Post-grad programs

Zach,

Thanks for your advice today on a post-grad program. I put them all into a list, and figured it might be fun to share it on the blog, to see if you or any stragglers out there in the series of tubes have any thoughts.

Again, my two main requirements for programs:

1. I want to work with smart and motivated kids around my age
2. I want to do something physical and as outdoorsy as possible

I'll just summarize some of the things I've been looking at (in rank order of relatively interesting-ness):

• American Jewish World Service (AJWS)
  
  • Zach and Yoav did programs here. Zach says it really defines the Jewish community of my generation. He says it's an excellent NGO.
    • They have a Volunteer Summer: 7 weeks in rural Africa, Asia, or Americas helping to build infrastructure and sustainability (http://ajws.org/what_we_do/service_and_travel_opportunities/volunteer_summer/)
• AVODAH is a Jewish Service Corps
  • http://www.avodah.net/apply/
• Humanity in Action has a summer program to explore social and political roots of discrimination
  • http://www.humanityinaction.org/programs/summerfellowship
• DOROT Fellowship
  
  • Jenny did this after college and she highly encouraged me to apply for this. It's like a year long in Israel. I don't know that it's up my alley exactly. But it looks compelling.
  • http://www.dorot.org/dfioverview
    
• SIT has a number of semester and summer programs
  • You could spend 6 weeks in the Balkans studying social exclusion and minority rights (http://www.sit.edu/SSA_Other_documents/SIT-Study-Abroad-summer-catalog.pdf)
• CIEE has a number of programs like SIT
  • http://www.ciee.org/study/index.aspx
    
• WWOOF is an international network focused on working on an organic farm, where you don't pay them anything and they don't pay you anything, but you live there, eat their food, and work
  • http://www.wwoof.org/
• Volunteers for Peace has a lot of projects throughout the world
  • For example, http://www.ivsp.org/vfpdetails.aspx?campcode=PerUrp22-10&begin=04/07/2010&end=04/27/2010&type=
• AmeriCorps looks cool
  • http://www.americorps.gov/about/ac/index.asp
• TechnoServe
  • Helping people in poverty devise business solutions. I think it's mostly for McKinsey folk. http://www.technoserve.org/work-impact/index.html
    

And for good measure,

• Skiing and working in Colorado
• Vipassana meditation or TM
• Going to yeshiva. Pardes looks amazing (http://www.pardes.org.il/student_life/)
  • Also: http://www.pardes.org.il/about/philosophy/index.php

Elliot

Building, Awareness, and the Benefit of Online Chat

Zach,

I'd like to point out a few things I really enjoyed about your post:

• "As an inherently interactive blog, we can aim to increase our self-awareness"
  
  One of my qualms that I enumerated in my initial post is that blogs often broaden, and don't build, in the sense that we have scattered knowledge about a lot, but no deep knowledge about any one thing, which is essentially useless. (This was, as I remember, the central thesis of Nick Carr's article in The Atlantic). But here you signaled blogging as an approach to building: you write, "we can aim to increase our self-awareness."
  
  We're not just writing and hoping something develops. I don't think continued production works or means anything. (A favorite quote of mine, "We've heard that a million monkeys at a million keyboards could produce the complete works of Shakespeare; now, thanks to the Internet, we know that is not true.") That's why The New Republic's blog has lost resonance with me. It's just conventional wisdom commenting on other conventional wisdom. I don't think it serves to really educate, even though it does make us aware of political goings-on.
  
  Hopefully, a blog can have a trajectory that serves to deepen. And I haven't fingered my blogging trajectory yet, but I mostly know what it's not.
  

• "I think with awareness dishonesty becomes a lot harder and openness a lot easier, and that it ultimately makes for a much more interesting writer to read."
  
  I think this is a gorgeous point, but I don't agree with it. I see self-awareness as a tool (or force), that doesn't have a direction associated with it such as the honesty-dishonesty dimension. For example, in Zen in the Art of Archery, Herrigel became a master archer under the direction of Awa Kenzo. In order to achieve mastery, he had to cultivate a mental state that had much more to do with awareness than anything physical. After Herrigel returned to his native Germany, he became a Nazi. So the point is, how could someone who cultivated such great awareness go down such a wrong path?
  
  If you think about actors who are especially self-aware, you realize they are using their abilities to deceive or act. The beauty of Andy Kaufman's acts was that you were never sure whether he was faking it or being serious. Was he really traumatized by an audience laughing at him? He would make many believe so.
  
