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shadowkat1. For the Emily Dickinson fans on my flist.
Emily Dickinson's Electric Love Letters To Susan Gilbert
Four months before her twentieth birthday, Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) met the person who became her first love and remained her greatest — an orphaned mathematician-in-training by the name of Susan Gilbert, nine days her junior. Throughout the poet’s life, Susan would be her muse, her mentor, her primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment, her “Only Woman in the World.”
I devote more than one hundred pages of Figuring to their beautiful, heartbreaking, unclassifiable relationship that fomented some of the greatest, most original and paradigm-shifting poetry humanity has ever produced. (This essay is drawn from my book.)
Susan Gilbert had settled in Amherst, to be near her sister, after graduating from the Utica Female Academy — one of a handful of academically rigorous educational institutions available to women at the time. She entered Dickinson’s life in the summer of 1850, which the poet would later remember as the season “when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens.”
Poised and serious at twenty, dressed in black for the sister who had just died in childbirth and who had been her maternal figure since their parents’ death, Susan cast a double enchantment on Emily and Austin Dickinson. Sister and brother alike were taken with her poised erudition and her Uranian handsomeness — her flat, full lips and dark eyes were not exactly masculine, her unchiseled oval face and low forehead not exactly feminine.
“Best Witchcraft is Geometry,” Emily Dickinson would later write. Now both she and her brother found themselves in a strange bewitchment of figures, placing Susan at one point of a triangle. But Emily’s was no temporary infatuation. Nearly two decades after Susan entered her heart, she would write with unblunted desire:
To own a Susan of my own
Is of itself a Bliss —
Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord,
Continue me in this!
A tempest of intimacy swirled over the eighteen months following Susan’s arrival into the Dickinsons’ lives. The two young women took long walks in the woods together, exchanged books, read poetry to each other, and commenced an intense, intimate correspondence that would evolve and permute but would last a life- time. “We are the only poets,” Emily told Susan, “and everyone else is prose.”
Take-away quote..."We are the only poets," Emily told Susan, "and everyone else is prose."
2. Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe
One of science’s most challenging problems is a question that can be stated easily: Where does consciousness come from? In his new book Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, philosopher Philip Goff considers a radical perspective: What if consciousness is not something special that the brain does but is instead a quality inherent to all matter? It is a theory known as “panpsychism,” and Goff guides readers through the history of the idea, answers common objections (such as “That’s just crazy!”) and explains why he believes panpsychism represents the best path forward. He answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Can you explain, in simple terms, what you mean by panpsychism?
In our standard view of things, consciousness exists only in the brains of highly evolved organisms, and hence consciousness exists only in a tiny part of the universe and only in very recent history. According to panpsychism, in contrast, consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it. This doesn’t mean that literally everything is conscious. The basic commitment is that the fundamental constituents of reality—perhaps electrons and quarks—have incredibly simple forms of experience. And the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow derived from the experience of the brain’s most basic parts.
It might be important to clarify what I mean by “consciousness,” as that word is actually quite ambiguous. Some people use it to mean something quite sophisticated, such as self-awareness or the capacity to reflect on one’s own existence. This is something we might be reluctant to ascribe to many nonhuman animals, never mind fundamental particles. But when I use the word consciousness, I simply mean experience: pleasure, pain, visual or auditory experience, et cetera.
Human beings have a very rich and complex experience; horses less so; mice less so again. As we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of experience. Perhaps, at some point, the light switches off, and consciousness disappears. But it’s at least coherent to suppose that this continuum of consciousness fading while never quite turning off carries on into inorganic matter, with fundamental particles having almost unimaginably simple forms of experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature. That’s what panpsychists believe.
You write that you come to this idea as a way of solving a problem in the way consciousness is studied. What, in your mind, is the problem?
Despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain, we still don’t have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complex electrochemical signaling is somehow able to give rise to the inner subjective world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes that each of us knows in our own case. There is a deep mystery in understanding how what we know about ourselves from the inside fits together with what science tells us about matter from the outside.
While the problem is broadly acknowledged, many people think we just need to plug away at our standard methods of investigating the brain, and we’ll eventually crack it. But in my new book, I argue that the problem of consciousness results from the way we designed science at the start of the scientific revolution.
