Chief Justice Roberts, I know you're out there.

Quite obviously, he relies on this blog for reading recommendations:

Referencing the work of acclaimed Montana writer Norman Maclean on Thursday, Chief Justice of the United States John Roberts Jr. sought to inspire and encourage a future generation of lawyers, comparing the fundamentals of their chosen profession to firefighting.

“It might seem that smokejumpers and litigators have nothing in common,” Roberts told an overflow audience at the University Theatre. “But both are willing to jump into an environment that others try to avoid” and that contains a problematic situation.

Drawing on passages from “Young Men and Fire,” Maclean's nonfiction account of Montana's tragic 1949 Mann Gulch forest fire, Roberts settled into a classic Western theme as he delivered the ninth installment of the Judge William B. Jones and Judge Edward A. Tamm Judicial Lecture Series.

OK, but as for his claim that litigators have something meaningful in common with smokejumpers, other than being both mammals? Clearly erroneous!

Yinz gowen dahntahn?

The City Paper has just published this neat city guide, which includes a section on Squirrel Hill: Pittsburgh's Promised Land. Hee hee.

Lord Pratt, R.I.P.

Lord Michael Pratt has died. "[O]ne of the last Wodehouseian figures to inhabit London's clubland and . . . an unabashed snob and social interloper on a grand scale," Lord Pratt was "sent to Eton, having already acquired the rotund shape that would stay with him for the rest of his life." His office career was short:

After graduating Pratt found a position at Lazard Brothers, the merchant bank. Three months into his new job, however, he judged that it would be more agreeable to attend Royal Ascot than to turn up at the office, and his services were dispensed with. He never again sought full-time employment.

The responses, from the letters page of the Telegraph:

Sir - Your obituary (September 8) of Lord Michael Pratt was mean-spirited and, in a number of respects, false. Lord Michael never "pined" for anything so ephemeral as "the days of Empire", and the description of him as an "unabashed snob and social interloper" is a travesty of the truth. Lord Michael certainly treasured his annual tours of Britain, Europe and America, when he visited his vast array of friends, all of whom greeted him with open arms. The allegation that he overstayed his welcome by weeks or months is quite untrue.

The caricature of Michael as a gin-soaked club bore is so far from being true that it would be laughable were the lie anything less than wicked. His quick wit, his charm, his depth of knowledge, his powers of conversation and, above all, his great capacity for friendship were the qualities which all those who knew and loved him will cherish. He was a loyal friend and a genial and generous host at Bayham, in London and in Italy.

— John Bromley-Davenport, London EC4


Sir - Your obituary of Lord Michael Pratt raised my spirits. He seems to have contributed very little of use to the world in his life, and it is only fitting that his obituary should, at least, raise a chuckle.

— Richard Greenfield, Mildenhall, Suffolk

(via Mefi.)

50 book challenge: #39, #40, #41, #42, #43.

#39: Lois McMaster Bujold, Cetaganda. Miles travels to Cetaganda, a thoroughly genetically engineered empire consisting of an upper aristocracy, the haut, and a lower warrior aristocracy, the ghem, and manages to foil a treasonous plot to overthrow the empire.

#40: Evelyn Waugh, Scoop. Based on Waugh's experiences covering the 1930s war in Ethiopia. Strangely, the book was more humorous when it was less directed. The more plot-intensive middle was diverting, but not as funny (and not trying to be, I think) as is usual.

#41: Alphonse Daudet, In the Land of Pain. Moral of the story: do not get syphilis when you are 17, if you live in an age before antibiotics. Otherwise, you will suffer treatments like being hung by your jaw from the ceiling (!) and you will end up addicted to morphine, which frankly is probably the best you can hope for. Daudet had two sons: Leon, a writer and anti-dreyfusard anti-semite, and Lucien, an intimate friend of Marcel Proust.

#42: Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion. Much of this book would not seem too out of place on Usenet, and I say that even as a member of his party. Shorter Dawkins: lolxtians pwnd!

#43: Norman, The Design of Everyday Things. A little on the consultant-speak side.

2007 Ride to Cure Diabetes: at the finish line.

I'm back from Montana, and the ride went great. I raised over $5,000, which is absolutely fantastic. Thank you and thank you and thank you again to everyone who donated. I couldn't have done it without you. You will be receiving personal notes of thanks from me in the near future, and I'll be posting a few pictures from the trip here, too, along with a ride report.

Photoblogging of Benjy and other subjects will be delayed for a brief time, since our camera got lost on Jeanne's trip to Los Angeles. Of course, as usual, it's not the value of the object that matters but the pictures of Benjy with great-grandparents and our friends that can't be replaced. A little sad.

Still, we have some photos in the hopper, so stay tuned!

50 book challenge: #34, #35, #36, #37, #38.

