Old Wisdom For a New Year

By Joel Bellman

Since my Christmastime column was a bit less than festive, I want to try and begin 2023 on a positive and upbeat note. Most of us are by nature eternal optimists—some would call it delusional, but I like to think of it as aspirational—and the new year always presents a fresh opportunity for us to improve ourselves. We start out with the best of intentions, but we’re too often doomed to fall short, hence the familiar internet meme: “I”m opening a gym called ‘Resolutions.’ It will have exercise equipment for the first two weeks and then turn into a bar for the rest of the year.”

There have been times, though, when selfimprovement was a way of life, not just a handful of quickly forgotten New Year’s resolutions. I was reminded of this in a recent Hanukkah gift from my brother, a facsimile edition of McGuffey’s Fifth Eclectic Reader, Revised Edition ©1920. McGuffey’s Readers had been a great favorite of our late father’s, an English professor, though more for their concept than their content. They were America’s first popular textbooks in the 19th century, originally written by Scottish immigrant and professional educator William Holmes McGuffey in the 1830s for primary school students through the 6th grade. They have reportedly sold an astounding 122 million copies, falling somewhere just behind Shakespeare, the Bible, and Webster’s Dictionary. The last official revised edition was just over 100 years ago, and they’ve now passed into the public domain, still in print and freely available online.

It’s a poignant irony that the books that taught millions of Americans to read, that were intended to set a national standard for literacy, reverence for learning, and formation of moral character are now effectively marginalized as fetish objects for home-schoolers and religious fundamentalists.

On one level, it’s easy to see why: McGuffey Readers fit right in with the aggressive back-tobasics/prayer-in-schools movement that surged in the ’70s and ’80s as a reaction to perceived ’60s permissiveness, opposition to “forced busing,” and political potency of wedge-issue culture wars. We still see it in Florida’s “don’t say gay” legislation, a coast-to-coast right-wing campaign to dial back “woke” educational curriculums and ban

“inappropriate” books, and hysteria over “critical race theory.”

The series itself recognized by the end of the 19th century that Bible-thumping Calvinism, stern moralistic lectures, and reinforcement of white male patriarchal social and political hierarchies, which may once have suited a largely homogeneous Western European population, had grown irrelevant in an increasingly heterogeneous, multi-cultural, diverse and more egalitarian society. But what was also lost as the series faded from wide popularity was the notion that it was worthwhile to impart a working knowledge of a common canon of prose and poetic literature, and to cultivate not just competence, but standards of excellence in reading, writing, and public speaking.

Nowadays, anyone who defends those 19th century virtues of cultural literacy, character formation, and formal communication skills tends to sound either like a fool or a reactionary, partly because for the past 40 years these concepts have been cynically commandeered by the political right. How this happened remains a bit of a mystery, since Ronald Reagan was famously one of our most intellectually incurious presidents, yet it was during his presidency that conservative intellectuals attained their greatest prominence, and there was serious and robust public debate about a wide range of policy questions. Today’s Republicans, children of the Reagan revolution raised to “maturity” in the era of Tea Parties and Donald Trump, are spoiled and thuggish, defiantly stupid, anarchic bomb-throwing brats, like some kind of weird cross between Ferris Bueller and a murderous Chucky doll.

But the civilizing values that the McGuffey Readers, at their best, tried to instill have not fared much better on the political left. There clearly was no Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee vetting their curriculum, and marginalized voices of BIPOC communities are nowhere to be found in their yellowing pages. What some have criticized as “the cult of the amateur”—the less formal experience and training the better, since by definition it only reinforces white male cisgendered hierarchies—promotes the idea that any of us can do almost anything if we have a strong enough passion for it. Maybe not brain surgery or flying a jet, but becoming rich and famous by live-streaming yourself playing video games on TikTok, or renting yourself out as a living, breathing video billboard for thousands of dollars to millions of viewers as a social-media “influencer”? No problem!

Our problems can’t be solved by assigning McGuffey Readers to today’s students. But I do think it would be beneficial to somehow revive the idea that cultural and actual linguistic literacy matters, that logic, reason, and critical thinking are worthwhile cognitive skills, and that good citizenship, civility, and civic engagement are not only desirable but in fact are essential elements in building and maintaining a functioning and durable democracy.

It’s not easy to wrap all this up in a neat little package of New Year’s resolutions, but I would reduce it to one: my father’s familiar admonition that I heard all my life, a bit of old-country Yiddish wisdom: “Be a mensch.” * I’m trying, Dad. I’m trying.

*a person of integrity, honor, dignity, rectitude; a stand-up guy

The Closing of a Year

Dreams and Fears. Awakes at Night.

Laughter and Smiles.

Frowns and Downs. Wishes and Wants.

Loss and Gain.

The Balance of a Year Of A Life.

The Gift of a Year Of A Life.

To do with what we can. Please Ourselves and Others.

Give as Good as we Get.

But Love is the Constant. The Grease on the Wheel. The Smooth Substance that slows the wear.

Emboldens the Heart.

Embellishes the Gift like the Gilt of a Cake.