A key moment in the scientific revolution was Galileo’s declaration that mathematics was to be the language of the new science, that the new science was to have a purely quantitative vocabulary. But Galileo realized that you can’t capture consciousness in these terms, as consciousness is an essentially quality-involving phenomenon. Think about the redness of a red experiences or the smell of flowers or the taste of mint. You can’t capture these kinds of qualities in the purely quantitative vocabulary of physical science. So Galileo decided that we have to put consciousness outside of the domain of science; after we’d done that, everything else could be captured in mathematics.
This is really important, because although the problem of consciousness is taken seriously, most people assume our conventional scientific approach is capable of solving it. And they think this because they look at the great success of physical science in explaining more and more of our universe and conclude that this ought to give us confidence that physical science alone will one day explain consciousness. However, I believe that this reaction is rooted in a misunderstanding of the history of science. Yes, physical science has been incredibly successful. But it’s been successful precisely because it was designed to exclude consciousness. If Galileo were to time travel to the present day and hear about this problem of explaining consciousness in the terms of physical science, he’d say, “Of course, you can’t do that. I designed physical science to deal with quantities, not qualities.”
3. Two Sisters: Two Different Journey's Through Australia's Health Care System
CAULFIELD SOUTH, Australia — When Eloise Shepherd was pregnant with her three children, she had a decision to make each time: She could deliver at a public facility, which meant government-provided insurance would pay for most of the cost of delivery; or she could go to a private hospital and pay through the private insurance she carried.
All three times, she opted for the public route.
It wasn’t glamorous. For her second baby, Shepherd remembers being in a hospital room with three other women, only curtains between their beds. She could hear one of her roommates Skyping with her family through the night. She describes the food as “slop in a trough.”
But it was adequate — and it was cheap. Delivery and her epidurals at the public facilities were free. She paid a couple hundred bucks for a prenatal genetic test when she was pregnant at age 37, the one thing she opted to get done outside the public system, but that was about it aside from copays for her prenatal appointments.
Her sister Madeleine Campbell went the other way in fall 2018, when she was expecting her first child. She wanted to deliver at a private hospital, not a public hospital like her sister, with an obstetrician of her choice, who would see her from her first prenatal appointment all the way to labor. Shepherd, on the other hand, says she saw a different midwife or obstetrician on every visit to the public hospital.
“I like to know what’s happening,” Campbell says, “and I like things to be organized and orderly.”
When Campbell had a brief scare with detecting her baby’s heartbeat, she was able to call her obstetrician’s office from her car and see him on the spot, a luxury Shepherd never had. At the private hospital where she delivered, Campbell was moved from an inpatient room to a nice suite in a hotel after the first night. The food was, as she recalls, “excellent”; she had poached eggs on toast and smoked salmon one morning.
Campbell got exactly the experience she wanted for herself and her newborn daughter. But it cost her $5,000 Australian.
When I met the two sisters at Campbell’s home in a Melbourne suburb on a warm October afternoon, they wore matching polka-dot sundresses. They look alike, and even sound alike. But they made different choices when it came time to deliver their babies, and the diverging paths they took offer an intriguing look at Australia’s hybrid health system.
The country’s health care system is perched precariously between two principles: universal coverage and personal choice. Australians generally believe everybody should be able to get care, affordably. At the same time, they believe that people who can pay more should be able to get more.
But those two tiers bring inequities. There can be long wait times for elective surgeries at public hospitals. The emergency and ICU departments get crowded, especially in a public health crisis (Australia has had particularly bad outbreaks of flu in recent years). Patients can occasionally get hit with unexpectedly big bills after a visit to a specialist.
The private care experience, as Campbell found, is smoother. You choose your doctor and you get more time with them. You can pick the day and time for your knee surgery. You have choices — but it will cost you.
Vox is looking abroad for lessons about how to achieve universal and affordable health care. We wanted to understand the choices other countries made and the consequences of those decisions. No health care system is perfect. But America’s economic peers have figured out a way to deliver truly universal coverage and quality care. Our project, Everybody Covered, was made possible by a grant from The Commonwealth Fund.
Every decision has trade-offs. Australia is still figuring out what role private health insurance should serve alongside its universal public system. Over the past 45 years, it’s been a pendulum swinging back and forth: Conservative governments try to strengthen the private sector, pushing for the public system to act as more of a safety net, while the liberal
4. A Maine Paper Mill's Unexpected Savior - A Chinese Tycoon
OLD TOWN, Maine — During the deepest part of last winter, a van pulled off the highway and followed the two-lane road that skims along the Penobscot River, coming to rest beside the hulk of a shuttered pulp mill. The van’s door slid open and passengers climbed out: seven Buddhist monks from China.
