When utilitarianism falls down: DIY foreign aid and Singer

You probably have read by now about the do-it-yourselfers of foreign aid who are risk-taking, inspiring, and just this side of crazy.

I appreciate that Nicholas Kristof mentions the difficulties they have run into in practical aspects of their life (jobs are lost, lives are abandoned) because it makes Kristof seem less sanctimonious. At first blush this seems to bolster Kristof's unofficial anointing of Peter Singer as the official philosopher of the "culture of social engagement" (I suppose this is like being the anti-Nietzsche). Singer is, after all, a utilitarian. If, on the one hand, you don't have a date, a job, a bed, or a car, but on the other hand are building a shelter for orphans in Nepal - you can easily reckon up "greatest good for the greatest number" and come out in the win column.

But not so fast, Utility Man! It's all about how the utilities are calculated. What happens when the shelter gets bigger and better? Now it's a school, with

[...]classes from kindergarten through sixth grade, as well as a library, a cafeteria and an outdoor auditorium. The plan is to expand it one year at a time until it is a high school as well.

At what point should Maggie Doyne - according to Singer - say "That's enough now! Let's stop here and give the rest of the money to people who need it even more. There are poorer orphans down the road, or in Burma or Africa." Does the school really need a library, a cafeteria, and an outdoor auditorium?

Of course this is ridiculous. The orphans should have a great school. But at this point we aren't talking any more about the greatest good for the greatest number. We are talking about needy orphans who Maggie Doyne fell in love with and wants to help. Utilitarianism falls down but compassion keeps on.

My recent New York reading, recorded

Here's a recording of the Yiddish-English poetry reading under the auspices of the League for Yiddish, under the title "What Would Glatshteyn Do," which took place on August 1st in New York. You can hear me at about the 2:30 mark.

PDFs of the poems in Yiddish and English are here.

Współczesna literatura jidysz

That's Polish for "Contemporary Yiddish Literature." An article of mine in English by that title was translated into Polish for the inaugural issue of the journal Cwishn, "a Jewish literary quarterly." I haven't seen the translation yet, so if there are any Polish readers in the audience, let me know how it is.

I plan to post the English article at some point.

The thought I just can't catch

Naturally it reveals itself to me,
the thought I just can't catch,
as I highstep out of the bath.

More here.

The Popular Language that Few Bother to Learn

Will Yiddish scholarship, the eternal victim, fall prey to lackluster language learning?

Twenty years ago there were four American universities with Yiddish programs: the Jewish Theological Seminary, Harvard, Columbia, and UCLA. Now there are more than a dozen. From Michigan to Maryland, from Chicago to Santa Cruz, students are learning about Yiddish literature and culture. Interest in Yiddish is growing even as its speakers (outside Charedi enclaves) continue to decline in numbers. But interest in the topic of Yiddish does not translate into a stable foundation for teaching the language, which makes some scholars nervous about the future of Yiddish scholarship.

More here.

After the article's publication, a number of comments were published in another issue of Mendele.

An Altar Barbecue

To the barbecue of sacrifice
the hyssop branches add their spice...

...for more, become a backer here!

When our things get old

When our things weren't supposed to think so much, when they were old-school cars, squat rotary phones, and pea-colored refrigerators, they broke down because their bodies broke down. A wire shorted or a fan belt broke. Now when our things have brains bigger than ours, they do what brains do with age: break down slowly. Startup takes longer than it should, programs pop up that we want hidden away, data is corrupted, thoughts ooze slowly through the tangle of pipes.

Then the decision comes. When there is no bright flash before the burst bulb, when there is no flat tire to the thinking machine, when do we throw it away?

What should a bilingual book of poetry look like?

Should every poem be "available" in both languages -- via translation? "equivalent" poems? how? Or does there not need to be an exact symmetry? You can read what promises to be an enlightening discussion by pledging even just one thin dollar at Kickstarter and becoming a prenumerant (pre-subscriber) of my poetry manuscript.

Ode to the Dove at Words Without Borders

Trapped on the lips are sounds, like pearls of forts oceanate
are mute for thousands of years, and over the muteness—a blade.
"Dove darling, childhood's child, let the lips speak, give them speech
Become now the cry of the sounds, or else the dream is extinct . . ."

Read more.

Not in the Same Breath: A Yiddish and English Book of Poetry

Get in on the ground floor and support my nascent book of poetry over at Kickstarter!

Losing Yiddish bookstores and cluck-cluck-clucking

The general point of Joseph Berger's article in the Times is that CYCO, the bookstore, is going out of business. This is sad, of course! Hayim is a great guy, has struggled manfully under trying circumstances, and I (with all my organizational and financial talents, which are +/- nil) will try and help find a substitute. I've bought hundreds of dollars of books from CYCO and we have sold hundreds of dollars of books through them.

This is not stupid.

