One of the themes I was struck by at the Berkman at Ten conference was the idea that the net is now mature enough that we should be studying what’s actually happening, not just what we think should happen. While that doesn’t sound like that much of a breakthrough, it’s useful to me, at least, in thinking about how the center takes on projects and research topics. A good bit of the early work at the Center – especially our work on ICANN – was far more prescriptive than descriptive. A project like the Open Net Initiative, on the other hand, is careful to focus on documenting what’s happening around the Internet, leaving change of those realities to related projects like Psiphon and Global Voices Advocacy.

The focus on journalism at the Berkman Center over the past couple of years has been a focus on what’s really happening, not on what we thought might happen. I suspect that had you asked Professors Zittrain, Nesson and Lessig in 1998 whether the survival of high-quality journalism in a digital age was part of the Center’s mission, your question would have been met with a curious look. Now you’re likely to get a curious look because it’s so apparent that the question is central to our research.

I’ve spent a lot of time with Berkman colleagues – and colleagues throughout the Boston/Cambridge community, including friends at the Business School, the Nieman Center and local newspapers – talking about business models for journalism in a digital age. A conversation we had on Wednesday makes me wonder whether there’s an opportunity here to move from the prescriptive to the descriptive. In other words, while I’ve spent a lot of time lately agonizing about how Global Voices might find a revenue model to sustain our work, the answer may be to look closely at revenue models people are already using to support substantive journalism in the era of blogs, Craigslist and media consolidation.

One of the groundrules for these conversations has been a focus on journalism that’s difficult to finance: investigative journalism and international journalism. This isn’t meant to imply that other types of journalistic writing – political opinion or entertainment journalism, for instance – are somehow inferior… just easier to finance. Investigative and international journalism is expensive, requiring travel, research and time. Many of the stories that result are “long-tail” stories – they’re not going to be interesting to the entire news audience as, for instance, Iraq war stories were in 2003. The people who’ve been participating in these conversations believe firmly that there’s a public interest in reporting these stories, and that this work is essential for partipatory societies even if it’s not easily supported by pure for-profit models.

A conversation about supporting this sort of journalism tends to start with a good deal of despair about the state of American newspapers and the dismal future young journalists face. Newspaper layoffs are so common that graphic designer Erica Smith is maintaining an interactive layoffs map, called “Paper Cuts“. Jill Carroll, in a paper for Harvard Shorenstein Center, documents a 30% reduction in the number of foreign correspondents employed by US newspapers. Media critic David Shaw bemoaned a shrinking “newshole” for international news, reduced 70-80% between the mid-1980 and 2001.

If we’re interested not in preserving newspapers, or the ability to make a living as a professional journalist, it’s possible that the picture changes somewhat. Accepting Dan Gillmor’s observation that people will “commit acts of journalism” – and observing that some people appear to commit these acts serially – it’s possible that there are a number of business models that might support “difficult” journalism on an ongoing basis.

Some models that have come up in conversation:

The 5% Model – One of the problems American newspapers suffer from is the difficulty of delivering a 20% return on investment year to year to investors, a level of return that’s evidently demanded by financial markets. Perhaps traditional newspaper models are sustainable if the goal was to return a much more modest – say 5% – return on capital investment.

Cross Subsidy – Related to the 5% model is the idea that newspapers support “difficult” journalism with more lucrative content – entertainment, sports and local news. If other parts of a newsgathering operation are sufficiently profitable, it’s possible to finance in-depth reporting.

The Membership Model – Newspapers outsourced much of their reporting to the Associated Press, using a shared news bureau to provide a breadth of coverage difficult for any one paper to provide. While AP is now large, powerful, and sometimes critiqued by newspapers for high fees, there’s still room for membership-based bureaus. Eight Ohio newspapers are sharing resources on state-wide political coverage in a new collaboration called OHNO, an interesting swipe at AP.

Ad Supported – The default internet business model – supporting coverage through a combination of banner and keyword ads – may be able to support “difficult” journalism, either through cross-subsidy or just attracting sufficient attention to key stories. The concern on the model is that there’s a constant temptation to fish for attention-grabbing stories. This can be a benefit in a cross-subsidy model, but it might be dangerous for a tightly subject-focused news outlet.

Niche Content – High-quality niche content can survive on subscription models. One example offered in our discussions is statehouse newsletters. Local newspapers find it expensive to provide deep statehouse coverage – subscribing to specialist newsletters may well be cheaper. And lobbyists find the content to be mission-critical and are willing to pay a premium for the information.

