Tag: curiosity

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A Magical Lesson

“You see a beautiful ballroom, decorated for a feast or party of some kind. Music is playing, but you can’t see from where. In the center of the room, a man and woman dressed in clothes from 300 years ago are dancing, you think you can see through them. What do you do?”

My nephew Gil considered the situation. Then conferred briefly with his mom and Heather. Even for a bold Elven adventurer, this was going to be tricky.

On the other end of the webcam, 1,300 miles away, I smiled. Not the “gotcha” smile of the devious Dungeon Master. But the nostalgic smile of a proud uncle.

A new adventure had truly begun.

My sister likes to say that Gil and I have a lot in common. He’s a big reader on every topic imaginable. He loves good games and bad jokes and weird facts. He even started learning piano after fooling around with the one at our house for the first time.

Now he’s taken another step in the Déjà Vu Chronicles. Gil has discovered fantasy roleplaying, the world of broad imaginations and funny-shaped dice. Not only that, he’s starting at just about the same age I did.

Did someone cast a flashback spell when I wasn’t looking?

My own adventures started in fourth grade, fueled by a love of “The Hobbit” and curiosity about a game I’d seen mentioned in comic books and “E.T.” I quickly fell in love. I mean, I’d already been creating my own stories for fun and this was just the next step, right? (The fact that calculating experience points gave a boost to my math skills – which, frankly, needed all the help they could get – was an unforeseen bonus.)

Gil, likewise, discovered the games in his own reading and wanted to know more. His mom told him “You should really ask Uncle Scott.”

I’m sure she was barely hiding a smile the whole time.

It’s been exciting to see him learn the same lessons I did: the ones about cooperation, creativity, planning and why it’s a really good idea to avoid a room full of green slime. But the most exciting one has come from four words, repeated over and over again.

“I check it out.”

Whether from his reading or his own intuition, Gil has decided that anything could be more than meets the eye. So his character checks for traps. For secret doors. For hidden objects and lurking spiders. If a room the size of a closet holds a spyhole and a single wooden stool, the first words will be “I check out the stool.”

In this day and age, I can’t think of a more valuable reflex to train.

We live in a world where assumptions are easy and conspiracy theories streak across the internet at warp speed. We’ve seen – or been! – the friend who swallowed a story whole because it fit what they already believed, even when 30 seconds on Google would blow it up like the Death Star. After all, why disturb a beautiful theory with the facts?

With so much coming at us, checking it out is vital. And it’s usually not as hard as it sounds. But the hardest step is to realize that something needs checking – that our own assumptions and beliefs might actually be wrong. That requires humility, reflection, and a willingness to learn.

It’s not as glamorous as stubbornly holding your position at all costs and feeling like a hero. But it’s better for all of us in the long run. And if some magic and monsters can help ingrain that in my nephew, then bring on the quest.

It’s adventure time.

Let’s have a ball.

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The Hole Truth

Who knew that nothing could be so fascinating?

OK, technically a black hole is something. A rather large something, at that. But the image in my mind has always been a bit like the Nothing in The Neverending Story, an unstoppable void that consumes everything in its path. Inexorable. Powerful.

And apparently, beautiful.

Recently, humanity received its first-ever photo of a black hole – darkness surrounded by a burning ring of fire, as though it had been willed into being by a Johnny Cash fan. Millions stopped for just a minute to literally stare into space, and not just because they were still mourning the demise of their March Madness bracket.

Who knew that it would look like this?

I’m still trying to decide why it’s so fascinating. Granted, I’m a longtime space geek, so I find just about anything in the Great Beyond fascinating. But this has – pardon the phrase – a real pull.

Is it the unexpected beauty of it all, like the colors and designs once captured by the Hubble space telescope?

Is it the sense of perspective, the understanding that amazing and marvelous things are happening beyond our reach and influence, the same sense of momentary awe we get at a solar eclipse?

