Philadelphia: The greatest social distancing debacle in modern pandemic history occurred 102 years ago today in the City of Brotherly Love on Sept. 28, 1918

Philadelphia.

The greatest social distancing debacle in modern pandemic history occurred 102 years ago today in the City of Brotherly Love on Sept, 28, 1918. That was the day Philadelphia public health director Wilmer Krusen allowed the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade, with some 200,000 people jamming Broad Street, “cheering wildly as the line of marchers stretched for two miles,” to proceed, as the second and far more deadly wave than the first of the Spanish Flu pandemic rolled out across the American landscape. Within a week of the rally an estimated 45,000 Philadelphians were afflicted with influenza.

Some 675,000 Americans would die in the pandemic, while the worldwide death toll was probably somewhere around 50 million. The world population in 1918 was about 1.8 billion, compared to about 7.8 billion people today. How bad were things in September and October 1918, during the waning weeks of the First World War, in the United States? Some frontline public health scientists by October and November thought the United States on the verge of an extinction-level event. “If the epidemic continues its mathematical rate of acceleration, civilization could easily disappear from the face of the earth within a matter of a few more weeks,” wrote Victor Vaughan,  a former president of the American Medical Association (AMA), and head of the U.S. Army’s division of communicable diseases, as he sat in the Office of the Surgeon General of the Army in October 1918.

John M. Barry’s 2004 book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, chronicling the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic, to my mind anyway, remains the definitive historical work to date in the field. Barry also serves as an adjunct member of faculty at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.

Wilmer Krusen’s actions – and inaction – as the case may be, in allowing the Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade, with some 200,000 people jamming Broad Street, to proceed has been looked at again in recent years.

Both the Smithsonian magazine (https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/philadelphia-threw-wwi-parade-gave-thousands-onlookers-flu-180970372/) and Quartz (https://qz.com/1754657/the-1918-parade-that-spread-death-in-philadelphia/) have published interesting pieces over the last couple of years on what happened in Philly in September and October 1918.

But what really struck me is the very, very rapid breakdown in public order, Barry chronicles, despite official protestations to the contrary.

Nurses, who were right on the front lines, and truly, truly heroic in the earliest stages of the pandemic, in many cases soon just stopped coming to work. Many, of course, were too sick to, gravely ill or dying themselves, but many who were still well stopped coming to work out of fear of becoming infected themselves, and perhaps also infecting their loved ones. The same happened across many different public offices.

Government in many cases, and particularly at the municipal level, pretty much ceased to function – and that happened very, very quickly. State and provincial governments weren’t much better in many cases, and federal governments were, to be very charitable, slow off the mark. The international institutions we have now, for the most didn’t exist in 1918.

Philadelphia is one of Barry’s chilling examples that has stayed with me. Things were so bad there in the fall of 1918, when the Spanish Flu pandemic arrived in the city, that a group of volunteer women, holding no official titles or offices, who lived on Philadelphia’s “Main Line,” home of the city’s old money and prestige, essentially took over the key functions of the city government and co-ordinated Philadelphia’s response to the pandemic.

In essence, the Ladies Auxiliary, albeit a very well off, and a very well connected one, saved the day in Philadelphia in 1918, but it was a very close thing indeed.

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Misplaced patriotism and public health propaganda are no disinfectants for a pandemic

John M. Barry’s 2004 book The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History, chronicles the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic. It is a compelling read, and placenames such as Haskell, Kansas, an isolated and sparsely populated county in the southwest corner of the state, remain etched in my mind.

Barry also serves as an adjunct member of faculty at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.

But what really struck me was the very, very rapid breakdown in public order, Barry chronicles, despite official protestations to the contrary.

Nurses, who were right on the front lines, and truly, truly heroic in the earliest stages of the pandemic, in many cases soon just stopped coming to work. Many, of course, were too sick to, gravely ill or dying themselves, but many who were still well stopped coming to work out of fear of becoming infected themselves, and perhaps also infecting their loved ones. The same happened across many different public offices. Can any of us really know what we would have done faced with similar circumstances? I think not.

