A weblog written by Anton Zuiker since July 2000
©2000-2012 Anton Zuiker, a Zuiker Chronicles Online website. Sweetened with Textpattern, Textdrive, OSX, skEdit and memories of Paama.
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Martinis & Mentors - drinks & stories with Michael Ruhlman - 5/16/2012
Michael Ruhlman DM’d me recently to say he’d be back in North Carolina to attend From A Long and Happy Life to Midstream: Reading and Celebrating the Works of Reynolds Price at Duke University on May 15. Would I want to get some local foodies together for another event? Of course.
Back in November when Michael was here, Andrea Reusing hosted and prepared an amazing multi-course dinner at her Chapel Hill restaurant, Lantern. Michael wrote about his visit and that dinner in his post, Book Tour Blessings.
This time, I thought, we’d do something a bit simpler.
Michael has been blogging about cocktails on Fridays, including The Manhattan and The Perfect Martini. (My friend, Ilina Ewen, also blogs about cocktails in her 5:00 Fridays posts on Dirt & Noise.) Michael also had an inspiring post about teaching his son to cook, Chicken Curry: Teach Kids to Cook.
I’ve had a total of one martini in my life, and that one not very good. Like Michael, I’ve had mentors who have helped me become the writer and person I am today (explored in my recent post). And, just today Malia was at my side learning to make strawberry jam.
So, why not a Martinis & Mentors event, to mix some drinks and share our stories about the mentors in our lives?
That’s just what we’ll do on Wed., May 16 from 7:30 p.m. on at the home of my neighbor, Jason Roberts (a Ruhlman fan, too). We’ll have space for 40 or so, and are asking for $20 per person to cover the cost of the martini mixings and appetizers (perhaps something from Ruhlman’s Twenty or another of Michael’s books about chefs, restaurants and good eating).
Join us! Register now (popup form) form.
TweetA life boat would do
My work at Duke finished for the week, I pulled into nearby Waller Family Farm to pick another bucket of strawberries. On the radio, SiriusXM channel 33 – 1st Wave, She Blinded Me with Science by Thomas Dolby came to an end, and DJ Richard Blade mentioned that Dolby had recently been on the radio talking about his home in East Anglia, where he had placed an old lifeboat in his yard, the lifeboat outfitted as a recording studio powered by wind and sun.
Given my lifelong desire to park a decommissioned submarine in my own backyard, I was delighted by the story.
Read about Dolby’s lifeboat-studio in this Treehugger post.
And, I now know that Dolby is connected to TED, for which he serves as musical director. Maybe we can invite him to ScienceOnline2013 to talk about his hit song, lifeboat and more.
TweetKnowing when to listen
It’s my decade for narrative, and I see stories all around me.
Yesterday, I learned a lesson.
I was walking back from a meeting across campus, and I came upon Irving Holley, emeritus professor of history. Normally, he’s walking and talking with another gentleman, a librarian, and I catch a snippet of their conversations as I stride swiftly past. Once, I stopped and asked them who they were and why they were always talking about the past.
Yesterday, Holley was walking alone, slowly making his way down the long, new concourse that connects the buildings of Duke University Hospital. I pulled up to him, and asked if I could join him. Together we ambled along, he using a cane and me enjoying the relaxed pace so I could listen to his recollections and sage advice, including “Stay away from old age as long as you can.” Holley is 93, and still writing.
When I parted ways at the hospital cafeteria, I’d realized my lesson: never walk past a story.
TweetCome back, but silently
This summer, I’ll be headed back to John Carroll University for a reunion of the Class of 1992.
It’s been 20 years since I graduated with a degree in communications, ending a very enjoyable four years in suburban Cleveland. As I was preparing then to move far away to Hawaii — to hang out with my dad, learn to surf and work to pay off my student loans (just $5,000) — a mentor said to me, “Anton, don’t forget, you can always come back.” That advice meant more than just returning to JCU. It was really a lesson in empowerment, a reminder that I didn’t need to feel stuck anywhere.
And so when my loans were paid off, I’d realized I was too blind and clumsy to surf well and my love affair with Erin wasn’t diminished, I did return to Cleveland, and gladly (also mentioned in my Cleveland Plain Dealer essay about running the Honolulu Marathon with dad). As Erin finished her fourth year at Carroll, I roamed the city working as a writer, bookseller and failed one-day waiter.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about a specific string of days during my college experience.
