Dispatches #159: Personal bests, Healthy Harold and sport inventors

in #writing7 years ago

Thursday, 3 August 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. I skipped last week due to a constrained schedule while visiting Melbourne.

No new words this week, but I wanted to mention to Brisbane readers that I'm launching a book at Avid Reader bookstore on Friday, 4 August – tomorrow night, if you're reading this on the day of delivery. It's called Colombiano, and it's a novel by Australian author Rusty Young, who is best known for his 2003 bestseller Marching Powder: A True Story of Friendship, Cocaine and South America's Strangest Jail (which I reviewed here in Dispatches a few weeks ago).

His second book blends fact and fiction: for seven years, Rusty Young lived and worked in Colombia, interviewing special forces soldiers, snipers, undercover intelligence agents and members of two vicious terrorist organisations. During this time, he was both shocked and touched by the stories of child soldiers he encountered. He vowed to one day turn their tales into a book and let their voices be heard. Colombiano is that book. It's a thrilling read, and I'm very much looking forward to speaking with Rusty about it at Avid Reader on Friday, 4 August, from 6.00pm. 

I have a couple of double passes to give away to Dispatches readers, so if you're interested in coming along, please reply to this email and I'll get back to you. You can also book your spot via Avid's website here for $7.50 per person.

Sounds:


'How To Invent A New Sport' on StartUp: Slamball

How To Invent A New Sport on StartUp (35 minutes). Perhaps you've heard of Slamball – a compelling mix of basketball and football played on trampolines – or come across it while flipping channels on late-night television; that's how I first saw it a few years ago, and never again since. It's a  This great episode is devoted to the sport's origin story, and explains how Slamball has found an unlikely audience in China despite never really taking off in the USA. 

Mason Gordon's dream is to create a new global team sport, something that hasn't happened since basketball came on the scene in the 1890s. But Mason is determined. He invented Slamball–an amped up combination of basketball and football that's played on trampolines–nearly twenty years ago. He had some splashy early success and got two seasons on TV. And then Slamball seemingly disappeared. But Mason is still at it, and now Slamball is surging in popularity on the other side of the globe.

Our Student Loan Secrets on Death, Sex & Money (60 minutes). I knew student debt was a big problem for many people in the United States, but I didn't really grasp the enormity of the stress involved until listening to this great two-part episode on the subject, featuring plenty of painful personal stories and a few happy ones, too. (Part two is here.) 

When we asked you to tell us your stories about how student loans are affecting other parts of your life, we were overwhelmed by your responses. You've shared more than a thousand stories in all, and they keep coming. We heard about years of incremental payments and the thrill of getting to a zero balance, but also about delayed weddings, tensions with your parents over your shared debt, and fading hopes of ever buying a home or saving for retirement. It makes sense that you have a lot to say about student debt. More Americans are taking out more in student loans and taking a longer time to pay it off. And it's fundamentally reshaping how you think about the value of education and the milestones of adulthood.

El-P on The Moment with Brian Koppelman (74 minutes). I love the hip-hop duo Run The Jewels, but I know little about the inner lives of its two rappers, so I really enjoyed this conversation about El-P's expansive career in music so far. 

Brian Koppelman is joined by El-P to discuss his musical development and growing up in New York City. El-P is best known as one-half of Run the Jewels, but he has been producing and rapping for decades, first as part of Company Flow and then as a solo artist and producer on albums such as Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein, Killer Mike's R.A.P. Music, and his solo albums Fantastic Damage and Cancer 4 Cure. They discuss how El-P got into hip-hop, high-school delinquency, achieving massive success, and finding his place in music.

A Celebration of John Clarke on The Wheeler Centre Podcasts (162 minutes). Two and a half hours of John Clarke's friends, family and collaborators, telling stories about the man and reading some of his work aloud. Absolute bliss. It's all great, but Geoffrey Rush's reading of Clarke's poem 'A Child's Christmas in Warrnambool' toward the end is particularly marvelous. 

On Sunday 2 July, crowds filled the Melbourne Town Hall to pay tribute – and share in the humour of – the late satirist John Clarke. Here, we're sharing photos and a full audio recording of the event, as well as a rundown of the evening's programme. 

Minka on Reply All (43 minutes). This story is far removed from the usual internet-based reporting that Reply All is known for, but I'm glad they're branching out. Here, they look at one American man who is pushing back against the "nursing home industrial complex" by designing ways for elderly people to receive care at (or near) their family home, rather than receiving expensive care in a custom-built institution.

A man takes on an impossible job: fixing the place you go before you die.

The Magic Show on This American Life (60 minutes). I fucking love magic, and everything about it, so this instantly became one of my favourite This American Life episodes because it takes magic seriously. A key source is Teller, the (usually) non-speaking half of the double act Penn & Teller, who loves magic more than just about anyone else on the planet. Also, if you want to see a card trick, this recent one from The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon is bloody good (8 minutes).