Andrew Edwards, a mill superintendent from the nearby town of Lincoln, led them to a room where he had stockpiled the things they had requested for the ceremony: oranges, limes, apples and seven shovels, one for each monk.
Snow lay deep on the ground, two feet of gritty, frozen crust, and he remembers worrying a little about the visitors. “They were in their, I don’t know what they’re called, their Tibetan outfit,” he said. “With the sandals and whatnot.”
He stepped back and watched as the monks wandered from the boiler houses to the limekiln to the pulp mill, chanting, burning candles and gently tapping a gong.
Mr. Edwards had grown up beside a now-defunct mill, and seen the human chaos that resulted from failures and bankruptcies — the foreclosures, the layoffs, the departures of young families.
So he had every reason to be curious about the new boss. Zhang Yin, known in China as the “Queen of Trash,” had built an empire, Nine Dragons Paper, by producing corrugated board out of recycling scrap. She was different from the American owners who preceded her, and not only because she could afford to spend lavishly on feng shui.
The most startling thing about Ms. Zhang was her promise that Nine Dragons would operate the mill for 100 years, long enough to employ Mr. Edwards’s children and grandchildren.
“People don’t go back and redo these mills, they just don’t,” Mr. Edwards said. “Mills get torn down or scrapped out. And here’s Old Town in the middle of it, coming back to life.”
The year 2019 was, by any measure, a disastrous one for the relations between America and China.
President Trump steered the United States into a trade war, bringing average tariffs on Chinese goods to 21.3 percent, up from 3.1 percent when he came into office. Americans’ opinions of China turned sharply negative, sliding to the lowest point since the Pew Research Center began recording them.
But a different story was unfolding in this battered New England mill town, population 7,500. The Chinese government had cut off the import of American recycling, jeopardizing the supply lines that fed Nine Dragons’ broader business. To keep its paper plants humming, Nine Dragons needed this mill.
And the Old Town mill, cast aside by a parade of short-term investors, abandoned to the elements, needed a savior. No amount of trade-war bluster would change either of these things.
Along with gratitude came a tinge of apprehension, a sense that unpredictable change had come to the north woods.
“You want my honest opinion? This country is being recolonized by Asia,” said Katie Bosse, 77. She had grown up, as she put it, “under the stack,” the daughter and granddaughter of millworkers, and had a Mainer’s suspicion of outsiders.
“Most people who do this do it out of greed,” she said. But she had spotted the site manager for Nine Dragons lingering at the back of the crowd and wanted to catch him. Because this was also true: Finally, after so many years, there was opportunity to be grasped in Old Town.
She dashed back to see if she could snag a job for her brother.
5. 6 Ways to Become a Better Listener
Ever zone out while someone is talking? Of course. We all do. The average human has an eight-second attention span. With electronic distractions competing for your time and an abundance of responsibilities at work, it makes listening attentively to someone else speak pretty difficult.
“We are living in a time when it’s more challenging to be consistently aware and intentional because so many things are demanding our attention. Our brains haven’t caught up to the technology that’s feeding them,” says Scott Eblin, author of Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative. “The impact of this leaves people in a chronic condition of fight or flight.”
Listening is also hard because we’re often consumed with ourselves, says Hal Gregersen, executive director of the MIT Leadership Center. “It’s really hard to walk into a conversation without my agenda being written on my forehead and your agenda written on yours,” he says. “Unfortunately with the hectic, chaotic, complicated pace of work life today, people are even more committed to getting their own agenda accomplished.”
Why Listening is Critical
When you approach a conversation thinking only of your own agenda, your goal is to maneuver and manipulate the conversation and to come out better than the other person, says Gregersen.
“I might influence you to do, buy, or act, but the probability that I get any surprisingly new data is close to zero,” he says. “I’m thinking that the conversation is about me, or it’s about me controlling you. Neither are great conversation starters.”
Walking around with closed ears is fine if what you’re doing is the right thing and the world doesn’t change. “But if the world changes and we happen to not be doing the right thing, it becomes critical to pay attention to other people’s thoughts, emotions, words, feelings, and perspectives,” says Gregersen. “It’s important to be open to new information that you’re not looking for but need to hear.”
