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Music parents’ tips for summertime music-making

The lazy days of summer pose a special challenge for music parents. With school and regular music lessons on hiatus until the fall, it can be hard to persuade youngsters to continue to practice their instruments without the prod of needing to prepare for a lesson or a school ensemble rehearsal. If there isn’t a certain amount of vacation practicing, however, some of the musical gains children made during the school year may begin to melt away.

Many music parents solve this problem by enrolling their youngsters in summer music programs. These can include music day camps and workshops sponsored by local music schools, arts organizations, Suzuki associations, or recreation and education departments. For older youngsters, there are sleep-away camps that include music-making in their activity line-up. Advanced students could try out for some of the more high-powered audition-only summer music festivals. Making music with other kids is one of the best ways to encourage practicing at any time of year, giving youngsters a chance to make musical friends and let positive peer pressure work its motivational magic. Summertime music programs have a special advantage of letting kids be “on their own . . . learning from kids—not from a parent—how important practice is,” says Ohio music mom Ann Turner, whose daughter attended music camps as a youngster and is now a professional French horn player.

If signing up youngsters for a summer music program isn’t possible this year, there are other ways to inspire summertime music-making. Below are a few ideas from veteran music parents who, like Ann Turner, share their suggestions in The Music Parents’ Survival Guide.

The author’s sons as youngsters, taking part in an informal neighborhood Fourth of July parade. Photo courtesy of the author.

— Concertgoing. “What I say to any parent that wants to know the best approach to get kids interested in music: There’s nothing better than exposure,” says Ellis Marsalis, father to a quartet’s worth of jazz musicians, including trumpeter Wynton Marsalis. The power of attending a live performance can spark kids’ interest in making music themselves when they get home. Summertime concerts have the added attraction of frequently being cost-free, such as the performances that local bands and orchestras present in public parks, as well as outdoor drumming circles that take place in some areas. In addition, if it isn’t possible to sign up for a local summer music camp or program this summer, attending the program’s student concerts offers an opportunity for families to check out the program to see if it might be a good choice for the following summer.

— Fun music. “Music should be fun for kids. That is the key,” says Marin Alsop, a music mom and conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Lesson-free summers offer a chance to explore new ways to have fun with music. Without the pressure of preparing a particular piece for a lesson, kids can branch out a bit and download different kinds of music that they might want to experiment with on their instruments. “We got music for pieces they could play on their own for fun, like Star Wars music and the Pink Panther theme,” says Oregon music mom, Diane Cornelius. Other families added elements of fun to whatever pieces youngsters were practicing by encouraging them to make up stories to go with the music, as if the music were a movie’s soundtrack. For young children, scavenger hunts can add fun to practicing. A parent can hide index cards around the house (or in a basket) for a child to find with the names of songs or exercises to practice. Youngsters could also do some improvising to make up their own tunes, and then learn how to write them down, using the free introductory versions that are available for such music notation software programs as Sibelius or Finale.

 

— Rewards. When her son was young, Marin Alsop used “reward minutes” that he could cash in on weekends to play Wii video games, as a way to reward him for the time he spent practicing. Many parents have used various kinds of reward systems when their children were young. Annette Radoff placed a cotton ball in a jar each time her daughter Elena Urioste (now a professional violinist) did a good job practicing. “When it was full, Elena would choose an activity as a reward, like watching a movie, going on an outing, or baking things together,” says this Philadelphia-area music parent. Education experts say that rewards—if used in moderation—can be effective motivators.

— Role Models. Parents who play an instrument can model good practice behavior by fitting in some practice time themselves, even during the dog days of summer. Baltimorean Thanh Huynh, inspired by her daughter’s musical interests, started playing piano again after a multi-year gap. “My daughter could see that I practice what I preach with regards to practicing,” says Thanh Huynh. “Music should enrich everybody’s life”—even a busy music parent’s.

 

Featured image: “Fast musical notes on a music sheet” by Horia Varlan. CC by 2.0 via Flickr.

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Banks, politics, and the financial crisis: a demand for culture change (Part 2)

The retail side of banks’ business culture is of particular political significance; public disapproval of wholesale and shadow banking behaviour flow less readily into voter intentions. It is through the prism of experience of retail banking that politicians and the public believe themselves to be afforded insight into banks’ failure in these more remote areas – and believe the whole system to be rotten.

Unhappily for the banks, therefore, it is on the retail side of banking that ideas about what caused a deterioration in culture and what it would take to repair it are most fully developed.

It is a simple narrative: in the days before Big Bang (on 27 October 1986), the Big Five banks operated a simple business model of retail banking, in which banks’ profits were generated by interest on lending to businesses and individuals. The banks’ business was conducted through relationship banking: i.e. personal, long-term relationships between bank manager and borrower which afforded the bank an intimate knowledge of its credit risk. Such a business model depended on high levels of trust and on valuing the customer relationship over any individual transaction within it. Profit was accordingly measured over a longish cycle.

After Big Bang, by a process of acquisition, the Big Five became “universal banks”, which meant they also conducted investment banking. As investment banking was more profitable, this side of the bank’s management dominated at board level. Those investment bankers predictably did what they know – they introduced investment banking techniques into retail banking and centralised IT systems. A “relationship culture” was replaced by a “sales culture”, which valued transaction volumes and margins over relationships – i.e. numbers over people. Profit was accordingly measured over shorter time-cycles.

Customers noticed the difference. The justification for this “the-computer-says-yes”, sales-driven approach, lay – as it did in sub-prime lending in the US – in the argument that it spread wealth by making credit freely available where it was previously denied. But even by January 2005 – when the FSA decided to regulate general insurance to capture the mis-selling of PPI – a sense of abuse of power and corrosion of trust was palpable. When, in 2008, easy credit tipped into excessive debt, the credibility of the argument dried up along with the credit.

