Midweek Musings - June 26, 2024

Summer Heat, Competitive Excel, Mourning in America, Team USA/C, and Pringles

It’s a bit sweltering in most places around the United States right now. Even here in Southern California, we’re all a bit overheated (a relative term compared to the humidity of most of the country). So I couldn’t help but fondly remember this great bit of local news coverage from WOOD, the NBC affliliate in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It’s now about 13 years old, but in trying to inform residents of “Furniture City” about the perils of a failing air conditioning system in the summer heat, the local reporter seemed entirely unaware or indifferent to the fact that her main interview was with Alvin Plantinga, one of the world’s greatest living philosophers.

Part of what makes the entire scenario in this segment so wonderful and refreshing is that Plantinga seems to convey absolutely no sense of pomposity, ego, or entitlement about the whole thing. If Plantinga lives in an academic ivory tower, the tower seems to have HVAC challenges just like everyone else. Or as the Templeton Prize winning philosopher put it, “You’ve got to have a PhD in engineering just to use your thermostat. And that seems over the top to me.”

When the chyron simply reads, “Alvin Plantinga: Air Conditioning Stopped Working” while he’s interviewed against his shelves lined with books… well, it’s not quite burying the lede, but it sure does seem to omit some interesting information about the interviewee.

The closest Plantinga gets to a philosophical reflection in the segment? “You know, there are worse things. I mean, if it were like 10 degrees below zero, that would be worse.” He’s exactly right.

It’s the Wrestlemania of Excel, Brother

I work with some extraordinary colleagues at Biola University, but have noticed that some have an especially strong skillset when it comes to Excel. So I am toying with nominating them to participate in the Excel World Championship, held annually in Las Vegas. Yes, that’s right. Competitive Excel. David Pierce tells the story over at The Verge:

“Competitive Excel has been around for years, but only in a hobbyist way. Most of the people in this room full of actuaries, analysts, accountants, and investors play Excel the way I play Scrabble or do the crossword — exercising your brain using tools you understand. But last year’s competition became a viral hit on ESPN and YouTube, and this year, the organizers are trying to capitalize. After all, someone points out to me, poker is basically just math, and it’s all over TV. Why not spreadsheets? Excel is a tool. It’s a game. Now it hopes to become a sport.”

You might not make it all the way through Pierce’s telling of his encounter with the world of trash-talking, swaggering Excel superstars (yes, they exist it seems). But what does pop out in the article is the suggestion that anxieties about how Excel would change workspaces and jobs in the 1980s might now give us some insight into the genuine opportunities afforded by AI.

Memento Mori and Mourning in America

Over at The New Yorker, Cody Delistraty writes of the ways in which American culture has shifted in its relation to death and mourning. Delistraty generally neglects the place of secularization and industrialization in the whole story (both of which are significant), but there’s still a lot here worth engaging. In particular, Delistraty notes how in the past decade, a new and more public form of mourning has emerged:

“On social media, one often finds public grief that’s rooted in private interests. When a statesman or a celebrity passes away, or when videos of a distant tragedy circulate, expressions of mourning can sometimes seem to be a mix of sincerity and performance, an opportunity less to confront death than to strategically display one’s sympathies. Corporations issue statements of solidarity which are, at bottom, advertisements. (After the Boston Marathon bombing, the food site Epicurious tweeted, “In honor of Boston and New England, may we suggest: whole-grain cranberry scones!”) Crystal Abidin, an ethnographer of Internet culture, calls this phenomenon “publicity grieving”; it returns grief to the public square, but in strange, vaguely unnerving forms. When millennials began taking “funeral selfies” around 2013, the trend sparked a minor media frenzy, eliciting think pieces and advice articles, including one from a casket-making company.”

If you’ve paid attention, you’ve likely noticed the “publicity grieving” phenomenon. Certainly there is often something inherently performative about it. But I suspect there’s more to it than just that, as our neighbors and coworkers struggle to reconcile their innate impulse to grieve death, while also having fewer social outlets and institutions in which to process that grief as part of a local community.

Years ago, I told students in my classes that one especially important question to ask of any culture was how they treat their dead. From how the body is handled, to how the community establishes rhythms and rituals to mourn, one can learn a lot about the social fabric. In our own case, swimming in the Neo-paganism of late modernity, our grief does indeed seem to be both increasingly private and disembodied, while also strangely performative in digital platforms.

By the way, if you want to read something profound on the whole subject of death (and who doesn’t during the summer months), check out Lydia Dugdale’s The Lost Art of Dying Well: Reviving Forgotten Wisdom. We were fortunate to host her at Biola earlier this year.

BYOAC and Team USA

What do you do when anxieties about climate change, sustainability, and corporate virtue signaling conflict with competitive advantage at the Summer Olympics? Well, you bring your own air conditioning units! As reported by the Associated Press, the U.S. Olympic Team will be one of a number of nations providing their own AC units after French organizers made clear their plans not to provide air conditioning in the Athletic Village, largely due to environmental concerns.

U.S. Olympic and Paralympic CEO Sarah Hirshland said Friday that while the U.S. team appreciates efforts aimed at sustainability, the federation would be supplying AC units for what is typically the largest contingent of athletes at the Summer Games.

“As you can imagine, this is a period of time in which consistency and predictability is critical for Team USA’s performance,” Hirshland said. “In our conversations with athletes, this was a very high priority and something that the athletes felt was a critical component in their performance capability.”

In contract, the same AP story quotes Paris mayor Ann Hidalgo, “I want the Paris Games to be exemplary from an environmental point of view.”

So bring home the gold medals and stay frosty, Team USA.

Those Aren't Pringles, Your Honor

This is the kind of news story that must be shared with any pre-teen or teenage boy in your life (or anyone who was once one). I’ll let the story speak for itself, straight from The Columbus Dispatch.

“In November 2021, surveillance cameras recorded footage of Blakeslee, a criminal defense attorney, dropping a Pringles potato chip can into the parking lot of a crime-victim advocacy center. The can contained human feces.

Blakeslee's behavior called into question his fitness to practice law, the Ohio Supreme Court decided in November.”

Good news for Mr. Blakeslee, his law license was indeed reinstated. Bad news for the city of Columbus, Mr. Blakeslee aknowledged he had engaged in this caper on at least ten occasions in the past year.

I have more than a few questions about all of this. For one, Mr. Blakeslee was defending a client on a murder charge. If your legal counsel is prone to defecating in a tube and then launching it like a Molotov cocktail with the kind of frequency that earns one a free sandwich at Subway, surely you’ve got a shot at appealing your case due to ineffective counsel, right?

As for me, I’ll skip the Pringles next time I’m in Columbus and head straight to Jeni’s Ice Cream.

What I’m Reading

Brian Fairbanks, Waylon, Willie, and the Boys: How Nashville Outsiders Changed Country Music Forever (Hachette)

Ethan Mollick, Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI (Portfolio)