#34: Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. Though revised a few years ago, the second edition seemed pretty dated, relying mostly on the same graphs that were in the original. Still, this book is a classic for a reason, and helped me think better about the topic, but like many classics it is also slightly nutty - for example, Tufte's focus on counting up graphic elements (each line, word, dot, etc.) and minimizing that number as a sure indicator of quality is a little hobby-horsish. I'm willing to believe that that may be a decent proxy for certain aesthetic values, but several graphs he deemed superior after eliminating all "unnecessary" elements I found harder to understand and interpret. In this he has something in common with modernist architecture.

#35: Annie Dillard, An American Childhood. Memoir of a child growing up in Point Breeze, an upper-middle class neighborhood just next to Squirrel Hill. Dillard has a good understanding of childhood as a series of awakenings, or maybe that's just how it's recalled by adults. Ask a child, I guess. Being a resident here myself, of course the intensely local flavor of the book was great. You can see all the places mentioned in five minutes on a bike - and, of course, this being Pittsburgh, they are all still there, 50 years later.

#36: Bujold, The Vor Game. I devoured this and was hungry for more.

#37: Audrey Niffenegger, The Time-Traveler's Wife. Sadly, I had taken this book with me to Montana in the expectation that it would keep me occupied for the weekend. No such luck. I enjoyed reading it so much that I had almost finished it by the end of the plane ride into Missoula and polished off the little remaining by that night. I was a little sorry to have read it so quickly, thus reducing the amount of time during which I was deriving pleasure from actively reading the thing, but the story has stayed with me so that pays dividends. In a way, I was glad to read it so quickly because it more impact had more proactive impactfulness that way and also made it less confusing, what with all the switching back and forth between time periods. Highly recommended.

#38: Norman Maclean, Young Men and Fire. I bought this on my way out of Missoula and only wished that I read it a little earlier, before getting to Montana. Yes, by the author of A River Runs Through It, and a former forestry student and even firefighter, before becoming a professor of English at the University of Chicago. Maclean didn't publish his most famous works until late in life; this book, in fact, was unfinished at his death, but it holds together surprisingly well for being something of a patch job. And anyway, the story has a kind of meditative discursive quality that probably lends itself to a bit of assemblage. His investigation, both scientific and moral, into the Mann Gulch fire of 1949, which killed 13 smokejumpers who were overtaken and killed by a wildfire in a matter of minutes after landing in the area. It was also an essay on how history gets written and why it matters, and the fact of the smokejumpers' death, and Maclean's reconstruction of the moments shortly before and at the moment of their death had a lot to do with his own advanced age, and with the past death of his wife from esophageal cancer. The section on the scientific studies of fire spread had a little of the "throw everything left in the writer's file into the book" about them, but overall that quality added to the book's charm. An unusual work of nonfiction.

50 book challenge: #32, #33

#32: Tolkien, The Return of the King. Good guys win. Yay. Strangely, the scouring of the shire totally works in the book yet would have been terrible in the movie. When movies are done, you just want them to be done. There's no patience for noodling around after the climax.

#33: Bujold, Warrior's Apprentice. Bone-damaged Miles fails entrance exam for Barrayan service academy; smuggles to kill some time and accidentally finds himself head of the non-existent Dendarii mercenaries. Wins a war at 17 years old, upon returning home avoids execution for violating Vorloupulous's Law. Bothari dead?

OPEC: Organization of Petroleum Pizza Exporting Countries

From a Times article called "A Neighborhood Balks at a Chain Restaurant," about the resistance from local pizza shops in a Brooklyn neighborhood to a new Papa John's franchise (to be owned by 23-year-old Sandeep Singh). The most interesting sentence was in the last paragraph.

Some of Johnny’s competitors who signed the anti-Papa John’s petition are not taking the news any better. For years they worked in friendly rivalry, helping each other through tight spots.

“If we get short on cheese or tomatoes, we go to him or he comes to us,” said Gino Campese, the owner of Scotti’s Pizza. “When it’s time to raise prices, we get together. There’s room for everybody. But not for Papa John’s.”

I don't know. Maybe everyone would be better off if Papa John's stays out, because the entrance will trigger a race to the bottom of lousy pizza, albeit at cheaper prices. Maybe pizza-eaters don't know what's good for them, or at least aren't willing enough (from quality-pizza-makers' perspective) to pay for it.

But there's at least another story you could tell her about what's happening: it's a classic price-fixing cartel, which depends for its survival on enforcing barriers to entry. I was surprised to see the story take that turn at the end. But maybe I'm naive. Anyway, good luck with that, fellas!

Ride to Cure Diabetes: 2007 (UPDATED: GETTING CLOSER...).

The time: August 25, 2007.
The place: Glacier National Park, Montana.
The cause: The Ride to Cure Diabetes
The goal: Raising $4,000 for a cure.
Raised so far: $500 $566 $666 $1,186 $1,286 $1,586 $1,771 $1,891 $3,281 $3,661!

