Curing the care issue
Letting go: my battle to help my parents die a good death | Death and dying | The Guardian
My mother dreads the hospital for sound reasons. Like hospitals in general, this one is good at heroic interventions, less good at nursing care. It is an academic institution with many groundbreaking researchers, but frail elderly people with tedious, multiple conditions are not often of interest to them. When my mother had an emergency stomach bleed she was superbly treated, but when she had spine pain she was left for four nights on a trolley, and was even trundled to theatre on it at one point to have someone else’s operation (fortunately she was turned back at the door).
This all rings true to me. Although I am suspicious of those who argue that ‘groundbreaking researchers’ produce better cures or care. Clinical practice is not synonymous with research excellence, and, in some situations, I fear the relation may be an inverse one (as, I believe, some data from the US suggests). Clinical expertise is medicine’s ‘dark matter’: it is everywhere, but we understand little about it. Worse than that: we often appear indifferent to it.
Zooming in on virtual protests
Greta Thunberg: ‘It just spiralled out of control’ | Free to read | Financial Times
But today, the world is very different. When we speak in mid-March, most of Europe is under some form of lockdown. Thunberg is at her family home in Stockholm — her dad’s exercise bike and some houseplants form the backdrop of our Zoom call. She’s also back at school, and isn’t cutting classes on Fridays any more: protests during the pandemic have been mostly virtual. [emphasis added]
A rebel song
John le Carré, chronicler of Englishness, died Irish, son reveals | John le Carré | The Guardian
John le Carré, the great embodiment and chronicler of Englishness, saved his greatest twist not for his thrillers but the twilight of his own life: he died an Irishman.
The creator of the quintessential English spy George Smiley was so opposed to Brexit that in order to remain European, and to reflect his heritage, he took Irish citizenship before his death last December aged 89, his son has revealed.
“He was, by the time he died, an Irish citizen,” Nicholas Cornwell, who writes as Nick Harkaway, says in a BBC Radio 4 documentary due to air on Saturday. “On his last birthday I gave him an Irish flag, and so one of the last photographs I have of him is him sitting wrapped in an Irish flag, grinning his head off.”
The interview is available on the BBC Sounds app here. Wonderful stuff.
Resilience. Lessons from Uruguay.
Digital Education: Why Uruguay’s Schoolchildren Are Doing So Well in the Pandemic – DER SPIEGEL
Brechner has now also begun consulting countries and international organizations on educational issues. He says that when people ask him these days if it is really necessary for every schoolchild to have a laptop and internet access, he asks: “Do we really need electricity and warm water?” He says he is in no way interested in replacing teachers with technology. “But we can’t just continue on as we were before the pandemic,” Brechner says. “We are living in the 21st century and have 19th century schools.”
It has already been more than 10 years since the country – as one of six around the world – introduced a one-laptop-per-child policy. On top of that, Uruguay installed free internet in public squares around the country, including in rural areas, and also founded a state agency for digital education called Plan Ceibal. “In general, the last school year worked quite well,” says Fiorella Haim, a manager at Plan Ceibal.
In addition, the country began offering every schoolchild 50 gigabytes of free internet per month.
The Dream is Over 1
The Sonic (Entrepreneurship) Boom | No Mercy / No Malice
The world’s most powerful lubricant of upward mobility (U.S. higher ed) has morphed into a corrupt enforcer of the caste system. It has enjoyed 30 years of tuition increases matched only by the arrogance and self-aggrandizement of its leadership. Covid is the fist of stone coming for this chin. The pandemic moved 1.6 billion people into online education, and many will stay there. India’s largest edtech firm, Byju, is reportedly closing a $600 million investment, valuing the company at $15 billion, and Coursera is expected to go public at a $5 billion valuation.
We shall see. I fear the new boss will just be another rent collector. Hope I am wrong.
- The Dream is Over: The Crisis of Clark Kerr’s California Idea of Higher Education, Simon Marginson. 2016. ↩