One Shot One Kill One Liner

The book review is your best friend. If you didn’t know that, you’re either not a grad student, or you aren’t paying attention.

Every so often, I’ll read a book or movie review so good that I’ll laugh out loud. Last week’s New York Times review of The Enemy at Home, by Dinesh D’Souza was the first I’d seen in quite a while. The review’s author, Alan Wolfe, didn’t like this book. That’s a bit like saying that Napoleon was sensitive about his height. He *really* didn’t like the book. Now, I’d seen D’Souza on The Colbert Report (part 1 and part 2) and thought he’d been a bit, well, odd. In a right-wing nut bar sort of way. Still, those can be tasty. (I may read the book anyway. It sounds like a car accident whose very horror is so attention-grabbing.) But Wolfe’s take really made me appreciate the power of a good (or bad) review:

At one point in “The Enemy at Home,” D’Souza appeals to “decent liberals and Democrats” to join him in rejecting the American left. Although he does not name me as one of them, I sense he is appealing to people like me because I write for the New Republic, a liberal magazine that distances itself from leftism. So let this “decent” liberal make perfectly clear how thoroughly indecent Dinesh D’Souza is. Like his hero Joe McCarthy, he has no sense of shame. He is a childish thinker and writer tackling subjects about which he knows little to make arguments that reek of political extremism. His book is a national disgrace, a sorry example of a publishing culture more concerned with the sensational than the sensible.

I don’t think he liked it. I suppose in a way, that kind of vehemence is akin to D’Souza’s, but I have to say I enjoyed it. Sad schadenfreude, but a guilty pleasure all the same. In a similar vein, here’s a list of officer performance report statements supposedly from the British military. It’s been floating around the internet for years, but they still make me chuckle when I read them anyway:

— His men would follow him anywhere, but only out of curiosity.
— This young lady has delusions of adequacy.
— She sets low personal standards and then consistently fails to achieve them.
— He has the wisdom of youth, and the energy of old age.
— This officer should go far–and the sooner he starts, the better.
— I would not breed from this officer.
— This officer is really not so much of a has-been, but more of a definitely won’t-be.
— When she opens her mouth, it seems that this is only to change whichever foot was previously in there.
— He has carried out each and every one of his duties to his entire satisfaction.
— He would be out of his depth in a car-park puddle.
— Technically sound, but socially impossible.
— This officer reminds me very much of a gyroscope: always spinning around at a frantic pace, but not really going anywhere.
— When he joined my ship, this officer was something of a granny; since then he has aged considerably.
— This medical officer has used my ship to carry his genitals from port to port, and my officers to carry him from bar to bar.
— Since my last report he has reached rock bottom, and has started to dig.
— In my opinion this pilot should not be authorized to fly below 250 feet.
— Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.
— This man is depriving a village somewhere of an idiot.

What does this have to do with a dissertation? Well, only this: I’d love to have a few one liners like this (not about me, though!). This sort of pith takes a lot of work and not a little talent.

Procrastination Hack

It shouldn’t have worked.

I’m a regular reader of a kind of blog known as “productivity pr0n”. It’s not actual porn, but appeals to the perverse side of me that admires clever and potentially effective ways to become just a little more efficient. Three blogs of this sort on my regular reading list are: 43 folders, lifehacker, and lifehack. Anyway, a while ago, the first of those sites talked about a “procrastination hack” or “(10+2) *5 hack“. The idea behind it is that its natural to procrastinate any large task, and that one way to move forward on it is to — oddly — plan ahead for procrastination. It works like this: Get a timer (watch, clock, downloadable timer if you’re working on a computer) and set it for 10 minutes. Then, ONLY work on the task at hand for 10 minutes. When the timer rings, reset it for 2 minutes, and ONLY do something other than work, such as surfing the web or answering e-mail. Repeat for 5 times and you’ve done 50 solid minutes of work.

I decided to give it a shot this week with the dissertation. Every day this week, I managed to write the five page quota by noon and pushed into the next day’s work. By the end of the week, I’d run through four to five days of extra work. One reason I think it worked is that I always write a very detailed outline before tackling the first draft. That means that the work is a bit more mechanical than a freer form of writing might be. Still, the two minute breaks not only let me surf the web a bit (ironically to read the productivity blogs), but they were also short enough that I didn’t lose my train of thought.

It seemed way too cheesy to work, but it did.