Foundations Pay – A great deal of high quality journalism is already foundation funded – listen to the credits at the end of an NPR show for a sense for some of the major players in the field. ProPublica, with backing from the Sandler Foundation, is promising a newsroom of 26 journalists, “all of them dedicated to investigative reporting on stories with significant potential for major impact”. This is, for better or worse, the model that Global Voices is currently using to find support.

One Rich Guy – A variant on the foundation model – which comes complete with program officers, oversight boards and all sorts of checks and balances – the one rich guy model has been responsible for some excellent journalism in the case of Al Jazeera. It’s known to be a weak model for investigative stories about the rich guy in question.

Public Funding – The BBC’s funding comes from television license fees, a form of public funding for public interest reporting. That said, it’s hard to imagine a future in which public broadcast funding is massively increased in the US – and even harder to imagine a future where independent reporters and bloggers could successfully compete for that funding. We raise this model so we can talk longingly about working as journalists in Europe.

Advocacy Journalism – Highly partisan political organizations have turned out some excellent investigative journalism – see the Polk Award Talking Points Memo won for coverage of the US Attorney’s controversy. A major concern is that while advocacy journalism on different sides of a political issue may serve to provide balance and fact-checking, it’s not hard to imagine situations in which a key issue might only be investigated by highly partisan journalists on a single side of an issue.

Sponsor a Beat – In one of our conversations, someone mentioned blogs raising money for reporters to cover specific stories. David Axe of War is Boring uses this model – I’d love other examples of international and investigative journalism sponsored this way.

Indirect Revenue – This is the model I end up advising most new bloggers to take: don’t expect your blog to make money directly, but look for the indirect ways it benefits your work. Blogs lead to freelance work, to books, to speaking invitations – it’s possible that serious journalism in whatever medium may have indirect benefits to the author that outweight direct benefits.

Our conversations have included some theoretical models as well. If you’ve got examples of people trying these models, I’d love your links.

Multimedia production – A small team might produce the same story in different media – text, video, audio – and sell to various news outlets. The ability to sell stories across platforms might make a model more fiscally sustainable. (Circle of Blue, a non-profit effort focused on covering the world’s water crisis, is pursuing this sort of model)

Translation as cross-subsidy – This is a model that’s come up a few times in talking about sustainability and Global Voices. We translate lots and lots of content to produce our site, and our translators are phenomenally talented. A service like Global Voices could serve as a showcase and legitimator for translators, a front-end to a web-based human translation marketplace, and profits from that marketplace might cross-subsidize our translated coverage. (I’m firmly convinced that someone will build a strong, multi-lingual, reputation-based online translation marketplace in the next couple of years. A major regret in life is that I don’t have the time to do it right now.)

TookTheBuyout.com – More a joke than an actual model – a site designed to give all the talented journalists who’ve taken buyouts from mainstream newspapers a place to publish independent investigative reporting. Given the name recognition of some of the people who’ve stepped down from papers recently, this might well be ad supportable.

I’d love your input on other models that people are pursuing or thinking about. This isn’t a theoretical issue for me – over the next few years, Global Voices needs to pursue one or more models to support our work, even if that model involves continuing to persuade foundations that our work is important and worth supporting. Examples focused on investigative and international journalism are the ones that are most helpful; models that are in use and supporting high-quality journalism are the most interesting ones. Please share what you know and help me get beyond a short dozen of models here.

I’d hoped that spending three weeks offline would be a great time for ideas to ferment, much as they do when I’m on vacation. Turns out that this healing thing is harder work than I’d anticipated. Rather than a wealth of insights to write about, I’ve mostly got a backlog of unanswered research questions that I wish I’d been able to research. That, and a new addiction to episodic dramas produced by HBO.

One of the questions I’ve wanted an answer to for some time is how the community focused on Darfur has managed to attract so much attention to their cause. While the situation in Darfur is dramatic and dire, there are a number of other situations on the African continent that demand attention and, generally, receive a small fraction of the attention paid to Darfur. Medicines Sans Frontieres publishes an annual list of stories they feel are underreported, including situations in Somalia, eastern DRC and the Central African Republic. (I wrote at some length on the topic of “underreporting” and these top-ten lists some months earlier.)