Is it the labor that went into it, the research and invention and collaboration involved? The final photo was a composite of several photos – parts making up the hole, if you will – and the path there required just as many pieces to fit together.

All of it’s true. All of it’s important. But in my own mind, the most stunning piece of all may be the novelty. We had literally never seen this before. We had theorized black holes, modeled them, knew that they existed and how they worked. But no human eye had ever looked on one.

Until now.

The mightiest pull in space does not belong to a black hole. It belongs to discovery. One of the most famous science fiction franchises of all time even has the concept embedded in its prologue: “To boldly go where no man has gone before.”

Human curiosity is a restless thing, and we have boldly gone in a lot of directions in exploring our world and its phenomena. So much so that we sometimes to live in the midst of an age of wonder – and yawn. As a species, we’re sometimes on the verge of becoming the teenager that’s seen it all, for whom there’s nothing left to do. “Crossed the continents, explored the genome, created the Dairy Queen Blizzard. Oh, well, guess I’ll watch TV.”

But wonder doesn’t die so easily.  It waits, patient and timeless. And a good thing, too. If wonder ever truly ceased to be, that would pretty much be our end as a species – we might still exist, but we wouldn’t truly live.

But it still stubbornly flares to life, light and fire illuminating the darkness. It might originate from something as simple as a tale well told, or as grand as the first glance of a cosmic marvel. But it becomes a reminder that there is still so much to discover, still so much to see. That with a universe to experience, we’ve barely stepped beyond our front stoop.

That’s an exciting potential. It inspires hope that we can be more than who we are, that today’s world may only be the beginning. That the stress of the moment may eventually be consumed by the potential of the moment ahead.

That’s a lot to pull out of a hole.

But sometimes, Nothing really matters.

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Making an Im-Press-ion

(Appeared first in print 4/10/2017)

When you’re a teenager, it’s easy to wonder if you’ll ever make a difference.

That’s not a problem for the kids of Pittsburg High School. Not after turning their southeast Kansas school newspaper into a star of investigative journalism, and turning their school’s administration upside down in the process.

Yes, really.

For those who missed it, the teens probed into the background of their newly hired principal and found that some of her credentials didn’t seem to add up – in particular, that the university where she earned two of her degrees didn’t appear to be an accredited institution or even to have a physical address or working website. In fact, they discovered, it had a reputation as a “diploma mill.”

By the time they were done, what could have been a routine story about a new principal ended up by asking some very awkward questions. Awkward enough that the principal announced her resignation, just a month after her hiring.  By then, the kids had the attention of the national media and the thanks of the school district’s superintendent.

“We’d broken out of our comfort zones so much,” 17-year-old Connor Balthazor told the Washington Post. “To know that the administration saw that and respected that, it was a really great mo ment for us.”

I’ll add my own applause to that. These are the kind of lessons that need to be learned, not just by high school journalists, but by any citizen in a democracy.

And it happened because the kids had the opportunity to learn, the freedom to act, and the initiative to do something about it.

Kansas school papers, like Colorado ones, have a guaranteed freedom of the press for high school journalists. (In fact, Colorado passed that guarantee while I was still in high school myself.)  The schools have only a limited ability to restrict what appears in the paper – mainly, things like libel or obscenity – allowing students, like their grown-up counterparts, to work uncensored.

But that only matters if you have writers who are willing to go past the obvious. And much journalism, whether high school or professional, is comfortable to stick with the routine. The state championship winners. A new class or a retiring teacher. Much of it is necessary stuff, but it doesn’t often demand much of the writer or the reader.

To go further, a good reporter needs to remember two principles. Always ask the next question. And always verify the answers you get, even if they seem to make sense. Especially then. “If your mother says she loves you,” the old newsman’s saying goes, “check it out.”

In a day when many newspapers are folding (no pun intended) and when social media allows the half-true and the false to circulate more rapidly than ever before, that’s an important skill for everyone.