But whenever Berger writes about Yiddish as a language - well, see my "friend's" twitter feed @yiddishseuss. Yiddish isn't spoken by anyone anymore, except for the Holocaust survivors. Oh, and the Chasidim, among whom it is "booming" and a "lingua franca," whatever those are supposed to mean. And Yiddish has a "lilt" and a "kvetch." If anyone wrote about another language the way J. Berger does (say, about African American English or Spanish) he/she would be rightfully run out of town on a herring-draped rail.

And the whole *tone* of the piece, such cluck-cluck-cluck and automatic nostalgizing, got on my nerves. Yes it is sad, but the bookstore is failing because organizational and economic support is lacking, not because J. Berger's parents failed to speak Yiddish with him. English bookstores are failing all over this great land of ours too.

Cluck-cluck-clucking won't help much. Finding a warehouse, setting up a real Web site, and donating some dough will. Can I do these things? Prolly not.

The "was" and the "still"

from Diary Poems
Avrom Sutzkever

Here and the there are together-together
and to swim reaching depths the ray bends itself downward.

Scythe is connected to stalk. This is how,
like violin player is one with the sound.

That's how the was is enbrothered with still,
that's how a woman and man are enlimbed.

--from Yiddish: Z.Sh.B.

Sutzkever on the Square

Some translations of mine of his Diary Poems (Lider fun togbukh) are included in the Summer/Fall 2010 issue of Washington Square. (If you would like to look at the process of translation in the raw & blogged, look over here.)

What Would Glatshteyn Do?

That's the English title of this bilingual poetry reading I'm participating in tonight at the Bowery Poetry Club. (What would Glatshteyn do, indeed? Probably look down his nose at us.) If you can't make it, you can catch it online. Hope to see you there.

Dear Friends,
If you can't make it to our program WWGD? [What Would Glatshteyn Do?] An Evening of Yiddish Poetry you can watch it online at the exact time of the event, Sunday, August 1 6:00 PM - 7:45 PM (EST). Go to bowerypoetrylive.com.

POETS AND SONGWRITERS:

Zackary Sholem Berger, Gitl Schaechter-Viswanath, Josh Waletzky
David Botwinik, Leyzer Burko, David Fallick, Samuel Marder, Charles Nydorf, Mindy Rinkewich, Elinor Robinson, Yefim Vinnitsky, Gershon Weiss, Jennifer Goodman Wolloch

TRANSLATIONS:
Albert Rosenblatt, Yaira Singer, Wojtek Tworek, Sheva Zucker

Don't miss the Yiddish poetry event of the millenium!

What is a "Best Hospital"?

U.S. News ranked the hospitals again, and my employer came in first, for the 20th year in a row. I can't be unhappy about that!

But how should you choose a hospital anyway? I wrote about that a little while ago - it's more complicated than U.S. News makes it out to be.

Unfortunately, as a recent research article points out, the U.S. News index is based nearly entirely on reputation. Which is not a terrible thing, as I pointed out, just incomplete.

Maybe we should rank hospitals (or, at any rate, medical schools) according to a different index, say social mission? Some folks tried that, and their results are presented in the Annals of Internal Medicine (subscription required).

In that list, Hopkins, as well as NYU - where I trained for residency - are ranked rock-bottom. But the criteria used to quantify social mission has some big problems, as an accompanying editorial points out (sub. req.).

Until we have comprehensive outcome measures, it looks like we're going to have to integrate all indices according to our own individual metrics. Isn't that called reputation?

Disorientation in shul

I went to a synagogue in San Francisco on Shabbos and Sunday, and I was asked to lead davening on Sunday. I did not refuse the customary three times, because I am greedy for the amud. (Good thing I found that imperfection to work on, as we start the long slow slide, or hard sweaty climb, into fast-n-forgiveness. Because I'm lacking any others. Yes that's right.)

Leading davening for the first time somewhere is disorienting. You know someone thinks you're going too fast. Someone else wonders why aren't you songful & joyous & Carlebachelicious; a third grumbles why you don't get the hell on with it already, some people work for a living.

And then, of course, it's disorienting for them. It's Bob's turn today! Fie on thee, you usurper, why are you displacing Bob?

I find this disorientation a useful microcosm of liberal Judaism. You're never quite sure. You don't have the fundamentalist's confidence that God has blessed your every move. You have the narrow ells of the religious life and the wide anomie-spaces of modernity. You're always going too fast and too slow, always displacing someone.

But then there's hot tea afterwards (hot tea is welcome in San Francisco, even in July) and someone brought biscotti. Good morning!

Anthologized

I can sing the praises of the Ecco Anthology of International Poetry.

I can also mention that my translation of Glatshteyn was included! I know this only because a friend was browsing at the Newark airport and picked up the book.

Buy the book!