Government in many cases, and particularly at the municipal level, pretty much ceased to function – and that happened very, very quickly. State and provincial governments weren’t much better in many cases, and federal governments were, to be very charitable, slow off the mark. The international institutions we have now, for the most didn’t exist in 1918.

Philadelphia is one of Barry’s chilling examples that has stayed with me. Things were so bad there in the fall of 1918, when the Spanish Flu pandemic arrived in the city, that a group of volunteer women, holding no official titles or offices, who lived on Philadelphia’s “Main Line,” home of the city’s old money and prestige, essentially took over the key functions of the city government and co-ordinated Philadelphia’s response to the pandemic.

In essence, the Ladies Auxiliary, albeit a very well off, and a very well connected one, saved the day in Philadelphia in 1918, but it was a very close thing indeed.

But how did things get so bad in Philadelphia in the fall of 1918?

On Sept. 28, 1918, despite sound advice and warnings to the contrary, Philadelphia public health director Wilmer Krusen insisted on allowing a Fourth Liberty Loan Drive parade, with some 200,000 people jamming Broad Street, “cheering wildly as the line of marchers stretched for two miles.” It was after all the patriotic thing to do in the final Allied push to defeat the Central Powers and win the First World War.

“Within 72 hours of the parade, every bed in Philadelphia’s 31 hospitals was filled,” Kenneth C. Davis wrote in Smithsonian magazine in September 2018. “In the week ending October 5, some 2,600 people in Philadelphia had died from the flu or its complications. A week later, that number rose to more than 4,500. Allison C. Meier in an article for Quartz last November noted that historian James Higgins, writing in Pennsylvania Legacies, observed that by the first week of October 2018, roughly five weeks into the outbreak, “Philadelphia’s mortality rate accelerated in a climb unmatched by any city in the nation –perhaps by any major city in the world.”

We really are not very particularly good at learning the lessons of history. Or when we think we have, we often draw the wrong lessons. Misplaced patriotism. Public health propaganda. These are no disinfectants for a pandemic.

The original name of the new coronavirus was provisionally known as Novel Coronavirus 2019-nCoV, before the World Health Organization (WHO) adopted the name COVID-19.  The Coronavirus Study Group (CSG) of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, which is the entity within the International Union of Microbiological Societies, founded in 1927 as the International Society for Microbiology, and responsible for developing the official classification of viruses and taxa naming (taxonomy) of the Coronaviridae family, proposed the naming convention SARS-CoV-2 for COVID-19. The World Health Organization, perhaps finding the recommended name a tad too resonant politically to SARS from the not-so-distant past, opted instead for the official name COVID-19.

The revised World Health Organization’s case fatality rate earlier this week of 3.4 per cent from 2 per cent for COVID-19 on March 3 is a 70 per cent fatality increase.

“I think the 3.4 per cent is really a false number,” U.S. President Donald Trump told Sean Hannity, one of his favourite conservative Fox News hosts, in a phone interview broadcast live March 4.

In the early 1980s, I watched with surprise and unexpected admiration as C. Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian, who served as surgeon general under U.S. Republican president Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989, and was well known for wearing his uniform as a vice admiral of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, had the singular political courage to speak the truth about the science of AIDS as our knowledge increased. According to the Washington Post, “Koop was the only surgeon general to become a household name.”

Who will be the next C. Everett Koop, with the courage to speak truth to power, afflicting the comfortable, while comforting the afflicted? Someone Ike the late Dr. Li Wenliang, the whistle-blower ophthalmologist who sounded the alarm after contracting the virus while working at Wuhan Central Hospital.

There have been some exemplary public health responses to the COVID-19 public health emergency of international concern, such as those of Dr. Bonnie Henry, British Columbia’s, provincial health officer, whom André Picard, the health columnist at The Globe and Mail, earlier today described as setting “the standard for public health communication. Too often, public officials are dispassionate and robotic. Using clear language and showing genuine emotion makes your message more relatable and impactful.”

And then there have been the less than exemplary public health responses – or perhaps more accurately – lack of response.