A member of my chambers, who was on the wholesale side of banking before coming to the Bar, tells me that the attitude of investment banking’s management can be summed up as follows: “as long as the boys are making money we are happy. If there is a problem, we will deal with it.” However appropriate that attitude might be to managing a trading desk, it goes down badly with customers who are being asked to trust brand names on the high street. So now everyone is finally quite clear what they want to move away from – a sales culture – and where they want to get back to, a relationship culture. Indeed stakeholders now agree they need to restore that culture to rebuild trust. The question for both regulators and banks is: how?

High-level pressure from a regulator can sometimes work. The best-known example of such an approach is the forced departure on 3 July 2012 of Bob Diamond, ornament of investment banking culture, from his position as CEO of Barclays. He left in response to the FCA’s report into LIBOR fixing – a report that the head of the FCA considered important enough to the career of the head of the FCA for him to lend it his name, “The Wheatley Report”.

Barclays duly elevated its head of retail banking, Anthony Jenkins, to the position of CEO. He established the bank’s new TRANSFORM agenda (Turnaround, Return, Acceptable Numbers, Sustain FORward Momentum). Mr Jenkins propagated its five new corporate values: Respect, Integrity, Service, Excellence, Stewardship. But by 28 October 2015, Mr Jenkins had lost the support of his investment banker colleagues on Barclays’ board, who re-installed one of their own, Jes Staley, as CEO.

High-level pressure is often short-lived. It can also work the other way. On 17 July 2015, Martin Wheatley himself succumbed to political pressure from the Treasury when HSBC threatened to move their headquarters abroad in the face of what they described as a hostile regulatory environment. His departure was part of the “new settlement” between regulators and banks that the Chancellor announced in his Mansion House speech the previous month against a backdrop of HSBC threatening to move its headquarters and taxes to Hong Kong.

The banks have tried to give the appearance, at a high level, of taking the initiative of driving cultural change by creating the Banking Standards Board. To the public, the BSB feels remote from their experiences on the high street. And anyway, the political impact of its creation was more than overshadowed by the FCA dropping its own review of banking culture on 31 December 2015. That read as a defeat for the FCA and a win for the banks. It is also appeared to be a signal example of the influence banks have over the regulators and government. All the more so of the banks’ own creature, the BSB.

Will public disaffection subside while such high-level arrangements agreed between banks and regulators are the only ones in play? It has not in Holland. There, a new left-wing government has been voted in. It has torn up the confidential settlements that banks had reached, under pressure from the AFM, the Dutch regulator, with customers who had been mis-sold swaps. The new government has now ordered the AFM to install four “wise men” to impose new, more generous settlements on the banks. That does not sound like the rule of law. It sounds like a mini revolution. It is not what one expects in Western Europe. But it is happening.

So is it wise for bankers in London be satisfied with always being on the back foot on culture – taking fine after fine from the regulator? Would it not be wiser for them to find a more compelling way to take control of the crisis in their reputation? If the banks decide it is, it will be because they realise that the cost of giving the impression of being unfair is greater than the cost of being seen to be fair. If they are looking for a way to give an impression of fairness to retail customers, they can find it in this CMLJ article.

Featured image credit: Macro economics by Kevin Dooley. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

In the first part of this article, Richard Samuel examined the political climate surrounding bank regulation since 2008.

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A look into clinical pathology and medical publishing

Clinical pathology covers a broad range of responsibilities and functions in medicine. As a discipline, it includes clinical (bio)chemistry, medical microbiology, hematology, coagulation, clinical immunology, and increasingly molecular diagnostics. We recently sat down with the Editor of the American Journal of Clinical Pathology, Dr. Michael L. Wilson, to learn the vital importance of this field. Dr. Wilson also shares with us his insights on his journal’s readers, authors, and publishing a medical journal.

What is the role of clinical pathologists?

When the Journal was founded, the discipline of Pathology was divided into Experimental Pathology, which focused on research, and Clinical Pathology, which focused on diagnostic approaches to patient care. This included examination of tissues, analysis of blood and body fluids, and other aspects of laboratory medicine. Through time, examination of tissue specimens became known as Surgical Pathology in the United States and Histopathology elsewhere. The term Clinical Pathology was given to the several disciplines that are part of laboratory medicine: medical microbiology, clinical (bio)chemistry, transfusion medicine, and so forth. Today, clinical pathologists oversee the diagnostic laboratories in hospitals and clinics. It is an increasingly important role, as up to 70% of the information contained in modern health records is generated in clinical laboratories.

  Can you describe the American Journal of Clinical Pathology to those readers who are not familiar with it?

 AJCP is one of the oldest pathology journals in the world. As the title suggests, our primary role is to publish articles in the discipline known as either clinical pathology or laboratory medicine. We also publish articles in the discipline known as anatomic or cellular pathology, particularly in the area of hematopathology. As such, we are one of the few truly general pathology journals, as opposed to the many journals with a topic focus restricted to a single subspecialty.

Who do you think should be reading about new clinical pathology research?

Academic pathologists as well as those in other settings, such as private practice, industry, government, and management should all be seeking out new research. Because pathology is integral to patient care, and increasing access to health care services is a global effort, we increasingly target pathologists working in low- and middle-income countries. Students and trainees, particularly pathology residents, should also look to stay up-to-date regarding new findings in their field.

Because you publish articles on many topics, and AJCP has a diverse group of readers, what are your priorities for publishing articles?

This is probably our greatest challenge. We publish manuscripts with the best quality and scientific validity, but we must balance this against our goal of publishing articles from many disciplines, and increasingly those submitted from around the world where many physicians and scientists do not have access to the same resources that we have in the United States and Canada. We also make an effort to publish manuscripts from pathologists and laboratory scientists who are early in their careers. As a result, our published articles represent our topical content and our readership. Our Editorial Board spends a lot of time thinking about this.