How do you break bad habits? Here are six ways to become a better listener:
1. Listen to Learn, Not to Be Polite
“Often, whether realizing it or not, people listen to each other out of generosity, not out of curiosity,” says Ajit Singh, partner for the early stage venture fund Artiman Ventures and consulting professor in the School of Medicine at Stanford University. “Listening is good, but the intent has to be curiosity, not generosity. True dialogue does not happen when we pretend to listen, and it certainly cannot happen if we are not listening at all.”
“Each day, ask yourself, ‘What am I going to be curious about?’” says Gregersen. “Stewart Brand, [editor of the Whole Earth catalog,] wakes up every day asking himself, ‘How many things am I dead wrong about?’ Both questions effectively open your ears. It’s having a beginner’s mind-set walking into a conversation.”
2. Quiet Your Agenda
While you can’t control someone else’s listening habits, you can control your own, and that involves quieting down your mind.
“Turn off those agendas,” says Gregersen. “Really listen to what someone else is trying to say. We need information that is disconfirming, not confirming. If we ever finish a conversation and learned nothing surprising, we weren’t really listening.”
3. Ask More Questions
One of the simplest ways to be a better listener is to ask more questions than you give answers, says Gregersen. When you ask questions, you create a safe space for other people to give you an unvarnished truth.
“Listening with real intent means I’m going to be open to being very wrong, and I’m comfortable with that in this conversation,” says Gregersen. “In a world that’s getting more polarized, being able to listen is critical to reducing unnecessary conflict at any level, within a team, organization, or on a broader political country level,” he says.
4. Pay Attention to Your Talk/Listen Ratio
Strive for a 2:1 ratio of listening to talking, says Eblin. “If you’re a note taker during meetings or conversations, try keeping track of how much you listen versus how much you talk,” he says. “Mark off a section of the paper and write down the names of all the people on the conference call. Whenever a person talks for more than a sentence or two, put a check mark by his or her name. That includes you, too. The visual representation of comparing listening to talking might hold some lessons for you.”
5. Repeat Back What You Heard
A number of problems interfere with people’s ability to understand accurately what another person is trying to communicate, says Adam Goodman, director of the Center for Leadership at Northwestern University. “Am I anticipating what the other person is about to say? Do I agree or disagree with what’s being said? Maybe I’m agreeing too quickly and, upon reflection, I’d find myself disagreeing later?” he asks. “Put simply, there’s more opportunity to misunderstand then there is to actually understand.”
Instead, implement a process called active listening. “It’s been around for a long time, and works if done right,” says Goodman. The basic concept is repeating back to the speaker what you heard. If the speaker agrees that what you heard is what he or she intended to say, you can move on. If not, the speaker needs to reword their statement until the listener really does understand. [I do this all the time, and it really annoys certain people -- but, I do it, because I know how easy it is for me to mishear or misunderstand things. I'm dyslexic.]
6. Actually Wait Until Someone is Done Talking Before You Respond
The most difficult component of listening effectively is waiting for a period at the end of a sentence before formulating a reply, says Leslie Shore, author of Listen to Succeed.
“When we begin working on a reply before the speaker is finished, we lose both the complete information being offered and an understanding of the kind of emotion present in the speaker’s delivery,” she writes in her book.
This is dangerous, says Gregersen. “When I’m the most important thing in the world, that’s the moment when I’m most likely to be thinking about next thing I’m going to say instead of listening to you,” he says. “At the very core, that’s what going on; I’m declaring to the world I am more important than you. That’s an uncomfortable moment of self-awareness, and a self-serving way of approaching life.”
We all require self-focus, but leaders who make a difference are the ones who know the purpose is bigger than themselves, says Gregersen. “When a leader is operating on the edge of what’s possible, they’re in strong listening mode,” he says.
From Fast Company.
[I really need to work on this skill. I do not always listen well. And listening is harder than talking. It requires more patience, more mindfulness, and more kindness. It requires the listener to let go of themselves.]
Emily Dickinson's Electric Love Letters To Susan Gilbert
Four months before her twentieth birthday, Emily Dickinson (December 10, 1830–May 15, 1886) met the person who became her first love and remained her greatest — an orphaned mathematician-in-training by the name of Susan Gilbert, nine days her junior. Throughout the poet’s life, Susan would be her muse, her mentor, her primary reader and editor, her fiercest lifelong attachment, her “Only Woman in the World.”