These kids have learned it. And then some.

And in the process, they’ve taught a few lessons of their own.

They’ve shown a reminder that learning isn’t limited to the classroom, the test, and the textbook. The extracurriculars – newspaper, theatre, music, and more – offer a host of valuable lessons for the student who’s willing and able to take advantage of them.

They’ve reminded us that an alert media can make a difference. That an alert citizenry can make a difference. All it takes is a willingness to look, and a determination to keep looking.

They’ve even given us some hope for the future, that the next generation is ready and eager to join the conversation.

That sounds like a lot to build on one article in one school paper, I know. But they’ve worked to build it. And I suspect they’ve learned that it’s a work that never stops. The name of “journalist” is always being re-earned. Much like the name of “freedom” or “democracy.”

Let’s get to work, shall we?

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Puzzling it Out

Missy bent over the magazine, sharpened pencil at the ready. The point descended to circle one letter … then another … then one more.

She looked up from the penciled rings, her hundred-watt smile beaming. Just letters for now, no full words. But a New York Times crossword champion couldn’t have been prouder.

“Look!” she declared.

Despite all its other epochal moments, January 2017 will go down in history for Chez Rochat as the moment that Missy discovered Heather’s puzzle magazines. My wife Heather has long loved mind-benders of all kinds, from crosswords to sudoku to logic problems. Since her multiple sclerosis diagnosis two years ago, they’ve become not just a recreation but also a weapon to push back against the occasional MS “brain fog.”

Our disabled ward Missy, for her part, has always enjoyed more tactile challenges, like board puzzles, shape balls and simple jigsaws. But she’s never met a magazine she didn’t want to explore, whether to search for classic cars and pictures of fancy shoes or to disassemble for a spur-of-the-moment collage. And at a moment of Missy curiosity, Heather saw an opportunity.

Word searches and other letter jumbles are the current field of battle – anything Missy can peruse to track down a single letter, like finding where an “M” is or an “S.” It’s not quite the sort of play that the original puzzle-maker expected, perhaps, but it’s doing its job: sharpening a mind and challenging it to learn more.

Curiosity is a powerful thing once inflamed.

That’s something known by any scientist, any journalist, any parent of a 6-year-old. But somehow it still manages to surprise politicians. Even in its mildest forms, the nation’s curiosity can turn any offhand remark into a performance review, often pushing aside whatever message the elected official had hoped to promote.

And if that official is actually trying to hide something, or to cut off information, or to pre-empt debate? That’s when curiosity gets married to stubbornness.

Not always, I admit. People want to be right, and the desire to “mostly say hooray for our side” as Buffalo Springfield put it, can include a willingness to excuse behaviors and ignore inconvenient facts. But we also hate to hear words like “No,” “shut up,” and “You don’t need to know that.”

That becomes a challenge.

Ban a book and not only will it draw defenders, it’ll become a bestseller.

Cover up the truths behind a “third-rate burglary” and it becomes two years of Washington Post headlines, culminating in the first-ever presidential resignation.

Forbid someone to speak to the press officially and they’ll find a way to do it unofficially – often becoming more prominent and more embarrassing than if they’d been left to themselves.

Smart politicians learn this quickly. They learn that concealment and misrepresentation become their own stories, that open channels give you an opportunity to manage your message, that barriers don’t protect you but instead cut you off from any control.

The others? They learn what happens when you squeeze a sponge. The tighter you exert your grip, the more it leaks.

That mix of curiosity and stubbornness is woven tightly into this country’s fabric. It can be infuriating – but it’s also our national glory. Short of outright repression, it means no leader will ever go completely unchallenged. And none ever should, however popular they may be.

We want to know. We want to see. And given the slightest opportunity, we’ll find what we’re looking for.

Even if it’s as simple as an M-for-Missy.

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Now You See It

U.S. House Speaker Paul Ryan, whatever his other gifts may be, has clearly never been a reporter.