Does that emphasis on publishing manuscripts from authors who may not be as experienced in publishing lead to any other challenges?

Not as many as one might think. We do end up sending a number of manuscripts back for further revisions and make more extensive suggestions to authors, but overall the authors are quite receptive and clearly learn from the experience. Since I began my tenure as Editor we have processed several thousand manuscripts and there have been fewer than five authors who presented difficult challenges for us. That is a credit to the authors we have worked with.

What is it like being the Editor of a journal that is sponsored by a professional society as opposed to one that is fully independent?

Our sponsoring organization, the American Society for Clinical Pathology (ASCP), is one of the oldest and largest professional medical societies in the United States. Moreover, it has an outstanding track record in publishing both journals and textbooks, so publishing is fully part of the organizational culture. ASCP has always had leadership that understands the role of publishing in patient care, education, training, and research. ASCP leadership and the Board of Directors work hard to make certain that all parts of the organization are aligned and that the collective efforts are effective in fulfilling our mission. Some readers have asked if the journals are fully independent in terms of editorial functions and content, and the answer is firmly “yes”—everyone in the organization understands and supports the need for editorial independence. It’s a rewarding environment to work in.

How do you see the discipline of clinical pathology and associated research evolving in the future?

As populations around the world begin to demand better access to high-quality health care, there is going to be a marked increase in the need for affordable diagnostics. In addition, there will be a need for diagnostic technology that is more robust and durable, not as susceptible to climatic conditions such as heat and humidity, and requires less technical expertise to maintain and use. The role of clinical pathologists will be to compare and contrast competing technologies and determine which, if any, provide the diagnostic information needed for patient care in a given setting.

  With your emphasis on global health, what changes do you foresee in publishing a medical journal?

The role of medical journals has been fairly constant over the decades, mostly one of publishing results of research efforts to further knowledge, publishing review articles to keep the readers up to date, and providing opportunities for physicians and scientists to share their knowledge. Those roles will continue, but medical journals will need to expand their role in educating the public, in advocacy, and in guiding public policy. Put another way, they need to be able to present their content to a much broader audience and, as part of that, explain why their articles are important and how the findings relate to the broader world. A few journals have done this for many years, but more journals need to do so. Otherwise they will become irrelevant to all but a small audience, and small audiences tend not to have much global impact.

Featured image credit: Laboratory by DarkoStonjanovic. CC0 Public Domain via Pixabay. 

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The quest for professional management

When you book an airline ticket, you trust that the pilot assigned to this flight is sufficiently knowledgeable and competent to fly the aircraft. In fact, you expect the pilot to be a professional that has gone through many hours of flight training and theoretical study. How different is this when we turn to the case of ‘flying’ companies and other organizations. Have you ever checked the credentials of your boss, to assess whether (s)he is the professional ‘pilot’ one can entrust with leading (this part of) the organization to its next destination? Perhaps you assume such an assessment was done by those who appointed your boss at the time? Regardless of the various answers possible to these questions, there’s a striking difference between the level of professionalism naturally expected from an aircraft pilot and the more ambiguous and unclear expectations many of us have with regard to managers.

Historically, Mary Parker Follett, Henri Fayol, Peter Drucker and other pioneers in the management discipline conceived of management as a science-based professional activity that serves the ‘greater good.’ In the beginning of the 21st century, however, the nature and level of professionalism of management is under close public scrutiny. For instance, many large banks at Wall Street that failed so badly in 2008 were managed by people demonstrating anything but professionalism, resulting in mismanagement of risks and a one-dimensional focus on short-term profitability. The CEOs of these organizations “strayed from their strategies and took unwise and unsustainable risks, thus ignoring potential long-term consequences”, as Michael Beer observed.

Not only managers of financial institutions suffer from amateurism where professionals are highly needed. Enron, ICI, Worldcom, Global Crossing, Tyco International, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Kmart, Xerox, Volkswagen and many other companies appear to have suffered from mismanagement and lack of direction. Other recent cases include the mismanagement of megaprojects such as the Berlin Brandenburg airport, San Francisco Transbay Terminal, the 2014 Soccer World Cup in Brazil, and the 2014 Winter Olympics in Russia. Many supervisory boards, or boards of directors, also suffer from non-professionalism. A recent example is the supervisory board of Vestia, the largest public housing association in the Netherlands. When Vestia’s CEO mismanaged the organization for many years, its supervisory board failed to effectively monitor the CEO’s performance and later also failed to properly manage his exit.

Man adjusting tie by Unsplash. Public domain via Pixabay.

These cases of dramatic mismanagement raise the question whether they are perhaps exceptions, that is, incidental failures in an otherwise quite healthy profession. The academic evidence suggests the answer to this question is a straightforward ‘no.’ For example, Paul Nutt demonstrated that about half of all managerial decisions made in organizations fail. And Bloom et al. collected data on core management practices in over 10,000 firms to observe there are many very badly managed firms, compared to a very small population of well-managed ones. Of course, any professional discipline will have to accept the fact that low levels of professionalism will occur. The key challenge here is not to erase all forms of amateurism, but to make high levels of professionalism the norm rather than the exception.

The quest for more professional management is not only the ‘right’ thing to do on moral grounds. Throughout the world, young people are increasingly better educated and demanding more professional management practices from their employers. For example, a large study among 40 thousand employees and managers at PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) observed that employees under the age of 30 perceive present management practices in PwC as highly dysfunctional, causing most of them to resign within two years. Moreover, the study by Bloom et al. demonstrates that the level and quality of management practice, or what they call management as a technology, has a strong effect on firm performance. Investing in the professionalism of the management discipline is thus not only in the interest of many employees and managers, but is also of great importance for investors, customers, and society at large.