I devote more than one hundred pages of Figuring to their beautiful, heartbreaking, unclassifiable relationship that fomented some of the greatest, most original and paradigm-shifting poetry humanity has ever produced. (This essay is drawn from my book.)
Susan Gilbert had settled in Amherst, to be near her sister, after graduating from the Utica Female Academy — one of a handful of academically rigorous educational institutions available to women at the time. She entered Dickinson’s life in the summer of 1850, which the poet would later remember as the season “when love first began, on the step at the front door, and under the Evergreens.”
Poised and serious at twenty, dressed in black for the sister who had just died in childbirth and who had been her maternal figure since their parents’ death, Susan cast a double enchantment on Emily and Austin Dickinson. Sister and brother alike were taken with her poised erudition and her Uranian handsomeness — her flat, full lips and dark eyes were not exactly masculine, her unchiseled oval face and low forehead not exactly feminine.
“Best Witchcraft is Geometry,” Emily Dickinson would later write. Now both she and her brother found themselves in a strange bewitchment of figures, placing Susan at one point of a triangle. But Emily’s was no temporary infatuation. Nearly two decades after Susan entered her heart, she would write with unblunted desire:
To own a Susan of my own
Is of itself a Bliss —
Whatever Realm I forfeit, Lord,
Continue me in this!
A tempest of intimacy swirled over the eighteen months following Susan’s arrival into the Dickinsons’ lives. The two young women took long walks in the woods together, exchanged books, read poetry to each other, and commenced an intense, intimate correspondence that would evolve and permute but would last a life- time. “We are the only poets,” Emily told Susan, “and everyone else is prose.”
Take-away quote..."We are the only poets," Emily told Susan, "and everyone else is prose."
2. Does Consciousness Pervade the Universe
One of science’s most challenging problems is a question that can be stated easily: Where does consciousness come from? In his new book Galileo’s Error: Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness, philosopher Philip Goff considers a radical perspective: What if consciousness is not something special that the brain does but is instead a quality inherent to all matter? It is a theory known as “panpsychism,” and Goff guides readers through the history of the idea, answers common objections (such as “That’s just crazy!”) and explains why he believes panpsychism represents the best path forward. He answered questions from Mind Matters editor Gareth Cook.
[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]
Can you explain, in simple terms, what you mean by panpsychism?
In our standard view of things, consciousness exists only in the brains of highly evolved organisms, and hence consciousness exists only in a tiny part of the universe and only in very recent history. According to panpsychism, in contrast, consciousness pervades the universe and is a fundamental feature of it. This doesn’t mean that literally everything is conscious. The basic commitment is that the fundamental constituents of reality—perhaps electrons and quarks—have incredibly simple forms of experience. And the very complex experience of the human or animal brain is somehow derived from the experience of the brain’s most basic parts.
It might be important to clarify what I mean by “consciousness,” as that word is actually quite ambiguous. Some people use it to mean something quite sophisticated, such as self-awareness or the capacity to reflect on one’s own existence. This is something we might be reluctant to ascribe to many nonhuman animals, never mind fundamental particles. But when I use the word consciousness, I simply mean experience: pleasure, pain, visual or auditory experience, et cetera.
Human beings have a very rich and complex experience; horses less so; mice less so again. As we move to simpler and simpler forms of life, we find simpler and simpler forms of experience. Perhaps, at some point, the light switches off, and consciousness disappears. But it’s at least coherent to suppose that this continuum of consciousness fading while never quite turning off carries on into inorganic matter, with fundamental particles having almost unimaginably simple forms of experience to reflect their incredibly simple nature. That’s what panpsychists believe.
You write that you come to this idea as a way of solving a problem in the way consciousness is studied. What, in your mind, is the problem?
Despite great progress in our scientific understanding of the brain, we still don’t have even the beginnings of an explanation of how complex electrochemical signaling is somehow able to give rise to the inner subjective world of colors, sounds, smells and tastes that each of us knows in our own case. There is a deep mystery in understanding how what we know about ourselves from the inside fits together with what science tells us about matter from the outside.
While the problem is broadly acknowledged, many people think we just need to plug away at our standard methods of investigating the brain, and we’ll eventually crack it. But in my new book, I argue that the problem of consciousness results from the way we designed science at the start of the scientific revolution.
