Dispatches #153: Thought police, hot hands and tsunami flotsam

Thursday, 15 June 2017

Welcome to Dispatches, a weekly summary of my writing, listening and reading habits. I'm Andrew McMillen, a freelance journalist and author based in Brisbane, Australia.

Words:

I had a story in The Weekend Australian Magazine on Saturday. Excerpt below.

Thought Police (2,300 words / 12 minutes)

Got a great, original idea? Australia's patent examiners will be the judge of that...

Each weekday for the past 25 years, Colin Fitzgibbon has gone fishing. His intended daily catch is old ideas that will disprove the originality of supposedly new ideas. It is a subtle and cerebral way to spend one's time, but as a patent examiner at IP Australia in the nation's capital, he is tasked with ensuring that only unique and useful inventions are awarded an Australian patent. Fitzgibbon must be meticulous in his research and documentation, and sure of his arguments. Not only will much of his written work end up on the public record, but more importantly, those who are granted an Australian patent get the exclusive right to exploit and market their invention for up to two decades.

The fisherman wears a blue checked shirt and black trousers. He has silver hair and blue eyes that dance back and forth across two computer monitors as he trawls international patent databases. If an applicant is attempting to claim an existing idea as their own, Fitzgibbon is tasked with reeling in the evidence. "We talk about the ocean of patent applications," he says. "There's lots of fish out there. How are we going to find that fish?"

This is not to say he enjoys discovering old ideas that disprove new ones, or delights in dashing the dreams of backyard inventors – a diminishing pool. One notable side-effect of globalisation is that Australian patents now comprise a distinct minority of the ideas assessed by Fitzgibbon and his colleagues. In 2016, IP Australia received 28,394 standard patent applications; 91 per cent of those were filed by non-residents, with US nationals accounting for almost half of the total. Just 2620 applications were submitted by people living in Australia, with the CSIRO, universities and poker machine company Aristocrat among the most frequent domestic hopefuls.

Fitzgibbon, 55, examines mechanical engineering inventions – his areas of expertise are agriculture and lifesaving – but refuses to deal with patent applications that involve weapons or ammunitions on moral grounds. "It's a good job," he says as he leans back in his chair. "It's all about being meticulous, to make sure the applicant gets a patent that nobody else can challenge." (If somebody disagrees with a patent being granted, they must file a notice of opposition within three months.) "Sometimes you'll spend a week searching, at the computer seven hours a day, and you can't find it." At that point, a patent examiner has to wonder: "Is there something I missed the first time? Is that fish still out there, laughing at me?" says Fitzgibbon. "We've got tools, but we're not perfect. There might be other fish out in the sea, but I'm guessing they're out in the Indian, not the Pacific – or they're hiding in the [Mariana] Trench."

To read the full story, visit The Australian.

How I found this story: Over a few beers with some friends in February, we got onto the topic of how one goes about acquiring a patent in Australia. None of us had any idea, so that's usually a good sign that a story idea is worth pursuing further. I also wanted to know about the people who review each patent application to determine whether it's genuinely new or already been done before. I went to Canberra for this story, and spent a day with a couple of patent examiners to see how they work. It's a fairly dry subject, which involves a lot of people sitting at desks and looking at computer screens, so the challenge was to try to hook the reader and make it interesting. Not sure if I succeeded, but I'm glad I tried.

Sounds:

Marcus Teague on Penmanship (110 minutes). Episode 38 of my podcast about Australian writing culture features editor, freelance writer, songwriter and musician Marcus Teague. His contribution to Australian music journalism during the last decade has been significant. After co-founding a magazine and website devoted to independent music named Mess+Noise, Marcus went on to work as music editor at The Vine for six years from 2008. Under his editorial guidance, this pop culture-centric website became one of the most popular and respected outlets for music writing in the country. It also provided a regular home for thoughtful, longform journalism and criticism for many freelance writers, myself included. Writing for Marcus at The Vine was an incredibly important aspect of my development as a journalist and music critic, and I have many fond memories of my time writing for the site for four years from 2010.

