WPLongform

Social media post controversy – listening vs. reading

A Good Reed Review Commentary & Pubs , , ,

By Ande Jacobson

Over time I have learned a few things about social media posts.

First, a surprising number of people consume the stuff I write for which I am appreciative.

Second, even something I consider innocuous or even trivial can become controversial depending on the consumer’s interpretation.

Third, it’s important to take a step back and not necessarily engage at face value. A person’s response may not necessarily be directly related to what I wrote or intended but could be a response to something my writing triggered in them or to an unstated connection they made. They experienced what they experienced. They could be reacting to that with my writing acting as a catalyst for them. No matter the reason, discussion is fine, but attacks are not.

Fourth, the way language is used today, meanings seem somewhat fluid despite what the dictionary may have recorded. This unfortunately goes back to an experiment I ran at work several years ago regarding that elusive concept of “common knowledge.” Common knowledge in this case extends to the meaning of various words or terms which may not be as universal as I thought. This makes communication much more challenging and sometimes frustrating. Continue reading →

What a Rat Race

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By Ande Jacobson

Robert was restless. He looked around quickly and then took off running through the lab, climbing over various apparatus, leaping from landing to landing, until finally stopping atop a bookcase in the corner. It was late, the lights were dimmed, and he wanted to play. This was not an unusual occurrence after the scientists left for the day. Continue reading →

Too many people

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By Ande Jacobson

To welcome the New Year, 60 Minutes presented a sobering look at the negative impact humankind has had on our planet. Humankind has been too successful as a species. The objective measure of that “success” is that we have grown beyond the bounds of what the earth can support. There are too many people, and according to Dr. Paul Ehrlich, the problem was well in sight many decades ago. In his 1968 book The Population Bomb he put the crisis on food, forecasting that humanity would be unable to feed itself. Instead of working to control our population, we found ways to substantially increase the food supply. Now, while we may be able to produce enough food to feed our ever increasing world population, we cannot create space that doesn’t exist or provide enough fresh water. Through our exponential population growth we’ve encroached on natural habitats worldwide and exacerbated climate change. This combination has created the sixth mass extinction crisis where species the world over are disappearing destroying the ecological balance needed to sustain life, all wrought by too many humans roaming the planet. Continue reading →

2022 is almost over

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By Ande Jacobson

Every night (or first thing in the morning) I read Heather Cox Richardson’s latest Letter from an American. She writes her observations of the day’s events from the perspective of an historian focused on what she thinks will be important 100 years from now. Her letters often pull together disparate threads to provide a read on current events that might not always be obvious to someone not-so-well-versed in history and in which events seemingly have historical significance. One thing that she’s said many times in her various live sessions is that as an historian, she often focuses on what people say and do. This includes reading newspapers, and in her deep dives into the past, those news reports provide a fascinating view into the important events of the day. Continue reading →

‘The Daughters of Kobani’ shows just what motivated women can do

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By Ande Jacobson

In February 2021, Gayle Tzemach Lemmon’s groundbreaking book, The Daughters of Kobani, became available. This is an important book telling the story of the women of the Kurdish Militia, an all-female fighting force (the YPJ) that pushed back and took revenge on the men of ISIS to free Kobani and other Kurdish towns in northeastern Syria. They faced long odds and opposition from their families, the oppressive regime in their native Syria, and hostile neighboring nations. They showed that women are not only equal to men, they are a force to be taken seriously. Lemmon spent hundreds of hours on trips and interviews between 2017 and 2020. She spoke with a broad swath of militia members as well as with civilians just trying to survive in Syria and Iraq. She also talked with the American military advisors in country and with military and political functionaries in the U.S. about the challenges surrounding U.S. involvement. The U.S. was keenly aware of the dangers posed by ISIS to the region and to the world, so there was a vested interest in making this work. Continue reading →

Is Mastodon the solution?

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By Ande Jacobson

I’ve written about social media before, most recently as the Twitter turmoil was ramping up. I originally joined Twitter back in 2011 mostly to help bolster my fledgling A Good Reed Review website. Originally, that’s all I used it for. Every time I’d publish a piece on the site, I’d have it appear on the site’s Facebook page and on what I considered its Twitter account. Then I got involved in politics in a more substantial way in 2020 volunteering for the Biden text team during the general election. At that point, I started using my Twitter account for more than just the music and theater related content on my website, and I started to recognize much of the good that Twitter could do. News agencies had long used it to get important information out quickly, particularly in times of crisis. The same was true for various public figures. Continue reading →

What happened to Edgar Roy?

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By Ande Jacobson

David Baldacci’s fifth book in the King & Maxwell series came out in 2011. The story in The Sixth Man picks up where First Family left off. Sean King and Michelle Maxwell have again taken on more than they expected when they venture up to Maine to help out King’s old mentor on a case. A brilliant but troubled genius has been accused of mass murder. The man is Edgar Roy who theoretically worked for the IRS. In reality though, his job was far more complex than that. He was recruited to help the intelligence community in ways that are completely unimaginable. He was the only person in the country, and probably the world, who could do the job for which he was hired. He was part of something known as the E-Program, and he was the only E-Six ever discovered after a few E-Fives went down in flames. Continue reading →

Timothy Snyder’s ‘On Tyranny’ is a must read

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By Ande Jacobson

In 2017, after one of the most contentious presidential elections our nation had experienced up to that point, Timothy Snyder wrote a little book capturing both history and the warning it provided to the current time. On Tyranny’s full title is: On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century. In it, Snyder starts with a Prologue offering historical context framing what follows. The book starts with a wake-up call at the top of the Prologue:

“History does not repeat, but it does instruct.”

Continue reading →

We need more people like Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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By Ande Jacobson

In 2016, Teri Kanefield wrote a captivating biography of one of the giants of the U.S. justice system – Free to Be Ruth Bader Ginsburg: The Story of Women and Law. In it, she starts with Ginsburg’s humble beginnings as the younger daughter of two Jewish Eastern European immigrants. She then follows her through her education, personal experiences, and her impressive judicial career first as an attorney and law school professor, then as a judge, and finally as a justice on the U.S. Supreme Court. In every capacity she held, she broke new ground and furthered the quest for equality and fairness in the country’s jurisprudence. Kanefield doesn’t just list facts and figures, she shows the reader a portrait of an incredible person of integrity and perseverance striving for fairness and equality across the board. Continue reading →

The book every woodwind player and technician should have

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By Ande Jacobson

Woodwind Instruments: a practical guide for technicians and repairers by Daniel Bangham is a new release that will be a useful reference for woodwind technicians and players alike. Expected in late October 2022 through The Crowood Press, Bangham’s book provides instructions for setting up a complete workshop to repair and maintain clarinets, flutes, saxophones, oboes, and bassoons. The detailed repair instructions for technicians include most routine and complex repairs they might encounter. For players, the book can serve as a guide on caring for their instruments along with what to look for when they are encountering problems going so far as instructing them on some stop gap measures until they can get their instruments to a repair shop. The book is aimed at technicians, particularly given the specialized equipment needed to affect repairs, but understanding more about how their instruments work helps players get the most out of them even if they don’t want to try to make the repairs themselves. Continue reading →