My interest in this question about Darfur isn’t because I want to wag a finger at the Darfur movement, but because I hope other movements can learn from it. There aren’t a ton of examples of situations where a large number of Americans have become passionately interested in political and security situations in developing nations without a strong indicator that the US might become militarily involved in those countries. (In other words, Iraq doesn’t count.) Tibet and Darfur are the main ones that come to mind. And while Tibet has been a celebrity cause du jour for years now (and benefits from the substantial charisma and media savvy of the Dalai Lama), interest in Darfur has developed quite rapidly and may have preceded mainstream media coverage of the issue.

(On the to do list is some searching through blog search engines, Lexis/Nexis and the NYTimes site to see when Nicholas Kristof picked up on the issue, in comparison to early blogs like Passion of the Present. A quick bit of research suggests that Kristof wrote his first major piece on Darfur in March 2004, titled “Ethnic Cleansing, Again“. Passion of the Present began publishing in March 2004 as well. I just glanced back at the personal blogs of Jim Moore (a former Berkman colleague) and Ingrid Jones, two bloggers who’ve been passionate and vocal on this issue since early 2004, and wasn’t able to find references before March 2004. Please send links if I’ve got this wrong – it would be very interesting to see a blog conversation about Darfur preceding Kristof’s article. (For what it’s worth, the earliest refernce I found on my own blog is February 4, 2004. And that post refers to BBC coverage, suggesting that it’s an instance of the blogger – me – following the mainstream media.))

One of the core arguments I’ve been making about media attention and the developing world is that it’s difficult to expect people in the developed world to choose to read about stories in the developing world unless someone makes the case that a particular story has relevance for that individual. It’s hard to discover these stories unless either someone in authority (a newspaper editor, a television anchor) leads you to the story, or unless your peer group leads you to it… in which case the homophily problem kicks in. Even if led to the story, it can be very difficult to connect with it – something Joi Ito has refered to as “the caring problem“. The Darfur story is an intriguing exception to these generalizations, and is worth studying as such.

Fortunately, that study is taking place. Charlie Beckett at the London School of Economics POLIS thinktank announced earlier this month that their center will study the emergence of the Darfur story in depth. He’s invited readers to offer their own theories – Rob Crilly, an excellent freelance journalist based in Nairobi, has weighed in with a compelling case:

The roots lie in the civil war of the south, when evangelical Christians from America found it easy to identify with a largely Christian population in the south pitted agains a Muslim, arab government in the north.

They carried their activity across to Darfur, bringing it the attention of many people who wouldn’t otherwise be aware of Sudan’s problems. But it has also attracted a bizarre mishmash of often conservative, religious groupings in an anti-Khartoum alliance.

Their black and white analysis has generally done more harm than good, and has sucked in people with a liberal viewpoint – including many of my esteemed colleagues in the press, who have a romantic notion that rebels are always the good guys.

I’ll be very interested to read the POLIS study and see whether they concur with Crilly’s analysis. I’ll also be interested to see whether there was activist media leading authors like Kristof to the story, or whether the movement picked up with mainstream media recognition and legitimation.

I feel a little like one of those late-night TV ads, where we see the photo of an overweight, schlubby-looking guy (i.e., someone who looks like me), followed by a toned, fit, six-pack-ab’d superman, whose stunning transformation was made possible through an all-grapefruit diet and three hours a day of headstands. In my case, my external appearance hasn’t changed very much, but man, get a load of my right retina!

Here’s a picture – an optical coherence tomograph – of my right retina two months ago. That nasty red stuff was scar tissue, obscuring the fovea (the center of the eye, with the highest nerve density) and pulling on the retina, causing it to ripple and distort.

Here’s what it looks like today:

It’s not perfect – the red shows areas where the retina is thicker than in a normal person. It’s possible that the thickness comes from inflammation, which continues to decrease as I heal from the surgery, which was only three weeks ago. Looking at the cross-section shows just how much distortion of the retina has been removed. Here’s before:

And after:

Those nasty, hollow cysts in the retina? Gone, more or less. The two remaining ones in this image may recede as the eye heals further.

There’s a great deal of faith involved with having surgery. Not only are you trusting somebody to cut holes in your body with the hope of making you well, but you’re confronted with the reality that you’re going to feel worse – for a while, at least – after the surgery than you did before. Despite my elation today, my right eye still has a lot of healing to do, and is only working 20/60 corrected today. (The goal, based on today’s progress report, is 20/25 in that eye in the next couple of months.) While vision in that eye has moved from Mark Rothko to Claude Monet to “Did I put on the wrong pair of glasses?”, and while reading is now possible, it’s still not easy. This process takes a long, long time.