When is a pandemic not a pandemic? When the World Health Organization (WHO) has Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus as its director-general apparently.

“I think it’s pretty clear we’re in a pandemic and I don’t know why WHO is resisting that,” said Michael Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota.

Devi Sridhar, a professor of global public health at the University of Edinburgh who co-chaired a review of WHO’s response to the 2014-16 Ebola outbreak in West Africa, said a pandemic declaration is long overdue.

While none of this is easy when we don’t yet have a clear idea of the transmissibility and virulence of COVID-19, it is equally true the absence of true, timely public health information and honest decision-making, we risk further fostering a not insignificant climate of international government and institutional distrust, leading to social media platforms being lit up with stories such as the ones suggesting that the novel coronavirus is a genetically engineered biological weapon with a protein sequence included elements of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS – either a Chinese one that had escaped from a laboratory in Wuhan or an American one inflicted on Wuhan, or that COVID-19 is perhaps some kind of so-called “false flag” operation to distract us from someone or something else.

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Charles Ammi Cutter’s legacy to the modern library

Truth be told, there are evenings in the library, when I misread or jumble the “Cutter Line” in the call number, the unique combination of letters and numbers that indicates the position of the book on the shelf, when I’m shelf reading in the collection – sometimes located on a way-too-narrow spine to suit my naturally aging hyperopic eyesight – I wonder if maybe it would have been a better thing if Charles Ammi Cutter had become the Unitarian minister he had planned on becoming when he entered Harvard Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1856. But that wasn’t meant to be apparently, as Cutter, who graduated from the school in 1859, was never ordained but instead carried on with the library work he had embarked on while on staff in the divinity school library as a student.

It was during the 1857-58 academic year at Harvard Divinity School that school year that Cutter started by rearranging the library collection on the shelves into broad subject categories. The following academic year, Cutter led a project to arrange the collection into a single listing alphabetically by author.

In 1860, Cutter joined the staff of Harvard College as assistant librarian and worked on the development of a new library catalog. Unlike most library catalogs of the time, Cutter’s catalog used index cards rather than being presented in the form of a published volume. The Cutter catalog consisted of an author file and an alphabetical classed catalog, which provided an early form of subject access. Cutter’s work with this type of catalog prepared him for his later work with a dictionary catalog.

Cutter’s legacy for librarians, as a result, has been what we refer to as the “Cutter Line” or “Cutter Numbers.” Cutter devised what is known as the “Two-Figure Author Table” as a method of arranging books by author within a given class. “His lifelong objective was the development of a classification system comprehensive of all human knowledge yet serviceable to the general user,” notes Noah Sheola in a June 2010 article for the Boston Athenæum, where Cutter served as librarian from 1868 until 1892. It was intended to be easy to use. How easy is still a matter of some debate. What is not debatable is the fact Cutter’s ideas, though he died in 1903 before completing the final schedules of his Cutter Expansive Classification, nevertheless formed the theoretical basis for the Library of Congress Classification (LCC) system widely used by academic libraries in particular. The Library of Congress Classification system was first developed to organize and arrange the book collections of the United States federal government held by the Library of Congress, now the largest library in the world. Over the course of the 2oth century, the system was adopted for use by other libraries as well, especially large academic libraries in North America.

The Library of Congress was established by an Act of Congress in 1800 when President John Adams signed a bill providing for the transfer of the seat of government from Philadelphia to the new capital city of Washington. The legislation described a reference library for Congress only, containing “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress – and for putting up a suitable apartment for containing them therein…”

Established with $5,000 appropriated by the legislation, the original library was housed in the new Capitol in Washington until August 1814, when invading British troops set fire to the Capitol Building, burning and pillaging the contents of the small library.

“Within a month,” the Library of Congress notes on its website at https://www.loc.gov/about/history-of-the-library/,”retired President Thomas Jefferson offered his personal library as a replacement. Jefferson had spent 50 years accumulating books, ‘putting by everything which related to America, and indeed whatever was rare and valuable in every science’; his library was considered to be one of the finest in the United States. In offering his collection to Congress, Jefferson anticipated controversy over the nature of his collection, which included books in foreign languages and volumes of philosophy, science, literature, and other topics not normally viewed as part of a legislative library. He wrote, ‘I do not know that it contains any branch of science which Congress would wish to exclude from their collection; there is, in fact, no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.'”