In this respect, circular management practices ― also known as sociocracy and holacracy ― illustrate the notion of management as technology, that is, a body of instrumental knowledge. These new forms of management perhaps offer the best hope of easing top managers’ stranglehold on companies and, by extension, on innovation in these companies, as well as the revitalization of the management discipline itself. These circular forms of management distribute power and leadership throughout the organization, while maintaining an unambiguous hierarchy. This type of management practice implies that people take on roles as needed, rather than anyone becoming exclusively and (almost) permanently assigned to a managerial or any other role.

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Valuing sadness, past and present

In September 2013, the American comedian Louis C.K. talked to chat-show host Conan O’Brien about the value of sadness. His comments grew out of a discussion about mobile phones, and the way they may distract us from the reality of our emotions. ‘You need to build an ability to just be yourself and not be doing something. That’s what the phones are taking away, the ability to just sit there. That’s being a person.’

For Louis C.K., a large part of that ‘being there’, of being a person, is about being sad. ‘‘[S]ometimes when things clear away, you’re not watching anything, you’re in your car … it starts to visit on you. Just this sadness. Life is tremendously sad, just by being in it.’’ And the best response to this, he suggests, isn’t to dodge the feeling by picking up a mobile phone, but rather to look at it head on, ‘‘and let it hit you like a truck … Sadness is poetic. You’re lucky to live sad moments.’’

Four hundred or so years ago, around the time of Shakespeare, Queen Elizabeth I, John Donne, and King James I, people also talked about the meaning of sadness, and whether or not it brought any value to life. While few would have described the experience of sadness as ‘lucky’, many did suggest that, in the right contexts, the emotion could be seen as useful, productive, and even enlightening. Think of Shakespeare’s King Lear on the stormy heath, whose extraordinary sorrow helps him see life from a different point of view, to acknowledge the suffering of his impoverished subjects and ‘to feel what wretches feel’.

If we read much of the literature of this time – and perhaps any time – we discover a world of agonising, and yet somehow also constructive, pain and sorrow. Emotion is repeatedly represented as an extension of the self, meaning that as characters start to know their feelings, they also start to understand themselves and the world that they’re a part of. At the same time, if we read much of the more formal and explanatory writing on emotion from this period, we get a rather different story. Here, writers frequently characterized emotion as a ‘malady’, a ‘perturbation’, and even a ‘disease of the soul.’ For emotion was believed to cause motion in the mind and body, which could destabilize rational thinking and jeopardize the harmony of the self.

Portrait of Ginevra Aldrovandi Hercolani, c. 1595, by Lavinia Fontana. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

This was nowhere truer than in the experience of sadness. Of all the emotions recognized and discussed at this time – or of all ‘the passions’, as they were called then – sadness or ‘grief’ was widely regarded as the most dangerous and damaging. Countless writers emphasized the physical ailments sad feelings could bring. ‘‘There is nothing more enemie to life, then sorrow’’, the humanist and diplomat Thomas Elyot wrote in his best-selling medical regimen The Castell of Health, and the theologian Thomas Wright likewise advised readers in his The Passions of the Minde in Generall to ‘‘Expell sadnesse farre from thee; For sadnesse hath killed many, neither is there any profite in it.’’

Medical physicians agreed, identifying the passions as one of the six ‘non-natural’ factors dramatically influencing health (the other five being diet, sleep, exercise, environment, and, to put it delicately, ‘evacuation’). Linked to the cold, dry humour of melancholy (literally meaning ‘black bile’ in Greek), sadness was seen as the harbinger of numerous bodily troubles, including stomach aches, light-headedness, heart palpitations, and wasting illnesses, which, in their most extreme forms, might even cause death.

Indeed, while we might think that dying of sorrow is a rather sentimental idea fit only for the stage, in the seventeenth century ‘grief’ was regularly included as a cause of death in the London Bills of Mortality, which were one of the earliest forms of municipal record keeping. Though many of the Bills no longer survive, if we look through those that do remain, we can see that during the years 1629-1660 more than 350 people in the city of London were believed to have died from extreme sadness. Elyot and Wright’s comments, it seems, were not idle threats.

And yet, despite the palpable dangers posed by sadness at this time, many writers still suggested that it had important benefits, and even a kind of ‘poetry’, to harken back to Louis C.K.’s twenty-first-century observations. First and foremost, these writers insisted that there were different sorts of sadness, which had different effects on the mind, body, and soul. ‘Grief’ was not always identical to ‘melancholy’, which was certainly not the same as ‘godly sorrow’ or ‘despair’ – both of which had much more to do with theology and the immortal soul than physiology and the medical body.

Second, and perhaps most importantly, these different sorrows didn’t mean the same thing irrespective of the sufferer. Even a dangerous grief could be productive if the person experiencing it deemed it so. In the literature and historical records of the period we can find numerous instances of people defying the advice of doctors, priests, family, and friends, and persisting in sorrow due to a belief that it revealed something important to them about their own sense of self.

Many scholars have suggested that culture offers people ‘emotional scripts’ by which to make sense of and act out their feelings, but looking at responses to sadness in Renaissance England we can also see how people engaged in what I call ‘emotive improvisation.’ These wilful, and often defiant, responses took sufferers ‘off book’ and towards new ways of understanding emotional experience and self-discovery. They show us what happened when people ‘put the phone down’, as it were, and let life hit them like a truck.

Headline image credit: Woman desperate sad tears by Counselling. Public domain via Pixabay.

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What does Brexit have to do with human rights?

The economy and sovereignty are the two main themes dominating the political campaign preceding the EU Referendum that is taking place on 23 June. The sovereignty argument revolves around the notion of “taking back control from Brussels” and human rights are amongst the examples of control lost to the EU cited by leave campaigners. A similar connection between Brexit and human rights has also been made by those advocating a vote to remain in the EU. They warn that if the UK, a Conservative government would be free to trample on people’s human rights as it pleases.

But would a “leave” vote resulting in an eventual Brexit really have consequences for the level of human rights protection enjoyed by people living in the UK?