Since he left The Vine in 2014, Marcus has freelanced for the likes of Rolling Stone and Guardian Australia, while copywriting and working on artist bios on the side, in addition to his day job as commercial editor at Broadsheet. One evening in April, I met Marcus at a studio in Fitzroy, and our conversation touches on why he thinks suspicion is an essential character trait for music journalists; how he developed resilience as a fledgling musician who dreamed of making it in Melbourne; how he started writing songs in tandem with publishing a magazine that was a precursor to Mess+Noise; why he now finds it harder to write songs as he becomes more invested in journalism, and what happened when the drummer of Metallica read a concert review on The Vine and decided to give Marcus a call.

Reads:

The Long, Lonely Road of Chelsea Manning by Matthew Shaer in The New York Times Magazine (9,500 words / 48 minutes). An exhaustive, compelling profile of a key public figure about whom most of us know very little. I read this story as soon as I saw it had been published, and given Matthew Shaer's extensive (and exclusive) access to Chelsea Manning, I wasn't disappointed in the slightest. His profile is as striking, memorable and elegant as the magazine cover photo. It's a must-read.

On a gray morning this spring, Chelsea Manning climbed into the back seat of a black S.U.V. and directed her security guard to drive her to the nearest Starbucks. A storm was settling over Manhattan, and Manning was prepared for the weather, in chunky black Doc Martens with an umbrella and a form-fitting black dress. Her legs were bare, her eyes gray blue. She wore little makeup: a spot of eyeliner, a smudge of pink lip gloss. At Starbucks, she ordered a white-chocolate mocha and retreated to a nearby stool. Manning has always been small (5 foot 4), but in her last few months at the United States Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, she jogged religiously, outside in the prison yard and around the track of the prison gym, and her body had taken on a lithe sharpness, apparent in the definition of her arms and cheekbones. She looked healthy and fit, if a little uneasy, as people who have served long spells in prison often do. She had been released only eight days earlier, after serving seven years of a 35-year sentence. Her crime, even in hindsight, was an astonishing one: handing WikiLeaks approximately 250,000 American diplomatic cables and roughly 480,000 Army reports from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Collectively the largest leak of classified records in American history, the disclosures cleared a path for Edward Snowden and elevated the profile of Julian Assange, then little known outside hacker circles. 

Scorsese Shade Of Winter by Andy Hazel in The Saturday Paper (1,300 words / 6 minutes). Two stellar entries have appeared in The Saturday Paper's travel section in consecutive weeks. I think I've written here before that its travel pieces are usually worth the price of a subscription, let alone the fine analysis and commentary seen elsewhere in the paper, and Andy Hazel's piece here brilliantly conveys time and place. To get a table at quintessential New York Italian restaurant Rao's, you need to have got your name in the book in 1977 – or know someone who did. Hazel talks his way in, and soaks up the scene for our benefit.

In New York, snow doesn't lend a gentle glow or soften the sounds of the city. The opposite is true. After a week of subzero nights, snowfall is announced by the sound of a truck scraping a heavy blade over the frozen streets, spraying salt in its wake. This happens at 3am, and again at five. At six, the chorus begins: trains whine in the subway, ambulances wail in the streets and New Yorkers enter the fray, rife with purpose. Shopkeepers drag their shovels across their shopfronts and salt the pavement, hoping to avoid the inevitable slips and falls happening within a litigious distance of their door. As a visitor, the smart move is to get off the streets entirely. If the world seems to be undergoing epochal change, in New York at least one culture remains steadfast, resisting reinvention with an alluring shrug – that of the Italian American. Throughout the past winter, Martin Scorsese's short documentary film Italianamerican screened at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens. In it, the director and his parents discuss their cultural experience of New York. They recount how many migrants never needed to learn Italian. They could speak solely their regional dialects and only rarely be at a social disadvantage. Elsewhere, in the Museum of the City of New York, an interactive exhibit details Italians' temporal shift in the city, first gravitating to East Harlem and areas in Brooklyn, before establishing Little Italy in Manhattan. Today, as the older Italians give up their increasingly unaffordable real estate on the Lower East Side, and Chinatown steadily takes over Little Italy, restaurants serve as embassies.

