Category: Personal

On June 2, 1967, my parents spent the day in the car. They were in Pennsylvania then, bored witless in the town of State College, where my father was getting an MBA from Penn State because it seemed like a better option than getting drafted and going to Vietnam, and my mother was working toward her (never finished) Ph.D. in German because they kept paying her more to be a graduate student than she could make being a secretary. I happen to know that they spent June 2 in the car because that’s the date that Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band came out in the United States, and I grew up with the story of how my parents drove around all day, listening to radio reports on the progress of the truck bearing the precious records to the local store.

As I got older and began to explore the Beatles for myself, I came to wonder just what it was about Sgt. Pepper that made it such a phenomenon. Don’t get me wrong: it’s a great record. It deserves massive praise, and I love it dearly. It’s just that I couldn’t figure out why it was Sgt. Pepper and not its predecessor, Revolver, that got all the attention. Just like Sgt. Pepper, Revolver delves into Indian music, features a string quartet, has socially conscious lyrics and makes explicit reference to psychedelia. What did Sgt. Pepper have that Revolver didn’t?

A complete US release, that’s what. From the enormously helpful beatles-discography.com, I learned that the American release of Revolver is missing “I’m Only Sleeping,” “And Your Bird Can Sing,” and the all-important “Doctor Robert,” all three of which were released on Yesterday … And Today instead. Considering that the full version of Revolver is only 34 minutes, the truncated US release would have been barely more than an EP.

Sgt. Pepper, by contrast, was famously a complete album, not just a collection of songs. In fact, it was the first Beatles record that was the same in the UK and the US. And it benefitted from association with the singles that came out around the same time and were being talked up as part of the Sgt. Pepper sessions. In particular, “Strawberry Fields/Penny Lane” had come out in February, and people thought of them as part of Sgt. Pepper even though they weren’t on the final album. Likewise, “All You Need Is Love/Baby You’re a Rich Man” came out in July to much fanfare, so it would have been part of the blitz of radio play that accompanied Sgt. Pepper, which in turn was part of a tremendous sense of excitement around the Summer of Love.

So, as I had long suspected, the awe with which Sgt. Pepper is regarded, compared to other Beatles records, had as much to do with the particulars of time and place as with the actual music.

How did you first learn to use computers? If you’re under 40, chances are that you did it on your own, learning through trial and experiment on everything from a Commodore Vic 20 at the library to an Atari 2600 at your neighbor’s house to the Apple IIe in your middle school’s lab. The little bit of organized training I got in the Logo language was not nearly so helpful as just having a Commodore 64 on my desk, and it was not the earnest typing programs my parents bought me but the engrossing role-playing game Exodus: Ultima III and its successors that taught me to type. It seems that children have an innate ability to grasp complex computer technology with almost no instruction.

A new charity called Hole in the Wall is taking advantage of this idea by making Internet-enabled computers available to the poorest of poor children in India. According to a BBC News article, an Indian IT professional, Sugata Mitra, was struck by the disparity between his tech-savvy coworkers and the urchins sleeping in shanties just beyond the perimiter of his fancy IT campus. And he decided to do something about it, building kiosks that would give these street children access to computers (the kiosks are designed to keep out adults).

The results are astounding. Illiterate children quickly pick up not just computer skills, but also rudimentary English. As Sugata puts it, “Groups of children given adequate digital resources can meet the objectives of primary education on their own.” The implication of all this is that computer kiosks may be more cost effective — indeed, more effective, period — than human teachers.

So far, there isn’t nearly enough evidence to prove such a radical notion. But if Hole in the Wall merely brings literacy and education to a few hundred of India’s poorest children, who would otherwise go without, that strikes me as a good start.

Also, they’re looking for volunteers.

Hope to see you there!

I just wanted to point out a couple of good articles I’ve read recently. Unfortunately, neither is free, but in case you happen to subscribe to one of these magazines, or know someone who does, or feel like spending a few bucks for an article is worth your while, I wanted to mention them.

John Brown

In The New York Review of Books, James McPherson reviews several books about John Brown (there’s also a review in last week’s New Yorker), the militant abolitionist whose botched assault on Harper’s Ferry in 1859 and subsequent trial and hanging — some would say martyrdom — helped bring about the Civil War. His story raises difficult questions about our contemporary struggle with terrorism.

Here was a man driven by religious conviction to commit acts that fit the modern definition of terrorism: killing for the purpose of spreading terror and causing political change — in this case, ending slavery. Immediately after the Harper’s Ferry attack, the northern abolitionist response was essentially unanimous in condemning Brown. The Transcendentalists were the first to turn the tide, celebrating Brown as a man of conscience and action. Brown himself managed to win admiration through his dignified demeanor throughout his trial and especially in the period between his sentencing and execution. By the end, northerners were saying that John Brown’s actions were wrong, but that he himself was a good man. Understandably, southerners were horrified and failed to appreciate the subtlety of this argument. (Imagine being told by a Muslim that Osama bin Laden’s policies may be wrong, but that he himself is a good man whose motives are pure and just.)

John Brown is difficult because he was a terrorist fighting for a cause that we now see as unequivocally good and right: ending slavery. He raises the troubling question of when, if ever, it becomes legitimate for individuals to take up arms against evident evil. If never, then what do we say about the partisans in World War II, or the Iraqi rebels we supported (half-heartedly) after the Gulf War? But if we admit that yes, sometimes extralegal violence is legitimate, then how do we decide when? John Brown was a hero not just to the Union Army, whose Battle Hymn was an adaptation of a song about Brown, but to Timothy McVeigh and to the bombers of abortion clinics.

The second article is a piece in Foreign Affairs by Niall Ferguson that discusses the weaknesses of the current process of globalization, drawing parallels between our own time and the period that led up to World War I. Then, as now, new communication technology had drawn the world into a complex web of interdependent trade. The major empires were overstretched fiscally and militarily, there was an unstable balance of powers, and there was the constant threat of terrorism from rogue states (Serbia) and extragovernmental groups. One can go too far with these sorts of exercises — one key factor that Ferguson doesn’t discuss is how much difference it makes that this time around, we know how horrific a Great Powers war really is — but the observations are striking. Among other things, Ferguson points out that after World War I, the period of globalization and free trade came to an end, followed by a period of nationalism, economic protectionism, and Soviet Communism, not to mention the Great Depression.