(p. D10) Creativity is almost always: unlearned. Ask young children, “Are you creative?” They’ll all raise a hand. By age 16, none of them will because they’ve had their creativity gently squeezed out of them by those who think conventionally.
. . .
One of the great mistakes is: the open-plan office. If I were starting a business—and this is a great time to reinvent the workplace—I’d give everybody an office. It’s essential you’re not interrupted when you’re working. And you must have lots of rooms for people to meet and play.
(Note: ellipsis added. The questions from the interviewer, before each colon, were bolded in the original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date October 28, 2020, and has the title “20 ODD QUESTIONS; John Cleese on Why Open Offices Are Among History’s Greatest Mistakes.”)
(p. A5) “Retrospective studies are great and they provide some hints, but there are caveats,” said Dr. Shyam Kottilil, a professor of medicine with the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine. “It’s very difficult to establish causality.”
Interest in the cross-protective effects of vaccines has led to efforts to repurpose old vaccines that may have potential to provide at least transient protection against the coronavirus until a specific vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 is developed and proven safe and effective, he said.
“But nobody knows whether this approach will work unless we test them,” Dr. Kottilil said. “To endorse this, you need to do really good randomized clinical trials.” There is little incentive for private companies to invest in expensive trials because the old vaccines are cheap and off-patent, he added.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date July 29, 2020, and has the title “Old Vaccines May Stop the Coronavirus, Study Hints. Scientists Are Skeptical.”)
The above is an “embed” from a YouTube video posted by singer (and English Professor) Ryan Cordell. The lyrics were written by Gretchen McCulloch and the tune is from Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” The YouTube URL is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCwNQtnI64I
In my book Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism, I write about “effective sympathy” which I describe as “actions taken by sympathetic observers that actually save or improve the lives of those who are suffering” (p. 110). I admire Dolly Parton for donating copies of The Little Engine That Could to poor children. I also admire Dolly Parton for donating a million dollars to help start research on the Moderna vaccine for Covid-19. Dolly Parton knows how to practice effective sympathy.
(p. 12) She wrote “I Will Always Love You” and “Jolene” on the same day and built a theme park around herself. She has given memorable onscreen performances as a wisecracking hairstylist and harassed secretary. She even helped bring about the creation of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”
Now, Dolly Parton’s fans are crediting her with saving the world from the coronavirus. It’s an exaggerated, tongue-in-cheek claim, to be sure. But for legions of admirers, Ms. Parton’s donation this spring to Vanderbilt University Medical Center, which worked with the drugmaker Moderna to develop a coronavirus vaccine, was another example of how her generosity and philanthropy have made her one of the world’s most beloved artists.
. . .
“Her money helped us develop the test that we used to first show that the Moderna vaccine was giving people a good immune response that might protect them,” Dr. Denison said on Tuesday.
Ms. Parton told the BBC on Tuesday [November 17, 2020] that she was excited to hear her contribution provided a “little seed money that will hopefully grow into something great and help to heal this world.”
. . .
On Monday [November 16, 2020], after Moderna announced that early trials of the vaccine showed a 94.5 percent effectiveness rate, fans reacted rapturously.
. . .
Ryan Cordell, an associate professor of English at Northeastern University in Boston, filmed himself singing a song about the vaccine to the tune of “Jolene.”
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 17, 2020, and has the title “Dolly Parton: Singer, Songwriter, Pandemic Savior?” The online version says that the title of the New York print version was “Dolly: Country Music Legend, Songwriter, Pandemic Hero” and its page number was 8. The title of my National print version was “Dolly: A Star of Country, a Songwriter, a Virus Hero” and its page number was 12.)
My book mentioned above is:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
The use of The Little Engine That Could to encourage entrepreneurial perseverance is analyzed in:
Yandle, Bruce. “I Think I Can! Does the Little Engine That Could Matter?” Journal of Private Enterprise 26, no. 2 (Spring 2011): 127-42.
A screen capture from the Replica Edition of the NYT, p. A4 for Thurs., Nov. 18, 2020.
