Benjy Entertains Anne.

Our Two Babies

What I've been reading

Bryan Caplan, The Myth of the Rational Voter. Provocative. Really the meat of the argument is in chapter 5 and can be expressed with a simple demand-supply graph - as the private cost of irrational behavior goes to zero (because one vote won't make a difference, this freeing one to vote on emotional reasons), the quantity consumed will increase accordingly. Uh, okay! Could be true. Some of this book had the feeling of a notes-dump for padding, or completeness, or something.

Robertson Davies, What's Bred in the Bone. Third book of the Cornish trilogy. The board members of the Francis Cornish foundation put on an ETA Hoffman opera while Simon Harcourt solves the riddle of Cornish's painting.

Yasmina Reza, Dawn, Dusk, or Night. Author of Art and other plays joins Nicolas Sarcozy during his campaign for the French presidency in 2007. An unconsummated romance.

What I've been reading.

Discover Your Inner Economist, Tyler Cowen. The blog is better.

No one belongs here more than you, stories by Miranda July. Not my cup of tea. Precious, twee, affected, yes, etc. But there's redemption! The book's web site is neat and only takes, like, three minutes. Article here.

The brief wondrous life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. By turns maddening and gripping, this book left me pretty conflicted most of the way through. The second half was better than the first, and the end was the best part. In fact, I suggest the following reading plan: read the first chapter on Oscar, then skip to the chapter on Oscar's mother, Beli, then read the chapter on Beli's parents, then read the end. And you're done! I feel like my background in role-playing games, fantasy, science fiction, and comic books gave me an advantage in grokking most of the allusions in this book. I will dispense explanations of terms like "10d4" and "Darkseid" for a nickel.

2008 Ride to Cure Diabetes: Asheville, N.C.

I'm posting here the text of an e-mail I sent today. Thanks for reading!

Dear friends -

Well, I'm planning for two events at the moment: (1) the impending birth of my second child (only a few days away, probably), and (2) the 2008 Ride to Cure Diabetes - Saturday, August 9, 2008, in beautiful Asheville, North Carolina, in the Great Smoky Mountains.

You can help with the second! Please donate to my ride here, and please forward this e-mail to anyone who might help.

This event, and this cause, are all about numbers. Back in January, I marked five years since being diagnosed with what is now my constant companion, type-1 diabetes. That's a pretty sobering anniversary. For a diabetic on a regime of multiple (5 or 6) daily injections, that would add up to more than 9,000 injections. Ouch! With my insulin pump, it's a slightly different story, though that also involves needles of unsettling length, and a plastic catheter inserted under my skin 24 hours a day. I test my blood an average of ten to twelve times a day, which means almost 20,000 finger or arm sticks in that time.

So that's the bad news. But the Ride to Cure Diabetes is about good news, too, like the fact that human safety trials have now begun on a vaccine for type-1 diabetes. (As a Pittsburgher, I'm especially pleased that this work is being done right here at Children's Hospital.) The vaccine has so far proved effective in mice. Among the type-1 community, people feel like the question of a cure or vaccine is not "if," but "when" - all the more reason why it is vital to speed up this research as much as possible.

Because the research is as much about the as-yet-invisible diabetics - that is to say, people who haven't yet developed the disease - as it is people like me. Consider the story of a different disease, polio, that eventually got a vaccine.

50 years ago, a doctor also working at the University of Pittsburgh, Jonas Salk, was trying to cure a disease that struck disproportionately at children. As a result of his work, that disease has now been completely eradicated from the United States and mostly eradicated in the rest of the world. But of course there are still survivors. Recently, I happened to read a tragic story about a woman who died after living most of her life in an iron lung, after being stricken with polio in 1952 as a three-year-old child. She missed the polio vaccine by three years.

That's what the JDRF's work is about. We don't want to have to say to a child, "Sorry, kid, you got diabetes a few months too early and missed the vaccine." When you donate to JDRF, you help save a child - maybe my son, Benjy (who has a relatively high risk for developing the disease), or soon-to-arrive daughter, or maybe someone you don't even know - from falling into this "just missed" category. And in addition to the promising vaccine research, the JDRF is making good progress on a cure for those of us who already have diabetes.

Again, you can donate by going here to the JDRF's secure web page, or I will gladly accept checks made out to "JDRF." You can mail them to me at 5734 Northumberland St., Pittsburgh, PA 15217. And, of course, all donations are tax deductible, and you will receive a receipt from the JDRF confirming that.

Thank you in advance. For those of you who have donated before, as so many of you have, I cannot thank you enough for your generous past support. It makes the miles on my bike feel like nothing at all.

Matt

Ew!

This ad for the JDRF won some award or other, and ran in the Post-Gazette, the local paper. I will be posting some more pleasant pictures, of Benjy, shortly.

What I've been reading.

House, by Tracy Kidder. I had never heard of this 1985 book before, but picked it off a library shelf while browsing. One of the best works of narrative nonfiction I've ever read. An upper-middle class couple, Jonathan and Judith Souweine, hire a freshly minted architect, William Rawn, and builders, Apple Corps, to build their new house in Western Massachusetts. Original NY Times review here. Google allows for some updates. Rawn has gone on to bigger things. Jonathan Souweine, a politically active local lawyer, is now recovering from cancer. Having had some small dealings with contractors and the like, parts of this were instantly familiar to me.

 

Class: A Guide Through the American Status System, by Paul Fussell. This is something I've been meaning to get to for a while. A taxonomy of class in America, from top-out-of-sight down to upper-middle, through the proles (high, middle, and low), and on down to bottom-out-of-sight. Some things have changed in the 16 years since this has been published. Is it characteristic of the upper-middle to have a small, outdated kitchen? I would say no, but you know -- this is probably just an instance of "prole creep," so there. Fussell does explain it all. Thankfully, Jeanne let me stick two bookcases in our living room, which count for 16 class points just by themselves, and help mitigate the presence of our tacky, tasteless (yet awesome!) giant TV somewhat.

 

Rationalism in Politics and Other Essays, by Michael Oakeshott. An interesting counterpoint to the Fussell, actually. The main essay I found simultaneously profound and shallow. The profound bits were the first 15 pages or so - but the vagueness that followed (how does he see politics as working, exactly?) I guess are symptomatic of the skeptic. How does Andrew Sullivan, the blogger/writer, reconcile Oakeshott with Barack Obama's view of partisan politics as roadblock to the One True Solution? This puzzles me to no end.

A step forward.

Human safety trial begins on vaccine for type-1 diabetes, at Children's Hospital here in Pittsburgh.

Walk Score.

Walk Score calculates nearby amenities and scores your property from 0 to 100 for walkability. This could be pretty useful for deciding where to move. In my case, at least, Walk Score only confirms what I already knew: 95, baby!

Do not pass go.

In a hurry to comply with the recent court decision declaring that U.S. paper currency discriminates against the blind? Print your own multicolored money here! You can pay me later.