Are light-bulb moments dead or just evolving?

Steven Johnson wants to replace the “you” in “eureka” with “we.”

The author of “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation” and a related TED Talk that has been viewed more than 1.5 million times, Johnson argues that the light-bulb metaphor of creation − where one person, often working alone, is struck by a moment of blinding insight − is inaccurate.

Instead, Johnson believes many good ideas come as the result of conversation and cooperation. Even something as revolutionary as Darwin’s theory of natural selection is more likely to “fade into view over a long period of time” than be the product of a single a-ha moment, according to his research.

Johnson credits the creation of the coffeehouse as an impetus for many modern ideas. It is, he argues, a place where folks come together and talk about pressing issues and, presumably, find solutions. (He is silent on whether many moments of inspiration are lost to a barista who shouts out orders and mispronounces names, or to customers who grouse over the high price of the latest venti concoction at the neighborhood Starbucks.)

Johnson’s book and TED Talk are 11 years old, but they are poised for a re-examination today.

For one thing, the world has invested heavily in the collaborative model, either because of theories like Johnson’s or as part of a larger communal push that Johnson’s work reflects. In education, where I spend most of my time, it’s hard to find a contemporary lesson that doesn’t feature some element of discussion.

“Work with a shoulder partner” and “get into groups” have become common teaching directives, far more so than in previous generations, when the main instructional mode was lecture and the primary way to demonstrate understanding was working solo.

These are tough times for students to be introverts, for sure. The world favors the extrovert or at least the ambivert, that rare bird at home in solitude and a crowd.

Another reason for Johnson’s work to come back into vogue is more obvious. Society is lurching toward some semblance of normal after several years of forced isolation because of the coronavirus pandemic.

During much of that time, coffeehouses, along with most everything else, were closed or operating on a heavily modified business model, one that kept people apart rather than together.

Some of the workarounds for face-to-face transactions, such as ordering by app and contactless deliveries − are here to stay, further minimizing the sorts of interactions that Johnson argues are essential for new ideas to percolate.

Nor were restaurants and coffeehouses the only businesses affected.

In every area of communal life, similar losses were felt. Businesses large and small transitioned to work-at-home models, and Zoom meetings replaced gathering around the conference table. Churches began to congregate via video feeds. Physical classrooms were replaced with virtual ones.

And while each of these substitutes still carried opportunities for collaboration, few people would argue that the replacements were equal to the originals. Nor has the return to “normal” been seamless. With some folks preferring to work from home, will their potential innovations also be AWOL?

It will be interesting to see if the world experiences an “idea crash” in the next few years as an intellectual echo of the various supply chain and financial woes cycling through now. Or maybe we will see instead a reflowering of various creative endeavors driven by individuals instead of groupthink.

Perhaps physical presence doesn’t matter as much in a world where social media sites have become the coffeehouses of a new age. Who is to say that the next great idea won’t come as the result of a Twitter thread with hundreds of contributors or a series of Wattpad entries that a group of readers interprets in a slightly different way?

The coffeehouse may look different, but the creative outcomes may be the same. The spirit of innovation could be experiencing its latest evolution.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

@cschillig on Twitter

Does 'undo send' make e-life even harder?

I usually don’t get excited about iPhone updates, but iOS 16 might be the exception.

The new operating system allows users to do two things that are really awesome, he said in his most breathless voice. One might even be life-changing. That is, if your life doesn’t involve skydiving naked from an aero plane or a lady with a body from outer space, as Vince Neil sings.

First things first − the cool, non-life-changing update. If you hold down your finger on a dominant figure in one of your photos, Apple’s new operating system automatically removes the background.

I tried it first with a photo of my dog. Boom! The camera fairies traced him with a white line that looked a little like a firecracker fuse. When I opened social media, I could paste just his image, minus the half-dozen Wilson tennis balls he’d strewn around the floor and the mountain of unread books on my nightstand.