In order to answer this question it is important to avoid confusing the European Union (and its Court of Justice) with the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and the European Court of Human Rights. The Convention is a treaty independent from the EU. It is binding on 47 countries (including all the EU’s 28 Member States) and provides for the protection of a number of human rights, such as the right to life; the right not to be subjected to torture; free speech; fair trial rights; the right to property; freedom of religion, and so on. Most of the rights in the ECHR are applicable within the UK’s legal order by virtue of the Human Rights Act (HRA) and not because they are part of EU law. Most of the human rights judgments considered as controversial (or even problematic) in the UK originated in the European Court of Human Rights, e.g. the judgments on prisoner voting; on the deportation of Abu Qatada to Jordan; or on whole-life sentences.

Even in the event of a Brexit and withdrawal from the EU, the UK will continue to be bound by the Convention and be subject to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Human Rights. In particular the vexed issue of prisoner voting is not going to go away because of it. In addition, a possible Brexit will not have any implications for the UK’s international obligations towards Ireland under the British-Irish Agreement, which underpins the Good Friday Agreement. That agreement places the UK under an international treaty obligation to “complete incorporation into Northern Ireland law of the European Convention on Human Rights”, which, for the reasons mentioned, would not be threatened by Brexit.

There are numerous EU Directives prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, religion or belief, disability, and age

This doesn’t mean, of course, that the EU has nothing to do with human rights. It has a Charter of Fundamental Rights – in force since 2009 – which mirrors most of the rights found in the ECHR and includes a number of additional rights. The Charter is first and foremost binding on the EU and its institutions and thus constrains their ability to legislate or to conclude international agreements. These constraints came to the fore, for instance, in the case of Digital Rights Ireland in which the Court of Justice declared the EU’s Data Retention Directive invalid because it violated the right to private and family life and the right to data protection enshrined in the Charter. Another example is the case of Schrems where the Court of Justice held a decision by the European Commission, which said that a transfer of data from the EU to web servers in the US if a company had signed up to so-called “safe harbour principles”, to be invalid for violating these same rights.

Apart from constraining the EU and its institutions, the Charter is also binding on the EU Member States, but only “when they are implementing Union law”. One can distinguish two scenarios here. First, where a Member State authority acts on the basis of an EU obligation, e.g. it transposes an EU Directive into national law (e.g. in the UK the Working Time Directive resulted in the Working Time Regulations); or the police arrest a person on the basis of a European Arrest Warrant. Second, if a Member States (lawfully) derogates from one of its obligations under EU free movement law, e.g. when deporting a worker from another EU Member State because of severe crimes that person has committed. It should be noted in this regard that the UK has not achieved a complete opt-out from the Charter.

So what is the point of the Charter in practice given that the HRA already protects human rights in the UK? Given that the Charter is only applicable in limited circumstances, the protection it offers is weaker than that under the HRA. At the same time, if the Charter applies, it comes with the force of the primacy of EU law. This means that if, say, an Act of Parliament contradicted the rights guaranteed by the Charter, any UK court would be obliged not to apply that Act in the case before it. By contrast, under the HRA senior courts can make a declaration of incompatibility if there is a conflict between an Act of Parliament and the HRA. Such a declaration does not change the outcome of the case – the Act remains applicable – but merely opens up an expedited route for amending the Act.

Another field of human rights protection in which the EU has been active is anti-discrimination law. There are numerous EU Directives prohibiting discrimination (mainly in the workplace, but increasingly also in the supply of goods and services) on the basis of race, sex, sexual orientation, religion or belief, disability, and age. These have been incorporated into UK law by the Equality Act 2010.

Having outlined the main pillars of human rights protection flowing from EU membership, the question remains what would happen to human rights protection in the UK in the event of Brexit. As pointed out above, the UK’s obligations under the ECHR would not be affected. It is also clear that the Human Rights Act would continue to apply, unless it were repealed separately (and perhaps replaced by a British Bill of Rights). It seems equally clear that the Charter of Fundamental Rights would no longer be binding on the UK and could no longer be relied on before UK courts. In so far as the Charter mirrors the rights guaranteed in the ECHR, the only practical effect of this would be that courts would no longer be allowed to disapply a contravening Act of Parliament. Where the Charter provides for stronger protection than the ECHR (e.g. in the area of data protection or children’s rights), these rights would be lost even though they were of course only relevant in the UK where there was an “implementation” of EU law. The fate of anti-discrimination law is harder to predict. Its EU law basis would certainly disappear with a Brexit, but this would not change the existence of the Equality Act. If Parliament wanted to weaken anti-discrimination law in the event of Brexit, it would therefore have to amend this Act.

Featured image credit: Polling Card European Referendum, by Abi Begum. CC by 2.0 via Flickr.

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How to write a thank you note

I write a lot of thank you notes. I thank donors of organizations that I support, gift givers after the holidays and birthdays, friends who have invited me over for dinner, guest speakers who come to my classes, community partners who work with my students, colleagues who help me solve problems, and editors and publishers (you know who you are). You probably write a fair number of thank you letters too (or should), for graduation and wedding gifts, scholarships and fellowships, interviews and recommendations, moving help, and just plain good advice.

Thank you notes are part of my daily writing practice and something I like to do when I’m still well-caffeinated and relatively creative. Writing thank you notes involves the same elements of craft as any writing: a clear point, conciseness, and enough detail show that you have put some thought into the exposition. Email or paper? Often an email is fine for a thank you, but for many things, I still like the ritual of cards, envelopes, and stamps.

Many of us struggle with thank you notes. We live in such an age of irony and casual communication—the tweet, the post, and the selfie—that it can feel awkward to express sincere gratitude gracefully. When we fumble our thank yous, we may fall back on cute expressivity like Thank you sooo much!!!! (where the oooo’s and !!!!’s are trying do all the work) or archaic gravity like Words cannot express the depth of my gratitude for your kind help.