Digitizing Archival Documents

I’m working on a web page (actually, it’ll probably end up being a series of web pages) on how to digitize archival documents. I’ve sketched out a very preliminary one which you can find by clicking here. I’ll work on it over time, but I figured someone out there might find even the rough draft of use.

I’m trying to document the process by which I the bulk of my archival research over the past year. It took A LOT of trial and error to get to this, and I’m sure there are plenty of ideas and refinement that can be made. That said, I hope it’ll help someone out there.

Daily deadlines – time vs quantity

How much should I write today?

First, simply asking the question is good sign. It shows that the dissertation writer (I hate the word “dissertator”) is committed to making progress. But, there are two ways to answer it, and I found that only one works for me.

The fruitless way is to define progress as writing for a defined period of time. “I’m going to write for five hours” or “I’ll write until dinner” just doesn’t get the job done. It’s too easy to surf the web for 4 and a half hours, write three sentences, and call it a day. Sometimes that’s all the writer can do, but it would be counterproductive to then claim that as a productive day.

The only way that keeps me going is to have a defined quantity of writing per day — a quota. (Or, as I sometimes think of it, thanks to a reading kick I had a few years ago on the Gulag, a “work norm”.) Getting a defined number of pages done per day (in my case five) has done the trick to push me forward. An additional benefit is that if I finish the five pages before lunch, I’m free to use the rest of the day as I see fit. (Or, I can try to be a stakhanovite and push to seven pages.) The key point is that if I don’t make it to the assigned quota, its difficult to lie to myself and say that everything is rosy.

More importantly, when I’m laying awake at 3AM, worrying irrationally, if I reached 5 pages that day, I can tell myself that at least I’m making measurable progress. (If you’re doing an MA or PhD right now, you know exactly the kind of thoughts I mean.)

The next paragraph

David Allen’s Getting Things Done is filled with ideas which have helped me, both with the PhD and outside of it.  One of them has been a relatively simple concept (as, truthfully, is all of GTD — simple but not easy):  next action.  No matter what project you’re working on, from cooking dinner to running for Congress to writing a dissertation, it always boils down to answering “what’s the next physical action?”  When it comes to the dissertation, this has meant a couple of things.

At the macro level, the “next action” view dovetails nicely with the advice Joan Bolker gives in Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day.  She says that you don’t “write a dissertation”, you write the next paragraph.  It made a big difference in reducing my anxiety when I finally accepted it.  That’s a GTD way of addressing the problem.

More concretely, thinking about next actions has helped guide setting daily milestones for creeping closer to the finish line.  My daily (six days a week) goal is simple:  five pages.  I’m not writing chapter six right now, I’m crunching out five pages.  If that gets me to the end of the chapter (unlikely), fine, if not, then I’ll get there soon enough.

Sometimes, if I’m staring at the blank screen, and I can’t churn out the next paragraph it means that there’s something else that should be the “next action”.  I may need to look for a particular note, or skim a chapter in a book, or even take a trip to the University library.  What’s important in that case is realizing that the next thing to do may not be writing.

“What’s next?” is hardly a profound idea, but it’s been essential to staying on track.

A Cold War perspective on today’s unthinkable

Today’s five page dissertation quota covered a series of reports published by the Net Evaluation Subcommittee, an Eisenhower era arm of the National Security Council. Here’s a representative sample from my text about the 1959 report:

“The 1959 NESC report (the last thus far declassified) examined a 1962 war in which the US received 48 hours of warning before a Soviet attack. Despite this preparation time, the panel estimated that SAC would lose 85 of its 90 bases, 1200 of 1700 bombers, all missiles, and 85% of its manpower. The Soviet attack would damage thirty percent of American homes, set fire to over 150,000 square miles of land (occupied by 28% of the population), and spew lethal radiation over half the nation. Out of a pre-attack population of 185.5 million, 12.5 million would be killed outright and the number of dead would rise to 60.6 million with an additional 6 million sick and injured. Thirteen percent of industry would be destroyed outright and 22 percent unavailable for up to a year due to damage or radiation. A major difference from the no-notice attacks previously posited is that the federal government was expected to survive largely intact due to the two day warning period.[i]

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[i] “1959 Report of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee,” ca. Nov 1959; Folder – 1959 Report of the Net Evaluation Subcommittee; Box A04-12; Intelligence Files; US National Security Council Presidential Records; Dwight D. Eisenhower Library, Abilene, Kansas, p. 8-10.”

