Thought Bananas 21

“I'll play it first and tell you what it is later.” -Miles Davis

🍌In This Issue 

This is the second issue of Thought Bananas that is split into three separate sections according to the three areas that I write about.. The feedback on this format was so good I’m testing out new banners! I am not a designer so go easy on me, but let me know what you think.  

This week in Antecedence: 

• 🍌Netflix Presents “Sr.” by Robert Downey Jr. touches on fatherhood, family, and marking art—it looks great. 

• 🍌In The Making Of: Requiem for Sean in D Minor, I share an interesting thing I learned about music theory when trying to name my most recent (most popular) essay.

This week in Psychological Riches:

• 🍌Embracing Tsundoku is a brief check-in from my home life where I am buried under piles of books but can’t seem to get around to reading them. 

This week in The Rawlsian Toolbox:

• 🍌College enrollment is headed for a cliff is the first of two news stories this week–this one is about the impending existential threat to some colleges and universities caused by demographic shifts. 

• 🍌IRS cracks down on Venmo and similar platforms is the second news story–this one about how the IRS is changing the rules and going to get their pound of flesh from people doing business on Venmo. 

• Another check-in from my life in 🍌A Night at the Results Banquet, where I contrast the positive energy of an in-person meeting I was at last week with the doom and gloom of social media. 

• Finally, I share some very insightful feedback from a reader on last week’s issue in 🍌Reader Feedback: Teacher, Bureaucrat, Cop. 

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Antecedence

In Antecedence I share stories and experiences about family, meaning, masculinity, and history. 

🍌Netflix Presents “Sr.” by Robert Downey Jr.

Anyone who’s been reading Thought Bananas knows how much I love trailers on their own. This piece of art is a preview of a documentary Robert Downey Jr. made for his dad. It has everything: dry Dad jokes, cracking voices on the edge of tears, montages of little RDJ, and “Father & Son” by Cat Stevens.

“It’s a bit of a foray into trying to understand your Dad.”

 

🍌The Making Of: Requiem for Sean in D Minor

The first essay I sent directly to people’s inbox was Requiem for Sean in D Minor. It was based on a prompt to write about something within arms’ length. I chose to write about my car keys, which reminded me of my friend Sean who helped me buy the car. It is a sad story about my relationship with Sean, that touches on fatherhood and how I set a boundary with Sean but often questioned it later. (Go read it now if you haven’t yet.) 

I wasn’t sure what to call the story, so I decided I wanted to make it some kind of play on words with “keys.” A Requiem is a piece of music historically associated with Catholic memorial masses and now known more generally to mean memorial or remembrance. I knew I wanted to call it a Requiem for Sean in ____ and then fill in the blank with a sad key. The problem was I don’t know anything about music theory, so I needed someone who did to confirm my idea. 

I googled, “what is the saddest key?” (D minor.) Then I reached out to composer and fellow Write of Passage alumni Jordan Ali, who went above and beyond in helping me decide the name was good. His feedback on my choice was so in depth and educational that I asked him if I could include some of it here: 

Minor keys generally have the reputation for being sad; major keys, happy. This is found to be true by musicians and non-musicians alike. The most profound and emotionally deep music has often been written in minor keys. For hundreds of years, composers have identified certain moods with certain keys. For example, some composers have said F minor is 'stormy and agitated', while G minor is ‘contemplative.’ The truth is, it doesn’t really matter what key you’re in. It’s all subjective. You can play the same song in F minor or G minor and the emotions will stay the same, the only thing that will change slightly is the color. But, slight changes often have a big impact.

I think you picked a really good one: D minor is considered the most profound key by a lot of musicians. Mozart’s requiem is in D minor. Beethoven’s 9th symphony is in D minor. Bruckner’s symphony 9. Bach’s partita no. 2. The tocatta and fugue (a famous one) are all in D minor. D minor is a pretty good key to write a requiem in. (I like it even better than F minor.) It’s got the resonance of a lot of great pieces of music written throughout history.

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Psychological Riches

In Psychological Riches I hope to cultivate and promote a psychologically rich way of living through book reviews, art critique, travelogs, fiction, and general explorations of the creative process. 

🍌Embracing Tsundoku

I love the Japanese loanword Tsundoku. It means to let books pile up without the plan to read them. There’s a certain carelessness implied in the original word, but I like to think of myself more as someone building an anti-library and less as someone cavalierly hoarding books. I will probably never read all the books I own, but that doesn’t mean that accumulating them is a compulsion: every chance I get I read chunks, or flip through them, or loan them out. As a matter of fact, my wife and daughter went out of town last weekend and I did what any man with a house to himself would do: I decided to reorganize my books. 

