Archives for 2021

Wrist Seams and Typing Discomfort

November 7, 2021 By Mark Leave a Comment

Whether you consider yourself an aspiring, practicing or recovering writer, or are emotionally enmeshed with same, one perquisite which greatly appeals to many wordsmiths is the socially sanctioned synergy between creature comfort and presumed performance. Where pajama pants and a baggy T-shirt would be inappropriate for an attorney or banker, that ensemble not only ensures the necessary ease of movement over long hours spent shifting and slouching in a chair, it also provides the minimum necessary coverage to avoid arrest during excursions to various therapists. (Even for writers working regular hours in an office setting, there is usually a certain sartorial latitude granted in day-to-day practice, as compared to executives, managers or customer-facing staff.)

While there are certainly occasions when a writer should be presentable — say, in court, or at their own funeral — almost everyone agrees that what writers need to be is productive. In that context it seems axiomatic that if your work involves plumbing the depths of your imagination, psyche or intellect, you might have a hard time doing so if your senses are aggrieved. While a compelling need to limit distractions can also lead to compulsive rituals, if not histrionic demands of fellow employees, family members or random citizens — and may be motivated more by procrastination or a morbid fear of failure than any valid grievance — here we are concerned not with mental anguish about fashion but actual physical discomfort. So if you are currently debating whether to wear your new beret at a tilt or dead-level, or whether it might be time to transition to a full-blown dandy, we commend questions of both style and sanity to your personal support community. [ Read more ]

Annual Pink Wristies BOGO Sale

October 11, 2021 By Mark Leave a Comment

As fate would have it, while I was drafting a post about writers and keyboard comfort an email arrived reminding me that October is buy-one, get-one month for pink Wristies.

If you’re not familiar with Wristies — and most people are not — they are soft glove-like coverings for the wrists and palms, which leave your fingers free to do nifty things like press keyboard keys or buttons on a remote control. And yes that probably sounds like a product of interest only to people who have perpetually cold hands, but I am here to tell you that if you spend a lot of time typing on a computer keyboard you should definitely give Wristies a try. (Also good for working reporters who have to venture outside in colder weather, but leave their fingers free to take copious notes.)

[ Read more ]

Ed Wasserman: As If By Design

September 19, 2021 By Mark Leave a Comment

Paying close attention for almost six years to administrative machinations at the university I attended in my youth proved to be perpetually dispiriting, but as a compensating balance I also became aware of the individual academic and educational contributions of members of that community. One such example is a book which was published earlier this year by UI Professor Ed Wasserman, titled, As If By Design: How Creative Behaviors Really Evolve. Situated like a traffic cop at the crossroads between cultural narratives and behavioral evolution, Wasserman’s book not only reveals the concept of a eureka moment to be unfounded in many celebrated instances, but fills in critical context which was excluded over time to bolster the romantic concept of individual inspiration.

Although Wasserman is a professor in the University of Iowa’s Department of Psychology and Brain Sciences, and as such is certainly familiar with statistics and the rigors of the scientific method, his book is accessible to readers of all ages and backgrounds. In fact, if you’re in secondary or undergraduate education, and looking for a text that will not only spur discussion but engage your students, you would be hard-pressed to find a better current example — and that’s particularly true if you are located in Iowa. (There are a number of Iowa-centric examples which will be broadly familiar to residents of the state, yet for those who believe they are in the know that only makes the missing details that much more compelling when Wasserman fills out the story.)

To be clear, you don’t have to be from Iowa to connect with Wasserman’s examples, many of which will be familiar to most Americans. Personally, as an Iowan I found the section on Iowa’s blackout license plates to be both hilarious and absurd, but if I had to pick a favorite vignette it would unquestionably be the section on Florence Nightingale. Although I already knew a great deal about Nightingale’s importance to the practice of medicine and profession of nursing, I knew nothing about her contributions to what we now call data visualization.

In short, an enjoyable and informative read, and an important corrective on the all-too-human tendency to create and celebrate idols.