In January 1815, Congress accepted Jefferson’s offer, appropriating $23,950 for his 6,487 books. “The Jeffersonian concept of universality, the belief that all subjects are important to the library of the American legislature, is the philosophy and rationale behind the comprehensive collecting policies of today’s Library of Congress.” Today a national institution, the Library of Congress is located in Washington in the Thomas Jefferson Building at 10 First Street, SE; the James Madison Memorial Building at 101 Independence Avenue, SE; and the John Adams Building on Second Street SE, between Independence Avenue and East Capitol Streets.

The Library of Congress Classification system divides all knowledge into 21 basic classes, each identified by a single letter of the alphabet. Library of Congress Classification call numbers generally use a mixed notation of one, two, or three CAPITAL letters, integral or whole numbers from 1 to 9999 with possible decimal extensions, one or two cutter numbers, and, if appropriate, a year of publication. A single letter, always combined with numbers, represents a main class, corresponding roughly to a broad academic discipline, e.g. N33 equals general dictionaries of the visual arts.

Double or triple capital letters combined with numbers represent sub-classes of the main class, e.g. NB50 equals dictionaries and encyclopedias of sculpture, i.e., a sub-class of the broader visual arts.

Most of these alphabetical classes are further divided into more specific sub-classes, identified by two-letter, or occasionally three-letter, combinations. For example, class N, Art, has sub-classes NA, Architecture; NB, Sculpture, ND, Painting; as well as several other sub-classes.

Each sub-class includes a loosely hierarchical arrangement of the topics pertinent to the sub-class, going from the general to the more specific. Individual topics are often broken down by specific places, time periods, or bibliographic forms (such as periodicals, biographies, etc.). Each topic (often referred to as a caption) is assigned a single number or a span of numbers. Whole numbers used in Library of Congress Classification may range from one to four digits in length, and may be further extended by the use of decimal numbers. Some sub-topics appear in alphabetical – rather than hierarchical – lists and are represented by decimal numbers that combine a letter of the alphabet with a numeral , e.g. .B72 or .K535.

Relationships among topics in Library of Congress Classification are shown not by the numbers that are assigned to them, but by indenting sub-topics under the larger topics that they are a part of, much like an outline. In this respect, it is different from more strictly hierarchical classification systems, such as the Dewey Decimal Classification (DDC) system, which is also used by the Library of Congress, as surprising as that may be to some given that the Library of Congress has its own classification system. But the Library of Congress “Dewey Section” uses the Dewey Decimal Classification system, to cite an example, when working in conjunction with the Dublin, Ohio-based Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC), a global library co-operative founded in 1967, as the Dewey Decimal Classification system is widely used by public libraries, as well as by elementary and high school libraries, along with many foreign libraries, with the DDC classifying hierarchical relationships among topics, shown by numbers that can be continuously subdivided.

In fact, the Library of Congress has a long tradition of providing Dewey numbers on its bibliographic records. In 1930 the Library of Congress began to print DDC numbers on nearly all of its cards, making the system immediately available to America’s libraries, the majority of which use the Dewey Decimal Classification system, developed in the 1870s by Melvil Dewey, and currently in its 23rd edition.

“The system organizes library materials by discipline into 10 main classes and its notation uses Arabic numbers, with three whole numbers making up the main classes and sub-classes and decimals creating further divisions,” noted Caroline Saccucci, Dewey Program manager for the Library of Congress, in a January 2014 report.

“The Arabic notation and hierarchical structure make this classification schema suited to use in any language,” wrote Saccucci. “Indeed, libraries in over 138 countries use the DDC, making it the most widely used classification system in the world. The DDC has been translated into 30 languages, and the editors of the Classification are frequently in discussions with translation partners around the world. Because libraries can shorten the class number for a more general classification, the DDC is ideally suited to smaller libraries of more general collections, such as school and public libraries.”