Unfortunately, once I had all nearly 1,000 books unshelved, I realized I had no idea how I would actually organize the books to be put back. I wondered whether I should do it by topic or by era, or whether I should integrate books I have read alongside books I haven’t read, or whether I should just store the books I want to read the most where I spend the most time. I even considered taking a page out of High Fidelity and ignoring all this stuff to organize all the books autobiographically: 

Alas, in the end–none of this mattered. They were back before I knew it and I had to reshelve all the books wherever they would fit, but not before my wife snapped this pic:

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The Rawlsian Toolbox

In the Rawlsian Toolbox, I share stories of educators and entrepreneurship, techniques for molding minds and building businesses, and policy discussions around schools and businesses.

🍌College enrollment is headed for a cliff

Colleges and universities are uniquely positioned to educate people and promote entrepreneurship. However, they also face a new challenge that I don’t think nearly enough people are talking about. As Vox explains in The Incredible Shinking Future of College: 

“In four years, the number of students graduating from high schools across the country will begin a sudden and precipitous decline, due to a rolling demographic aftershock of the Great Recession.” 

This “college enrollment cliff,” spells trouble for private colleges, regional colleges, and the liberal arts: 

“But the most powerful force driving the post-cliff transformation, by far, will be the labor market. First and foremost, students go to college so they can start a career. As tuition and student debt have increased, on-the-job training has declined, and as the unforgiving job market has raised the bar for well-paying careers, students have moved away from the traditional humanities toward degrees in business, health care, and IT. The enrollment crisis will shift this trend into overdrive.”

Read the rest of the article here if you’re interested in why this is happening, the history of this problem, and how this might effect schools, the economy, and politics. 

🍌IRS cracks down on Venmo and similar transactions

Among the entrepreneurs I work with, many of them do business online and transact using platforms like Venmo or Paypal. Last week, the IRS posted an explainer that they are changing the rules. Previously, if you used third party apps like Venmo or Paypal to receive money for goods and service, you only had to report them if you had more than 200 transactions and the gross payments exceeded $20,000 for the year. Starting now–every year after 2021–you have to report to the IRS for any number of transactions (even one transaction) that add up to $600 or more. Six hundred dollars!

🍌A Night at the Results Banquet 

Last week I went to a banquet for the Houston area chapter of Results. From Wikipedia: 

“RESULTS is a US non-partisan citizens' advocacy organization founded in 1980. The organization aims to find long-term solutions to poverty by focusing on its root causes. It lobbies public officials, does research, and works with the media and the public to fight hunger and poverty. RESULTS has 100 U.S. local chapters and works in six other countries.” 

It was a nice “recharge.” The news of crypto exchange FTX collapsing had dominated headlines for a week and I had become a bit despondent about the number of smart, hopeful people who had been duped and the amount of money that had been lost. It was good to get away from the hype and skepticism of the internet. Joining a big room full of people who cared about finding smart solutions to big, systemic problems was invigorating–I should do it more often. (You probably should, too.) 

As an added bonus, the keynote speaker was Chris Tomlinson, an author and journalist for the Houston Chronicle. Chris is a great writer unto himself but also bears the distinction of being the first person to include a quote and picture from me when in press coverage of the program I work for at University of Houston. His keynote speech was about his experience with poverty, how he had encountered it in his work, and people he had seen working to fix it. I jotted down a few of his quotes because I felt they would fit right at home in The Rawlsian Toolbox: 

• “Poverty is not necessary . It is a social, economic and political failure, usually caused by a history of injustice.”

• “Fighting poverty is neither socialist nor capitalist. We must safeguard political and economic Justice.”

• “Only two things can handle poverty: commerce and politics.”

🍌Reader Feedback: Teacher, Bureaucrat, Cop

In Thought Bananas 20, I shared Teacher, Bureaucrat, Cop–an essay by an intro to philosophy professor about how the roles a teacher must play (teacher, bureaucrat, cop) change how a teacher must behave and what function grades serve. 

Upon reading, loyal Thought Bananas reader Bruce responded with a very thoughtful message: 

“The author says a lot of teachers go hardcore cop in the classroom on things like citations and formatting, but the concept of keeping order was barely touched upon.

One of the things that I hear most often from friends (both politically right and left) that have been involved in teaching (some have quit) is that they are hamstrung by the administration in their ability to keep order. If a student is acting up, they can’t punish them in any way and can only document what happened. I’ve heard some pretty extreme examples.

Apparently we are in the middle of a teacher retention crisis. What would you say if I put forward that a major root cause of that is the complete breakdown of their ability to function as the “cop” in the teacher, bureaucrat, cop paradigm?”

I think this is an excellent point that makes a lot of sense, and highlights why these kinds of discussions are so important. 

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See you next issue!

Until then, track your Venmo, check on your friends, and find some cool people doing good things in real life to hang out with!

Thanks to everyone who edited, proofread, and gave feedback on the writing in this issue. And thanks for reading Thought Bananas!