Doomsday Prep For The Super-Rich by Evan Osnos in The New Yorker (8,200 words / 41 minutes). I loved this colourful look inside the world of wealthy Americans who are planning for how they'll survive when civilisation cracks up. Evan Osnos started reporting this before the 2016 election, but the piece took on an even more urgent tone once the new President was announced. Also, as an extremely near-sighted person, I'm totally on board with the reason for laser surgery given by Reddit's CEO in the lede below.

Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit, which is valued at six hundred million dollars, was nearsighted until November, 2015, when he arranged to have laser eye surgery. He underwent the procedure not for the sake of convenience or appearance but, rather, for a reason he doesn't usually talk much about: he hopes that it will improve his odds of surviving a disaster, whether natural or man-made. "If the world ends–and not even if the world ends, but if we have trouble–getting contacts or glasses is going to be a huge pain in the ass," he told me recently. "Without them, I'm fucked." Huffman, who lives in San Francisco, has large blue eyes, thick, sandy hair, and an air of restless curiosity; at the University of Virginia, he was a competitive ballroom dancer, who hacked his roommate's Web site as a prank. He is less focussed on a specific threat–a quake on the San Andreas, a pandemic, a dirty bomb–than he is on the aftermath, "the temporary collapse of our government and structures," as he puts it. "I own a couple of motorcycles. I have a bunch of guns and ammo. Food. I figure that, with that, I can hole up in my house for some amount of time."

The Truth About The Hot Hand by Tom Haberstroh on ESPN (5,100 words / 26 minutes). If you don't care about basketball, you can probably skip this one, as it's all about the idea of the "hot hand", where one or more players on a basketball court are hitting shot after shot without missing. For 30 years, the consensus in the statistical and scientific community has been resounding: our eyes are deceiving us, and the hot hand is little more than a mirage. But what if they were all wrong?

When Klay Thompson struck the match on perhaps the biggest inferno the game had ever seen, the world was still debating whether he deserved to be an All-Star. It was Jan. 23, 2015, against the Sacramento Kings, and Thompson was ice cold coming out of halftime. The then-24-year-old had missed his previous five shots, including an uncontested layup from point-blank range, and a pair of 3-pointers without a defender in the vicinity. No one could have foreseen what happened next. With the score tied with 9 minutes, 45 seconds left in the third quarter, Thompson's masterpiece began. A midrange pull-up. Splash. A slam-on-the-brakes transition 3-pointer at the top of the key. Boom. Another transition 3-pointer. A one-handed alley-oop dunk on the fast break. A 3-pointer off the dribble in the face of rookie Nik Stauskas. Another 3 on Stauskas, top of the key, as the decibels in Oracle Arena began distorting the audio feed from the CSN broadcast. He was just getting started. A 3, left wing. A 3, right wing. A finger-roll over three defenders. Another transition 3. A pull-up jumper at the free throw line. A corner 3-pointer with Stauskas blanketing him so fully that it prompted an incredulous "No way!" from Golden State Warriors broadcaster Bob Fitzgerald before the shot went down. And then, finally, the signature elevator-doors play. After letting their shooter squeak through at the top of the key, David Lee and Draymond Green sealed off Thompson's chasing defenders. Open look. Bucket. The place went bonkers. When the flames had abated, when the smoke had cleared, the Warriors were up 95-71. And it was on the back of 13 makes in a row, all from one player, in under 10 minutes of action. Thompson finished the quarter with a record-smashing 37 points.