  Kerouac had a special style of writing. I remember his jive-talk in On the Road. But the stream-of-consciousness narrative style (I've got to read every book on this list) just has to be different from the psychological theory of stream-of-consciousness. William James' conception was that stream-of-consciousness refers to everything that is passing through the mind. Since much of what passes through the mind is pre-linguistic (all of these inarticulated thoughts), it would be very hard to record them all to paper. I won't say it's impossible to capture stream-of-consciousness to paper, and in fact, I think that's the benefit one gets from writing and meditating--capturing those fleeting thoughts and bringing them into reality through writing.
  

• "Personal interactions offer intangible human qualities that an internet community could never provide: a joke is always funnier with others to laugh with, and most would agree there to be a physical quality to loneliness"
  
  I think I can empathize with this point, because I can recall laughing so hard in person with friends. But I can also recall laughing during online conversation. I think that talking online, having the ability to leave your immediate time and place, and often communicate anonymously means that you don’t have to deal with a lot of social stigma or “layers.”
  
  You seem almost sure that offline interaction trumps an online interaction. In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell tells the story of Chris Langan, who demonstrated brilliance at an early age, but due to his poverty and the place where he grew up, he could not connect himself to the right mentors and professors. So he grew up, with IQ off the charts, working as a bar bouncer, finally married, and then spent his time in the rural country reading and working on a broad theory on physics, continuing to be cynical of universities and the general system (recall your paraphrasing of Obama who said we need to work within institutions...clearly it's bad that Langan had such a dismal outlook on universities as a function of his limited interaction with them).
  
  Or my good friend, I'll call her Tiffany, who found a chatroom on AIM in the 7th or 8th grade. She would come home after school and meet the same group of kids day after day. They were from all over the world. They developed deep friendships, had wondrous discussions, and their relationships persist to this day.
  
  Or my friend Katarina, growing up in rural Pennsylvania was turned on to fashion and books and movies from reading the Sunday New York Times. In an article one Sunday, the Times profiled a fashion blogger. So Katarina went online, found this blogger and discovered a whole community of like-minded people. Katarina's choice was to either follow fashion, music, movies, and discussion topics of her high school (to provide context, my public high school was generally into MTV and a culture of fake-toughness), or she could plug into this whole world of intrigue and humanism.
  
  The big point I'm trying to draw on is that online social networks can be a means of allowing people to express their inner beings. Maslow writes about the gap between "I want" and the "I am," which is to say that it is harder for us to enact the "I want" into the "I am" often because of our environment. We have not perfected dialogue through social networks yet, so the cases of Tiffany and Katarina are the exceptions and not the rule. But I think we can develop them to a point where our interests, wants, and needs can become better expressed, and through social networks we can find ways to help people bridge the "I want" and "I am."
  
  (This might be an interesting topic to draw on from a social policy perspective. One of the things I've heard Michelle Obama talk about is a need for more mentorship in society. It might be practical to reach young people through existing institutions. But consider that a large amount of young people's time is spent on Facebook and MySpace. If online social networks could better facilitate dialogue and a matching up of needs, I think it would be a key way to realize the need for mentoring.)
  

Elliot

on blogging...

Elliot,

Well I'd like to start off here similar to the way you began, which is by considering the purpose of the blogging tool.

I think a good analysis should begin with background information, so as to set a clear context for further investigation. In this case, the context is quite impressive: there is an empty white square about a foot and a half from my face where I can hit buttons on a black button board and through an electronic process enter pre-configured textual characters that then appear in the white square. The process begins in my mind, then goes through my fingers, and into the square. The characters are published for the universe to see when I point and click an arrow on an orange (signifying danger?) "publish post" button.

Now that the context is set, I can more clearly investigate the utility of this tool. What buttons I choose seems to be what is important here. Because others will see what I'm writing, I must consider the full consequences of clicking the "publish post" button. As you allude to in your entry, I must consider how my typing will be perceived by the world outside my mind.

You note that writing requires a higher degree of self-reflection and personal definition than non-writers. Writers, more than talkers, must filter what thoughts they keep and which they thoughts they share. This is what made the stream of consciousness writing of Jack Kerouac so interesting. His aim was to get rid of the filter between his mind and what he shared on paper. The product of his work was groundbreaking because of the window it opened into the internal dynamics of his mind. His work is weird for sure, but brutally honest.

While I don't suggest that we follow Kerouac’s stream of consciousness model in our blog - as it would likely make for a very difficult read - , I do think that we can benefit as writers by simply being aware of the filter . I think good writers strive for self-awareness. I think with awareness dishonesty becomes a lot harder and openness a lot easier, and that it ultimately makes for a much more interesting writer to read.