Don’t write to me saying that Android phones have been doing this since Obama was president or that some 99-cent app does it better. One, I’m an unrepentant Apple snob, and two, I like the convenience of having nothing to install and just holding down my finger.

Now for the life-changing … uh, change. The new iOS gives you the option to edit or even delete a sent text message. Ever send a break-up text to the wrong significant other? Or had a glaring typo in a text to your boss that changed “oh fudge” to the word that got little Ralphie’s mouth washed out with Lifebuoy soap in “A Christmas Story”?

No? Me either, but I needed something dramatic to convey how indefatigably cool it is to be able to “edit” or “undo send.”

Because maybe at some point in your life you’ve been having two simultaneous text conversations, one with a colleague and one with your spouse, and accidentally told your colleague you loved him and your spouse that a Thursday morning meeting would be terrific.

Not an apocalyptic mistake, but still.

But here comes the small print − and as always, the devil is in the details. You can only truly edit messages to other people who are using the same iOS 16 operating system. If they have an earlier version or an Android phone, they’ll just get a new message with the edited text, so your gaffe or inelegant wording (“I think your boyfriend is a schmuck”) remains.

Even if you’re chatting with people using the new software, they can still press down on the edited message and see the original, so the “schmuck” message is just a fingertip away.

Which raises ethical, Pandora Box-y type questions. If I see an edited message, will I press down on it and see what the person said originally? Or do I respect their revision process and stick with the second draft?

You gotta know I’m pressing down on that edited message. Every. Single. Time. If you aren’t, then what’s wrong with you? (Editor: please edit that last sentence to read, “If you aren’t, then you are a far better person than I am.” Thank you.)

Better to use the “undo send” feature, which blows up the message on the screen with a little puff of blue, much like Wile E. Coyote hitting the desert floor after falling off a cliff.

Even there (the deleted text, not the desert floor), a few caveats remain. “Undo send” works for only two minutes after a message is sent.

And if the receiver has even one Apple device, like an older iPad, that still uses an earlier operating system, the message remains, even if it’s deleted from other devices.

I’m waiting for some wit to come up with a name for the daredevil practice of sending a scandalous text and then trying to delete it before the receiver reads it. Destined to become the next TikTok challenge, it could be called e-sendiary.

These changes may prompt iPhone users to have frank conversations among themselves. Have you updated yet? Will you peek at edited messages? How quickly do you generally check texts?

Plus the angst of wondering if your poker-faced friends read your rant about their lack of parenting skills after their little darling doodled with a Sharpie on your living room walls, or if you deleted it in time.

On second thought, maybe this second new feature isn’t life-changing and indefatigably cool. It’s more like a pencil with an eraser that still lets people see what’s been erased.

But hey, at least I can still drop out the backgrounds on my dog photos.

Keep all books circulating during Banned Books Week and beyond

Banned Books Week is Sept. 18-24, and it’s a perfect time to tell librarians thank you.

Thank you for helping us find books.

Thank you for helping to keep books available.

Thank you for helping to ensure that the local library’s collection reflects the diversity of the people who live in the community.

In today’s hot-button political climate, libraries are at the center of the culture wars. Groups in neighborhoods across the nation are working hard to limit the materials that circulate there. They are trying to put certain titles out of reach, either through outright bans or by policies about who may borrow them.

And when they don’t get what they want, these groups threaten library funding, pressure elected officials and promote candidates who support similar restrictive philosophies. All legal, to be sure, but with a result that, if successful, would decimate people’s ability to access information freely.

A recent Time magazine story chronicles an attempt by some conservative residents in Victoria, Texas, to compel the local library to remove 44 books, many with LGBTQ themes. When library officials resisted, the residents leaned on the county commissioners, since the county owns the building that houses the library. At least one commissioner supports serving the library with an eviction notice.

Curtailing access to library materials is especially dangerous because our libraries, much like our courts, are the great levelers. This court philosophy was popularized by Atticus Finch, a character in Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird,” a book that has taken a turn or two on the American Library Association’s Top 10 Most Challenged Books list.