— Mark Barrett

John Podlasek’s ‘Game Dev Advice’ Podcast

September 12, 2021 By Mark Leave a Comment

A long time ago in another life I spent a decade-plus working in interactive entertainment, more commonly referred to as the computer games biz. From the mid-1990’s until deep into the 2000’s I had a front row seat as the industry changed from a relatively small, creative-driven marketplace into a massive industry dominated by gaudy global corporations. Although Microsoft and Sony — with the Xbox and Playstation 2, respectively — did everything possible at the turn of the millennia to reduce computer gaming to a proprietary console monopoly, the fact that plucky Nintendo continued to shine, despite annual predictions of doom, was an important reminder that everything does not have to be reduced to cynical crap in order to be profitable.

Not only did I enjoy the work I performed in that new medium, including wrestling with complex theoretical issues underpinning the very concept of interactive entertainment, but I met a number of talented and genuinely decent people who were on that same journey. In an industry that has since become synonymous with bad behavior, if not a launch point for some of the worst ills in modern American society, it was both enjoyable and reassuring to find camaraderie in the pursuit of something new, and as a relative outsider to be welcomed into what was, early on, a close community. (In those early years the computer game community was also ahead of the cultural curve in its acceptance of transgender and LGBTQ individuals, at least until the corporate cowboys and graphics companies decided they could drive more business by focusing on realistic breast animations.)

In terms of my work experience, I can also honestly say that the only time I had a problem was with one of the multinational corporations referenced above, but that’s another story. In every other respect the producers I worked with were both professional and personable, and that includes John Podlasek, who I worked with over long hours in a recording studio on more than one occasion. (Recording studios are a lot like submarines. You learn who people are real fast because there is nowhere to hide.)

Not only does John’s background include music and the visual arts, but over decades in interactive entertainment he has worn every hat a producer can wear, yielding a formidable combination of experience and perspective. And yet at root he is a genuinely humble and often hilarious person, and if you have any interest in interactive entertainment I would suggest you make a point to listen to John’s ‘Game Dev Advice‘ podcast. You could talk to dozens of other industry veterans for days at a time and not get the kind of grounded and holistic insight that John passes along in a single episode.

— Mark Barrett

Picking Up Where I Left Off

September 3, 2021 By Mark 1 Comment

Six years ago to the day the corrupt Iowa Board of Regents announced the illegitimate appointment of an unqualified and belligerent crony boob as president of the University of Iowa. At the time that appointment came as quite a shock, but as the weeks, months and years passed it became clear that the university and indeed public higher education in Iowa had been and has been fundamentally compromised by politics. While that illegitimate president finally left office three and a half months ago — and that’s a good thing — we just learned from the Gazette’s Vanessa Miller that the university ignored a rape report that was filed with the Iowa City Police Department three weeks before the former president unexpectedly announced his intention to resign last October. In fact, had there not been a series of campus protests over the past few days about that reported rape, it is likely that report would never have come to light — much like similar events which took place at the university in 2018, also under the permanently blind eye of the former UI president. (Likewise, today the Gazette’s Miller also reported that after an earlier unexpected defeat, and the subsequent political packing of the council which delivered that initial rebuke, the Iowa Board of Regents just secured the right to build a massive new hospital complex in North Liberty, after intentionally falsifying the size and nature of that project to the crony-packed council which gave its foregone approval.)

Although the initial shock of that corrupt presidential appointment was disorienting, in retrospect the timing could not have been better. In the summer of 2015 I had been verging on contacting UI about an issue that might prove mutually beneficial in an academic and medical context, but given what I now know those thoughts were grossly naive. Over the intervening six years I learned what I could about UI specifically and higher-ed generally — and along the way probably met the equivalent criteria for a master’s and doctorate in one academic discipline or another — and what I learned was almost universally dispiriting. (As regular readers know, I grew up in and have lived most of my life in Iowa City, where UI is located, so I was not oblivious to the usual problems on a major college campus. But I honestly had no idea how pervasive the corruption is in the ranks of academic administration and by governing boards.)