“ThankYouCards_Pile_of_Thanks_jmgrants” by Jo Miller, GPC. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

What can you say in a thank-you note besides thank you? Be specific about why you are grateful. Be authentic. And let your note fit the action you are thanking someone for and the relationship you have with that person. Here are some ideas and examples (with details changed) that can help you build specificity, authenticity, and good fit into your thank you notes.

Say why a gift or act is meaningful, useful or helpful. When someone gives a presentation, you might thank them by writing something like this:

I appreciate your coming to my class to speak about editing—and from their feedback, the students appreciated your visit as well. Having someone who works in the publishing business provide first-hand insights allows us to have discussions that go beyond the textbooks and journal articles we read. Thank you.

Or when you return a borrowed item, you can express your appreciation and explain how the loan affected you:

Thanks for encouraging me to read Go Set a Watchman and for lending me your copy. I was undecided about reading it, but when I did I came away with a new regard for Harper Lee. Now I’m inspired to reread To Kill a Mockingbird.

Another approach to specificity is to tell how a gift was used. For some birthday cash from a relative, you can explain what you bought:

Thanks for the generous gift card, which I used to buy a new jacket—with professorial elbow patches even. I’m planning to wear it to an upcoming conference. I appreciate your thoughtfulness and value your friendship, which I’ll think about whenever I wear the jacket. 

Or in the case of a donation to a non-profit, you might explain what that donation does for the organization’s clients:

Thank you so much for your generous donation to the Community Fund. Your gift will help to provide scholarships for youth and seniors, and will bring them together in meaningful arts activities. With support like yours, we able to build inter-generational programming and a stronger community for all of us.

And if you receive a scholarship yourself or for a family member, you can describe its impact:

I am writing to thank you for the scholarship support for my daughter’s the summer arts program. We have had a hard time the past few years and have had to move around a lot. She has always enjoyed the arts and the summer arts program, which we could not afford otherwise, is something she has always hoped to take part in. Working with artists and making new friends will be a life-changing experience for her. Thank you all so much.

“Writing” by Caitlin Regan. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

We also thank people for favors, acknowledging their efforts on our behalf. A thank-you note is appropriate even when the actions are part of someone’s regular job, but especially if they make an extra effort or if their work has had a significant impact. If a staff member lends her expertise to solving a problem, you might send a note or email like this:

Thanks for your help last week working through all of the policy issues with our unruly group. All of us appreciate your thoughtful preparation and the clarity you brought to the effort. Because of your help, we’ve now got a revised document that the Executive Committee has reviewed and approved.

And if someone gives you some resume coaching, you can let them know the result:

I wanted to let you know that I got the editorial internship that I applied for and thank you again for looking over my resume and cover letter. Your advice enabled me to make a more effective and successful presentation.

Thank yous are about relationships and gratitude, not give-and-take, but sometimes it’s okay to offer to return a favor.

Thanks again for the ride to the airport. It’s great to have a friend who will wake up at the crack of dawn to help me make my flight. I hope I can return the favor sometime.

Finally, give your note a check for “cheesiness,” which is variously defined as “vulgar sentimentality” or “blatant inauthenticity” (and check out the Oxford English Dictionary for some interesting etymological tidbits on that word. Cheesiness, will lead you to cheesy and cheese, and a possible connection in some of its meanings to the Persian word chīz, meaning “thing”. Who knew?).

Cheesiness is a relative notion, of course, and what sounds inauthentic coming from me might sound perfectly authentic coming from you, so it’s a matter of being true to your own voice and temperament, as well as the situation. But generally speaking, stay away from adverbs and exclamations and from flowery, stilted language.

And thank you for reading this. I appreciate the monthly opportunity to think, reflect, and share in my blog column.

Featured image credit: “Thank You” by Free for Commercial Use. CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr.

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6 reasons why the Hogwarts library is the true hero of the Harry Potter books

It’s undeniable: all Harry Potter fans secretly expect to receive their very own Hogwarts acceptance letter. Ready to be the next magical prodigy, we assume that we’ll hop onto the Hogwarts Express, promptly be sorted into Gryffindor, achieve straight O’s in our O.W.L.s, and inevitably end up as Minister for Magic. After all, like Albus Dumbledore, we are surely destined for magical greatness.

Alas, when our letter-bearing owl rudely pulls a no-show, accepting one’s muggle status is a hard pill to swallow. But, as today is Magic Day, we’ve decided to temporarily shelve our disappointment, and pay tribute to our favourite Hogwarts hotspot. Undoubtedly, the unsung hero of the Harry Potter series, we’re referring to a place with more answers than Albus, better looks than Lockhart, and even more mystery than Mad-Eye Moody.

This is why we love the Hogwarts library:

It inspires Hermione to create S.P.E.W.

The library provides Hermione with both the inspiration and information to establish the Society for the Promotion of Elfish Welfare, or as it is more commonly known, S.P.E.W. Dobby, Winky, and Kreacher, though prone to the occasional mood swing, are incredibly loyal magical creatures, and we would challenge anyone to look into their great orb-like eyes and not instantaneously become a campaigner for elfish rights. Here at Oxford University Press, we are all in agreement; had we not been born talentless muggles, we would don our S.P.E.W. badges with pride.

Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford where the library scenes in the Harry Potter movies were filmed. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It’s home to Madam Pince.

No library is complete without its librarian, and one can’t help but admire Madam Pince and her sassy remarks.


We particularly praise the vulture-like lady for calling Harry a ‘depraved boy’ on catching a glimpse of his maltreated copy of Advanced Potion-Making, which originally belonged to the Half-Blood Prince, Severus Snape.

Bravo Madam Pince: we applaud your commitment to the preservation of books, and we personally hope you do find love with Argus Filch (that is, if you manage to sideline Mrs Norris).

It’s beautiful.