Please donate here. And please forward this post, too, if you know anyone willing to help with my ride.

Let's recap: In January 2003, I was diagnosed with type-1 diabetes. And the second semester of my third year of law school turned out not to be quite the party I had been expecting. In fall 2004, I decided to do something about it, and I rode 105 miles through Death Valley to raise money for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation, one of the most effective charities on the planet. In spring 2006, I did the ride again, also in Death Valley, and again I raised thousands of valuable dollars for diabetes research.

So I've got the Ride to Cure Diabetes on my schedule again for this year, except a couple of things have changed. First, I'm through with Death Valley, at least for a little while. It's a place of stunning beauty, to be sure, but I'm eager for some variety. And my last experience, which involved the taking of IV fluids, didn't exactly endear the place to me. (See here for more details.)

But second, something else that's much more important has changed. You can probably guess what that is. If you read this blog at all and you have functioning eyeballs, you will have noticed that, in the main, it is devoted to my son, Benjamin. Jeanne and I are lucky that his life so far has been close to perfect. His birth was (relatively) smooth, and he has been healthy since.

Unfortunately, because I am his father, he inherited a genetic predisposition to developing type-1 diabetes himself. As part of a study we enrolled him in, he had genetic testing that showed his risk of developing the disease to be almost 10 percent. That's pretty high. And there's no way to delay onset, or guarantee that he would get the disease at the same age I did - the early 20s, which is very unusual for type-1 (formerly known as juvenile diabetes for a reason).

Treating an infant or child with diabetes requires solving very different - and much more difficult - problems than those faced by an adult. I'm a pretty responsible person, I don't mind needles too much, and I have patience. In fact, I don't really have any scary stories about sudden and severe lows in the past 3 years. (Partly this is because I'm fanatical about my control, but partly I've been lucky.)

If you talk to parents of diabetic children, however, you get a very different picture. You'll hear about multiple trips to the emergency room, and about the constant struggle to keep their child's glucose numbers within ranges that are much wider, out of necessity, than what I aim for and usually hit. Maybe it's a fraction easier if one parent has the disease, too - and there are many families in that situation - but no one wants to bond with a child over shared hobbies like counting grams of carbohydrates, or pricking fingers a dozen times a day. Bicycling, to pick just one example, is a much enjoyable father-son activity than insulin pumping in this respect.

At least for Benjy, and for other babies and children who haven't developed the disease yet, there is a real chance that research into a cure will bear fruit in time to make a difference. Though of course I hope that what the JDRF is doing will pay off for me, the most promising therapies depend for success on a recent diagnosis, when enough islet cells (which make insulin) survive in the pancreas to be rescued and restored. Diabetes doesn't set in all at once; the body slowly destroys the islet cells over a period of time, sometimes lasting months or years.

Please help me make sure that diabetes is one thing that Benjy and I will never, ever have in common. Your money makes a difference. Just check out the JDRF's list of accomplishments recently on replacement and regeneration. There's so much promise now, but time is short. We won't know if there's a timer counting down inside him until it's too late.

I thank you for your generosity, and Benjy would thank you, too, if he could take his thumb out of his mouth for a second. (Or if he had acquired yet the power of speech. Judging from this, though, that's not too far away. . .)



Thanks for reading, and again, you can donate here, or by clicking on the link to the right.

50 book challenge: #28, #29, #30, #31

#28: Leon Sciaky, Farewell to Salonica. Memoir of growing up as Jewish boy in Salonica, the Greek city a.k.a. Thessaloniki. After the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, many migrated to Salonica, making it the city with the largest population of Jews in the world for a couple of centuries. The Jewish community remained strong until the end of the Ottoman empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This is a story of the end of that era.

#29: David Crystal, How Language Works. Now I know! Thanks! (Reading a book with this title is a little like Candide's finding out, to his amazement, that he had been speaking prose all his life.) Some interesting insights here for parents of a small baby just now trying out his first phonemes.

#30: Andre Aciman, Out of Egypt. Another memoir of the end of an ancient Jewish community, this time in Alexandria. The author's family was partly from Constantinople, partly from Syria. Eventually, they were forced to leave Egypt in the mid-1960s, one of the last left. The techniques here were heavily fictional in style, I would say (as in, extensive precise quotations from conversations the author was not a party to), so I'm not sure how much of this is experience and how much imagination.

#31: Barbara Tuchman, The Proud Tower. A story of European civilization in the days before World War One. One especially interesting chapter was on the rise and virus-like spread of a violent, dogmatic, and socially destabilizing ideology that resulted in numerous terrorist attacks and assassinations (including an American president): anarchy. I also like the chapter on Richard Strauss and his milieu. Oh, and also the one on the Dreyfus Affair. Overall, her prose was superb.