That said, what a dispiriting six years it has been across the board. The state of Iowa slipped into cultural collapse and is now controlled by arch conservatives and fundamentalists — who, without irony — helped put a degenerate con artist in the White House, then conspired to overthrow American democracy in service of their delusions. Throw in the COVID-19 pandemic and Iowa’s determination to expose as many young children as possible to the virus, even though vaccine approval is on the horizon for kids between five and twelve years of age, plus the ravages of global warming, and a conniving abdication of responsibility by the United States Supreme Court in support of Texas’s subjugation of women, and gosh-golly what’s next?

In that context it has been interesting watching my mind slowly disengage over the past three and a half months from the singular pursuit of tracking events at the University of Iowa. Not that there still isn’t plenty to read, as attested to above, but I no longer feel an obligation to jot it all down and make sure I have the supporting documents and videos, because the narrative arc I was following finally did come to a close. (I’m sure there will be future revelations about the illegitimate president’s tenure, but for now UI is just another bummer in the news.)

What that mental space has given me is a chance to go back and look at old draft posts I was working on in 2015, as well as catch up on clerical and administrative chores I either dropped at the time or subsequently neglected over that six-year span. And as you might imagine, it feels good to be thinking about something other than failed human beings, and to be reconnecting with the positive pursuits I was focused on lo those many years ago. So…where was I?

— Mark Barrett

Coping With the Persistence of Covid-19

May 31, 2021 By Mark Leave a Comment

One year ago to the day I published a post titled ‘Coping With the Reality of COVID-19’. In a rational world that post would not have been necessary because every nation would have implemented strict policies to suppress the virus, but we humans do not live in a rational world. Instead, we live in a world constrained by our individual and collective narratives, and for the greater majority those narratives do not allow for intrusions. And a pandemic is an intrusion. [ Read more ]

Ongoing Harreld Hire Updates — Epilogue

May 16, 2021 By Mark Leave a Comment

After five years, eight months and fourteen days of blithering administrative idiocy, illegitimate University of Iowa president J. Bruce Harreld is now Iowa’s former illegitimate president. As warranted I will log any lingering developments on the Harreld front in this post, but I honestly don’t expect to hear from him again unless he is called to testify in court. (When this post scrolls you can find it by searching for ‘epilogue’, or clicking the ‘Harreld’ tag in any other Harreld post.)

08/09/21 — Just flagging this for the everlasting shame — as reported by Cleo Krejci at the Iowa City Press-Citizen: UIowa only Big Ten university without masking requirement for fall semester.

The bureaucratic perversion of the Iowa Board of Regents by right-wing politicians has been complete for close to a decade now, so there is little chance that new University of Iowa President Barbara Wilson will be able to convince the board to change its masking policy. (At least not until the regents have suckered as many revenue-generating students as possible to the UI campus, much as they did last year before providing the vast majority of classes online.) Adding irony to insult, the Board of Regents promotes its current president as a former physician, while at the same time allowing him to omit from his bio the fact that he is currently a casino owner and big-money Republican donor. What a world we live in when a former practicing physician is more than willing to abandon his Hippocratic Oath in service of Iowa’s thrill-killing governor, who can’t enough blood on her hands — so now she’s determined to make sure students of all ages across the state end up contracting and spreading the Delta variant.

Speaking of which…we’re only a few weeks out now from the recent tradition of the UI football program ingratiating itself to sports fans by leading The Wave at sick children looking down from the upper floors of the new UI children’s hospital. No word yet on whether the university plans to announce how many of the children at that hospital are on life support because three months ago Iowa’s Republican politicians also passed a law which makes it illegal to mandate masks for K-12. [ Read more ]

Ongoing Harreld Hire Updates — 31

April 25, 2021 By Mark Leave a Comment

The final threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.

05/16/21 — So illegitimate University of Iowa president J. Bruce Harreld bid a fond farewell to the campus during a ‘Celebration of Graduates’ at Kinnick Stadium, and in so doing also seemed to declare the pandemic over. One notable absence at Bro Bruce’s big sendoff was UI College of Education Dean Dan Clay, who was perhaps too busy running his for-profit, private-sector business. Then again, after ripping Harreld repeatedly in his candidate forum, during his own failed bid for the Iowa presidency, it’s also possible Clay wasn’t invited. [ Read more ]

Ongoing Harreld Hire Updates — 30

March 31, 2021 By Mark Leave a Comment

A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.