Though not a readily recognized name today, unlike his contemporary Dewey, Cutter’s influence on the organization of modern libraries is unsurpassed. Cutter’s codes and standards and developments in how catalogue records are communicated not only laid the groundwork for the Library of Congress Classification system but he also popularized the view that library catalogs ought to cross-reference subjects with authors’ names and titles, a practice that is almost universal now.

Both Cutter and Dewey were among the 103 librarians (90 men and 13 women) who founded as charter members the American Library Association at the “Convention of Librarians” on Oct. 6, 1876, during the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The American Library Association is the oldest and largest library association in the world.

At the 1883 meeting of the American Library Association, Cutter presented a now famous prescient essay entitled The Buffalo Public Library in 1983, which elucidates a utopian future for American libraries and remarkably anticipates the technological advances of the 20th century, including inter-library loan, audio books, regional depositories, remote reference services and automated retrieval.   You can read it here at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Buffalo_Public_Library_in_1983

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Today marks the feast day of the remarkable Saint Gianna Beretta Molla – pediatrician, mother and a powerful pro-life witness both in her life and death

April 28 marks the feast day of the remarkable Italian 20th century saint, Gianna Beretta Molla, who was canonized by now Saint Pope John Paul II on May 16, 2004. The miracle recognized to canonize Gianna Molla involved a 35-year-old Brazilian mother, Elizabeth Comparini Arcolino, who sustained a tear in her placenta that drained her womb of all amniotic fluid. Because a normal term of pregnancy is 40 weeks,  Arcolino was told by her doctors the baby’s chance of survival was “nil.” Arcolino said she prayed to Gianna Molla asking for her intercession, and was able to deliver a healthy baby girl, Gianna Maria, on May 31, 2000, despite the lack of amniotic fluid.

The case of the miracle was studied by the Consulta Medica of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints and on April 10, 2003 it was determined that, despite the grave prognosis for the fetus and the mother as the result of the total loss of amniotic fluid at the 16th week of gestation, and despite medical treatment that failed to alleviate and was inadequate for such a grave situation, the positive outcome of the pregnancy, both healthy mother and healthy child, was unexplainable in medical terms. The decree super miraculo was promulgated by the Congregation for the Causes of Saints in the presence of now Saint Pope John Paul II on Dec. 20, 2003.

Gianna Beretta was born in Magenta, about 24 kilometres west of Milan, on Oct. 4, 1922, as the 10th of Alberto and Maria Beretta’s 13 children. The name Gianna derives from the Hebrew, and means “God is gracious.”

During high school and her undergraduate years in university, she applied her faith in apostolic service among the youth of Catholic Action and charitable work among the elderly and needy as a member of the St. Vincent de Paul Society.

After earning degrees in medicine and surgery from the University of Pavia in 1949, she opened a medical clinic in Mesero, near Magenta, in 1950. She specialized in pediatrics at the University of Milan in 1952 and thereafter gave special attention to mothers, babies, the elderly and poor.

She first met Pietro Molla, an engineer, factory director and fellow member of Catholic Action, who was 10 years older than her and would become her future husband, just in passing, in September 1949. But it was a meeting more than five years later on Dec. 8, 1954 – the Feast of the Immaculate Conception, and the 100th anniversary of the day on which Pope Pius IX solemnly defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception – which proved to be the decisive moment in the attraction that was developing. Both had been invited to the first mass of a mutual friend, Father Lino Garavaglia. They were married on Sept. 24, 1955, in the Basilica of St. Martin in Magenta. In November 1956, she gave birth to Pierluigi, followed by Maria Zita, known as Mariolina, in December 1957, and Laura in July 1959.

In September 1961 towards the end of the second month of her pregnancy with a fourth child, Gianna Emanuela, she developed a fibroma in her uterus.

