Beginning this week we are starting an experiment.. the Bouncing Boomer Weekly Zeitgeist (BBWZ). It gathers all on one page some especially interesting tidbits and links that bounced on to our radar this week, each of which could have launched a blog post of their own had time and space been sufficient. It will be a quick handy way to share links, quotes, books and sites that made a recent impression before they scroll away.
Click here to read the first edition, then follow the topic "BBWZ."
There is a lot of talk these days about empowering patients to observe
their own treatments and be their own advocates. This is supposed to give
us a safety net and and reality check in a health care system that is
increasingly stressed and error prone.
Continue reading "How Would You Do in 21st Century Med School?" »
Barack Obama "exults in complexity," said Nicholas Kristof today in
his NYT column, sounding as if he was feeling a mix of excitement and
relief. I second those emotions.
It is so refreshing, on so many levels, to see pride in learning return to the White House. Or it will be, come January when we can listen to a president who "speaks in paragraphs rather than sound bites" and trust that he actually gets what he is talking about.
I was feeling pretty despondent on this topic in late September when the Palin pick was fueling an angry surge of people proud of being unschooled. It drove me to my own impatient essay, It's the Complexity Stupid, in which I wondered out loud how anyone sane could question the need to marshall the best of minds in the worst of times.
Happy New Era to US all!!!! (she said while tagging this post to every category on this blog where I now feel more optimistic than I did yesterday)
I just added a new theme to my tags: Upbeats in Downtimes. It's about
seeking bits of hope between all the discouraging headlines. Getting
past the Wall St. mess, however long it takes, will have a whole lot to do
with sustaining hope and restoring confidence.
My first nominee for this new tag goes to the white-boarding "Fast Draw Team" on CBS Sunday Morning. Today's vignette was about "Market Monsters" and how to face them down. Very clever. As the FD fellows suggest, if you dump a stock or a fund, that money is gone and you're just out of luck. But if you hold on, there still is at least a chance that it will come back.
To anyone of Boomer age, this has to feel like Deja Vu All Over Again.
For a former op-ed columnist to sit on her pen this year feels downright un-American, so I began drafting a post with this title a few weeks ago. I figured the point would be self-evident after the Palin pick even for those who surfed on without reading past the hyperlink. But I scrapped the text in that draft when events unfolding around the will-we-or-won't-we bailout, and the will-we-or-won't-we debate, made the point even more pungent.
Here we are facing the largest financial crisis since 1929 and when it first hit, one candidate for president wanted to wait until a deal had been struck before even discussing his take on the issues, while his opponent said the crisis made it even more urgent for the two of them to engage on a public stage.
This generated some pundit quips on the topic of multi-tasking. For me, it underlined that only one of these prospective presidents is truly comfortable being scrutinized while events unfold in real time.
But even more significant is what it all suggests about which of the two is best equipped to make discerning decisions in difficult times on complex issues.
I am only half-way into this book but I can't say enough good things about it. This could as easily have been called "How Engineers Think" or "How Professors Think" since many of the same dynamics apply to anyone who absorbs a large body of knowledge and needs to apply it flexibly under real world conditions. However if a physician gets overly stuck inside a logic box it runs a real risk of killing someone. This issue is tackled head on by Jerome Groopman MD who also writes on matters medical for the New Yorker. In this book, he gives us an intimate, accessible glimpse into the minds of doctors, explaining the most common mistakes a physician might make. In this era of soaring medical error rates, everyone with a pulse should check out this book before their next checkup.
Title: How Doctors Think (click on the title to jump to the Amazon page)
Author: Jerome Groopman MD
Author's site: www.jeromegroopman.com
Spotlight NYT: Two recent columns are "must reads" for anyone who likes to keep the thinking lobes of their brains engaged. Both are steeped in insight and irony of the kind a Boomer might like, and together the two neatly bookmark each pole of the American spectrum that runs from over- to under-thinking.
In the first piece, Paul Krugman deftly skewers the new cult of know-nohing politics and the people who think too little. In the second hit of this double header, David Brooks lampoons the "social pseud" who wants to appear as if he thinks so much, you could never keep up.
Follow the story jump for links and detail.
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