You know from my previous posts — A family orientation and Found in the archives: My story on The Story — that I contemplated the priesthood. As part of my discernment, and because JCU is a Jesuit university, one fall break I attended an eight-day silent retreat, in which I walked in the snow, read at length, wrote in a journal and generally contemplated where my life would take me. I spoke only briefly each day when I met with a spiritual advisor, and I listened intently for the voice of god, although only the cardinals and the brown squirrels seemed interested in talking to me.
Those eight days were a luxury, and I’m envious of my 20-year-old self. Now, my life is so much more full — wonderful family, great job, list of projects and plans (more about that in a post coming up) — and I’d love the opportunity to take 8 days for a silent retreat, or even the full 30 days for the Ignatian retreat that Jesuit novices complete before being ordained.
Two years ago, I took two days for a self-guided silent retreat to the North Carolina coast, and there I had an epiphany: Thinking places, or I am before I am reinforced the importance of quiet contemplation. As I wrote then, being a reader is fundamental to me being a writer and a thinker.
I was honored that my friend, Beck Tench, was inspired to take a retreat of her own.
This week, seeing that Harry Marks is giving up on words for a year made me chuckle, and shudder.
Just give me silence for 30 days, or 8, or 2, or tomorrow. I’ll be refreshed, and ready to come back.
TweetThe four Cs of inspiration: Overlapping networks of ScienceOnline
Today over at the Of Schemes and Memes blog, Rockefeller University scientist Jeanne Garbarino recalls the beginnings of Science Online NYC, a monthly meetup in New York that started in April 2011.
It’s always interesting to see what inspires people to come together. Jeanne explains how she got connected to the online community of scientists. Bora gets a nice reference — “…or getting a twitter follow by this guy who goes by BoraZ, I somehow found myself quickly immersed in the science online community” — and Jeanne’s use of the ScienceOnline2011 livestreams (thanks NASW and AAAS/Science/EurekAlert! for underwriting that!) whetted her appetite for face-to-face conversations with other science lovers.
The ScienceOnline meeting in North Carolina, however, was different. EVERYONE who wanted to be heard was heard. There was no hierarchy and information flowed freely. Even though I was tuning in from afar, I could tell that this meeting was different, for it was not a “meeting” at all. To me, it seemed more like a gathering of friends who are all passionate about communicating science and, miraculously, the lines between being professional and being social became blurry.
Jeanne connected with John Timmer, Lou Woodley and Joe Bonner, and together they planned the inaugural Science Online NYC, or SoNYC, with a kick-off in April 2011.
[Note the spaces in the name; while the ScienceOnline conference and community helped inspire SoNYC, (and Science Online London before that), a question about a trademark and how a formal organization might later be named led to the shared-but-different name. More about that below.]
Connections, conversations, collaborations, community: these are the values that have instilled our BlogTogether and ScienceOnline activities for more than 10 years now. In this journey, I’ve been inspired by others — I last wrote about some of the people and experiences that helped form me in my post Triptych: Three reasons for me being me — and I’ve been quietly happy when I see that my late-night, chocolate-and-slivo-fueled efforts have been some small inspiration for others.
Last month, when I was in Palm Springs, Ivan Oransky told me over lunch that his experience at ScienceOnline helped give him energy to build on his idea for Embargo Watch. Jai Ranganathan and others have similarly taken inspiration from the ScienceOnline community, and their #SciFund Challenge is an exciting experiment in crowdsourcing science. There’s a host of our ScienceOnline friends involved in Download the Universe, which grew out of that group’s learned discussions at past conferences about new science publishing opportunities. Last week saw the grand opening of the Nature Research Center at the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, and I was delighted to watch David Kroll, Brian Malow, Holly Menninger and others in action during the 24-hour opening. (Brian mentions his introduction to ScienceOnline in this great interview on WUNC’s The State of Things.) And now there are ScienceOnline meetups and activities starting in Seattle, Vancouver, the Bay Area, Chicago, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C. and other cities.