The ALA notes that a challenged book is one that somebody, somewhere, has tried to have removed from library shelves. If the attempt is successful, the ALA then characterizes the book as “banned.”

Just to show that the practice isn’t exclusively right-leaning, one of the reasons given for the most recent appearance by “To Kill a Mockingbird” on the list, in 2020, is that it includes a “white savior” character, often a complaint by people on the left who oppose certain mainstream texts.

And while the potential trauma from exposing students to racism of the past with the “n-word” in books like “Mockingbird” and Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” is a topic worthy of discussion, it’s not reason enough to restrict access to the books.

It would be easy to see book banning as a purely academic issue, far removed from day-to-day concerns about the economy or the environment. But consider this: Suicidal thoughts and attempts by LGBTQ youth are significantly higher than among their non-LGBTQ peers. One of the reasons is a sense of alienation and lack of community support.

The library is one of the few places these kids can go to find materials that answer questions about their lives and make them realize they are not alone. When these materials are removed from shelves or require parental consent, these kids lose access, especially if they live in households that are not supportive.

For these patrons, libraries and freely circulating materials could be the difference between life and death.

Even people who are indifferent or opposed to the struggles of LGBTQ youth should recognize the perils of letting any group dictate the contents of taxpayer-supported libraries.

While today it might be about content that they too disagree with, tomorrow it could be something central to their way of life. German pastor Martin Niemöller, writing about the rise of Nazism, voiced a similar sentiment in these often-cited lines: “First they came for the ________, and I did not speak out / Because I was not a __________.” Readers likely know how the quote ends.

So, during Banned Books Week, visit a library, peruse the shelves, find something you already like and something that challenges you. Read with an open mind, and if you still disagree with that tough book, talk about it and write about it, but don’t deny others the same opportunity you had to experience it.

And while you’re there, thank the librarians for helping to keep the doors of knowledge open for everybody.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig.

@cschillig on Twitter

Biden's mistakes in addressing extremism

In Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” pilots who fly dangerous missions are categorized as crazy and are therefore ineligible to fly dangerous missions. But when they recognize these missions are dangerous and ask not to fly them, they are demonstrating their sanity, and can no longer claim the exemption.

President Joe Biden faced a similar paradox in his decision to speak last Thursday in Philadelphia.

As president, Biden has a responsibility to call out dangers to the nation. MAGA extremists are such a danger. They refuse to recognize the rule of law and the peaceful transfer of power, and they are increasingly comfortable advocating for violence to achieve their ends.

Yet calling out a small but nonetheless significant sliver of Americans risks further entrenching their MAGA identity and could serve as a catalyst for the very violence the president seeks to prevent.

Catch-22 territory, for sure.

Biden’s speech was laudatory in many ways. He noted the zero-sum fallacy that motivates many far-right radicals: the mistaken belief that there is only so much freedom to go around. “The MAGA Republicans believe that for them to succeed, everyone else has to fail,” Biden said, the opposite of a nation that is “big enough for all of us to succeed.”

He noted legislative successes that will make life better for all Americans, including a new gun safety law, health care reform and a climate initiative.

And he was correct in noting that American democracy is not guaranteed. Election deniers are working “in state after state to give power to decide elections in America to partisans and cronies.”

We need a president to speak out forcibly about such issues, even if by so doing he can no longer claim to be above the fray when it comes to politics.

However, Biden’s speech had significant missteps, too.

The first was a failure to separate hardcore MAGA supporters from Republicans. The president was clear that only a very small number of Republicans are truly aligned with MAGA philosophy, despite the party today being “dominated, driven and intimidated by Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans.”

However, we’ve reached a point where it is helpful to more forcibly separate rank-and-file Republicans from this extremist faction, which seeks to align itself with the GOP as a means to an end, since their numbers alone are insufficient to win elections.

Unfortunately, the reverse is also true. Many rank-and-file Republicans have also felt it necessary to align themselves with MAGA supporters to win elections. This allegiance has proven somewhat effective in the short-term but threatens to delegitimize the party in the long-term.