That might sound obvious, like noting that Bill Gates has never been an NFL linebacker. But it may explain a curious decision of Ryan’s on Wednesday.

For those who missed the drama, several Democratic members of Congress staged a sit-in Wednesday, literally sitting on the House floor until a gun control bill would be heard. This would be shown to the nation via C-SPAN, an all-Congress, all-the-time cable network that normally draws a lower viewership than competitive crochet.

And then Ryan gave the protesters a gift of inestimable value. He ordered the House cameras turned off.

Now, since the cameras belonged to the House and not to C-SPAN, Ryan had the right to do this. No question. But that’s not the same as saying it was a smart thing to do, since:

1) Several of the protesters carried these amazing devices called smart phones and could stream live video for C-SPAN to rebroadcast.

2) Nothing attracts a reporter’s attention – or an audience’s – like a closed door.

It’s sometimes called the Streisand Effect, after a long-ago attempt by the singer to remove a picture of her home from an online collection of 12,000 pictures of the California coastline. Before Streisand’s efforts, six people had viewed the photo online. In the month afterward, that soared to over 420,000.

People want what they’re told they can’t have. Especially when someone powerful or famous says so.

It works on a smaller level, too. Years ago, I was covering the efforts of Emporia, Kan. to hire a new city manager. This was of moderate interest to the community since the incumbent was one of those long-timers who had been around since “Crocodile Dundee” was the biggest thing to hit movie theatres.

And then moderate interest became burning interest. The Emporia City Council went back on an earlier decision and decided it wasn’t going to announce the finalists for the position.

The result was a flood of emails and online comments, a front-page story and a very rapid surrender by the council. The decision to close the doors had become a bigger story than any announcement of the finalists could ever have been.

Most of us, whether reporters or consumers of the news, don’t have a lot of time in the day. There are a lot of things screaming for our attention, most of them claiming to be pants-on-fire urgent. So it’s normal that a lot of stories, sometimes even fairly large ones, will slip beneath the radar of the average reader or viewer.

But we’re also a stubborn bunch. We have been for a long time. And when someone talks down to us saying “You don’t need to see that, “it almost always prompts an immediate “Why not?” For a moment, we KNOW where to focus our attention – and our frustration.

I’m not saying that the gun-control bill was good, bad, or as ugly as Eli Wallach. I am saying that its proponents should send Paul Ryan a thank-you card. Whether they succeed or fail in their quest, they’ve gotten the attention they wanted, and then some.

Come to think of it, maybe the Speaker’s found a second career. I’m sure there are many other struggling broadcasts that could use his assistance in getting a larger audience.

“Live from the Pepsi Center … it’s the 2016-2017 Denver Nuggets season that Paul Ryan didn’t want YOU to see!!”

Couldn’t hurt.

Let us know, Mr. Speaker, willya?

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Turning Tales

Many of my baseball-loving friends have the blues. And they couldn’t be happier.

Some of that blue belongs to the colors of the Kansas City Royals, questing for their first title in 30 years and desperate to wrap up the unfinished business of last year’s almost-world championship. No question, these are Royals in search of a coronation.

The rest have a darker shade to their uniforms – appropriate, since these are the friends who know the blues indeed. These are the brethren of the Chicago Cubs, the legendary hard-luck team that has not even seen a World Series game in 70 years without buying a ticket. The team that has not won a championship in over a century. The team cursed by a goat, now praying to be freed by the prophecies of the Back to the Future movies.

I promise, I’m not kidding.

If both teams manage to make the Series at once, I think Facebook may just explode. After all, these are fans who have not just been loyal, they’ve done penance. The moment is at hand – Luke Skywalker in the Death Star trench, Frodo Baggins at the edge of Mount Doom, Rocky Balboa ready to get the tar beaten out of him.

Er, never mind that last one. But it does make a compelling story.