She rejected the possibility of having an abortion to save her own life, instead opting for risky surgery, before which she told Pietro, “If you must decide between me and the child, do not hesitate: choose the child – I insist on it.” Gianna Emanuela was born on April 21, 1962. Her mother, Gianna Beretta Molla, died a week later on April 28, now her feast day, as the result of complications from the pregnancy. She was 39. Gianna Emanuela, like her mother, became a doctor, and is a geriatrician living in Milan. There is also now a Saint Gianna Physician’s Guild, founded by Catholic laymen who saw a need for physicians and other healthcare workers to bring their faith into their lives and medical practices in a more pronounced way. The mission of Saint Gianna Physician’s Guild, based in San Diego, California, is to unite and encourage Catholic physicians, and those in the healthcare profession, to promote and defend Catholic principles in a public way by word and example, and to inspire sanctification in their lives.

“Conscious immolation” was the phrase used by now Blessed Pope Paul VI to define the self-sacrificing act of Gianna Beretta Molla, remembering her at the Sunday Angelus of Sept. 23, 1973 as, “A young mother from the Diocese of Milan, who, to give life to her daughter, sacrificed her own, with conscious immolation.”

Pietro Molla, then 91, was present at the canonization ceremony in St. Peter’s Square in front of over 100,000 people for Gianna Beretta Molla on May 16, 2004, marking the first time in the 2000-year history of the Catholic Church that a husband had witnessed his wife’s canonization. The entire Arcolino family was also present for the canonization.

Along with  Saint Pope John Paul II , Saint Gianna Beretta Molla has been named patron saint of the World Meeting of Families in Philadelphia in September, which Pope Francis is scheduled to attend during his first papal visit to the United States.

In 1979, Saint Pope John Paul II  was the first pope to visit Philadelphia, where he said mass on Logan Circle for nearly one million people filling the Benjamin Franklin Parkway. In 1994, he celebrated the first World Meeting of Families in Rome, which aimed to strengthen the bonds of family across the globe. Upon his canonization a year ago on April 27, 2014, he was declared “the pope of the family.” Saint Gianna Beretta Molla is the patron saint for mothers, physicians and unborn children.

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Versioning Weblog World 2.75: Dish no more

A “weblog is a website where a person writes regularly about recent events or topics that interest them, usually with photos and links to other websites that they find interesting.” So says Oxforddictionaries.com, helpfully describing the origins of the word as dating back to the 1990s “from web in the sense ‘World Wide Web’ + log in the sense ‘regular record of incidents.’” In recent years, Oxford also points out, weblog is almost always abbreviated simply to blog.

Wikipedia will tell you that as of Feb. 20, 2014, there were around 172 million Tumblr and 75.8 million WordPress blogs in existence worldwide. Origins are always a bit of a murky business, but Justin Hall, who began posting online in 1994, while working as a student intern at San Francisco-based Wired magazine in the summer of his sophomore year at Swarthmore College, just outside Philadelphia, was among the pioneers of online diarists and web loggers who started personal blogging.

In a Jan. 28 note to his readers, Andrew Sullivan announced he was shuttering his blog after almost 15 years. Originally known as The Daily Dish (later called simply the Dish), it had been online since the summer of 2000. “Biased and Balanced” became the blog’s motto in January 2012.

Sullivan wrote the blog alone for the first six years, “for no pay, apart from two pledge drives. In 2006 he took the blog to time.com and then to theatlantic.com, where he was able to employ interns for the first time to handle the ever-expanding web of content,” the Dish reported at http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/about/

In explaining his decision to end the Dish, Sullivan wrote:

“Why [end the Dish]? Two reasons. The first is one I hope anyone can understand: although it has been the most rewarding experience in my writing career, I’ve now been blogging daily for fifteen years straight (well kinda straight). That’s long enough to do any single job. In some ways, it’s as simple as that. There comes a time when you have to move on to new things, shake your world up, or recognize before you crash that burn-out does happen.

“The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.”

His last blog post, “The Years Of Writing Dangerously,” written by Sullivan, was posted Feb. 6 “@ 3:00pm.”