This leads me to your point about the benefits of this form of blogging. As an inherently interactive blog, we can aim to increase our self-awareness. You can tell me when you think I am wrong and vice versa. We can deepen our comparative perspective of how different minds work and hopefully expand the paradigms in which our minds operate. This is true as well to all those who may eventually read this blog and provide comments.

(Let me quickly note that I think you underestimate the power of person to person interaction by favoring an intellectual internet community over personal friendships. I think there is only so much to be gained in virtual language exchange. Personal interactions offer intangible human qualities that an internet community could never provide: a joke is always funnier with others to laugh with, and most would agree there to be a physical quality to loneliness. This is something we could talk more about in the future…)

To end, I like what you had to say about the importance of creating. I hope to be challenged to think differently and introspectively here. What better way to do this then by creating something which can be looked at over and over again and which others can view. I may look at this writing in forty years and learn something that I would never have learned otherwise. This blog is no different from a time capsule that can be re-examined as the future unravels and the present becomes the past.

My Mom is begging for the computer. I look forward to many future debates and discussions.

Two words: BRING IT!

Zach

Pope Benedict and the Jews

Pope Benedict got pushed over by a woman today and a number of interesting events unfolded over the past week. Last Saturday, he decided to beatify WWII-era Pope Pius, and on Monday he delivered a speech about his May 2009 trip to Yad Vashem.

Interest on the Web of Pope Benedict and the Holocaust peaked earlier this year when he lifted the excommunication on an anti-Semitic bishop, though there hasn't been a lot of online buzz recently:

I want to call attention to this, from a Dec 23 article in the NYTimes:

"In an effort to calm growing tensions with Jewish groups, the Vatican said Wednesday that Pope Benedict XVI’s decision moving the wartime pope Pius XII closer to sainthood was not a “hostile act” against those who believe Pius did not do enough to stop the Holocaust." ...

"The decision by Benedict — a German who was an unwilling member of the Hitler Youth — to move Pius closer to sainthood was the latest in a series of controversies. It came less than a year after he revoked the excommunication of a schismatic bishop who had denied the scope of the Holocaust"

It's interesting that someone who was Hitler Youth and served in the Nazi Army is beatifying Pius and brought at least one anti-Semite and Holocaust denier back into the Catholic fold. In both cases, the Pope chose the interests of his Catholics over the wishes of the Jews.

As I remember, the Jews* did not make a big case out of his membership in the Nazi Army. Nobody said, "out of all of the possible candidates, why did the Vatican have to choose someone with that background?" Which is not to say that Ratzinger was a bad choice for a Pope. It's not like he was an active Hilter Youth: "'He was very certainly not for Hitler,' Augerer said of Joseph Ratzinger. 'Absolutely not. They couldn't do anything about it. ... You can't forget the times.'"

When the Nazi issue came to bear during Ratzinger's selection, it was spun as though Ratzinger defied the Nazis. What did he do? He listened to Allied radio:

"Blinds drawn, windows closed, Joseph Ratzinger huddled with his father and older brother around a radio and listened to Allied radio broadcasts, volume on low. It was a small and risky act of defiance in this conservative Bavarian village deep inside Adolf Hitler's Germany."

It is interesting that the process of beatifying Pope Pius comes just as he recounted his May trip to Yad Vashem. In a speech Monday at the Vatican, he said, "The visit to the Yad Vashem has meant an upsetting encounter with the cruelty of human fault, with the hatred of a blind ideology."

What does it mean that he had an upsetting encounter with "the cruelty of human fault" and "the hatred of a blind ideology"? That the fault that exists in man was what led the Nazis to exterminate Jews? It sounds like the Germans were led by an unconscious process. "The hatred of a blind ideology"? I don't know what that means, but is it an active enough stance against the actions of the Nazis?


So why is Pope Benedict beatifying the Pope who reigned from 1939 to 1958? He's beatifying him for his "Christian life" and not “the historical impact of all his operative decisions.” Is a Christian life separate from a life in reality? But for that matter, what did these "operative decisions" include? Quiet diplomacy ("the Vatican insists Pius used quiet diplomacy to try to save Jews"). This, according to the Jews, was not enough in the face of genocide.

So I don't take issue with the appointing of Ratzinger, a former constituent of Nazi Germany, to be Pope. Ratzinger was no matyr, and didn't actively defy the Nazis. But I'm not saying that the Pope has to be a matyr, a person who really laid down their well-being and transcended his time and place. The Pope doesn't have to be someone like Oskar Schindler. Though wouldn't it be amazing if it was? But the papacy isn't a democracy...

But for someone of Ratzinger's background to beatify the Pope seems wrongfully insensitive to the Jews.



* It's interesting to note that even the ADL, whose very namesake is to be "anti" and on defense, supported Pope Benedict's selection. Who didn't? Chief Rabbi of England, Jonathan Sacks (who received his Ph.D. in philosophy from Kings College London, to boot).