And, of course, unlike the guy with the six-pack abs, I’ve had nothing to do with this transformation. I just lay there, heavily sedated, while Dr. Jorge Arroyo worked his magic. And I’ve basically griped and complained while friends – especially my lovely wife – and my doctor here in Pittsfield, Dr. Andrew Danyluk, have nursed me back to health.

And so I’m very, very grateful and very happy to be (partially, a few hours a day) back online.

Here’s hoping that anyone else who has to go through vitrectomy and retinal peel to combat diabetic retinopathy has at least this level of good fortune.

Dr. Ulrike Reinhard, who is building a new online and offline publication, We Magazine, interviewed me at Berkman at 10. You can watch me squint as my damaged eye tries to deal with sitting outside, or you can just focus on some smart questions about whether the Internet is helpoing us broaden the idea of who constitutes “we”.

Since I haven’t been reading very much, I haven’t been posting bookmarks. But the trip to and from Boston gave me a chance to catch up on podcasts – both ones publicly available, and ones custom made for me. (Thanks David, Sandy.) Some of the highlights:

This American Life takes a close look at the intricacies of the US mortgage market and the collapse in value of mortgage-backed investments. It’s a huge, complex story, and an hour-long show is exactly the amount of time it takes to get a sense for just how badly broken regulatory mechanisms have been surrounding these financial instruments.

I’ve got mixed emotions about WNYC’s “Radio Lab“. At best, it’s a terrific popular science show. At worst, it’s annoying, cloying and cutesy. But I really liked the closing segment of “Pop Music”, a story about accordianist and journalist Gregory Warner, who discovers that Afghan tribesmen really, really like American country music. (Based on his success playing Johnny Cash songs to Afghan audiences, I’m now learning “Ring of Fire” on the squeezebox, because, well, you never know.)

Paul Collier’s “The Bottom Billion” is the best book I’ve read this year. So I was thrilled to find an hour-long podcast of him discussing economic theory with the host of EconTalk. And there’s now half a dozen podcasts on EconTalk I’m looking forward to this week.

Got something I should hear? Please let me know in the comments – with eyes closed, I’m all ears.

Expectations matter. Psychological research suggests that you can drive rats (or humans) crazy by shocking them at random. Give them a light that precedes each electric shock so they can brace themselves, and they’ll get only mildly depressed. (And let them administer the shocks to themselves, and they’ll survive the same quantity of daily shocks with little or so ill-effects psychologically.)

The surgeon who operated on my eye last week didn’t do a very good job of helping me set my expectations. I asked him how long it would take after the surgery before I could drive – he told me I coul drive the next day. This was true, in a sense – had I wanted to drive home from Boston with no vision in my right eye, I suppose I could have. (This might explain something about Boston drivers. Perhaps they’ve all recently had eye surgery.)

My eye doctor here in Pittsfield hasn’t been able to give me clear expectations, but at least he’s helped me understand why it’s so hard to figure out when my eyes are going to heal. Looking at the surgeon’s handiwork on Tuesday, he said, “Wait, there are no sutures!” Vitrectomy, the surgery I had last week, used to require three single-stitch sutures on the white of the eye to close the holes made by the surgical instruments. The instruments my surgeon used are so small that it’s possible not to suture the wounds and just let them heal on their own.

In other words, my extremely talented, very well experienced doctor had never previously seen the surgery I’ve had done on my eyes.

So when I asked him how long it might take before the cloudiness in my right eye cleared, he didn’t answer. “Two weeks? Four weeks? Six?” I asked. “Those are all reasonable guesses.”

He did, however, have very smart healing advice. The reason playing video games seems to help the vision is that the best thing I can currently do is keep the eyes motionless. Staring at a TV screen helps; closing both eyes helps even more. Driving isn’t too bad – you tend to focus on a distant point – while riding in a car is terrible, as your eyes move all around. Walking? Not great, as the body motion shakes the eye – he’s recommending that I ride an exercise bike instead of going for walks to get cardiovascular exercise.

