antimeria

The impetus for this post (and the last one) were Ta-Nehisi Coates’ closing words in a post about feeling unqualified to give life and career advice:

[Writing] is about rolling the dice, and it’s paramount that you give yourself as many chances as possible to toss those bones. It was easy for me, I was either going to write or drive a cab–probably both. I wasn’t really capable of doing much else. So whenever I’m faced with a smart group of kids who could be doing something else, and making more money than me doing it, and they’re asking for advice it’s always weird. I feel like so much of my life is in spite of formal education.

I’d say this is true, as far as it goes, but it misses another important point, made by Dwayne Betts:

[F]rom reading this blog, and from hearing TNC talk about all the books he still reads – I think it’s pretty apparent that the actual education one puts into a job is always going to go beyond the walls of the university. … And that’s what I’ve found kids don’t always get.

This is a good time to point out that my career path owes as much to making Command and Conquer fansites as my B.A. in English. After the jump, Betts’ comment also gets at a second point I wanted to highlight from “The Recession’s Long Shadow“: (more…)

When I first heard about Baltimore Fiber in passing, I assumed it was some sort of healthy-eating initiative. Instead, it’s something I actually care about:

Google is planning to build ultra-high speed broadband networks in a small number of trial locations across the country. The plan is to deploy 1 Gbps, fiber optic connections directly to people’s homes. This connection would be 2,000% faster than the fastest connection currently available to Baltimore residents.

My rationale for including Bmore in this project:

1. High population density in the city itself. Houses are small and are literally touching, in many cases.
2. Small physical area. The whole of Baltimore City is less than 100 square miles.
3. Much-needed competition. Comcast offers overpriced, slow service, and Verizon, although cheaper, is similarly slow and doesn’t offer fiber optic service in many areas.

If you’re in or around Baltimore, you should lobby Google and voice your support.

Today, the Sun reported that the “majority of the poor in the Baltimore region now live in the city’s suburbs.” This trend has existed for a while, and it fits my experience in Chicago, DC, and Baltimore–take your mass transit system of choice out towards the suburbs during rush hour, and the further you go, the higher the proportion of scuffed-up passengers gets. It also should be a reminder that a) major demographic shifts can happen pretty quickly, and b) a lot of these suburbs don’t have much of a safety net or many local jobs, having largely sprouted up as bedroom communities.

It also underscores the need for effective regional mass transit, but I wouldn’t hold my breath on that.

And of course, the news doesn’t change the fact that 23% of Baltimore’s 625,000-strong population fall below the poverty line, including over 30% of minors. So Baltimore still got problems.

It had to happen, I suppose.

Update: Nothing was stolen, not even my sunglasses sitting out in the center console. On a tangential note, I am disappointed with my Nexus One camera’s ultra-low-light shots.

While discussing a (soon-to-be-revealed!) project with a friend, I suggested that she go explore the south side of Chicago by herself for a day. She demurred on grounds of safety, which is entirely reasonable, now that I think about it. It also made me wonder if my perception of danger has recalibrated itself in Baltimore.

Now, because I loved The Wire, I watched Generation Kill, the HBO miniseries based on the book of the same name and produced by Wire creators David Simon and Ed Burns (synopsis: a Rolling Stone reporter embeds with a Marine unit during the Iraq War’s early stages. The original RS articles start here, and are worth a look). In one particular scene, the unit comes under fire. While the reporter huddles next to the side of a Humvee, one of the soldiers next to him says something along the lines of “Most people think Iraq is dangerous, but safety is all about context. If we were to stand up, we might be killed. But to us, behind this Humvee, Iraq is a safe place.”

About a month after we moved to our current house in east Baltimore, my girlfriend read the then-year-old story of Zach Sowers, a young, freshly-married Johns Hopkins financial analyst who lived a few blocks away. He was jumped by a group of teenagers who beat him into a coma, and he eventually died from his injuries. And during the last two weeks of December 2009, there were six seven robberies, eight aggravated assaults, and two stolen vehicles within a half-mile radius of my house.

But to us, on our block, Baltimore is a safe place.