Home to thousands of ancient magical books, with breath-taking views over the Hogwarts grounds, the library is undeniably a picturesque place of study.

We can’t imagine a more scenic spot to kick back with The Tales of Beedle the Bard, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, or, my personal favourite, Men Who Love Dragons Too Much.

It’s a place of love.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire sees an unlikely romance blossom in the Hogwarts library, between bushy bookworm Hermione Granger, and big and brooding Viktor Krum.

Whilst Harry and Ron are faced with rejection and embarrassment in their mission to find partners for the Yule Ball, Hermione effortlessly nabs a date with the world-famous Bulgarian Quidditch player, who visits the library on a daily basis just to pluck up the courage to talk to her.

Move over Tinder, we’re heading to the library!It helps Harry, Ron, and Hermione in their quests

Credit where credit is due: the Hogwarts library helps our favourite gang of Gryffindors time and time again in their battles against Voldemort.

Cast your mind back to the Chamber of Secrets crisis. Harry only discovers the true form of Slytherin’s monster, and why only he can hear its whispers, on finding a page from a library book scrunched up in Hermione’s hand. Whilst we cannot condone such shameful brutalisation of books, we must admit that this information was helpful to the somewhat stumped Harry and Ron.

Bodleian Library. Photo by DAVID ILIFF. CC-BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

It has screaming books.

Though, deep down, we’re rooting for Harry to succeed in his endeavours, given his complete disregard for the rules, we can’t help but feel a certain amount of satisfaction when one of his plans goes awry.

As far as we’re concerned, any young scallywag who presumes to enter the restricted section of the Hogwarts library in the dead of night, without even attaining a teacher’s note of approval, deserves to happen upon a screaming book.

On this particular occasion, we commend the library for thwarting this little rascal’s rebellious plans.

There you have it: six reasons we love Hogwarts library. In summary, whilst most Harry Potter enthusiasts may believe that the moral of the series is related to the importance of love, friendship, and loyalty, it is glaringly obvious that the real moral of the story is as follows –

Libraries are the best.

Featured Image: “hp7cover2” by Austen Squarepants. CC BY 2.0 via Flickr.

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The feminist as the story teller

The relationship between the critical self and the creative design is a question that remains complex and unresolved. What exactly is the connection between ideology and literature? Does belief play any role in the actual realization of a literary artifact? British novelist D.H. Lawrence once famously declared: “never trust the artist, trust the tale.”

Nevertheless, readers and connoisseurs of literature have always been drawn to interviews, letters, and memoirs of writers in order to understand their novelistic or poetic oeuvres. While some writers are not amenable to easy categorization, there are others whose critical and creative selves seem to coalesce in a seamless manner.

Sarala Devi, 1904-1986, was a prolific Odia writer whose work encompasses many genres including prose, poetry, short stories, essays, literary criticism, novels, and plays. She was a versatile genius who occupies an important place in the domain of women’s history. She was a Gandhian feminist and a critical modernist who eschewed exclusive binaries between the home and the public place, the sacred and the secular. While she was not a theorist in the conventional sense of the term, her views on the subject of feminism were informed by wide readings, critical thinking, and an astute understanding of the women’s location in patriarchy. She recognized women’s oppression as a global phenomenon, and yet was careful to reject the view of women as universal dependents. Similarly, she made a nuanced response to the question of women and religious ideologies. She argued that our critique must be context specific and be informed by particular histories of women in given society and ideologies.

While Sarala excelled as an original feminist thinker, she has distinguished herself equally well in her tales for children. We often see a parallel between her feminist beliefs and the stories for children she handled. In Maru Kahani, she offers a set of fascinating tales for children. In the Preface to this collection, she explains her basic objectives: “I believe that children are more attracted to fantasy than facts. [The stories] contain moral lessons; they have the twin purpose of delight and instruction.”

Sarala Devi Chaudhurani (1872-1945). Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

The stories are dedicated to women colleagues such as Shakuntala Devi, Radhamani Devi, Sailabala Devi, Debahuti Devi, and Rama Devi. The final tale is dedicated to her son Amithabha Mohapatra. There are seven tales from different lands: ‘The Magic Horse’, ‘The Tale of the Persian Merchant’, ‘The Sorcerer Wife’, ‘The Fisherman’s Wit’, ‘The Ungrateful King’, and finally, ‘The Land of the Yakshas’.

In keeping with Sarala’s international vision and outreach, the gripping tales cross national and cultural frontiers. They focus on universal moral and ethical issues such as loyalty, gratitude, obedience and generosity that accord with the ethical approach she always upheld in her life. Most stories have alien settings and yet all have principal Indian characters. This seems to be a deliberate decision: to guarantee local interest and relevance for the Indian child. Her vision was global and yet her approach invariably local. The narrator employs an easy, conversational tone, a typically colloquial style characteristic of a grandmother. Even here, one will notice Sarala’s unfailing interest in the gender and ethical questions. Consider, for instance, the ending of the tale ‘The Magic Horse’:

“As the horse rose in the air, the Prince shouted at the Sultan: ‘O Sultan. You, who should have protected the princess who sought your protection, instead, tried to exploit her. You humiliated and insulted her. If you wish to marry someone, first learn how to seek her permission.’”

Here is an advisory for a new conjugal bonding, meant for the socialization of the young in perfect alignment with Sarala’s abiding faith in equality among the sexes.

Similarly, the story ‘The Tale of the Persian Merchant’ invokes insightfully geographical and cultural resonances from far away Arab and Middle Eastern regions, bringing in cities like Cairo, Aleppo, and Damascus, and food items such as Olive into the discussion. The tale underlines the native wisdom of children in solving issues that are beyond the ken of adults: What the Kazi and the Khalifa could not resolve, was easily done by a group of children engaged in play-acting. As the story concludes:

“The Khalifa learnt a lesson in law from the young boy – how to bring out the truth through intelligence. He was very pleased with the boy. So he gave the boy one hundred gold coins for his wit and bid him farewell.”