A key moment in the scientific revolution was Galileo’s declaration that mathematics was to be the language of the new science, that the new science was to have a purely quantitative vocabulary. But Galileo realized that you can’t capture consciousness in these terms, as consciousness is an essentially quality-involving phenomenon. Think about the redness of a red experiences or the smell of flowers or the taste of mint. You can’t capture these kinds of qualities in the purely quantitative vocabulary of physical science. So Galileo decided that we have to put consciousness outside of the domain of science; after we’d done that, everything else could be captured in mathematics.
This is really important, because although the problem of consciousness is taken seriously, most people assume our conventional scientific approach is capable of solving it. And they think this because they look at the great success of physical science in explaining more and more of our universe and conclude that this ought to give us confidence that physical science alone will one day explain consciousness. However, I believe that this reaction is rooted in a misunderstanding of the history of science. Yes, physical science has been incredibly successful. But it’s been successful precisely because it was designed to exclude consciousness. If Galileo were to time travel to the present day and hear about this problem of explaining consciousness in the terms of physical science, he’d say, “Of course, you can’t do that. I designed physical science to deal with quantities, not qualities.”
3. Two Sisters: Two Different Journey's Through Australia's Health Care System
CAULFIELD SOUTH, Australia — When Eloise Shepherd was pregnant with her three children, she had a decision to make each time: She could deliver at a public facility, which meant government-provided insurance would pay for most of the cost of delivery; or she could go to a private hospital and pay through the private insurance she carried.
All three times, she opted for the public route.
It wasn’t glamorous. For her second baby, Shepherd remembers being in a hospital room with three other women, only curtains between their beds. She could hear one of her roommates Skyping with her family through the night. She describes the food as “slop in a trough.”
But it was adequate — and it was cheap. Delivery and her epidurals at the public facilities were free. She paid a couple hundred bucks for a prenatal genetic test when she was pregnant at age 37, the one thing she opted to get done outside the public system, but that was about it aside from copays for her prenatal appointments.
Her sister Madeleine Campbell went the other way in fall 2018, when she was expecting her first child. She wanted to deliver at a private hospital, not a public hospital like her sister, with an obstetrician of her choice, who would see her from her first prenatal appointment all the way to labor. Shepherd, on the other hand, says she saw a different midwife or obstetrician on every visit to the public hospital.
“I like to know what’s happening,” Campbell says, “and I like things to be organized and orderly.”
When Campbell had a brief scare with detecting her baby’s heartbeat, she was able to call her obstetrician’s office from her car and see him on the spot, a luxury Shepherd never had. At the private hospital where she delivered, Campbell was moved from an inpatient room to a nice suite in a hotel after the first night. The food was, as she recalls, “excellent”; she had poached eggs on toast and smoked salmon one morning.
Campbell got exactly the experience she wanted for herself and her newborn daughter. But it cost her $5,000 Australian.
When I met the two sisters at Campbell’s home in a Melbourne suburb on a warm October afternoon, they wore matching polka-dot sundresses. They look alike, and even sound alike. But they made different choices when it came time to deliver their babies, and the diverging paths they took offer an intriguing look at Australia’s hybrid health system.
The country’s health care system is perched precariously between two principles: universal coverage and personal choice. Australians generally believe everybody should be able to get care, affordably. At the same time, they believe that people who can pay more should be able to get more.
But those two tiers bring inequities. There can be long wait times for elective surgeries at public hospitals. The emergency and ICU departments get crowded, especially in a public health crisis (Australia has had particularly bad outbreaks of flu in recent years). Patients can occasionally get hit with unexpectedly big bills after a visit to a specialist.
The private care experience, as Campbell found, is smoother. You choose your doctor and you get more time with them. You can pick the day and time for your knee surgery. You have choices — but it will cost you.
Vox is looking abroad for lessons about how to achieve universal and affordable health care. We wanted to understand the choices other countries made and the consequences of those decisions. No health care system is perfect. But America’s economic peers have figured out a way to deliver truly universal coverage and quality care. Our project, Everybody Covered, was made possible by a grant from The Commonwealth Fund.