In that post, Sullivan points readers back to a Sept. 3, 2002 post of his, “Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?” published in Slate’s “Webhead. Inside the Internet” section. Wrote Sullivan more than a dozen years ago: “[T]he speed with which an idea in your head reaches thousands of other people’s eyes has another deflating effect, this time in reverse: It ensures that you will occasionally blurt out things that are offensive, dumb, brilliant, or in tune with the way people actually think and speak in private. That means bloggers put themselves out there in far more ballsy fashion than many officially sanctioned pundits do, and they make fools of themselves more often, too. The only way to correct your mistakes or foolishness is in public, on the blog, in front of your readers. You are far more naked than when clothed in the protective garments of a media entity.

“But, somehow, you’re liberated as well as nude: blogging as a media form of streaking. I notice this when I write my blog, as opposed to when I write for the old media. I take less time, worry less about polish, and care less about the consequences on my blog. That makes for more honest writing. It may not be ‘serious’ in the way, say, a 12-page review of 14th-century Bulgarian poetry in the New Republic is serious. But it’s serious inasmuch as it conveys real ideas and feelings in as unvarnished and honest a form as possible. I think journalism could do with more of that kind of seriousness. It’s democratic in the best sense of the word. It helps expose the wizard behind the media curtain.”

Closing down a blog has always been part of the life cycle of the web. “I’ve seen this happen a thousand times,” said Rebecca Blood, author of The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog, which was published in July 2002. Blood has been blogging since April 1999 and can be found at http://www.rebeccablood.com

“It’s usually people have a baby, or get married, or get a new job – interests changed, and they stop posting.” Blood wrote those words more than a decade ago. She still blogs herself at Rebecca’s Pocket, and her most recent posting on Feb. 28 was on season three of BBC One’s Sherlock, starring Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock Holmes, and Martin Freeman as Dr. John Watson. Rupert Graves plays Detective Inspector (D.I.) Greg Lestrade.

Mind you, Sullivan was not much of a fan of Blood’s book, The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. In his Sept. 3, 2002 post “Are Weblogs Changing Our Culture?” published in Slate, Sullivan refers to Blood’s book published earlier that summer in July: “It’s almost silly to write a dead-tree book about blogs anyway, don’t you think? The critical language of blogging—the hypertext links to other Web pages, for example – cannot even be translated into book form, and you end up with lame appendixes and footnotes crammed with web addresses. There were a few amusing essays in We’ve Got Blog – Julian Dibbell’s ‘Portrait of the Blogger as a Young Man,’ and Tim Cavanaugh’s ‘Let Slip the Blogs of War,’ for example – but both these tomes struck me as products of old media thinking: ‘Hey, there are all these blogs out there. Let’s Do a Book.’ How about ‘Let’s Not Do a Book?’”

Bloomberg View columnist Megan McArdle, whose Asymmetrical Information blog appeared in Newsweek and the Daily Beast, and who has also written for the Atlantic and the Economist magazines, wrote in a Feb. 5 Bloomberg View story – the day before Sullivan’s departure from blogging – “Journalism is a lecture; blogging is a conversation … My industry faces two big challenges. The first is to find a business model that will pay for journalism — which is not being killed off by bloggers, but by giant web companies that sell lots of ads without doing any of that expensive reporting. Andrew was the pioneer of one possible model – subscriptions – and I think his experience has shown that this model won’t work. The Dish got an amazing amount of support from loyal readers, far more than anyone else could hope for, and it pulled in enough money to cover the cost of operations, but only if those operations operated at an unsustainably high pitch.

“The other challenge is ‘what will journalism careers look like?’ My profession, after grousing about ‘pajama-clad bloggers’ who were allowed to say anything they wanted without editorial interference, has moved toward that model. As ad dollars have died, we have come to rely more and more on armies of people putting out quick content.”