Just a few years before he got the internship at NPR that started him in radio, our host Ira Glass had another career. He performed magic at children's birthday parties. A powerful sense of embarrassment has prevented him from ever doing an episode on the subject, but when he learned that producer David Kestenbaum was also a kid conjurer, they decided to dive in together.

Reads:


'Personal Best' by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker

Personal Best by Atul Gawande in The New Yorker (7,800 words / 39 minutes). Top athletes and singers have coaches. Why don't people in other professions, such as surgery? Why did surgeon (and brilliant writer) Atul Gawande find it inconceivable to pay someone to come into his operating room and coach him on his surgical technique? This fantastic essay is devoted to these questions, and it might make you rethink how you go about getting better at whatever field you're in. 

I've been a surgeon for eight years. For the past couple of them, my performance in the operating room has reached a plateau. I'd like to think it's a good thing–I've arrived at my professional peak. But mainly it seems as if I've just stopped getting better. During the first two or three years in practice, your skills seem to improve almost daily. It's not about hand-eye coordination–you have that down halfway through your residency. As one of my professors once explained, doing surgery is no more physically difficult than writing in cursive. Surgical mastery is about familiarity and judgment. You learn the problems that can occur during a particular procedure or with a particular condition, and you learn how to either prevent or respond to those problems. Say you've got a patient who needs surgery for appendicitis. These days, surgeons will typically do a laparoscopic appendectomy. You slide a small camera–a laparoscope–into the abdomen through a quarter-inch incision near the belly button, insert a long grasper through an incision beneath the waistline, and push a device for stapling and cutting through an incision in the left lower abdomen. Use the grasper to pick up the finger-size appendix, fire the stapler across its base and across the vessels feeding it, drop the severed organ into a plastic bag, and pull it out. Close up, and you're done. That's how you like it to go, anyway. But often it doesn't.

The $5,000 Decision To Get Rid Of My Past by Ben Kuchera on Polygon (1,700 words / 9 minutes). I loved this personal essay about deciding to give up one's video game ghosts, by turning a bunch of bad memories and regrets into a chunk of cash.

I noticed that she started wearing a t-shirt between the shower and the bedroom. That's how these things begin. You build up a small barrier between people, and the tiny intimacies of living together fall away. You close the door when you use the restroom. You roll over and fall asleep before the other person gets in bed. You get dressed in the bathroom so the other person doesn't see you naked. She was gone, along with most of the furniture, about a week later. These things happen, and there were good reasons that they did. I came up with some of them, and she came up with the rest. That's how things fall apart when you live with someone in your 20s. You barely understand your own heart, and that makes it very hard to be what someone else needs. I went on a trip for work, and when I returned, there was a note where a person used to be. I sat very still for a very long time. Someone broke into my apartment and stole my video game collection exactly four days later. A dozen or so systems, and over 600 games, all gone. This is the story of what happened next.

Writers Dish On Scoops That Slipped Away by Elon Green on Columbia Journalism Review (4,900 words / 24 minutes). For a reporter, being scooped is one of the worst feelings you can encounter in your career. Here, Elon Green approached numerous journalists to ask them about what it's like to be scooped, and how they try to avoid it where possible. 

Far as I know, I never got scooped on a story. But it almost happened: I'd spent several years working on a true crime piece about a serial killing in San Francisco. A draft was rejected by a dozen publications. I'd happily dipped into the red, thanks to plane fare and Castro accommodations. But when it finally ran, people liked it. And then I got an email. It was from Sarah Weinman, a journalist whose work I revere. She said that the case had been on her radar for years. In fact, we'd pitched it to the same publication. This was after the fact, of course, but it was frightening to learn I'd had a superior colleague breathing down my neck and had no idea. I experienced what I assume were heart palpitations. I imagine that to actually get scooped on a story must feel considerably worse. So over the last two weeks, I contacted a number of journalists whose work I admire, and asked what it was like to be scooped. Some said that, like me, they'd managed to dodge a bullet. Others were not so lucky. Responses have been edited for length and clarity.

Killing Our Media by Nick Feik in The Monthly (6,400 words / 32 minutes). What do we stand to lose when Facebook and Google continue to dominate the online advertising market, while traditional media outlets struggle to replace the revenue they used to receive from print ads? Nick Feik explores this question at length, and wonders about the effects of Facebook knowing so much about our habits and preferences.  

While Facebook, Google and "the internet" may be responsible for the collapse of the traditional media business, blaming them is like holding a shark responsible for biting. Technology was always going to reveal mass-market advertising as a blunt instrument. Printing every single advertisement for a second-hand car, and attempting to distribute this to every single person in the market, may have seemed great at the time, but time makes fools of all of us, especially if we're Fairfax executives. Spraying ads for holidays to Fiji across the media was never going to be as effective as simply catching those who googled "flights to Fiji". Facebook allows advertisers to target consumers by age range, gender, location, education level, political leanings, interests, habits, beliefs, digital activities and purchase behaviour; by what they "like" and share, and who their friends are; by what device they use. It can shoot an advertisement directly into your hand because you're a middle-aged male who searched online for a hardware product and you're near the new Bunnings on a Saturday afternoon.

Iraqi Surgeon Returns Home to Help the Wounded Get Back in the Fight by Adam Baidawi in The New York Times (1,900 words / 9 minutes). An excellent profile of an Iraqi surgeon who now works in Australia, based on writer Adam Baidawi following him back to his home country for a few days. "For me, having grown up in Australia with an immigrant family that traces at least 18 generations back in Iraq, Dr. Muderis represented a fascinating hybrid of cultures and languages, trauma and recovery, science and religion," Baidawi writes.

A young Iraqi soldier wheeled himself into a makeshift examination room in Baghdad's best government hospital and used his elbows to climb onto the bed. Ripping off an array of straps, he removed a worn prosthetic leg so Dr. Munjed al-Muderis could examine his stump. Dr. Muderis, an Iraqi-Australian orthopedic surgeon, was back in his hometown for the first time since he escaped in 1999 after being ordered to cut off the earlobes of army deserters. He had come at the personal behest of Iraq's prime minister, Haider al-Abadi, who has an army full of soldiers with limbs lost in the relentless battle against the Islamic State. Some 200 such amputees had been summoned to be triaged over two days. As he worked through the throng, Dr. Muderis, 45, never sat or even so much as leaned on a desk. When I asked at one point if this was the most amputees he had ever seen in a day, he replied, "It's the most amputees anyone's seen in a day."

Information Overlord by Stephanie Wood in Good Weekend (4,700 words / 23 minutes). This is Stephanie Wood's final story for Good Weekend as a staff writer for the magazine, sadly, but it's a good one that links into the Nick Feik essay linked above. Here, Wood explores what the 'fun' Facebook quizzes you see in your news feed are really doing to our privacy, and how the data from these tests are helping a global industry to predict what makes us tick, suggest what we should buy and even manipulate how we vote.

The personality quiz challenges me with an existential question: "Do you know who you really are?" I respond on a sliding scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree) to statements including "I believe in the importance of art", "I tend to vote for conservative political candidates" and "I know how to captivate people". "Continue to your score," it says. But first I must log into Facebook or provide my name, gender, birth year, postal code and email. "We require your details to provide an accurate personality score." Bits of me float off into cyberspace. But I don't give a thought to that because the quiz is now telling me who I really am. "Our psychologist says you're a Rebel," it says, and reveals I pursue intellectual and artistic activities, enjoy challenges and can be impulsive. It tells me where I sit on the OCEAN scale, a measure psychologists use to determine someone's Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. It tells me I'm high in neuroticism and low in agreeableness. I don't think the quiz really knows who I am at all. When Alexander Nix took the quiz, the "psychologist" told him he was "a Champion", a highly aspirational problem-solver interested in unique and creative ideas. He is resilient, tenacious and able to cope well with setbacks, although he sometimes exerts negative behaviour in reaction to conflict. I think I see some of that behaviour when I meet Nix in a Sydney city hotel lobby. 

Puppet Love by Stephanie Van Schilt in The Saturday Paper (1,200 words / 6 minutes). Most children educated in Australia in the last 30 years would be familiar with Healthy Harold from the Life Education van. I certainly recall the feeling of entering that dark van and learning about health and the human body, and I really liked this report about Life Education in the context of a recent federal funding scare that was quickly reversed after a public outcry.

As a thirtysomething childless writer, it feels strange parking in the grounds of a primary school. But as soon as I see the stationary white van, the smiling face of Healthy Harold, I'm transported: today is Life Education day. Shy, the north-east region educator for Life Education Victoria, waves at me from the doorway of the van. "Welcome, my dear," she says before wrapping me in a warm hug. I almost cry with comfort and joy. Before I can step inside the van an overeager mother rushes in, cutting me off. "My son can't go to the session with his class tomorrow because we're going on holiday this afternoon. So he has to be able to join the older kids today because he can't miss out," she demands breathlessly. Whether host, instructor or guardian of the magic portal, Shy's demeanour is unwavering: she is patient, calm and caring. She informs the parent that if the child's teacher approves, of course the boy can attend today.

++

Thanks for reading. If you have feedback on Dispatches, I'd love to hear from you: just reply to this email. Please feel free to share this far and wide with fellow journalism, music, podcast and book lovers.

Andrew

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