I don’t take credit for any of these — without exception, the individuals who are starting these initiatives and meetups are smarter than me, closer to the science, dedicated to advancing our knowledge of the world around and our bodies within. But at night, when I wake up and my subconscious tells me I’m doing too much and I should be overwhelmed and wouldn’t it be nice to chill out for a year or two, I smile and think, somehow, I’ve plugged into a community of amazing people, and if organizing a conference and building a community gets me opportunity to converse with them, I’m not stopping. In my waking hours, I talk at every opportunity about the 4 Cs (refer 2 graphs above) and the power of overlapping networks and how my life has changed because of all that.
And it’s with that enthusiasm for the greater ScienceOnline community that last April I proposed to my daughter, Anna, that she accompany me to New York City to celebrate her 10th birthday and to attend the first SoNYC meeting; I was particularly excited about being on hand to congratulate the organizers and support the endeavor. Anna agreed to go, albeit reluctantly, and the breakneck pace I put her through over our 36-hour trip confirmed all her suspicions. In her own words and from an essay she wrote to my wife, Erin, to explain her lingering feelings for the big city:
The New York trip was pretty fun but not the best. Well, the fun part is that we went to the bookstore, we saw my mom’s friend from work [her office up high over Times Square], we saw a movie and did a lot of other things. It was overwhelming because we kept going places and going places and we never got to stop at the M&M shop or another shop. But the best part about the trip was that I got to spend time with my dad and saw a movie and a museum. My dad had a meeting we went to and I slept for most of the time but I was tired. I just fell asleep on the table while my dad talked…When I got home I was so happy because my house is a gentle, kind-hearted place where I play and get along with my siblings, and of course our parents.
Over time, Anna’s talked more and more about our trip to New York City, and told me she loved our lunch at a Japanese restaurant, reiterated her appreciation for the mid-day movie break, and asked again why that naked cowboy guy with the guitar was standing in the cold.
In the year since that trip, and SoNYC’s start, the monthly meetup in New York City has proved quite successful — congrats Jeanne, John, Joe and Lou! — mirroring the amazing momentum of the greater ScienceOnline community and our flagship annual conference. The connections, conversations and collaborations are inspiring individuals and groups left and right, and as Bora and Karyn and I build out a new nonprofit organization to support this community, we’re listening for the right ways to reflect the overlapping networks, shared models, innovative tools and future opportunities that will promote science and the 4 Cs.
Which brings me back to the ScienceOnline moniker, spaces between words, and where we go from here.
Later this week over at ScienceOnlineNOW.org, we’ll be posting updates on the organization and drafts of community guidelines to help us chart the waters of brand building and network promotion and such. As is our constant aim, we thrive on feedback and ideas for crafting the best guidelines to grow and nurture the community. We’ll also have updates on plans for ScienceOnline2013, ScienceOnlineTEEN and more reflections on the smart and cool people stepping up to form local ScienceOnline groups and similar activities.
With luck, we’ll all think of the ScienceOnline community as a gentle, kind-hearted place were we get along, collaborate and love our parents. Long live Science, and may we share our inspirations through ScienceOnline.
Tweet100 performances
The E in TED and TEDMED stands for entertainment, and so the TEDMED 2012 program has included a number of artistic performances: dance, music, poetry and singing — including the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, which filled the inside steps of the Library of Congress and filled the hall with their joyful harmonies.
Spoken word artists Sekou Andrews and Steve Connell slammed us with a great poem: 
The Montreal-based dance troupe Traces thrilled us with their acrobatics: 
MOMIX mesmerized us, Jonathan Mann wrote a song, and the Washington Performing Arts Society’s Children of the Gospel Choir lifted us with their youthful, passionate voices.
Then, I was standing in the very back of the Kennedy Center’s Opera House, and Robert Vijay Gupta came onto the stage, violin in hand:
Somewhere in that beautiful moment, I was struck by how enjoyable life is with performers to entertain us, and how I want to experience more performances. Better yet, experience those performances with my children alongside. And why not make that a project? Why not set off to experience 100 performances with my children?
If I were to look back through the archives of my blog, I bet I’ve already taken in dozens of performances through the years, whether free concerts at the Carolina Inn or Durham’s American Tobacco complex and other venues around the Triangle. So, I’m thinking I’m about to set out to record the next hundred, and to ask Anna and Malia (and eventually, Oliver) to contribute to this 100 Performances project.