And here we are in the middle of it all.

Forgetting and Remembering. Only parts of it. Some for Better and some for Worse.

But it was Our Year. Shared, of course, but Ours!

The challenge of it all. So incremental are our Leaps and Bounds.

Looking Backward and Forward.

It’s all there—Our Time.

Our Soul’s Path etched like a Comet Streak On the Face of Heaven.

By Paula LaBrot

The Computer Electronics Show (CES) was back, live, in full force in Las Vegas for 2023.

This year, the event, which had been virtual during COVID, was its in-person-wild-andcrazy old self, with lots of mind-bending new products on display.

“CES is the most influential tech event in the world—the proving ground for breakthrough technologies and global innovators,” according to the Consumer Technology Association. Here is a roundup of highlights from the show.

Boats

Billed as the Teslas of the Seas, Candela of Sweden and Navier of California unveiled electric powered hydrofoil speedboats that can cruise for over two hours at 20 knots (23mph). Even Brunswick showed off an electric outboard motor for traditional boats. Electric powered boats would be great for the environment, but sailors have big qualms about their range limitations. Running out of juice or having mechanical difficulties 50 miles out at sea is not something a lot of mariners are keen to risk yet.

TVs

The TV I liked the best from this year’s models was the Displace Wireless TV. Samsung and other companies all presented wireless models which are TVs that hang on the wall and only require a power plug. They come with a connect box you can put off in corner that receives and transmits the television signals so you don’t have a tangle of wires to hide. But the Displace TV has another, amazing feature. At 55 inches and weighing 20 pounds, it sticks by suction, to any flat surface you want to place it on. You could put it on a wall or a window… anywhere you can stick it. And the Displace runs on four rechargeable batteries so you don’t even need a plug.

A giant TV was the 97-inch LG Oled Wireless TV that comes with a wireless connector box you can hide and a price tag of $25,000. But that was not the biggest screen. Samsung’s “The Wall MicroLED” TV runs 8K at a mammoth 292 inches! Hey, Weird Al, we are getting closer and closer to “Fred’s 2000-inch TV.”

Medical Innovations

Automotive Hands down, the flying car was the top of my list. Aska’s $789,000 flying car is pending approval from the FAA and hopes to be flying in 2026. It’s powered by electric batteries, carries four people and fits in a conventional parking space. It can fly 150 mph and has a range of 250 miles on a single electric charge.

The BMW iVision Dee is a color changing car that changes the exterior design of the car at the whim of its owner using E Ink’s low-energy segmented display technology. This digital beauty is a compact sedan that recognizes and “learns” its owner. It can sense the driver’s mood, and it can chat to the driver, acting as a road buddy. Instead of a normal dashboard, the car’s entire windshield is the display panel which can give basic info like speed all the way up to virtual or augmented reality overlays to entertain its owner during automated driverless journeys.

The digital innovations in medicine at CES are mindboggling. Ashirase’s wearable navigation system helps visually impaired people walk safely. It is an in-shoe device with a motion sensor that interfaces with a smartphone app. The app uses data from the sensor with map and satellite positioning information to generate navigational instructions which are communicated to the user through vibrations in the in-shoe device.

The ENAD (Endoscope AI Detector) Finder is an artificial intelligence (AI)-based program designed for computer-aided polyp detection systems in the area of colonoscopy to prevent colorectal cancer. It has the ability to detect polyps that may be hard to spot, even for doctors.

The Withings’ connected “urine scan” provides an immediate snapshot of the body’s balance by monitoring and detecting a large variety of biomarkers found in urine. The device sits inside most toilet bowls. Results are delivered to a smartphone app which provides the user with analysis and recommendations on hydration and nutrition, or helps women track their ovulation.

The Valencell fingertip blood pressure monitor looks like a pulse oximeter that clamps to the end of your finger. This little device lets users do away with cuffs that pump up and pinch.

The LG Breeze sleep earbuds use brainwavetuned sound, with the use of different frequencies on each side said to induce a sleep-specific state in the brain.

Wearables

To support workers in physically demanding jobs, German Bionics introduced the Apogee exoskeleton, an AI-supported wearable tool that provides 66 pounds of lower back support, perfect for jobs that require heavy lifting. It aids good posture and its active walking assistance feature minimizes fatigue in labor-intensive sectors like construction and logistics, according to ibtimes.com.

As part of a move away from smartwatches, the Evie Ring by Movano Health, designed for women, has typical fitness metrics. It can also measure menstrual and ovulation cycle, sleep stages and duration, and even mood track.

A Cornucopia of Digital Wonders

From electric roller skates to fantastic virtual reality adventures to cuddly, personality-filled AIdriven robot pets, CES abounds with the fruits of imagination and innovation. This was just a tiny glimpse at the thousands of exhibits on display this year. One thing for sure, we better learn how to recycle batteries better.

AI (artificial intelligence) continues to develop exponentially and is the main technology to watch as far as transforming the realities we live in. For me, though, no robot pet will ever take the place of a real dog snuggled up next to me on a stormy winter night.

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