation's leading law firms, Arnold & Porter, where he made partner. He was there for 18 years, until 2008.

Then he made a big change-- something I see in a lot of my classmates. He moved over to the business side, first for Hilton Hotels and now with Walker & Dunlap, a big commercial real estate service and finance company, where he serves as the Executive Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary (which frankly seems like a lot of jobs to do at the same time).

I've gotta think that commercial real estate would be a challenging business right now, with office space lying empty all over the place because of the pandemic. I'm hoping that the same lessons that sent us all in different directions are serving him well now.

Richard's daughter Kate has diabetes, and he has worked for years with the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation as a board member, advocate, and fund-raiser. Like many of my other classmates, he picked a cause and stuck to it-- the best way to make a difference.

We heard in verse from Nate about what he is up to:

Bar prepping all day
Practicing with a mask on
Is this lawyering?

And also from Desiree:

Driving to Richmond,
visit son number one and
eat Carey cupcakes.

I had to look up what Carey cupcakes are. I think it is this....

This is masterful. But... starting with making the bread?!? And I guess my own first step will be getting a beautiful stand mixer like that with the question-mark shaped attachment....

I have been profiling my classmates in the Yale Law class of 1990 on (most) Wednesdays-- it's been a blast to track them all down!

Whit Cobb came to Yale Law from Duke, and I got to know him pretty well since he was my roommate first year, the only year I lived in the dorm.  It actually was a beautiful dorm room, with a fireplace, fascinating leaded glass windows, and two separate bedrooms.

From the start, it seemed like Whit was way ahead of me. He immediately connected with some of the schools of thought whirling around the school and was a great conversationalist. We lived next door to Rich Sullivan and Vernon Grigg-- it was not a dull corner of the school.

What stood out to me about Whit from our law school years was his law journal note, which you can read here.  When I read it back then, I was thunderstruck-- it was clear and strong and true. In fact, I think it affected my own work going forward in very real ways (something that will be obvious if you read it). It was such an accomplishment for someone of our limited experience.

After law school, Whit clerked for Judge Thomas Clark of the 11th Circuit, and then served in the Army for four years. From there, he became a partner at Jenner & Block before being named as Deputy General Counsel of the Defense Department, where he served from 2001-2004. Since then, he has worked first as Vice President and Deputy Counsel for BAE Systems and now as General Counsel at PAE.

It's funny to think about the different directions the four of us on that little hallway have taken: Whit is in business, Rich is a federal judge, Vernon is running Up with People, and I'm doing whatever it is this stuff is called. I'd like to think that YLS prepared us all well for very different pursuits.

... and right now, Sarah Cooper is doing it for me:



I'm not exactly sure why that is so funny. It might be that anyone's distinctive voice, dissociated from their body and attached to someone else's, would be pretty funny. Or it could be that it makes you focus on what Trump is saying-- and that what he is saying isn't just incorrect, but deeply weird.

What is making you laugh?

Loved this from my dad:

The air is still and
so am I the flowers and 
virus are vibrant.

And Gavin's:

Hammock ‘tween two trees
The breeze rocks me back and forth
Lazy cloud floats by.

IPLawGuy nailed it:

Light until its late
Lots of time to play, but no,
Work keeps me busy.

The Medievalist is where I want to be:

A breeze in the trees,
Sunshine on my shoulders, warm,
A glass of cold beer.

Tim Fournier paints a picture:

The air stands sentry 
Laundry hangs limp on the line
The fish are biting.

Some good imagery there.... and an all-male set of poets this week!

I am watching this video over and over so I don't think about Roger Stone having his sentence commuted as 13,000+ petitions wait in limbo...

Hi! I'm Mark, and I'm a 57-year-old white guy from Grosse Pointe who now lives in Edina, a relatively affluent and mostly white suburb of Minneapolis. I used to be a federal prosecutor, and also in the Rotary Club. I lived in Texas for a while in a neighborhood called "Castle Heights." Even my name, Mark, was used as a proxy for whiteness on Saturday Night Live.

Based on all of these things, people tell me things they probably wouldn't say to someone who wasn't quite so white. Often those things are racist and terrible. I spend a lot of time pushing back, with mixed success.

One thing that I see now is a lot of White Guys My Age ("WGMA") having damaging discussions with people in their families and communities. I'd like to address a few of those tropes here.

#1: The only people being discriminated against now are people like us!

Really, WGMA? You look around you and see bias against... us? In what possible way is that true? What is the last video you saw of a WGMA being mistreated by the police? We are wildly over-represented in nearly every position that confers wealth and power. White men 50-79 years old represent about 15% of the US population. The next presidential election is guaranteed to involve at least 75% people from our group (Trump, Pence, and Biden). The U.S. Senate is composed of +60% white guys our age. We control corporations, non-profits, state governments, and just about everything else, despite being one-seventh of the population. If someone is trying to discriminate against us, it hasn't been very effective. The truth, if you care to see it, is that bias against others has favored us at nearly every step of our lives.