The Man Who Sailed His House by Michael Paterniti in GQ (7,300 words / 37 minutes). It's hard to find the words for this story. I'm tempted to reach for superlatives, because it's a singular piece of work told entirely in the second person, as if Michael Paterniti is writing it entirely for the subject of his piece: a Japanese man who lost his wife in the 2011 tsunami, and who then survived several days at sea while sitting patiently on the roof of his own house. Let me just say that I was greatly moved by this piece, and you might be, too. Paterniti is an absolute freak of a storyteller, and if you care at all about the written word, I highly recommend investing your time here.

Later, lost far at sea, when you're trying to forget all you've left behind, the memory will bubble up unbidden: a village that once lay by the ocean. Here are the neatly packed homes with gray-tiled roofs over which the mountains rise in rounded beneficence, towering over lush rice fields that feed a nation. Here are the boats that fish the sea, in all of its blue serenity, and the grass in all of its green. There is such peace in this picture of abundance: lumber from the mountain, rice from the field, fish from the deep ocean. People want for nothing here. This village woven together by contentment is yours, Hiromitsu, and it is here, in the memory of it whole, that you know yourself best, the fourth-generation son of rice farmers. Here among a hundred wooden houses is the concrete one your family built. The house is made with metal pilings, which by your calculations will stand any high tide or errant wave. On your verdant plot a mile from the sea, a garden bursts with peonies, outbuildings sag, a koi pond teems. Here you live with your wife, Yuko, to whom you daily profess your love, and your parents, whom you still honor with the obedience of a child. In the barn are the pigeons you adore, for there's no more beautiful sight in the world than a flock mystically circling deep in the sky, then suddenly one breaking for home, wings aflutter, straining, as if to say, I'm here. In this cage lie the chuckling pigeons, and in this barn of theirs, your happiness. 

Not A Random Attack by Robert Little on NPR (2,600 words / 13 minutes). When a couple of journalists were killed on assignment in Afghanistan in 2016, their shocked colleagues wanted to better understand how they died. Extraordinary reporting.

NPR journalists David Gilkey and Zabihullah Tamanna died a year ago this week, ambushed on a remote road in southern Afghanistan while on a reporting assignment traveling with the Afghan National Army. Since their deaths, NPR has been investigating what happened, and today we are sharing new information about what we learned. It's a very different story from what we originally understood. The two men were not the random victims of bad timing in a dangerous place, as initial reports indicated. Rather, the journalists' convoy was specifically targeted by attackers who had been tipped off to the presence of Americans in Afghanistan's Helmand province. Gilkey, an experienced photojournalist, and Tamanna, an Afghan reporter NPR hired to work with him, were sitting together in a Humvee when they were attacked. "After the loss of our colleagues, we wanted to be sure we understood what really happened on the road that day," said Michael Oreskes, senior vice president of news and editorial director at NPR. "So we kept reporting."

The Power Of The Game by Martin Flanagan in The Age (1,000 words / 5 minutes). I don't follow AFL at all, but I loved this farewell piece by senior writer Martin Flanagan about why he loves the game, and what it's meant to him to be able to write about it for decades. 

According to an old man I met in rural Ireland, the Flanagans have only ever been interested in four things: football, politics, horses and cattle. This may explain why football has provided me with a lifelong fascination. In Ireland, before there were wirelesses or telephones, poets carried the stories of the big games from one county to the next. I reckon I was one of them, going from town to town, singing Carrickfergus, talking footy. At its best, the game makes me forget about everything else in the world. There was a joy in doing that right from the start but, with the current state of world affairs, it is becoming a survival strategy. The game has been like a retreat for me. Like a wildlife retreat, full of life. In the Australia I grew up in, people didn't say much about what really mattered to them. They carried it with them silently. On the sports field, they let it out. Personal and social dramas exploded before your eyes. Then there were those boys, the ones unlike yourself who knew the game as a sort of dance and had a warrior spirit. They jumped and hung in the air. Through their outrageous athleticism, they caught the ball in flight. They left me with feelings like awe and wonder otherwise wholly absent from my 11-year-old life in a Catholic boarding school in Burnie on the north-west coast of Tasmania. 

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Andrew

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