And that’s a primal power indeed.

Stories surround us and penetrate us, binding the galaxy together – no, wait, that’s the Force. But it’s a small difference. This is a big world we live in, too large for us to take it all in at once. By shaping a story, we make it something we can hold and understand, something that makes sense.

It’s why sports can have such a draw. This is a story in its basic form, redrawn every day on the playing field: good guys and bad guys, victory and defeat, beer and hot dogs.

It sits at the heart of our politics. In a democracy, candidates compete to tell us the most convincing story, with themselves as the hero who can ensure success or avert disaster. Sometimes those stories are true. And sometimes … well, you know how to finish that tale.

It’s why good journalism can be some of the best writing around. Every person on this earth has at least one story worth telling; a skilled reporter can let you into that story as though it were your own and reveal the wonder that lies beneath the most everyday persona and event. Whether it’s a mighty flood or an airplane-throwing contest – and I’ve written about both – anything can be compelling if you find the heart beneath. (I’ve always said that the heart of every one of my columns is the question “Why do I care?”)

Granted, like any power, it can be misused. Often – maybe too often – we impose the story we want to see on the world around us, regardless of the facts. Researchers have recently suggested that our brains aren’t wired to seek the truth, but to cling to the items that support what we want to believe. Call it Simon’s Law: “Still a man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.”

But stories make us human. They fuel our curiosity and build a community. And if a story survives long enough, it can bind us across the centuries, tying us to anyone who ever invoked our version of “Once Upon A Time.”

Yes, even Cubs fans.

So if sports make you crazy, take heart. You’ve got a tale or two of your own that means just as much. From the outside, it may seem just as odd as celebrating men who swing lumber and fling horsehide. Let someone in. Share it. Revel in it.

How to do it? That’s another story.

And one that no one can tell as well as you.

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Well, Look at That

About 10 years ago, my boss took me to the emergency room. Nothing huge, just a bleeding chin that needed three stitches after my spur-of-the-moment attempt to make the Olympic parking-lot diving team. You know, the usual.

On his way back, he drove by an accident. He slowed down, as drivers do, and took a glance. So did another driver, one who found the accident much more fascinating than the road.

Boom.

And like that, my boss’s car had a keepsake.

We’ve all seen it. We all know it happens. And most of us shake our heads in disbelief – until we’re the ones going past the car crash or the house fire. All of a sudden, you just can’t look away. You have to see more.

You’ve joined the rubberneck brigade.

The word’s an interesting  one. “Rubbernecking” originally described the out-of-town tourist, the sort whose head swiveled at every building taller than two stories. Now it’s become the badge of the morbidly curious and the curse of the highway patrol; at least one study suggests that gaping at crashes is almost as likely to cause an accident as yapping on a cell phone.

And since the Big Flood, it’s become a pastime for some that’s second only to Broncomania.

You know what I’m talking about.

The driver who swings around abruptly on the highway, to get a better look at washed-out homes.

The passerby who has to climb over or cut through a snow fence, to see if the Greenway is really as damaged as the city says.

The folks who hike around barriers and across still-dangerous country to where people are rebuilding – not to offer any help, but just to see the sights.

At one story I covered, a frustrated Longmont Dam Road resident called it “disaster tourism.” Some of the things her neighbors wanted to call it couldn’t be printed in a family newspaper.

I call it heartless.

I recognize the irony of a reporter saying this. After all, part of my job is to go to places where the worst is happening and see it for myself. I’ve stood by families as their home burned to cinders. I’ve watched the water rise in neighborhoods and walked through mud-ruined trailers with their residents afterward. I’ve even seen emergency workers drape the sheet over drivers whose luck ran out one dangerous day.

It’s never comfortable. Any of it.

I draw lines, of course. I never get in the way of emergency workers. I try not to do anything stupidly dangerous. I approach victims carefully, trying to be a neighbor as much as a journalist. And if they want me out of their face and off their property, I respect that and go.