04/23/21 — Video of the hour-long campus forum for University of Iowa presidential candidate Daniel L. Clay can be found here. As an internal candidate there was naturally some difference in Clay’s opening statement and in the questions he was asked, as contrasted with the three prior external candidates. Not only is there nothing wrong with that, but to pretend that Clay’s familiarity with the university was not a prominent facet of his candidacy would be absurd.

Living in the real world means acknowledging the truth of asymmetries and inequities, because the search for truth is not advanced by pretending that circumstances are other than they are. There are situations in life where it is important to treat everyone exactly the same, but evaluating Dan Clay’s forum is not one of those situations. Because he is an internal candidate I do know more about Clay than I did about the external candidates, who were all unknown to me until they were introduced over the past two weeks, but that doesn’t mean I am now obligated to empty my mind of prior knowledge to render a judgement about what Clay had to say today.

In this post I focus mostly on comments from Clay which surprised me, and there were more than I would have predicted. Those surprises may bode well or ill for Clay’s candidacy, but we will dig into specifics shortly. Because of my familiarity with Clay, however, my reading of his responses may be different from that of a casual observer of the search, and on that basis alone I encourage anyone to view the archived video if they did not watch the livestream.

Finally, like any communal human endeavor, academic administration has a political component, and at an institution the size and scope of the University of Iowa you better have mad diplomatic skills if you intend to be remembered as anything other than roadkill. There is nothing wrong with putting your best foot forward when you are speaking with different constituencies, but if you want people to believe your word is good then you cannot tailor who you are to fit the political moment. People can smell that kind of administrative insincerity a mile away, and a university campus is nothing if not a community of discerning noses. [ Read more ]

Ongoing Harreld Hire Updates — 29

March 3, 2021 By Mark 2 Comments

A new threaded post on this topic can be found here. For previous posts about the Harreld hire, click the tag below.

03/28/21 — Because there were eight qualified semifinalists who interviewed for the Iowa presidency during the rigged 2015 presidential search — plus a ninth unqualified candidate in future illegitimate UI president J. Bruce Harreld — and because the current presidential search committee has repeatedly expressed a desire to conduct a broader, more inclusive search, I initially assumed that the current committee would invite between ten and twelve candidates to participate in the semifinalist interviews at the end of next week. In various committee meetings, however — and particularly in comments from representatives of the firm facilitating the search — the number of expected semifinalists was repeatedly pegged at eight, so I began to use that target number as well. Flash forward to last Friday, and after cutting down the initial pool of 79 applicants, the committee settled on twelve semifinalists who will be interviewed on April 1st and 2nd, then reduced to three or four (or possibly five) finalists on April 3rd.

While this larger slate of semifinalists complicates the process of choosing finalists, the fact that next week’s interviews will be held online — as opposed to in-person, during what are commonly referred to as ‘airport interviews’ for that point of physical convergence — means overall time demands will be decreased, and travel requirements completely negated for all involved. (Assuming the COVID-19 pandemic lifts at some point, I will be surprised if virtual semifinalist interviews do not become the norm in academic searches, if only for their logistical ease and cost savings.) In expanding the number of semifinalists, I see that not only as a nod to this committee’s genuine interest in hearing from a wide range of candidates, but as a long-delayed response to the 2015 search, which notably concluded with the done-deal appointment of an unqualified rich old white man. To be sure, most if not all of the twenty-one members of the committee already know which of the twelve semifinalists will likely be chosen as finalists, and which candidate will likely be chosen as the next president, and industry demographics alone suggest that J. Bruce Harreld will be replaced by another white male. That outcome would not mean, however, that inviting more women and/or people of color to participate in the interview process was only done for show, because that is part of the work that needs to be done to expand future opportunities. As a candidate, if you can’t even get in the room when people are making decisions, then you have no chance. [ Read more ]