Every decision has trade-offs. Australia is still figuring out what role private health insurance should serve alongside its universal public system. Over the past 45 years, it’s been a pendulum swinging back and forth: Conservative governments try to strengthen the private sector, pushing for the public system to act as more of a safety net, while the liberal
4. A Maine Paper Mill's Unexpected Savior - A Chinese Tycoon
OLD TOWN, Maine — During the deepest part of last winter, a van pulled off the highway and followed the two-lane road that skims along the Penobscot River, coming to rest beside the hulk of a shuttered pulp mill. The van’s door slid open and passengers climbed out: seven Buddhist monks from China.
Andrew Edwards, a mill superintendent from the nearby town of Lincoln, led them to a room where he had stockpiled the things they had requested for the ceremony: oranges, limes, apples and seven shovels, one for each monk.
Snow lay deep on the ground, two feet of gritty, frozen crust, and he remembers worrying a little about the visitors. “They were in their, I don’t know what they’re called, their Tibetan outfit,” he said. “With the sandals and whatnot.”
He stepped back and watched as the monks wandered from the boiler houses to the limekiln to the pulp mill, chanting, burning candles and gently tapping a gong.
Mr. Edwards had grown up beside a now-defunct mill, and seen the human chaos that resulted from failures and bankruptcies — the foreclosures, the layoffs, the departures of young families.
So he had every reason to be curious about the new boss. Zhang Yin, known in China as the “Queen of Trash,” had built an empire, Nine Dragons Paper, by producing corrugated board out of recycling scrap. She was different from the American owners who preceded her, and not only because she could afford to spend lavishly on feng shui.
The most startling thing about Ms. Zhang was her promise that Nine Dragons would operate the mill for 100 years, long enough to employ Mr. Edwards’s children and grandchildren.
“People don’t go back and redo these mills, they just don’t,” Mr. Edwards said. “Mills get torn down or scrapped out. And here’s Old Town in the middle of it, coming back to life.”
The year 2019 was, by any measure, a disastrous one for the relations between America and China.
President Trump steered the United States into a trade war, bringing average tariffs on Chinese goods to 21.3 percent, up from 3.1 percent when he came into office. Americans’ opinions of China turned sharply negative, sliding to the lowest point since the Pew Research Center began recording them.
But a different story was unfolding in this battered New England mill town, population 7,500. The Chinese government had cut off the import of American recycling, jeopardizing the supply lines that fed Nine Dragons’ broader business. To keep its paper plants humming, Nine Dragons needed this mill.
And the Old Town mill, cast aside by a parade of short-term investors, abandoned to the elements, needed a savior. No amount of trade-war bluster would change either of these things.
Along with gratitude came a tinge of apprehension, a sense that unpredictable change had come to the north woods.
“You want my honest opinion? This country is being recolonized by Asia,” said Katie Bosse, 77. She had grown up, as she put it, “under the stack,” the daughter and granddaughter of millworkers, and had a Mainer’s suspicion of outsiders.
“Most people who do this do it out of greed,” she said. But she had spotted the site manager for Nine Dragons lingering at the back of the crowd and wanted to catch him. Because this was also true: Finally, after so many years, there was opportunity to be grasped in Old Town.
She dashed back to see if she could snag a job for her brother.
5. 6 Ways to Become a Better Listener
Ever zone out while someone is talking? Of course. We all do. The average human has an eight-second attention span. With electronic distractions competing for your time and an abundance of responsibilities at work, it makes listening attentively to someone else speak pretty difficult.
“We are living in a time when it’s more challenging to be consistently aware and intentional because so many things are demanding our attention. Our brains haven’t caught up to the technology that’s feeding them,” says Scott Eblin, author of Overworked and Overwhelmed: The Mindfulness Alternative. “The impact of this leaves people in a chronic condition of fight or flight.”
Listening is also hard because we’re often consumed with ourselves, says Hal Gregersen, executive director of the MIT Leadership Center. “It’s really hard to walk into a conversation without my agenda being written on my forehead and your agenda written on yours,” he says. “Unfortunately with the hectic, chaotic, complicated pace of work life today, people are even more committed to getting their own agenda accomplished.”
Why Listening is Critical
When you approach a conversation thinking only of your own agenda, your goal is to maneuver and manipulate the conversation and to come out better than the other person, says Gregersen.
“I might influence you to do, buy, or act, but the probability that I get any surprisingly new data is close to zero,” he says. “I’m thinking that the conversation is about me, or it’s about me controlling you. Neither are great conversation starters.”