#2: Hey, Black Lives Matter-- What about black-on-black violence?

For some reason (actually, I think we all know the reason), this is a point that White Guys My Age seem a little obsessed with. Here's the problem: what you are doing here is changing the subject. Someone you know-- a child, a grand-child, a co-worker-- is making a point about racism in America, often in the context of police violence. And then you change the subject by turning to black-on-black violence.  You are blowing right past the point they are making to launch into something else-- signalling that you don't care about the topic they brought up (or, really, about them). If your concern for the black victims of gun violence is really so important to you, then maybe what you need to do is pick some other time to talk about it, and then seek out someone knowledgeable to talk to about it- hopefully someone from the community you are apparently so concerned about. The conversation might involve delving into issues of poverty, racism, and gun policies, so be ready for that.


#3:  These rioting Millennials don't know how the real world works!

There's at least three things wrong with this one. Least important, if you are talking about college-age people, they are the generation behind the Millennials-- Generation Z. Second, and more importantly, these people usually seem to be viewing everyone who was out in the streets as "rioters" or at least complicit in rioting (one example here). However, of the entire group in the streets, very few of them were rioting, but many of them were protesting, and the difference is crucial. The former can be a destructive crime. The latter is a right protected by the Constitution, and one which has brought important things to our nation from the beginning. Third, it is much more likely that you don't understand the very real world that young people are living in rather than they don't understand yours. Think about it: They face terrible unemployment, disrupted lives, a deadly pandemic, and a historically unstable federal government. That's pretty real. And they understand us better than you might think; after all, they grew up watching us. If they aren't impressed, maybe that is on us.

I have been devoting (most) Wednesdays to profiling the pretty remarkable members of my law school class. Sadly, Yale Law '90 just had our reunion canceled (understandably), so I will not get to catch up with all of the people I have written about!

For Akosua Barthwell Evans, Yale Law was just part of her post-college education: she has an undergraduate degree from Barnard, and a M. Phil. and a Ph.D. from Columbia. Like me, she was born in Detroit, the daughter of Sidney Barthwell, an entrepreneur who started a chain of drugstores and an ice cream company (Akosua tells his remarkable story here).  Her family, including her brother Sidney, was well-known in Detroit for their business and community leadership.

After law school, Akosua became a Managing Partner at JP Morgan, where she launched two national businesses and advised a wide variety of clients. She then returned to Detroit to become a consultant at Coopers & Lybrand, where she became the first female manager of the consulting group.

In time, she formed her own consulting company, the Barthwell Group, a boutique multi-dimensional firm with a remarkable client list. She is involved in many community groups, including the board of the Detroit Historical Society, which basically steered me towards my lifelong interest in history when I was a kid.

Detroit is lucky to have her back. I'm amazed at all she has done, and the legacy of her family that she has continued and enlarged in that place I hold dear.

... could be this gorgeous entry from last Friday by Megan Willome:

with the man who puts
a comma after Dearest,
watching "Hamilton"

And it is always good to hear from the Medievalist:

Me gustaría 
Estar en España y
Tomar cerveza.

[My translation:

I would like
Being in Spain but
This beer gave me a tumor]

I liked this from Christine (and it is familiar):

Pool side, the Shores Park
Grilled hot dogs delivered
to the life guard staff

Suntan oil, Sun In,
A breeze off cool lake waters
The stench of fish flies

Excellent work by Ann S. (remember, the topic is where we wish we could be):

In a country changed
2020 history
Proud to be mask free

This anonymous one sounds like my Mom:

Pinery camping
Little flags on the table
Wet sandy ex-pats.

And finally, this from my Dad (who also has a great blog post up-- check it out here):

on a windsurfer
my family safe on shore
is laughing at me

I remember watching this movie on television when it came out. It's a terrible movie. But there was something deeply chilling about the sequence that starts at 48:00.

It embodied, I suppose, our worst fears then.

It's been a weird year, huh?

And like everything else so far this year, the 4th of July will be, um, different. No fireworks (official ones, anyways). With the increase in COVID cases, probably no travel for most of us. And, no cupcakes, because of the cupcake shortage. It's pretty grim.

This week, let's haiku about where we would be for the 4th if we could be anywhere. Here-- I will go first:

Foot of Colonial
At the end of my old block
We would ooh and aah.

Now it is your turn! Just use the 5/7/5 syllable pattern, and have some fun!

Check out last week's Murphy Institute program, in which Lorri Stennis Brown gave an eyewitness account of what it is like in prison in the time of COVID: