At the outset, I was taking about 2 months to do a chapter. So at 20 chapters, 4 years seemed like the right estimate.

I hate revising. Here was my game plan; really, just a game. Write the text (words) and leave placeholders for the figures (Fig 0101, 0102, 0103…) along with a reminder for what I thought needed to be shown. And try to get the placements right without needing to go back and renumber them (at least once the writing part was finished for that chapter). The detailed outline was important to this game, as was the dead time before writing anything and keeping the entire plot in my head. Casual bike rides along a familiar path ended up being indispensable ways to simply think and plan and revise before writing. I was definitely writing and revising drafts in my head.

With a chapter’s text completed and the spots for figures placed, I went back and started to work on the art. While writing a chapter might take anywhere from 5-10 days, grinding through the art took twice that time. And there were about 70 questions to write and format for each chapter, which are also merely art.

As the end of the first term course (Books A and B) got closer to completion, near the end of 2019, I started thinking about production (taking my manuscript with its pasted in art and using publishing software to make it look more like a book, along with the editorial proofing). I planned on using the resources of the printer, and more or less hiring them as a service, the cost of which would be deducted as books were eventually sold. The preliminary negotiations with them seemed fine, so I soldiered on to Book C.

Worry about production when the time comes.

Are you keeping track of the time?

I clearly missed the memo when it said 2020 was going to go sideways with a global pandemic.

Fucking covid.

By summer 2018 I had my plan.

Nothing in and of a textbook today needs to be particularly useful once the course is over, including the book itself. A crossword puzzle book is not written to be preserved in a full color, glossy, hardbound splendor. It is consumable. No effort at all is spent on its shelf legacy. Textbooks, in other words, are now squarely in the realm of the majority of most other books.

I had years of experience with “course packs” (a cheap, spiral-bound b/w printing of collections of our old exams, updated annually). Our examinations are open response, (posed with data, write real answers on paper). And students consumed these course packs year after year: puzzle books. Convenient to carry, the spiral binding allows you to fold them open while working and to share your work with others. As a book, it looks cheap and invites writing. For decades, these things were universally deemed the most essential resource we had, and we were at a point when students were obsessing over ONLY old exam questions instead of reading the book and working on those preparatory exercises. It was a problem.

But this experience with the course packs gave me a plan: a consumable version of a textbook with its pedagogical focus.

Good thing I was doing this on my own. No publisher would have understood it. No one they sent their marketing prospectus out to would have understood it. And the conversation about doing it would have ended with filling the water glasses over that dinner meeting along with a plea “Just write us a book we can sell, will you?”

Um, negatory to that, good buddy. See ya on the flip side.

During most of July-August 2018, I committed a detailed outline to the design of this textbook and its content.

Ch 1: TOPIC
Intro essay, at least marginally related to the TOPIC
Sec 1.1 subtopic, parts A/B/C/D
questions about Sec 1.1 (formatted as our exam questions are)
Sec 1.2 subtopic, parts A/B/C/D
questions about Sec 1.2 (formatted as our exam questions are)
Sec 1.3 subtopic, parts A/B/C/D
questions about Sec 1.3 (formatted as our exam questions are)
Sec 1.4 subtopic, parts A/B/C/D
questions about Sec 1.4 (formatted as our exam questions are)
Outro essay: “What did we learn on the show tonight, Craig?”
Chapter questions.

There are 3-4 subtopics per chapter; always chopped up as A/B/C/D; each section more or less representing 1-2 class days (usually 1); always a set of questions to follow, separated from the Haiku of the pacing in the section. And then at the appropriate breaks, sets of exam questions (the old course pack content). Appendices for the critical reference materials that are part of the learning (think of them as subroutines: GoSub nomenclature, GoSub spectroscopy). There needed to be 4 volumes (2 per term, to keep things portable). Each inside front cover gives the big plan; each chapter has its detailed table of contents; but there is no index. Indices are a reference feature for a shelf item. Someone learning from the book does not need an index.

All this stuff needed to be figured out up front, of course. You cannot be deciding on a new feature while you are writing chapter 10 – not if you want to ever finish and be sane. Think it through; commit; don’t look back.

I wrote word 1 on page 1 of chapter 1 on September 1, 2018. I figured maybe 4 years before it could be in the hands of students (Fall 2022).

What was the revelation that hit me within two hours?

Until recently, textbooks needed to serve two purposes.

First, textbooks are meant to be learning vehicles, filled with pedagogical detail and guidance and explanation for people who have no prior knowledge of the subject. And hopefully written by people who have a degree of pedagogical content knowledge (ideas about teaching the subject that derive from understanding the subject combined with a utility belt’s worth of teaching strategies).

Second, textbooks were (note the tense) meant to be a bookshelf reference. Even as you were learning, if you needed to query the subject, you reach for the book and hit the index.

News alert for the 21st Century: no one reaches for a book to do this any more, not when the entire internet is a clever keyword (and key phrase) indexing system away and you carry it around in your pocket.

As I sat for the first time as a prospective author, I was faced with words and diagrams in the fifth edition of the Ege text that were bogged down in the world of the late 1970s and early 1980s, when textbooks serving two purposes were necessary. It’s only something you really see, I guess, when you are thinking about writing and what you want to say.

By 2015, I knew instinctively that I only needed to think about the pedagogical mission and not the reference mission, but the narrative of this 5th edition, whose basic foundation dated from a time when these missions were integrated, was simply falling apart as I even thought about editing the manuscript.

Surely this issue had been resolved in more contemporary texts?

Honestly, I knew the answer to that question, but I looked anyway. Book after book… all the same. Market pressure and the nature of how textbooks (and other commercial creative works) are created is central to this. Let me explain.

I never got past the initial conversation about authoring when it came up in my office, over and over during the years, because I am a strong Creator’s Rights advocate. Why does that matter? Because books are written as what is called “work for hire.” It’s the old press, studio, and gallery deal (the “We” who run the presses and own the galleries): We hire you to produce a work that We own and have complete control over. We cut you in for a piece of the action (royalties) but We retain ownership. If you do not want to edit something or revise something after We ask you to, then We retain the right to hire someone else to do it and they get their piece of the action, too. So the creators of Superman were paid their agreed upon fee and the company owns the property. And the Creators signed on from the outset (it’s called a work for hire contract). When Superman hits big, the Creators have no claim. Music artists who worked for a label; actors who worked for a movie or TV studio; and on and on. Many industries have come around (billion-dollar profits from films do not only remain with the suits), and production and distribution technologies (who can record, who can print) have loosened the monopoly previously held by publishers.

Throughout the years, my dinner conversations with publishers were short: I am happy to create a book, but I am going to finance it and own the property. I will provide edited and camera-ready copy. What I need you to do is enter into a licensing deal with me to print and distribute. Needless to say, those conversations were over even before the water glasses were filled and the bread basket was at the table.

Books are created by the suits, the suits want to sell as many books as they can. The suits cannot write books; they need to hire authors to generate the IP. Then they need the author as an employee who does what is asked based on market surveys. In my life, I met many textbook authors who went into text writing because of their intellectual and emotional enthusiasm to truly bring a personal vision forward. And in my life, the textbook authors I met were nearly always unhappy and frustrated by the process and how the product ended up.

And that brings me back to 2015. In less than two hours it was as clear as a bell that I needed to think about “design” in a big way if I wanted to create a textbook that was not bogged down by its mission as an on-the-shelf reference source at the same time it was serving its pedagogical mission.

And that took another 3 years.

I wrote a textbook.

Let’s review.

In 2007, I inherited the ownership of the 5th Edition of the Organic Chemistry textbook written by my late colleague, Seyhan Ege. I had been a consultant since the 2nd edition, and through its editions the book traced the insights and changes to the organic teaching program at the University of Michigan. The copyright on the fifth edition was 2003, and I continued to have a custom edition of the book printed. The course continued to evolve and the book, obviously, did not, and the divergence started to get substantial.

Around 2013 or so, I figured I might update the book by having the text extracted and placed into an editable manuscript. Seyhan’s only wish was that anything I did was not a “6th Edition” of her book. Her oeuvre would stand. Whatever was done was now on me.

It took until 2015 to clear some space and time.

Pencils sharpened. Knuckles cracked. Ready to roll.

Pursuing this strategy lasted less than two hours.

Another term, another test of patience and deciding whether to stay in person. The delta variant came and went, and then omicron appeared. It clearly did not get the memo that we were tired to this stuff. Classes began (in person) on January 5, with cautions. Lots of places delayed or went online for a few weeks. I did not see that as anything more than kicking whatever was going to happen down the road.

The northern tier never really cleared from delta, and the fact that the Brown University maps use the single red color for 25+ cases per 100,000 means that 500 per 100,000 ends up looking the same as 50 per 100,000. So the difference in scale between delta and omicron was not as obvious as nearly all states were 100+ per 100,000 and many were 400+

As projected, omicron peaked and then fell in rapid order.

As of these past few days, it is interesting to see that omicron has finally made its way into mainland China. I have been skeptical that the “zero covid” policy would be able to handle this sneaky variant when it finally hit.

January 4, February 4, and March 13, 2022

The only thing worse than a pandemic is online teaching during a pandemic.

I agree with the position being taken by schools, this fall, to just go ahead and start classes as scheduled, put in vaccine mandates, make testing convenient, and use common sense methods (e.g., masking) to mitigate risks.

The delta variant has been spreading… but more slowly in the directions where vaccination rates are higher.

July 4, August 4, and September 4, 2021

For the record: this pandemic sucks. Yeah, it’s a bad virus and it’s lethal. But what does it say about the state of human affairs that something such as a virus could be so politicized?

According to reports, the recoil over mask-wearing was common in the 1918 pandemic, decried as “dirt-catchers” and so inconvenient for smoking that some would cut holes in them for their cigars. The science of virology was barely young, and communication was not nearly as instantaneous. Global mobility was unfortunately higher than it might have been because of WW1.

The sense you get from 1918 is qualitatively different from 2020. I have yet to see a report from a century ago that deemed the pandemic to be fake, and where dying people were coughing out denials with their last breaths.

I was always suspicious that Friedman’s proposition of a totally egalitarian Flat Earth, in the globalization of everything, including communication and access to its platforms, had its down side. More than ever, some are more equal than others, perhaps because power is never shared, and perhaps, even, the inherent drive towards inequity (to gather wealth, to gather power) was accelerated by globalization precisely because the scoundrels now had the entire sandbox to play in.

The behavior of people in the US (and its government) has been atrocious. After the initial NY outbreak, I started to watch the various sites for how the virus was spreading. The Hopkins site gives that big, global picture, and this Brown site gives the nicest view of things in the US – a color code for each county, based on the last 7-day average: if 0-0.9 cases/100,000 per day: green; if 1.0-9.9 cases/100,00 per day: yellow; if 10.0-24.9 cases/100,000 per day: orange; and at 25 and above: red. Just as a little hobby, I have been capturing the county-detail for three segments of the US since mid-July.

I’m posting this on December 27, 2020, so let’s go to the maps on the 27th of the month, starting in July – when the locus of cases had moved from the northeast to the southern tier. You see the flow up the Mississippi to the upper midwest, the return to the northeast and the rebound to the south. Shout out to Michigan for being able to push back a bit. Being a couple of peninsulas creates at least the chance of mounting a defense from land-born transmission. You can see how it moved in from Wisconsin and Indiana.

By the way, take a look at that little green spec of a county in northwest Texas. Still today, it is the only green spot on my maps. That is Loving County, Texas. It covers 677 square miles, which is 50% of the land area of the state of Rhode Island, with its 1.06 million people, and has a population of 169 people. Loving County is the least populated county in the contiguous US (and second only to Kalawao County, Hawaii (53 square miles with 88 people). Loving County has had one recorded case of coronavirus.

July-November 27, 2020:

December 27, 2020 (Michigan gets a little credit here):

A Cruise Ship is safer than a Campus

The optimism for re-opening campuses to in-person activity in the fall is being cast as “cautious” and “guarded” and “prudent,” which are all the new euphemisms for reckless and unsafe. The only situation about the pandemic that has changed since mid-March is the behavior of people, who isolated from one another to interfere with the only thing that could be controlled: the physical transmission of the coronavirus. The behavior of the coronavirus is unaffected. The epidemiology of outbreaks remains unaffected. The greater the crisscross of contacts with other humans, the more likely transmission exponentiates into an outbreak. The closed and close-quarters environments of cruise ships and food processing plants are the proofs of concept. And a cruise ship is safer than a campus.

Welcome to the S.S. University. Most of the 45,000 passengers are drawn from every state in the union, rural and urban, each carrying whatever contacts they left when they set out for the ship, as well as every contact along the way to embarkation. The boat is parked, and only a fraction of the passengers actually stay in their small, randomly-assigned, double-occupancy rooms. The S.S. University is not isolated. It is surrounded by an archipelago of neighborhoods and a flotilla of other boats. The passengers who do not live onboard this cruise of young and eager singles live in a community of smaller boats that ring the main ship, typically in 3-6 person groups in apartment cruisers.

Passengers live on the ship, off-boat passengers live in the apartment cruisers, and the entire staff, from the captain to the deck hands to the cruise directors to the custodial staff, all commute in from a hundred nearby islands. The people who live onboard and close by move back and forth, taking crowded ferries that pick up and drop off passengers from meeting site to meeting site. Every member of the staff and crew leave from and return to their families every day, and all the contacts that they have, embarking and disembarking daily.

The S.S. University is not the only destination. Among the archipelago and the flotilla of other boats, there is a constant crisscrossing that takes place, mainly around socializing and commerce. Some of the services of the S.S. University are exclusive to its onboard passengers, but many other services ring the wharf and are open to whomever can get there: bars and gyms and restaurants and coffee shops that are built around cheap prices and high turnover, because many of the passengers need to watch their money, are also attractive to the members of the archipelago.

Outside of the social agenda, the actual paid-for cruise for passengers is built around side-by-side meeting rooms and a tight schedule, with 10-minute changeovers in narrow corridors with access through a finite number of human-sized doors (each with a handle). The air circulation can be non-existent, often in rooms with no windows that, anyone can tell you, linger with the distinctive humidity of anxious humans after the first meeting of the day.

Everything is communal: the ferries that move passengers and staff around, the meeting rooms, the seats in the rooms, the materials used by the staff in the rooms, and every bathroom. Have you seen what the bathrooms are like by the afternoon?

Distancing is the beginning, not the end, of safety in the pandemic. Distancing is a way to think about contact in the present, only. How to maintain distance when you take commuting and the integration of time into account? Occupying spaces that need to be made safe before and after occupancy is another aspect of distancing: distancing in time. It does not matter that you are six feet away in the room when you are sitting in the seat for which there is no practical way of ensuring its safety, including from the passenger from the last session who sneezed onto its emptiness and caused the blood pressure of everyone else in the room to spike. Nearly all rooms have at least two doors, so you might manage “in” and “out” – but it is a pretty magical 10-minute ballet if everyone moving “out” can distance from everyone moving “in” as well as from one another.

Some fraction of the highly experienced staff is either at-risk or interacts with an at-risk member of their own family or might come across someone while taking care of business over the weekend back at their home island. Personally, I am a session leader for one of these activity rooms. And as much as I loathe to admit it, I am at risk. I am 63, male, a type II diabetic, and carry a genetic hypercoagulative disorder. When I enter one of those session rooms, I can invariably smell the departing group and sense its humidity. I see every surface, in front of me, that has been used by my colleague from the previous session. My colleague who is standing there, quite unavoidably, needing to spray their words to the student with a question after class to cover the noise of the changeover and their attempts to stay distanced. I do not want to put that mic on, and I really have no interest in touching the 4-5 buttons I need to touch just to get ready for my session.