(p. A4) A 76-year-old man in La Jolla, Calif., says he will get a coronavirus but not the way he got a polio vaccine when he was 9 — lined up in the kitchen next to his two siblings. Their father had sterilized the needles and syringes by boiling them on the stove.
The father was Dr. Jonas Salk, who had developed the vaccine.
. . .
At the time, the vaccine had gone through trials with small numbers of children. A trial with 1.8 million children did not begin until the next year, and the vaccine did not receive approval as safe and effective until a year after that — a timetable that he said made the development of coronavirus vaccine candidates in just months “absolutely extraordinary.” He said he had been concerned about pressure from the Trump administration to have a vaccine ready by Election Day. But he also said the decision to back the development of vaccines through Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to accelerate vaccine development, “was quite positive.”
For the full story, see:
Barron, James. “Coronavirus Update; ‘l Just Didn’t Feel the Shot’.” The New York Times (Wednesday, November 18, 2020): A4.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: after considerable time spent searching, I was unable to find this article on the nytimes.com web site. I searched on 11/21/20 for the article that had appeared in-print on 11/18/20. In my experience, it is extremely rare for so recent a print article to be missing from the online web site. So, for documentary purposes, I have reproduced a screen capture of the article from the Replica Edition. (For subscribers to the NYT, The Replica Edition provides an online replica of the print edition for the previous 30 days of issues of the NYT.)
(p. B11) Arthur Ashkin, a physicist who was awarded a 2018 Nobel Prize for figuring out how to harness the power of light to trap microscopic objects for closer study, calling his invention optical tweezers, died on Sept. 21 [2020] at his home in Rumson, N.J.
. . .
Dr. Ashkin’s discovery was serendipitous.
In 1966, he was head of the laser research department at Bell Labs, the storied New Jersey laboratory founded by the Bell Telephone Company in 1925, when he went to a scientific conference in Phoenix. There, in a lecture, he heard two researchers discuss something odd that they had found while studying lasers, which had been invented six years earlier: They had noticed that dust particles within the laser beams careened back and forth. They theorized that light pressure might be the cause.
Dr. Ashkin did some calculations and concluded that this was not the cause — it was most likely thermal radiation. But his work reignited a childhood interest in the subject of light pressure.
Light pushes against everything, including people, because it comprises tiny particles called photons. Most of the time the pressure is utterly insignificant; people, for one, feel nothing. But Dr. Ashkin thought that if objects were small enough, a laser might be used to push them around.
. . .
Then, in 1986, he and several colleagues, notably Steven Chu, achieved the first practical application of optical tweezers when they sent a laser through a lens to manipulate microscopic objects. Their results were published in another paper in Physical Review Letters. Dr. Chu began using the tweezers to cool and trap atoms, a breakthrough for which he was awarded a one-third share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997.
Dr. Ashkin, it was clear, was irked that the Nobel committee had not recognized his foundational work in awarding the prize. But he had already begun to use the tweezers for a different purpose: trapping live organisms and biological material.
Other scientists thought this application would not work, as he explained in an interview with the Nobel Institute after he was awarded the prize in 2018.
“They used light to heal wounds, and it was considered to be deadly,” he said. “When I described catching living things with light, people said, ‘Don’t exaggerate, Ashkin.’”
. . .
Dr. Ashkin was awarded one-half the 2018 physics prize, . . . . In so doing he became, at 96, the oldest recipient of a Nobel Prize at the time.
. . .
Dr. Ashkin’s retirement from Bell Labs did not stop him from continuing his research. When he received word of his Nobel Prize, he was working on a project in his basement to improve solar energy collection. Asked if he was going to celebrate, he said: “I am writing a paper right now. I am not about celebrating old stuff.”
(Note: the online version of the obituary was updated Oct. 5, 2020, and has the title “Arthur Ashkin, 98, Dies; Nobel Laureate Invented a ‘Tractor Beam’.”)
(p. B1) The person who helped inspire the passive-investing boom, the late economist Paul Samuelson, became wealthy from his active investments.
The greatest active investor of our time, Warren Buffett, advocates investing passively.
. . .
(p. B6) Prof. Samuelson’s decisions show why investors shouldn’t become so doctrinaire about index funds that they completely cut themselves off from any chance, however rare, of doing better.
In 1970, the same year he became the first American to win the Nobel Prize in economics, Prof. Samuelson began buying stock in Mr. Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc., at a cost that eventually averaged about $44 per share. (Berkshire’s A shares traded this week at approximately $290,000 apiece.)
. . .
In an interview this week, Mr. Buffett says Prof. Samuelson believed the same thing he does: that markets are “generally very efficient but not perfectly efficient.”
Mr. Buffett adds, “I do think if you know something about finance and about people, you may be able to identify someone out there who can overperform. But for every one you identify who can, there’ll be 1,000 others who don’t turn out to be able to.”
Continues Mr. Buffett: “You’re betting enormously on your ability to be a reader of people, even more than your ability—or theirs—to select securities. They’re all promising overperformance and spending a lot of money on selling it very persuasively. Overwhelmingly this is a world of salespeople.”
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date December 21, 2018, and has the title “THE INTELLIGENT INVESTOR; What You Can Learn From One of Warren Buffett’s Smartest Investors.”)
In my book Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism, I praise project entrepreneurs for having as their main goal, not wealth or fame, but making a ding in the universe (to use Steve Jobs’s phrase). I also suggest that they are more likely to succeed, in part because they are more likely to stick with the venture they founded. But there may be exceptions to my narrative. Eric Baker sounds like a project entrepreneur who left his start-up because of conflicts with his co-founder, and who now is back in charge.
(p. B4) Eric Baker long envisioned bringing together the two ticketing companies he started.
This week eBay Inc. agreed to sell its StubHub unit, a business Mr. Baker launched nearly two decades ago, to Geneva-based Viagogo Entertainment Inc., the ticketing firm with a large European presence he has been running since 2006.
The $4.05 billion all-cash deal would create a global ticketing juggernaut in the booming business of live events. It would also put StubHub back in the hands of the person who early on saw the opportunity in the legitimate resale of tickets.
. . .
“You had to pay through the nose or find people on the street corner to purchase from,” says Mr. Baker. He felt there had to be a better, more efficient way to find tickets and imagined that could happen online.
He headed to Stanford Graduate School of Business that fall and, together with classmate Jeff Fluhr, started StubHub—then called Liquid Seats—in 2000.
. . .
Mr. Baker and Mr. Fluhr—who was chief executive and had majority ownership of the company—had their differences, and in 2004 Mr. Baker left at the board’s direction, said people familiar with the decision.
. . .
When eBay bought StubHub in 2007, Mr. Baker says he opposed the deal. “It’s rare you have the opportunity to have a business like that,” he says. “To me, you try to hold on to something that’s working.”
(Note: the online version of the story has the date November 29, 2019, and has the title “The Tale Behind StubHub’s Sale: How Eric Baker Bought Back the Ticket Seller.”)
My book, mentioned above, is:
Diamond, Arthur M., Jr. Openness to Creative Destruction: Sustaining Innovative Dynamism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019.
(p. A23) Christopher Hitchens was one of the great essayists in America. He would be unemployable today because there was no set of priors he wasn’t willing to offend.
Now the boundaries of exclusion are shifting again. What we erroneously call “cancel culture” is an attempt to shift the boundaries of the sayable so it excludes not only conservatives but liberals and the heterodox as well. Hence the attacks on, say, Steven Pinker and Andrew Sullivan.
This is not just an elite or rare phenomenon. Sixty-two percent of Americans say they are afraid to share things they believe, according to a poll for the Cato Institute. A majority of staunch progressives say they feel free to share their political views, but majorities of liberals, moderates and conservatives are afraid to.
Happily, there’s a growing rebellion against groupthink and exclusion. A Politico poll found that 49 percent of Americans say the cancel culture has a negative impact on society and only 27 say it has a positive impact. . . .
After being pushed out from New York magazine, Sullivan established his own newsletter, The Weekly Dish, on Substack, a platform that makes it easy for readers to pay writers for their work. He now has 60,000 subscribers, instantly making his venture financially viable.
Other heterodox writers are already on Substack. Matt Taibbi and Judd Legum are iconoclastic left-wing writers with large subscriber bases. The Dispatch is a conservative publication featuring Jonah Goldberg, David French and Stephen F. Hayes, superb writers but too critical of Trump for the orthodox right. The Dispatch is reportedly making about $2 million a year on Substack.
The first good thing about Substack is there’s no canceling.
(p. 27) Takuo Aoyagi, a Japanese engineer whose pioneering work in the 1970s led to the modern pulse oximeter, a lifesaving device that clips on a finger and shows the level of oxygen in the blood and that has become a critical tool in the fight against the novel coronavirus, died on April 18 [2020] in Tokyo.
. . .
Mr. Aoyagi’s contribution to medical science was built on decades of innovation and invention. In an essay about Mr. Aoyagi, John W. Severinghaus, a professor emeritus of anesthesia at the University of California, San Francisco, wrote in 2007 that Mr. Aoyagi’s “dream” had been to detect oxygen saturation levels without having to draw blood.
. . .
But he soon ran into a problem. Blood does not flow smoothly like an open tap, but pulses through the body irregularly, thus preventing an accurate recording of dye levels. The problem, however, turned out to be an opportunity. By devising a mathematical formula to correct for this “pulsatile noise,” he created a device that measured oxygen levels with greater accuracy than before.
“Greatness in science, often, as here, comes from the well-prepared mind turning a chance observation into a major discovery,” Dr. Severinghaus wrote.
(p. B11) Yuri Orlov, a Soviet physicist and disillusioned former Communist who publicly held Moscow accountable for failing to protect the rights of dissidents and was imprisoned and exiled for his own apostasy, died on Sunday [September 27, 2020] at his home in Ithaca, N.Y.
. . .
A credulous Communist Party member since college, Professor Orlov began having doubts about the party based on a growing foreboding under Stalin over what he later described as “slavery without private property.” He was further alienated by the subsequent Soviet repression of civil liberties movements in Hungary and what he called the “savage suppressions of workers’ unrest” in Czechoslovakia.
. . .
In 1956, after publicly advocating democratic socialism, Professor Orlov was fired as a research physicist at the Institute of Theoretical and Experimental Physics and expelled from the Communist Party. In 1973, in a letter to Leonid Brezhnev, the general secretary of the party, he denounced the stultifying effect of repression on scientific research and presciently proposed “glasnost,” or openness, long before that word was in common use.
. . .
Professor Orlov was arrested in 1977 and, after a show trial, sentenced to seven years in a labor camp, followed by five years in Siberian exile, for “anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda.”
(p. B12) Ken Robinson, a dynamic, influential proponent of stimulating the creativity of students that has too often been squelched by schools in the service of conformity, died on Aug. 21 [2020] at his home in London.
. . .
Mr. Robinson consulted with governments and schools around the world, conducted workshops and wrote books, including “Out of Our Minds: Learning to Be Creative” (2001) and “You, Your Child and School: Navigate Your Way to the Best Education” (2018), with Lou Aronica.
He preached that schools needed not only to broaden their curriculums but also to support teachers as creative professionals and to personalize learning by breaking large classrooms — artificial environments that invite boredom, he said — into small groups.
“Kids will take a chance,” he said in the TED Talk. “If they don’t know, they’ll have a go. Am I right? They’re not frightened of being wrong.” But, he added, “By the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.”
Mr. Robinson insisted that creativity can be taught — not through direct instruction, but by giving students opportunities, inspiration, encouragement and mentoring.
The educator Salman Khan said that his popular online website Khan Academy draws on Mr. Robinson’s teachings in part by personalizing curriculums to meet individual students’ needs.
“He opened our eyes to an educational system that isn’t fair to a lot of kids and holds back their potential,” Mr. Khan said in a phone interview. “He helped a lot of educators, including myself, say, ‘Hey, look, this is a time to change.’ ”
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Sept. 11, 2020, and has the title “Ken Robinson, Who Preached Creativity in Teaching, Dies at 70.”)
The updated third edition of Ken Robinson’s first book mentioned above is:
Robinson, Ken. Out of Our Minds: The Power of Being Creative. New York: Wiley, 2017.