I’m not just there randomly. I’m doing a job. In a way, I’m there so 500 other “tourists” don’t have to be.

And always, always, I make myself remember these are people in pain. Not just fodder for a lookyloo.

Maybe I haven’t convinced you. That’s OK. Sometimes I don’t always convince myself, either. But one thing I am convinced of – that callous curiosity carries a price tag.

There isn’t a place for it. Not here. Not anywhere.

It’s natural to want to see what the flood did. (If it wasn’t, our paper would have just wasted a lot of time and money.) But safely. Humanely. Please.

If getting a closer look makes you do something dangerous, it’s not worth it.

If getting a closer look puts you in the way of people trying to help, it’s not worth it.

If getting a closer look means stepping on someone’s heart, it’s really not worth it.

Have a heart to go with those eyes. Remember that these are still our friends, our neighbors. Treat them with the love and respect they deserve.

Let’s have fewer rubber necks and more open arms.

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Closing the Book

Maybe I should blame Jiminy Cricket.

Silly, of course. After all, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had 244 years of history behind it. That’s more than enough to outlast the Disney filmstrips that insisted the word was spelled “E-N-C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-D-I-A.”

But it couldn’t outlast the times. In an age of hyper-digital look-up and research, a $1,395 set of books just didn’t make bottom-line sense anymore. Which is why EB recently announced that the current 32-volume print edition (published in 2010) would be the last.

The thought depresses me.

I understand why they did it. The books weren’t even that big a part of their business these days. A news report estimated that less than 1 percent of Britannica’s sales come from the big, thick, books; the shift to electronic and online editions tipped past the balance point long ago.

But I’m a book person. I always have been.

I don’t mean that I eschew online sources or even (whisper the name) Wikipedia. Far from it. But I’ve always had a passion for physical reference books. Dictionaries, thesauruses, almanacs, Associated Press stylebooks – my wife and I have even sworn that if we ever win the lottery , a full edition of the Oxford English Dictionary will go on the shopping list.

Some of it’s the permanence. My Merriam-Webster isn’t likely to be hit by cybervandals tomorrow or be unreadable if the power goes down. (So long as the flashlight has batteries, anyway.)

Some of it’s the depth of experience you can get. Older editions of the Britannica had articles by Albert Einstein, Harry Houdini and Isaac Asimov, for Pete’s sake. Never mind the unseen watchdogs known as editors, a concept that still seems to elude many online sites.

There’s even a comfort to the heft. When your little sisters are invading your room, after all, you don’t want to be left trying to defend yourself with a DVD.

But for me, that’s all secondary. The real value to a reference book – an honest-to-goodness real, tangible book – is serendipity.

Dip in. Read. Just for fun. No plans, no map.

I love the Internet. And it’s invaluable when I need to track something down. But there’s times when you want to know something, and times when you just want to know.

Which is why, as a kid, I would dip through my folks’ Random House dictionary, swimming through cool words and their origins.

It’s why, as a college student, the AP stylebook became my nighttime pleasure reading, one of the best trivia manuals I had run across at the time.

It’s why my folks grabbed a cheap Encyclopedia Americana at a library book sale, or why I kept getting new World and New York Times almanacs for Christmas every year (one of which even introduced us to this curious search engine called Google). Those weren’t just homework references, they were pastimes.

Knowledge for its own sake. For the sheer joy of it.

For all that we’re in an Information Age, there seems to be less of that somehow.

I hope that survives. Because in the end, that was the real value of the well-bound books with the thistle on the spine: the hope (illusory or not) that you really could know it all, the feeling that you could dive in at any point and come up with something you had never thought about before. Something you had never even thought about thinking before.

The curiosity that leads someone to want to know more.

Not bad for 29 pounds of books, huh?

So thank you, EB. May your physical memories be many and your virtual trials few.

Hail, Britannica. And farewell.