As for me, I write pretty much what I want when I want. Which is about what I did as a print journalist for the most part, some of my critics would no doubt remind me. “Write what you know” remains good advice to writers, I think, although I’d go a bit further and add write what you’re truly interested in and write about things you may want to know more about. Then let the chips fall where they may. As I wrote in a blog post last Sept. 11, “In the old days, publishers and newspaper owners would from time to time ‘kill’ a writer’s column before publication. Despite their ballyhoo and blather about freedom of the press, publishers and newspaper proprietors are almost universally in my long experience with them a timid lot, if not outright moral cowards at times, always afraid of offending someone. Freedom of the press is the last thing they want when it comes to staff.” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2014/09/11/retroactively-spiked-the-post-publication-killing-of-msgr-charles-popes-blog-post-on-new-york-citys-st-patricks-day-parade/)

That latter notion of writing about things that interest you but you may want to know more about is particularly apropos for bloggers where your readers are often more than happy to comment and in some cases are almost guaranteed to have more expertise and background in a particular area than you do, which they may blog about themselves, and are usually happy to share with you and your readers.

Why online commenting on news stories seems so often to bring out the worst in some people is still something of a puzzle that researchers continue to study with some wondering if it is the anonymity afforded them by many commenting modules that don’t require real names, but only pseudonyms as usernames, that causes problems.

Still, it rarely has been a problem for me blogging, with the odd notable exception. While it seems likely much of what is said in online commenting on news stories would never be said face-to-face, person-to-person, it has been only a minor – and even then, exceptional  – annoyance for me. But if you are interested in a broader discussion on some of these issues, you might check out these links: “Robert Fisk: Anonymous comments and why it’s time we all stop drinking this digital poison” at http://www.independent.ie/opinion/comment/robert-fisk-anonymous-comments-and-why-its-time-we-all-stop-drinking-this-digital-poison-3349527.html, or Margaret Sullivan: Seeking a return to civility in online comments at http://fores.blogs.uv.es/2010/06/22/01-seeking-a-return-to-civility-in-online-comments/, or Katie Roiphe’s Slate magazine article, “What’s wrong with angry commenters?” at http://www.slate.com/articles/life/roiphe/2011/12/what_s_wrong_with_angry_commenters_.html

As a generalist, who writes on an eclectic (perhaps even at times eccentric) range of topics and ideas, I find readers who are more than happy to comment and share their expertise and background in a particular area very helpful. And even if they can’t help sometimes, other bloggers and commenters will often offer encouragement.

A couple of days after I posted a piece in part on the Sir Leonard Tilley Building (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/01/28/canadas-other-national-spy-agency-the-communications-security-establishment-used-its-internet-cable-tap-program-atomic-banjo-for-http-metadata-monitoring-and-collection-from-free-file-upl/), the old Communications Security Establishment (CSE) five-storey headquarters at 719 Heron Rd., near Carleton University, and well known to the intelligence community as “The Farm,” located at the corner of Riverside Drive and Heron Road, within the boundaries of the federal government’s Confederation Heights campus, in Ottawa, I serendipitously came across Bill Robinson’s Lux Ex Umbra blog, which bills (pun intended) itself as “monitoring Canadian signals intelligence (SIGINT) activities past and present.”

The Sir Leonard Tilley Building was built in 1961 and custom designed for use by intelligence services. The building’s exterior elevations conceal specialized features linked to intelligence gathering such as the design of “slippers” beneath the floor plates and the electrical and mechanical systems. The Communications Security Establishment’s $1.2 billion new headquarters at 1929 Ogilvie Rd., completed last July, dubbed “Camelot” in official Department of National Defence documents, is the most expensive federal building ever constructed in Canada, and located next door to the only slightly better known Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), which also has its headquarters in Gloucester in east-end Ottawa.

Bill, as it turned out, had written in some detail on the Sir Leonard Tilley Building about three years ago on April 7, 2012 (http://luxexumbra.blogspot.ca/2012/04/cse-facilities-sir-leonard-tilley.html), so I sent him an e-mail query Jan. 30 asking if subsequent to writing his post he “had any success discovering more about the ‘slippers’ beneath the floor plates and the electrical and mechanical systems in the Sir Leonard Tilley Building in Ottawa?”

Bill replied Feb. 1: “Sadly, I haven’t learned anything more about the Tilley building’s systems. I wonder if we’ll learn more about the building after CSE finishes vacating the premises (assuming they haven’t already).”

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