Running for Your Life: What Are You Reading?

When it comes to Divides in books, here’s my takeaway:

Pick up “The Divide” by gonzo journo Matt Taibbi and pick up (and then put down) “The Great Divide” by esteemed economist Joseph E. Stiglitz.

So much can be gleaned from a book’s first taste. (I found that to be true of the runaway bestseller “H is for Hawk” by Helen Macdonald. She ends her opening sentence with the word “indeed.” No greatness can come of that.)

So, let’s play. The Divide’s opener:

Tuesday, July 9, 2013, a blisteringly hot day in New York City. I’m in a cramped, twelfth-story closet of a courtroom, squeezed onto a wooden bench full of heavily perspiring lawyers and onlookers, watching something truly rare in the annals of modern American criminal justice  – the prosecution of a bank.  

The Great Divide:

The book begins with the onset of the Great Recession, several years before the start of the Times’s Great Divide series. The first selection was published in Vanity Fair in December 2007, the very month the U.S. economy slipped into a downturn that would prove to be the worst since the Great Depression.

Urgent political times demand powerful writing (and reading) responses. The Divide answers the call. The Great Divide, not so much.

Next: Running for Your Life: After Super Tuesday 2.0

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

It’s that time of year when minds of young (and old) men of a certain small-town Canadian demographic turn to: hockey.

Not long ago in this space, I wrote about the passing of hockey great Jean Beliveau, a true gentleman of the game.

For those of us who cheered not for the Montreal Canadiens, Beliveau’s team, but for two years with the Toronto Maple Leafs of that era, a man to watch was Andy Bathgate.

In the US, hockey can too often be characterized by its brutal moments. (Seen any lugs mowing down ice officials from behind lately?) But in my mind, it’s players like Andy Bathgate (1932-2016), who epitomized the type of guy who played hard, played right, and comported himself like a gentlemen. In fact, it was Bathgate who in December 1959 produced a controversial article for True magazine in which he warned that hockey’s “unchecked brutality is going to kill somebody.” In those days, it took guts to take on the league – and when a quality player like Bathgate spoke out, people listened.

I remember my mom clapping her hands with glee, calling him by his first name as if he were family. When he won the Cup for the Leafs in 1964, real tears were shed that day. Hockey as a game is great because of the contributions of hockey players like Andy Bathgate.

Next: Running for Your Life: What Are You Reading?  

  

Running for Your Life: 24-Hour News: A Demagogue’s Dream

Demagogue (n): a person who stirs up public feelings especially of discontent, ie that politician is just a demagogue who preys upon people’s fears and prejudices.

Question: What counts as news in America more than ratings. Anyone?

Answer: You’re right. Nothing.

Question: What would you guess is delivering on high ratings (higher profits) in the history of 24-hour cable news?

Answer: Candidate debates, 2016. In this the craziest presidential election year in every talking heads’ memory what to do but slate as many candidate debates on 24-hour news channels as you can. Oh, and don’t even think to tinker with the format, especially when ratings (profits), as we’ve found in the latest business quarter, soar when a demagogue “stirs up public feelings especially of discontent, ie that politician is just a demagogue who preys upon people’s fears and prejudices.”

As to the public right to know? A mandate to perform a public service by presenting and analyzing the news in a way that doesn’t merit comparisons to March Madness or the Super Bowl or the World Series, in which each of us gather round the set or table or neighborhoods bar (Go Donald! You tell ’em, Bern!) and cheer blindly for our favorite team (brand, politician), must be a foreign idea.

I’m thinking Canada, for one.

Which might speak to why the domicile-change requests to the Canadian consulate are spiking these days. Or am I not making the right assumptions here?

Next: Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday  

Running for Your Life: Running and the C-Word

This latest news comes from The Economist – Feb. 27 http://econ.st/1QdaTJQ. Aerobic exercise like running has long been seen as a cancer preventive, as well as way to forestall cancer’s return after treatment.

Now, this new study says it all comes down to adrenalin, or what the test tube folks call epinephrine.

So take a medicinal form of epinephrine and get the benefits of running for your life. Good idea, right? Well, yes. And the scientists in a study in the journal Cell Metabolism came up with a second chemical factor that gets stirred up when you kick up a sweat on a run: interleukin-6.

So let’s get these drugs into production: Epinephrine and interleukin-6 to attack cancer tumors. Don’t diminish the role of running in a life, though. Put it this way: If you run for your life, you can do so without spending an arm and a leg on new drugs (in the US, anyway; drugs like these wouldn’t come to market at anything less than $100 a pill – that is, unless Bernie Sanders were to win the presidency!)

Next: Running for Your Life: 24-Hour News: A Demagogue’s Dream   

Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

Okay, a pretty large majority of us agrees that Abraham Lincoln was a great president. And, yes, Donald Trump could be assumed to be the presumptive nominee of Lincoln’s Republican Party. Quelle horreur!

Well, yes, and no. Lincoln, the famous man of “peculiar ambition,” is definitely a founding father of the nation we know. But if this great were us (and not primarily memorialized upon monuments, on sacred native land, on our $5 bill) here’s what we may be talking about in the fuller context of Honest Abe.

“[Lincoln] advanced the country toward unlimited government … He was willing to use foreigners and minority groups against his own people. He was willing to have a selective ‘democratic’ conscience when it came to subjects like deportations.”

                                                  – Sam Dixon, Journal of Historical Review, Fall 1986

Then there is this from historian Richard J. Carwardine in “Lincoln: Profiles in Power”

“Lincoln himself composed a few articles specifically for the newspapers and gave careful thought to where his public letters should first appear before they were copied Union-wide. He controlled the press’s access to his private meetings, allocated lucrative government printing contracts to selected Republican papers, and rewarded loyal editors and correspondents with well-paid jobs at home and abroad. Unsurprisingly, loyal correspondents made up the presidential trainload to Gettysburg in November 1863, their place on the platform assured; hundreds of local papers subsequently printed and celebrated Lincoln’s speech, in repudiation of Democratic ridicule of a ”silly, flat and dish-watery utterance’. Probably most important of all, Lincoln, though not dependably accessible to reporters, made sure his door was open when it needed to be.”

None of this is to excuse the hard reporting that should go into the suitability of Donald Trump’s bid for higher office. My two cents? There just might be something to learn in just what are some of the common traits (granted, hopefully a narrow sliver of a Venn diagram) of the current Republican presidential front-runner and Lincoln himself, a man who reasonable people have convinced us to use as a cudgel against Trump – rather than doing the harder work of knocking him down on matters of policy, most damagingly, his penchant for inciting hatred and violence, ie, a proposed ban on all Muslims from visiting America and the advocated killing of terrorists’ families.

Next: Running for Your Life: Running and the C-Word