Here, Islam is not the alien ‘other’, but part of the lived experience that children of all faiths could empathize with and learn from.

The tales for children that Sarala Devi wrote and published were envisioned and crafted well; they are narrated with a trademark wit and humor. Combining delight and instruction, Sarala produced tales that have retained their freshness, despite the passage in time, and could be offered to the children of today. While Sarala Devi dealt with her many selves with effortless ease, her stories for children were firmly anchored to her feminist beliefs and life values.

Featured image credit: Child reading. CC0 public domain via Pixabay.

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The television paradox

Imagine that we have a black and white monitor, a black and white camera, and a computer. We hook up the camera and monitor to the computer, and we write a program where, for some medium-ish shade of grey G:

The computer tells the monitor to show a completely white screen if the average shade of the scene the camera is recording is darker than G.
The computer tells the monitor to show a completely black screen if the average shade of the scene the camera is recording is no darker than G.

You walk around point the camera and all goes swimmingly, until you get the bright idea to point the camera at the monitor. Then what happens?

There are two ways to answer this question: First, if we pretend that we lived in a world where electricity and light travelled instantaneously (that is, that the speed of light was infinite, so that light would leave the monitor and be detected by the camera at the same moment), then we would have a paradox. If the camera is pointed at the monitor then, at any point in time, the monitor will display a completely white screen if and only if the average shade of the scene the camera is recording is darker than G if and only if the average shade of the image depicted in the monitor is darker than G if and only if the monitor is not displaying a completely white screen (since, by the set-up, the screen always displays either a completely white screen or a completely black screen).

In reality, however, both light and electricity take a small amount of time to travel from one point to the next. As a result, we don’t have a paradox or impossible situation. Instead, if we actually set up a camera and monitor as described, the monitor will flicker – that is, it will alternate between a completely white screen and a completely black screen, and the time between switches between black and white will depend on how long it takes for light to leave the screen and be detected by the camera, and how long it takes for the electrical signals to travel from camera to computer, and how long it takes the computer to carry out the computations in the program, and how long it takes the signal to pass from the computer to the monitor.

Now, let’s complicate things a bit: Imagine that you now have an infinite stack of monitors, computers, and cameras. So there is camera #1, which feeds an image to computer #1, which then tells monitor #1 what to display, and then camera #2, which feed an image to computer #2, which then tells monitor #2 what to display, and then camera #3, which…

Now, for each camera #n, if we just point it at monitor #n (and each computer runs the same simple program as before) then we just have infinitely many instances of the earlier, simpler puzzle. But what happens if we do things a bit differently? Instead of pointing camera #1 at monitor #1, lets assume we set it up in such a way that the camera can ‘see’ monitor #2, and monitor #3, and monitor #4, and so on. Similarly, camera #2 is pointed to it can see monitor #3, and monitor #4, and monitor #5, and so on. More generally, for each whole number n, camera #n is positioned so it can see all monitors whose number is greater than n.

Now, let’s also change the program a bit:

Computer #1 tells monitor #1 to show a completely white screen if all of the monitors it can see are darker than G.
Computer #1 tells monitor #1 to show a completely black screen if at least one of the monitors it can see is no darker than G.

And similarly for computer #2, monitor #2, and camera #2. More generally:

Computer #n tells monitor #n to show a completely white screen if all of the monitors whose numbers are greater than n are darker than G.
Computer #n tells monitor #n to show a completely black screen if at least one of the monitors whose number is greater than n is no darker than G.

Regular readers of this blog will not be surprised that this is a television-variant of the Yablo paradox (obviously my favorite), just as the initial, single-camera version was a television-variant of the Liar paradox. Thus, if the speed of light and electricity were infinite, and hence the signals from camera to computer to monitor travelled instantaneously, we would again have a paradox.

Of course, if we were able to set up infinitely many televisions, cameras, and computers in this way, then we wouldn’t rip a hole in reality. Rather, the tiny but nevertheless real lag produced by the time that it takes for the signal to travel would result in the screens flickering from black to white and back again, as the camera detected different shades and the computer thus sent different instructions.

There is an interesting phenomenon here, however, in addition to this merely providing us with a novel presentation of familiar paradoxes. Let’s assume that it takes a precise fixed amount of time for the image to travel from the relevant monitors to each camera, then be sent to the computer, processed, and then the command sent to the monitor telling it what shade to display. Let’s call this time a antinosecond (parasecond was already taken). So, in the single-television setup with which we began, if we begin by having the television display an all white screen, then after an antinosecond it will switch to all black, then after another antinosecond it will switch to all white, and so on.

But what happens with the Yablo version, with infinitely many cameras, computers, and televisions? At first glance, you might think that it will depend on how you set it up initially – that is, on which monitors are showing a white screen and which are showing a black screen when you turn on the cameras, computers, and get things rolling. But it turns out that initial thought would be wrong:

Theorem: No matter what state the monitors start in, after a finite number of antinoseconds they will begin alternating between two states – all of them simultaneously showing a white screen, and all of them simultaneously showing a black screen.

I’ll give readers a couple days to ponder this before I post the argument in the comments.

In addition, there is a (surprisingly small) number such that we are guaranteed that the screens will be alternating between all simultaneously showing black and all simultaneously showing white, no matter how we set up the shades the screens are displaying at the start. Thus:

Bonus Question: What is the maximum number of antinoseconds before the screens are all the same shade (i.e. either all black or all white)?

Note: The television version of the Liar paradox is due to David Cole, a professor at the University of Minnesota – Duluth. Thanks are owed to David for allowing me to discuss it here. The Yablo variant is, as far as I know, novel.

Featured image: Google Earth on multiple monitors by Runner1928. Public domain via Wikimedia Commons.

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