A cruise ship is safer than a campus. I need a better metaphor. Navigating a campus in a pandemic is more comparable to every big heist movie you have ever seen. You do not just worry about the size of the bag you need in the moment you squirrel away the diamonds in the vault. You need to get in without being caught. You need to get out. You need to assume every surface and space has an alarm, so you better be prepared. Every single member of the team has a job to do, and you need to have trust in every other team member and in their skills, because your life is in their hands. And in this case, hundreds of different teams are carrying out their own heists in the same space as you, so your trust and confidence needs to exponentiate like a viral contagion. Before a heist, in the movies, you practice again and again in a simulated space, making the inevitable errors you make when you do something new, even when you are an experienced scoundrel. There is no room for rookies on your team.

In the campus pandemic heist, though, everyone is a rookie. The first bell rings on the first day, and you are following imagined instructions about how to proceed, procedures developed by senior management, whose memory of being an on-the-ground team member might not actually be from your campus or have taken place in the last two decades. In the 1981 noir film “Body Heat,” an experienced criminal played by Mickey Rourke is giving advice to a lawyer, played by William Hurt, who is contemplating pulling off a murder. Rourke returns the advice that Hurt once gave to him: “Are you ready to hear something? I want you to see if this sounds familiar: any time you try a decent crime, you got fifty ways you’re gonna fuck up. If you think of twenty-five of them, then you’re a genius… and you ain’t no genius.”

Are you contemplating in-person instruction this fall, in the absence of completely reliable testing, tracking, and a deep understanding about the mechanism of transmission of the coronavirus, particularly among the asymptomatic? If there is even one problem related to re-opening campus in this essay that had not occurred to you (did I mention that the toilets are all communal?), then heed Mickey Rourke’s advice about the hubris of genius. And believe me: I ain’t no genius. There are a countless number of unanticipated problems just waiting to turn your “guarded” and “cautious” optimism into reckless and unsafe actions.

Postscript:

The epidemiologists tell us to watch out for these variables in the equation of infectious exposure: space (farther apart, not closer), time (the lower, the better), people (the fewer, the better), and place (open, not closed).

That, and a heaping helping of common sense from Robert Strauss on how to behave when you are having a fight with a more powerful adversary:

You don’t quit when you’re tired – you quit when the gorilla is tired.

I do not follow too much in the way of web sites, but I do keep up with about 10 food sites. One of them is www.bonappetit.com        

Over the past few years, Bon Appetit has done a GREAT job featuring the young chefs in their test kitchen, and two of them now have pretty regular shows that are pretty fun to watch. There are other shows, but these two are my faves.

(1) Claire is a pastry chef who takes on the challenge of creating gourmet versions of junk food. https://www.bonappetit.com/video/series/gourmet-makes

(2) Chris is a super-taster and so one of his colleagues selects a dish, makes it, and then they blindfold Chris – he can smell, taste, and feel the dish, and then has to reverse engineer it without ever seeing it
https://www.bonappetit.com/video/series/reverse-engineering

It’s really great to watch how both of them approach the problem-solving, plus it is around food, so it’s inherently accessible.

Anyone remember settings such as this?

Bryant Park, NYC, late December 2019

I was in Beijing and Nanjing during the first two weeks of January 2020. We returned back to the US on January 16, which had been scheduled to simply avoid the crazy-busy travel season around Spring Festival (Lunar New Year) in China. Within days, the news about the coronavirus was making the news. Coincidentally, the first student we met with on January 4 was from Wuhan University.

I was supposed to go to Hong Kong via South Korea in mid-February, and while travel was still allowed at the departure date, things were changing fast in both places, and the night before the morning of my scheduled departure was the day that American Airlines first started to curtail its flights. I called my carrier, and they were planning to follow suit later in the week. No sense getting trapped: trip cancelled.

I got back from San Francisco a week ago. Other than some extra hand sanitizer everywhere, things were not notably different. Today they are in lock-down.