Walking around with closed ears is fine if what you’re doing is the right thing and the world doesn’t change. “But if the world changes and we happen to not be doing the right thing, it becomes critical to pay attention to other people’s thoughts, emotions, words, feelings, and perspectives,” says Gregersen. “It’s important to be open to new information that you’re not looking for but need to hear.”
How do you break bad habits? Here are six ways to become a better listener:
1. Listen to Learn, Not to Be Polite
“Often, whether realizing it or not, people listen to each other out of generosity, not out of curiosity,” says Ajit Singh, partner for the early stage venture fund Artiman Ventures and consulting professor in the School of Medicine at Stanford University. “Listening is good, but the intent has to be curiosity, not generosity. True dialogue does not happen when we pretend to listen, and it certainly cannot happen if we are not listening at all.”
“Each day, ask yourself, ‘What am I going to be curious about?’” says Gregersen. “Stewart Brand, [editor of the Whole Earth catalog,] wakes up every day asking himself, ‘How many things am I dead wrong about?’ Both questions effectively open your ears. It’s having a beginner’s mind-set walking into a conversation.”
2. Quiet Your Agenda
While you can’t control someone else’s listening habits, you can control your own, and that involves quieting down your mind.
“Turn off those agendas,” says Gregersen. “Really listen to what someone else is trying to say. We need information that is disconfirming, not confirming. If we ever finish a conversation and learned nothing surprising, we weren’t really listening.”
3. Ask More Questions
One of the simplest ways to be a better listener is to ask more questions than you give answers, says Gregersen. When you ask questions, you create a safe space for other people to give you an unvarnished truth.
“Listening with real intent means I’m going to be open to being very wrong, and I’m comfortable with that in this conversation,” says Gregersen. “In a world that’s getting more polarized, being able to listen is critical to reducing unnecessary conflict at any level, within a team, organization, or on a broader political country level,” he says.
4. Pay Attention to Your Talk/Listen Ratio
Strive for a 2:1 ratio of listening to talking, says Eblin. “If you’re a note taker during meetings or conversations, try keeping track of how much you listen versus how much you talk,” he says. “Mark off a section of the paper and write down the names of all the people on the conference call. Whenever a person talks for more than a sentence or two, put a check mark by his or her name. That includes you, too. The visual representation of comparing listening to talking might hold some lessons for you.”
5. Repeat Back What You Heard
A number of problems interfere with people’s ability to understand accurately what another person is trying to communicate, says Adam Goodman, director of the Center for Leadership at Northwestern University. “Am I anticipating what the other person is about to say? Do I agree or disagree with what’s being said? Maybe I’m agreeing too quickly and, upon reflection, I’d find myself disagreeing later?” he asks. “Put simply, there’s more opportunity to misunderstand then there is to actually understand.”
Instead, implement a process called active listening. “It’s been around for a long time, and works if done right,” says Goodman. The basic concept is repeating back to the speaker what you heard. If the speaker agrees that what you heard is what he or she intended to say, you can move on. If not, the speaker needs to reword their statement until the listener really does understand. [I do this all the time, and it really annoys certain people -- but, I do it, because I know how easy it is for me to mishear or misunderstand things. I'm dyslexic.]
6. Actually Wait Until Someone is Done Talking Before You Respond
The most difficult component of listening effectively is waiting for a period at the end of a sentence before formulating a reply, says Leslie Shore, author of Listen to Succeed.
“When we begin working on a reply before the speaker is finished, we lose both the complete information being offered and an understanding of the kind of emotion present in the speaker’s delivery,” she writes in her book.
This is dangerous, says Gregersen. “When I’m the most important thing in the world, that’s the moment when I’m most likely to be thinking about next thing I’m going to say instead of listening to you,” he says. “At the very core, that’s what going on; I’m declaring to the world I am more important than you. That’s an uncomfortable moment of self-awareness, and a self-serving way of approaching life.”
We all require self-focus, but leaders who make a difference are the ones who know the purpose is bigger than themselves, says Gregersen. “When a leader is operating on the edge of what’s possible, they’re in strong listening mode,” he says.
From Fast Company.
[I really need to work on this skill. I do not always listen well. And listening is harder than talking. It requires more patience, more mindfulness, and more kindness. It requires the listener to let go of themselves.]
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Date: 2020-01-19 05:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2020-01-19 09:59 pm (UTC)