Reading reports like this is particularly enlightening in light of the war on terror. The greatest fear we’re used to hearing about is a terrorist with an atomic weapon. That’s the “ultimate nightmare”. Yet, looked at from the security situation of the 1950s, such a threat would be nearly trivial. Yes, I realize the two are not directly comparable — the Soviets were rational, deterrable, and so forth — but that doesn’t change the nightmare scenarios. Put the two nightmares side-by-side, suitcase nuke in Manhattan and Khrushchev-era Soviet attack. When we have to think about the unthinkable (to use Herman Kahn’s phrase), which one is the best of the bad choices? And what does that mean about our reaction today to the current threat?

Food for thought.

[Of course, I’m posing these questions to my hypothetical reader, who according to my blog stats, doesn’t actually exist. Sigh.]

Fartootst

“Fartootst: Disoriented, confused, distracted”

A few days ago, I went up to the University to meet a friend in the same PhD program. She’s working toward comprehensive exams in a few months and I’m mid-way through the dissertation. Suffice it to say, we’re both deeply embedded in our work. Every few months, we’ll meet for lunch or dinner and just catch up. So, I arrived at the university fairly early, so that I could get some work done in the office. It wasn’t a bad work day, either. I hit my 5 page quota fairly early and took a little extra ground.

She arrived on time around 4:30, and we headed over to the grad student lounge for a quick bite to eat, since she only had an hour until she had to pick up her sister at the airport. Neither one of us clued in to the lack of people as we walked across the campus. At the student center, there was nothing. Apparently, finals had just finished and the university — with 30,000 students — had shut down all its services. We grabbed some coffee out of a vending machine and talked for an hour in our shared office before going our seperate ways.

I’m having more days like that as I wander through the PhD process. During coursework when I had to be at the university for a few days during the week, there was something to anchor me to the rhythms of everyday life. Now, especially since I work at home, I lose track of what day of the week it is, let alone what’s going on at the campus. And it’s not just me…neither one of us realized that the university had shut down for the holidays. It’s a weird part of the PhD challenge which I simply didn’t expect. Yes, there’s isolation, but this is different. The world is doing its thing and suddenly, I’m just an observer.

The dreaded question

For the past two years, the most dreaded question I’ve been asked (and I’ve been asked it again and again) is “What’s the topic of your dissertation?” It’s a natural question, of course, that invariably follows my admission that I’m a grad student.

I’ll get the actual answer out of the way here: I’m writing about American nuclear strategy in the 1950s. Today, when people think about nuclear weapons — if they think of them at all (and I include most military historians and military people) — we accept the basic truth that a nuclear war can’t be won. Assured destruction is generally accepted as the unavoidable standard which all nuclear powers should accept. Meaningful victory in nuclear war is impossible and, furthermore, structuring a military force to seek it is nonsensical.

But it wasn’t always so.

That’s what I’m looking at. There was a period from 1945 to about 1964 where atomic and thermonuclear weapons were incrementally added to existing strategic airpower doctrine. The resulting “air-atomic” strategy, like any traditional military idea, sought victory. What are its origins? How did it evolve? How did it end? It’s a story worth looking at, and one that has received remarkably little attention. Today’s airpower thought concentrates on precision and seems to consciously avoid any discussion of the 50s. Pick up almost any book about airpower history and there will be a conspicuous gap between the end of World War II and Vietnam. I hope to fill that niche.

Occasionally, someone will ask me (after they’ve recovered from their coma), why did I pick this topic? Of course, that really means, “Why on Earth would you spend years of your life researching and writing about something so useless?” The answer is that it really isn’t a rational interest. It’s just a fact that since I was in middle school and the Soviets were deploying their SS-20s and the US was putting Pershing II missiles in Europe — and the KAL 007 shootdown happened, and Soviet leaders were dropping dead every six months, and Star Wars was in the news — I began to wonder: Why have we never used these weapons? Ever since, if I haven’t been exactly obsessed with the Cold War and nuclear strategy, it’s always been at the edges of what I’ve chosen to study. So, the real reason to write this dissertation is that I hope to get it out of my system.

In reality, as much as I hate people asking me about the dissertation topic, the reality of it is that every time I’ve answered it I’ve had to clarify my argument. It’s strange, because, after a while, I thought I had it down. The whole topic seemed to be a fairly coherent whole…until I had to explain it.

But I still hate having to.