Similarly, Democrats have done themselves no favors in instances where they have supported MAGA candidates in primaries because they believe that such individuals will be easier to defeat in general elections.

All these “politics-make-for-strange-bedfellows” moments have helped to solidify and legitimize the MAGA brand and bring the weird QAnon-inspired theories that motivate many followers into the mainstream. Biden shouldn’t have called them MAGA Republicans; they are just MAGA.

Biden also erred in branding their extremist perspective a fait accompli. “MAGA Republicans have made their choice,” he said. “They embrace anger. They thrive on chaos. They live, not in the light of truth but in the shadow of lies.”

This may be accurate, but it doesn’t have to be permanent.

I recently read that instead of asking why MAGA supporters believe what they believe, we should ask what they gain from believing it.

One answer is that MAGA provides an identity, a place of belonging. Better to think of MAGA supporters as fervent fans of a sports franchise. No matter how many times the Cleveland Browns disappoint, most fans aren’t going to one day show up in Steelers jerseys.

But even for super-fans, there is a breaking point. If a team moves to another city or signs a player whose off-field actions are too appalling, some fans jump ship.

No matter how many times Trump lies about the election, foments dissatisfaction with anybody who disagrees with him and leads crowds in chants of “Lock her up!” after the FBI has removed hundreds of classified documents from his home, many fans are going to continue to wear his jersey.

But just as with sports franchises, a movement’s supporters can reach a breaking point. Republicans are increasingly removing Trump references from their websites and distancing themselves from his extremist views. And some MAGAs are awakening to the realization that where there’s so much smoke, there might be a fire. That’s a heartening sign.

Instead of writing off an entire demographic, Biden and the Democrats need to ask how to better publicize what they’ve done to help MAGAs. Then they need to ask themselves what else they can do to make their lives − and the lives of all Americans − better.

Listening and finding common ground is the first step. Consigning them to oblivion only makes the MAGA agenda, such as it is, more appealing. And that’s a Catch-22 to which Biden can’t afford to succumb.

'Today I am a man!'

This column is an oldie, but I can't say how old. Harvey Pekar passed in 2010, and this predates that. It still accurately describes my aversion to home repairs, although I've gotten better at making them over the years. But not much better.

***  

“Today I am a man!” shouts Harvey Pekar, plunger over his head, kneeling before the porcelain god he has successfully unclogged.

In “Another Day,” a collection of vignettes presented as comic-book stories, Pekar compares fixing a toilet to a Bar Mitzvah, how he was reluctant at age 13 to utter the five words that signal the change from childhood to adulthood because he was a “klutz” who “couldn’t do mechanical stuff … couldn’t fix anything.”

I know exactly how he feels about the agony and ecstasy of being all thumbs at home repairs.

This week, the sole toilet at Casa Schillig started to work overtime, gurgling water long after it should have. Luckily, it didn’t overflow, but for a few days, gallons were wasted, driving up the water bill and making us poster children for “Conspicuous Consumption.”

The solution, I found, was to jiggle the handle. If that didn’t work, removing the lid from the tank and pulling the lever on the filler valve did the trick.

Being the adaptable sort, this fix could have lasted me indefinitely. My wife and daughter, however, accustomed to the luxury of fully operational indoor plumbing, demanded more. Apparently, waiting around while the tank refills to see if one must manually stop the water flow isn’t convenient. Some people have no patience.

This left me with a conundrum. Behind door number one, as Monty Hall says, was the professional plumber, who would charge a fortune and look at me askance for not fixing such a simple problem myself.

Behind door number two were helpful family members who know full well that I can handle nothing more complex than changing a light bulb (if that) and who would make smart comments while handling the problem for me.

Door Number Three was the most frightening: Fix it myself.

A few years ago, I invested in the greatest do-it-yourself book ever, “The Stanley Complete Step-by-Step Book of Home Repair and Improvement.” It’s not great because it shows you how to fix lots of things (to be honest, I’ve never gotten past the table of contents), but because in the introduction, people like me are told to take a hike.

