- True. Some at the White House knew there were weapons in the crowd.
True. Trump knew there were weapons in the crowd.
True. Trump didn't mind the presence of weapons in the crowd.
True. Trump wanted that crowd at the Capitol.
True. Trump loved his ability to bring that crowd to a fever pitch.
True. Trump wanted to be at the Capitol to energize the crowd.
True. The Secret Service knew all of this.
True. Some members of the Secret Service may have liked the idea.#
- In "The Scalpel and the Pen," a new essay, Jerome Groopman opens by talking about his professional training as a surgeon having (at first) got in the way of his hope to write about medicine for a wide general audience, which is a very useful thing to do. The language use of a specialist in many fields is often so narrow, so wedded to insider talk and tightly controlled diction, that at first there wasn't a lot of hope for him as a specialist to write well for, say, sharp generalist readers at the Atlantic or the New Yorker.#
- He shows his spouse his early efforts and she says, "They're awful."#
- He realizes at least two things. One, "that many of the problems [in the drafts] reflected the conditioning that occurs during medical training." (True of other fields, too. True of my training in literature, for example.)#
- And two, he came to understand that writers (always informally, and perhaps with some formal training too) "needed a new kind of training, analogous to [a specialist's] training but very different." He goes on to describe his own path, which involved finding and reading the work of good models and mentors, not just to enjoy but more: to think about the choices they made as writers, line by line, page by page. For him, it was a kind of self-shaped apprenticeship.#
- The essay continues for three pages, looking at examples, and coming to the conclusion, I think, that his writing inside the profession is for getting the profession's work done, and writing of this other kind is for understanding the profession, and the people it seeks to serve, and himself, and our common humanity.#
- True. Some at the White House knew there were weapons in the crowd.
True. Trump knew there were weapons in the crowd.
True. Trump didn't mind the presence of weapons in the crowd.
True. Trump wanted that crowd at the Capitol.
True. Trump loved his ability to bring that crowd to a fever pitch.
True. Trump wanted to be at the Capitol to energize the crowd.
True. The Secret Service knew all of this.
True. Some members of the Secret Service may have liked the idea.#
- In "The Scalpel and the Pen," a new essay, Jerome Groopman opens by talking about his professional training as a surgeon having (at first) got in the way of his hope to write about medicine for a wide general audience, which is a very useful thing to do. The language use of a specialist in many fields is often so narrow, so wedded to insider talk and tightly controlled diction, that at first there wasn't a lot of hope for him as a specialist to write well for, say, sharp generalist readers at the Atlantic or the New Yorker.#
- He shows his spouse his early efforts and she says, "They're awful."#
- He realizes at least two things. One, "that many of the problems [in the drafts] reflected the conditioning that occurs during medical training." (True of other fields, too. True of my training in literature, for example.)#
- And two, he came to understand that writers (always informally, and perhaps with some formal training too) "needed a new kind of training, analogous to [a specialist's] training but very different." He goes on to describe his own path, which involved finding and reading the work of good models and mentors, not just to enjoy but more: to think about the choices they made as writers, line by line, page by page. For him, it was a kind of self-shaped apprenticeship.#
- The essay continues for three pages, looking at examples, and coming to the conclusion, I think, that his writing inside the profession is for getting the profession's work done, and writing of this other kind is for understanding the profession, and the people it seeks to serve, and himself, and our common humanity.#