Letting Go: What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?
Atul Gawande, a doctor and staff writer of the New Yorker, has already received numerous awards for this writing. Now he has penned in the New Yorker (August 2, 2010) a report on how American medicine handles the final stages of our lives. This is the most difficult story I have read in many years, perhaps ever. But I forced myself to read it all the way to the end. You owe it to youself to do the same. Gwande deserves the Pulitzer Prize for this article.
Read “Modern medicine is good at staving off death with aggressive interventions—and bad at knowing when to focus, instead, on improving the days that terminal patients have left” here.
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General Sherman: “War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”
From the the Writer’s Almanac: On this day in 1864 Union General Sherman wrote to the Atlanta City Council: “You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it.”
General Sherman had just captured Atlanta. Along the way, his soldiers had taken part in something known as “total war”: They’d burned down crops, confiscated millions of pounds of corn and feed, and destroyed thousands of horses and mules and cows. They’d wrecked bridges, torn up railroad tracks to make train transport unusable, and they’d destroyed telegraph lines. In late August, they’d forced the surrender of Atlanta, occupied the city, and demanded that it be evacuated.
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The Catcher in the Rye
Starded reading The Catcher in the Rye and I am lovin’ it. You sense clearly on the first couple of pages that Salinger has invented a new voice back in 1945. The voice of still feels fresh and strong.
Update: December 6, 2010. I finally finished reading this 192 page book yesterday. My fall was not a bountiful harvest for literature as you can see from these stats. This is 64 pages per month or two pages a day of reading. Well, it is at least not as pathetic as in high school when we discussed the book in class but I never read it. But I do have a good memory of the book cover. I will write a some observations about this American classic in the next couple of days.
Continue ReadingPoem of the Day: “This Night Only”
This Night Only
by Kenneth Rexroth
[Eric Satie: GYMNOPÉDIE #1]
Moonlight now on Malibu
The winter night the few stars
Far away millions of miles
The sea going on and on
Forever around the earth
Far and far as your lips are near
Filled with the same light as your eyes
Darling darling darling
The future is long gone by
And the past will never happen
We have only this
Our one forever
So small so infinite
So brief so vast
Immortal as our hands that touch
Deathless as the firelit wine we drink
Almighty as this single kiss
That has no beginning
That will never
Never
End
From the Writer’s Almanac
Continue ReadingHow to lead a good life courtesy of Wolfgang Goethe
“One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words.”
Continue ReadingTiger Wood’s ex Elin Speaks out: Life afer the Cheetah
Priests tell us that revenge is a base motive. But if your husband (or wife) cheated on you with a dozen of other people and you end up in tabloits for months looking like a fool, wanting to get even may be therapeutic. Elin waited to speak out until the divorce from her Tiger was finalized. Now she has given what she calls an exlcusive inteview with People Magazine. She describes the common emotions of any person whose trust was fundamentally violated. “I felt so stupid. How could I not know any thing. ... I have been through the stages of disbelief and shock, to anger and ultimately grief over the loss of the family I so badly wanted for my children.” Elin says this was her first and last interview. In true American fashion, despite obvious physical problems caused by the divorce stress (isomnia, weightloss, hairloss, etc.) she ends the interview with this statement: “I also feel stronger than I ever have. I have confidence in my beliefs, my decisions and myself.” Elin wants to finish her college degree in psychology. If she does, she will find that psychologically this is not over even though divorce papers are signed. Will Tiger ever regain his golfing ability? I hope he does not rush into another mariage in a quest to recature his golf mojo. What this episode shows once again: reason does not rule the world!
T-Shirt Message: “Meaningful Overnight Relationship Wanted”
I had lunch at a Thai Restaurant today. On the front side of her T-shirt, the attractive waitress had a daring message printed. I could not resist asking her: “What does ‘Meaningful Overnight Relationship Wanted’ mean?” She smiles and says innocently: “I don’t know.” This answer left everything open…
Should we mourn the disappearance of the Rocky Mountains locusts?
I am spoiled. I admit it. But in my defense, I shall say: In the industrialized world most of us are spoiled! We are living in far greater comfort than the kings of the middle ages who lacked modern medicine and ipods. If you don’t believe me, read on this story about the locust epidemics. The Writer’s Almanac reports:
It was on this day in 1875 that the largest recorded swarm of locusts in American history descended upon the Great Plains. An estimated 3.5 trillion locusts made up the swarm. It was about 1,800 miles long and 110 miles wide, ranging from Canada down to Texas.
Swarms would occur once every seven to 12 years, emerging from river valleys in the Rocky Mountains and sweeping east across much of the country. The size of the swarms tended to grow when there was less rain, and in 1873, the American West began to go through one of its driest periods on record.
I’m glad I am not David Cameron or Barak Obama
If you have been studying the business pages of major newspapers and business magazines, you will realize that a fierce battle is being waged by believers in demand or supply side economics. Everyone after the Great Depression used to be a demand sider; then Milton Friedman and his conspirators convinced many politians that government spending created short terms fixes but long-term growth problems. I would like to have someone spell out for me what evidence made the majority of economists swing the the demand side camp only in the 1970s and 1980s. David Brooks paints a thoughtful portrait, sympathiszing with demand siders, of the difficult positions Barak Obama and David Cameron are in. With regard to Cameron’s proposal to cut government spending by 40%, I think this is simply a negotiation ploy with the British bureaucracy. If not, God save the British people from the economic pain that Cameron will inflict on them in the short term.
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