The book “warns you away from potentially dangerous or difficult jobs and suggests when to hire professionals for the tasks you don’t feel qualified to tackle or ones where you know you will need help to meet codes,” writes the author.

I’ve quoted the line many times when the subject of home improvements comes up. Repaper the dining room? Potentially dangerous. Paint the ceiling? Not qualified to tackle. Hang a picture? It won’t meet code.

Yet I knew something would have to be done. I was spending too many nights worrying about the toilet, jerking out of a sound sleep because I feared somebody had forgotten to jiggle the handle after flushing. (The dog is particularly bad at this.) When I compared the cost of fixing the toilet to sleepless nights or the other alternative – selling the house – I decided to follow the path of least resistance.

For 12 bucks, I bought a toilet repair kit. The box shows a simple three-step method: Take out old guts, drop in new guts, start sleeping again.

Once I got it home and opened it, the three-step plan became the thirteen-step plan, with A, B, and C subsets illustrated with lots of pictures and filled with warnings about how the new unit would devour the bathroom if not properly installed.

My daughter saw me with the kit and promptly ran into her bedroom and shut the door. “This measly door won’t keep you safe from a solid wall of water,” I shouted.

“I know,” she answered. “But I just feel safer in here.”

Within ten minutes, I had a minor flood (they aren’t kidding when they say to drain the tank before starting), a stripped nut (on the toilet, ye of dirty mind) and a repair job that was going south fast.

Ten minutes later, things got better. I tightened everything up, pushed down on the flush button, and ran into the closet to hide. Nothing bad happened. Water went out, water came in, water stopped running.

Success!

I’ve learned not to get too excited when I fix something, because usually in a week or two it needs fixed again, this time by a professional who undoes whatever mess I made the first time.

But for right now, today, I refuse to think about that. Tomorrow I may well come home to find the toilet has fallen through the floor into the kitchen, but for now, I am joining Harvey Pekar and poet Walt Whitman in sounding my barbaric yawp over the rooftops of the world:

Today I am a man!

Full report on 'Full House' house

Vacations make strange bedfellows.

This was clear a few weeks ago when I found myself exchanging phones with a man from Australia so I could take his picture in front of the “Full House” house and he could take mine and my wife’s.

Yes, I said the “Full House” house.

It wasn’t on my list of Top Ten Things to Do in San Francisco. All I knew about “Full House” is that it starred John Stamos, Bob Saget and the Olsen twins.

But the site was on my wife’s itinerary, so I went along to get along, as the saying goes, despite signs the people who live in and around the house wanted lookie-loos to stay away. These include a literal “no trespassing” sign and a ban on tour buses on the street, located in the Lower Pacific Heights area.

So we took our photos and kept moving. Yet in the short time we were there, several other cars drove slowly by and dozens of pedestrians, cameras snapping and fingers pointing, showed up too.

A little Googling taught me that despite being set in San Francisco, “Full House” filmed only its opening credits and some exterior shots in the city. Most of the show was shot on the Warner Bros. studio lot in Los Angeles.

It reminds me of a situation much closer to home, the “Christmas Story” house in Cleveland. While the book the movie is based on takes place in Indiana and most of the movie was shot in Toronto, the Cleveland location (where exterior scenes of the home and neighborhood were filmed) has become a tourist magnet.

Unlike the “Full House” property, however, the “Christmas Story” house, purchased and restored to its original working-class splendor by a fan, welcomes visitors, especially those willing to pay to go inside or patronize the gift shop across the street.

This embrace of a modest pop-culture distinction may be the difference between the unpretentious Rust Belt and the tony west coast.

Our acquaintance from Australia seemed embarrassed by his pilgrimage to the “Full House” site. He needn’t have been. We all like what we like, after all. No apologies necessary.