Poverty and segregation: Baltimore versus Manhattan

I asked my cousin, who studies urban planning at Berkeley, the following (the question was provoked by my experiences with patients who come from desperate poverty here in Baltimore, something that I encountered only rarely among my Manhattan patients):

I keep comparing Balto. and NY. with regard to poverty and racial segregation. Can you point me to a good academic treatment of this topic? E.g.: Manhattan is segregated by income, obviously, but is it segregated by race when income is controlled for? And what is more influential in explaining Baltimore's neighborhood patterns, income or race?

I found her answer interesting.

It sounds like you're more interested in empirical evidence than theory (?), but I know more about the theory (and I think the theory is actually more interesting) so I'll start there. The classic debate about urban poverty, race, and segregation is represented by William Julius Wilson on one side, and Douglas Massey on the other. As I understand it, Wilson argues that segregation is at root a structural economic issue, not just a racial issue; Massey argues that segregation is caused primarily by racial discrimination. This debate is still simmering because - obviously - race and income segregation are so heavily intertwined that controlling for one of the other is exceedingly challenging, and even if you somehow distinguish between the two factors you still haven't really explained the black ghetto.

Wilson's first foray on this subject: The Truly Disadvantaged (1987) - also has a recent book out called More Than Just Race

Massey's response (with Denton): American Apartheid (1993)

Good survey of the literature on the causes of inner-city poverty: Chapple and Teitz, "The Causes of Inner-City Poverty: Eight Hypotheses in Search of Reality"

Empirical evidence: I don't know of a good overview or study that anyone considers definitive. A lot of the literature is historic (particularly now right before the new Census data is released). Rather to my surprise I did not find any interesting looking case studies about either Baltimore or Manhattan but maybe I didn't look hard enough.

I was interested to note that when I searched WorldCat and my favorite urban planning database (Urban Studies and Planning: A SAGE Full-Text Collection), most of the empirical studies seemed to be by public health or education folks. See two citations below that look interesting, but are old. The problem with using 1990 or even 2000 data is that we think so much as changed - i.e. the suburbanization of poverty, gentrification of the inner-city, immigration. If I run into anything else I'll let you know.

Coulton, Claudia J., Chow, Julian, Wang, Edward C., Su, Marilyn, Geographic Concentration of Affluence and Poverty in 100 Metropolitan Areas, 1990, Urban Affairs Review 1996 32: 186-216 (link)

Osypuk, Theresa L., Galea, Sandro, McArdle, Nancy, Acevedo-Garcia, Dolores, Quantifying Separate and Unequal: Racial-Ethnic Distributions of Neighborhood Poverty in Metropolitan America, Urban Affairs Review 2009 45:25-65 (link)

Authentic values and real interests: Daniel Sulmasy's new model of end-of-life decision making

These are very brief notes from a talk I attended at the Osler Center Day this past Friday.

Sulmasy presented what he calls the traditional tripartite view of EOL decision making, each part of which suffers from significant defects. The top of the pyramid, the optimum, is customarily held to be the living will (LW). However, living wills are both too vague ("no heroic measures") and too specific ("CPR but no counterpulsation"), involve interpretation of texts, and aren't done by most people anyway (current living-will rates are about 15%, per Sulmasy).

The next best choice is held to be substituted judgment (SJ). Sulmasy pointed out that SJ (a) places significant psychological pressure on families, with attendant sequelae; (b) is difficult to instruct family members in, because its meaning is not really clear; and (c) isn't what most people, when asked hypothetically, want to happen when they're non compos mentis anyway.

Sulmasy pointed out - interestingly enough - that the legal pedigree of substituted judgment goes back to English law, when questions like "What happens when a crazy person inherits a bunch of money?" or "Can a lunatic be made to donate a kidney?" had the courts looking to SJ for answers. (The case law had names like A Lunatic, but I can't remember the references. The big Columbia Law reference which got the SJ ball rolling in the 70s is here.)

Then at the bottom of the heap is Best Interest of the Patient, which no one likes because it's (a) paternalistic and (b) difficult to discern (Sulmasy didn't give (b), but I think it's obvious).

Sulmasy made the point that while LWs are supposedly optimum, everyone acts like Substituted Judgment is better.

So what's the better model? Consider the patient as a person, says Sulmasy, and think of the authentic values of that person. Then take into account, further, the clinical facts of the case. Then, keeping in mind the real interests of that person in light of their values and the facts of the case, try to come to a decision which respects all of those.

This is where my paraphase probably falls flat. But the key here that Sulmasy emphasized is (a) the neo-Aristotelian nature of his enterprise, i.e. emphasizing full flourishing; and (b) the skepticism of Sulmasy towards "Western, liberal" thinking which values autonomy above all else.

Another word for mustard

That's not how the word is pronounced, I hissed.

But the damage was done:

You tore the tongue out from every martyr

because you could not say the word for mustard

I taught you a week ago.

Torturing them over again

when we tell jokes about old men and fish

or different words for penis.

Am I wholly serious here? I'm not

serious enough. Reread the page.

Learn my name in the language

I want to speak. Silence

is the deadest tongue.