Blogging, blugging, feeling bluggerish

Zach,

I think the best way to kick off this blog is to first take a jab at the culture of blogging. I have long had the question, why blog at all? I can think of a few reasons not to: I don't want my private thoughts being broadcast when I don't know the readers. Because, what if blogging my thoughts will come back to haunt me in some form? So by that token, if I am to blog, then my thoughts will undergo some regulation, which means my writings will be a less-than-honest reflection of my ideas. (To counter this, remember when Sullivan said that he never self-edited and was not worried about judgment.) And if I engage in not-quite-the-truth expression on a regular basis, it's possible that my behavior will influence my self-image and I'll become less-than-honest in my daily expression.

(A digression: This is, I think, what occurs when we read our own profiles on Facebook: We know our interests...it was us who entered them, after all! So why do we read our own profile? I think it's to learn about ourselves. But it's the most shallow way to learn about ourselves because we created the profile. Psychologist Daryl Bem calls this behavior self-perception*).

On the other hand, I think there are tremendous advantages to blogging. First of all, how can thoughts or ideas really come back to haunt you? Dave Eggers offers a critique on our generation in A Heartbreaking Work, when we says that we should not have an inhibition to share. What does it matter if we tell people the details of our lives or spill the contents of our heads? I think one possible fear is that we will be discovered to be non-normal, and then our ideas or our selves will be discounted. But Eggers's case for sharing, I think, overcomes this fear.

A benefit offered by blogging is that it offers the same kind of personal definition that is available through writing in many other forms. If you write letters, keep a journal, or write a column for a paper, you have to undergo a period of reflecting and personal definition that non-writers simply don't do.

A point about this blog is because I am writing a letter to you and receiving a letter in response, it becomes an interaction as opposed to an individual process. New ideas will develop as a function of interaction that would not otherwise come out writing by myself. And this latter principle is a feature of the blogging world. You can find people who express interests close to your own just by searching the blogosphere. You can interact with people world away by commenting on their blog posts. For someone growing up in Farmland, USA with a lot of intelligence and interests about the world, the Internet becomes a liberating force.

I think a powerful cultural/psychological debate to have is, should a person engage people in their immediate surroundings and give up personal interests in order to pursue friendships? Or should a person give up people in immediacy in favor of an Internet community where they can truly engage their mind? I lean towards the second option, but it's worth acknowledging that you stand to lose the potential for people dissimilar from you to expand your horizons. Although if you're into Russian literature and the boys are into drinking brewskis and singing Kid Rock on tha karaoke, I don't know how much horizon expansion is going on.

(By the way, as we were driving through Indiana's countryside last July 4th, I remember pointing out how it was fascinating to consider how it was likely that every one of those houses had Internet, so children and teenagers there were experiencing a childhood completely unlike children living there before 1998/1999 (or whenever Internet penetration reached Indiana's countryside). For that matter, young countryside Hoosiers have the same experience as a kid in Manhattan or Silicon Valley. And this dramatic change--from spending time outside and watching television to spending more time on the computer interacting on Facebook and YouTube--happened in less than 10 years time!)

Another big benefit of blogging is that your writings are being attended to by other people. An obvious point, I know. But the fact that we can broadcast our ideas and interested people can tune in and read our thoughts is an intriguing idea. Rhoni told me how her friend Jeremy automatically keeps track of and shares his runs on Facebook (he uses Nike+, I think). He told her that knowing other people will view his progress is a huge motivation to run. I think this point is fascinating. Most people run for its intrinsic incentive: to keep fit and keep the body's physiology in order. Now the main motivation is extrinsic: we want others to view our runs. (Though, to be fair, I think extrinsic incentives existed before Nike+ in the form of marathons. White people love marathons.)

Lastly, I'll say that blogging has importance in one more manner that is similar to other instantiations of writing: there is a huge benefit to creating. Writing is much more valuable than talking because you're bringing something into existence in a way that has permanence.

That's it for now. Up next: Reflections on Gladwell's Outliers.

Hope you're enjoying the Florida sun,

Elliot

(* I forgot Daryl Bem's self-perception theory, so I first searched Google to no avail. Then I asked Aardvark, and before I got any responses on Aardvark, I took the question I used on Aardvark and Googled with it again. This time I got a hit. That is to say, the whole process of having to crystallize a question for others to understand made it clearer for me. Although the only person who got the answer correct on Aardvark is a fascinating young researcher situated in Cambridge. If I were to continue the conversation, it would be a fascinating connection. Think about the role of the Internet and social networks now!)

And they're off...