It did get me thinking, however, about how certain places become popular, sometimes out of proportion with their larger cultural significance. Certain perennially popular sites speak to our values systems and to what a society considers worth commemorating. If you believe history is written by the winners, then you must concede tourist guides are, too.

The places most people find worth visiting also benefit from extensive promotion. Some of the lesser ones survive because of proximity to more-popular attractions. The “Full House” house, for example, is one mile away from the Painted Ladies, a row of Victorian homes facing Alamo Square Park, drawing thousands of visitors every day. (Those homes are also featured in the “Full House” opening, I’m told.)

So if you’re already in the park and have even a passing interest in “Full House,” you’ll likely go.

Of course, San Francisco is notable for its many hills, making a normally short trek akin to scaling the Matterhorn. Would you do that for “Full House”? Or for somebody you love who loves “Full House”?

In most cases, getting there is half the fun of vacation. But this is not a hill I’m willing to die on when climbing a hill I’m not willing to die on.

Reach Chris at chris.schillig@yahoo.com. On Twitter: @cschillig on Twitter. 

Teachers' opening salvo sets tone for students

Few topics create more angst for teachers than the First Day Lesson.

If you have educators in your life, you know they’ve been thinking about how to start the coming school year since flipping the calendar to August, if not before.

The teaching profession, for the most part, endorses the philosophy that well begun is well done, that whatever happens on the first day sets the stage for every moment of the rest of the year. So that first lesson has to be sharp like cheddar. Or an obsidian knife. Don’t just break the ice in class, slice through it.

One of the most common icebreakers is the Candy Trick, where the teacher stands at the door with a bag of sweets (shades of the witch in “Hansel and Gretel”) and tells students to take as many pieces as they’d like. Only later do students discover they must share one fact about themselves for each piece.

A variation is the Toilet-Paper Trick, where the teacher substitutes a roll of (unused) teepee for the candy and has students roll off as many squares as they want. Then they have to write something about themselves on each square.

Teachers either love to share their first-day lessons or guard them like Gollum, stroking their origami notecards or glitter-covered snowflakes and crooning, “My precious! My precious!”

The sharers post everywhere, all over Facebook and social media, during staff meetings and to complete strangers in office-supply stores. They are proud of their intricate charts to ensure that every student will speak to every other student on the first day, or that each kid will contribute a block to a quilt on the wall.

I’m not immune to shenanigans on the first day, but not terribly original either. For the last few years, I’ve relied on the Notecard Trick, giving one to each student and having them answer some moderately gonzo questions about themselves − least favorite food, a color they’ve always wanted to dye their hair, a song they never want to hear again, etc. The only thing they can’t put on the card is their name.

Then I collect the cards, shuffle, and hand them back out. Students must find the owner of the card I give them, have a conversation and introduce that person to the rest of the class.

One thing teachers, myself included, often don’t consider is how First Day Lessons affect introverts. Sure, outgoing kids will love to rattle off 47 fun facts about themselves on 47 sheets of toilet paper or introduce a fellow student who hates linguine, but what about those who find such classroom antics painful? Or who have been subjected to them multiple times on the same day?

Edutopia, a website from the George Lucas Educational Foundation, offers different questions for teachers to ask at the start of the year. 

They are: 

1. What helps you feel welcomed?
2. How do you like to be greeted?
3. What strengths do you bring to the classroom? The school?
4. What do you like most about school so far? What could change?

These are a great foundation, either in addition to a rousing game of Two Truths and a Lie or in place of it. They give students lots of room to navigate, so what teachers learn might be more significant than the last show they binge-watched on Netflix.

A final point about first-day activities − or first days in general − is that it’s OK if they don’t go perfectly for teachers or students. Trying to make them flawless is part of why everybody is so jittery in August.

Most school years have 180 days. While the first is important, so are the other 179. One thing all teachers can model is a willingness to admit that yesterday didn’t go so well, but they’re back at it today, learning from what went right and what went wrong, even if the latter happened on the over-hyped first day.

That’s not always something that fits on a square of toilet paper, even if you write really really small.