My good friend (and best man at my wedding), Joe Cimperman, used to tell me about how his mom would take him to the Cleveland Orchestra at Severance Hall. His memories of those experiences are the types of memories I want to cultivate in my own children. And I want us all to revel in the arts, whether on the TEDMED stage or the porch down the street from us.
TweetIn at TEDMED, & left out of the Declaration of Independence
TEDMED rolls on, and I’m still here, and still grateful I got into this large, lavish, learned gathering.
Last night’s delegate party was in the Library of Congress, an inspired, and inspiring, choice. While my friend Karyn Traphagen used her special card to get onto the floor of the reading room, I wandered into an exhibit on the writing of the Declaration of Independence. I was fascinated by the editing — the cross outs and inserts and rewrites — and moved by the thought that the same work I do was done to so much better and longstanding effect by Thomas Jefferson and his compatriots.
My work is writing and editing, certainly, and I love the craft of finetuning a sentence and paragraph and article. But I’ve come to realize, too, that conversations drive me. I got the sense from the exhibit that quite a few conversations helped finesse the Declaration, too. TEDMED is giving me many new individuals to converse with, and I’m looking forward to seeing where these connections go.
TweetThe passive way to meet people can be the best
At TEDMED today, I waited after the late-morning session to have the chance to say a quick thanks to Francis Collins, NIH director (as I mentioned in an earlier post, Collins was kind to me a while back), and so I was late to the lunch. I filled a plate, chatted with Ivan Oransky about his very enjoyable talk (about baseball, prefixes and more), and then, considering whether I should join a conversation somewhere, instead found an empty table.
I sat down. Ate the delicious Indian cuisine. Took a few notes in my ScienceOnline2010 Field Notes notebook.
Then Donna Cryer (@DCpatient) walked over, saying, “No on should sit alone at TEDMED.” She sat down, and immediately we were talking about shared connections and ideas for facilitating conversations among patient communities. Donna has a great story — “Liver transplant and IBD patient accelerating patient engagement and collaborations in health technology, policy, and systems improvement” — and I’m looking forward to catching up with her again, soon.
Looking for another empty table …
TweetHeartbeats on the moon
At TEDMED today, Jay Walker brought out an artifact from his amazing Library of the History of Human Imagination. To set it up, he recounted the first moon landing and the frantic search for a boulder-free space to set down the lunar module.
“Sixty seconds,” says Houston, warning of the fuel running low.
“Thirty seconds.”
Finally, the famous “The Eagle has landed” comes back from the moon, confirming touchdown.
Houston responds with relief: “You’ve got a bunch of guys about to turn blue. We’re breathing again.”
And then Jay shows the actual EKG of Buzz Aldrin, showing his elevated heart rate. Pretty cool.
TweetAttending TEDMED2012
Next week, I’ll travel to Washington, D.C., to attend TEDMED2012, where I’ll be an invited blogger. I’m looking forward to these three days of talks and conversations that “explore the ideas, innovations and challenges that will help shape the future of health and medicine for 300 million Americans…and the world.”
Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health, will be one of the speakers. I’m sure the thousand other delegates will vie for his attention, but if I happen to run into him, I’ll thank him for taking the time to sit down with me (and Erin and others) in Chapel Hill back in 2000; I’ll explain to him that his willingness to listen to a graduate student inspired my attempts to combine my journalism background, public health interest and new media skills. Soon after grad school, I started my collaboration with Bora Zivkovic — Bora will attend TEDMED, too, along with ScienceOnline’s executive director, Karyn Traphagen.
It’s through ScienceOnline2012 that we met a couple of the TEDMED organizers, who invited us up to Washington to experience this gathering. We’re excited to see what we can learn, and what we might bring back to ScienceOnline.
Ivan Oransky, who has attended all six of the ScienceOnline conferences, will also be a TEDMED2012 speaker, along with Jonathan Eisen, and Diane Kelly, also scio12 alums.
While I’m at TEDMED in Washington, TEDMED will be at Duke via a live simulcast sponsored by the Association of American Medical Colleges (it was an AAMC meeting, for communications, marketing and development folks, that I attended last month in Palm Springs).
One reason I’m jazzed about attending TEDMED is my 40s-decade focus on narrative. I’ll be listening for the different ways that the speakers tell, and show, their stories.
[Edited to include Diane Kelly; HT Ben Lillie]
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