Tenth anniversary parties for your academic research center? Pretty bad, as it turns out. Making eye contact with a lot of people is surprisingly painful. So to minimize eye strain, I spent two days of a conference wearing blackout shades during the presentations, saving my eyes for the hallway conversations. Turns out this is actually a very nice way to enjoy an academic conference. I sat next to generous friends like Thomas Kriese and Beth Kolko, who read slides to me and helped me figure out appropriate times to ask or answer questions.

I’d expected to ne able to drive to this conference. Nope – I took the bus on Wednesday and took the train back today. I’d expected to be able to participate fully. Nope – I was so exhausted by three in the afternoon on the second day, I needed to head back to the hotel and nap before the gala dinner. I expect to go to San Antonio next week to see my wife’s family. But I’m starting to wonder whether the smart thing to do isn’t just to sit at home as much as possible.

If I’m honest with myself, I’d say that I expect to be able to return to a more or less normal schedule in about ten days. But I’m rapidly learning not to trust my expectations.

I came to the Berkman at Ten conference under doctor’s orders to keep my eyes closed. This leads to an unusual – for me, at least – approach to conference-going. I’m here in Ames Courtroom at Harvard Law School with a heavy blindfold on, sitting next to my friend Thomas Kriese, who’s telling me about the slides projected at the front of the room.

The blindfold is off now, because I lost a challenge with David Weinberger – it turns out that I cannot, in fact, liveblog blindfolded. I can, but what results isn’t exactly readable – turns out that I move one key in a random direction every few minutes if I’m not typing continuously.

Anyway. This event is an interesting blend of birthday party, complete with a certain degree of self-congratulation, and academic conference, featuring Berkman faculty as speakers. There’s a lot to celebrate. John Palfrey, our fearless leader, has just been elevated to vice-dean of the law school, responsible for the library and information services of the institution. The Center is moving from a Law School center to a “university-wide” center… though it’s a bit unclear what that move will mean. Yochai Benkler has joined our team, and with Cass Sunstein moving to Harvard Law, we’re hoping he’ll join as well. And Dean Elena Kagan urges us to use this conference as a chance to convince Jonathan Zittrain to accept an offer to take a tenured position at Harvard, where he taught until a few years ago.

Zittrain is the opening speaker, offering an overview of the argument in his new book, “The Future of the Internet, and How to Stop It“. His argument – in a nutshell – is that the amazing power of a programmable computer and an open internet, which he refers to as “generativity”, may be in danger of making the internet such a dangerous place that we try to shut off this generative magic.

Zittrain uses the “g-word” infrequently in today’s talk – instead, he refers to this magic as “the dark energy” of the internet… which is appealing to me, as the world is very dark indeed with this blindfold on. But the darkness of his vision provokes some serious pushback from the audience, which includes net luminaries like Scott Bradner and David Reed, who helpfully point out that people have been predicting the implosion of the internet for a long, long time now… and somehow the network proces resilient enough to survive.

Terry Fisher, framing Zittrain’s talk, explains that most conversation about the net has focused on a debate between market forces and open, commons-based creation. Zittrain offers a different model – a matrix that includes axes from top-down to bottom-up, and from hierarchy to polyarchy. The generative net has lived in the quadrant defined by bottom-up and polyarchy. Many of the solutions to the scary problems of the net move towards top-down, centralized solutions like that offered by the ITU. Zittrain’s hope is for a bottom-up, but hierarchical solution.

That’s the quadrant he’s pointing to on the screen, but his argument seems a lot more basic – we need to trust human nature and people’s willingness to do the right thing. I’m reminded that when I spoke to Brooke Gladstone at On the Media a week or so ago, she told me that all net visionaries she knows ultimately believe that human nature will save the Internet – it’s interesting to discover that JZ is soundly in that camp.

You know that moment in the old movies when they take the bandage off the patient’s eye? He blinks once, twice and as his vision resolves, he sees the beautiful nurse smiling at him.

That’s not how it happened for me.

As the medical resident took the bandages off me, I saw nothing but a yellow cloud. She covered my good eye, and asked me to tell her how many fingers she was holding up. I saw nothing, not even her hand.

The main feature of the surgery I had midday on Tuesday was the removal of the vitreous humor from my right eye. That’s the clear jelly that your eyes are filled with. That jelly had turned fibrous in my eyes and was acting as a trellis for blood vessels to grow on. So the surgeon removed the vitreous, the bad blood vessels, the scar tissue and refilled the eye with saline.

So far, so good. But there’s a lot of blood, tissue and crap in the eye, and that’s all mixed with the saline, resulting in a fluid much like muddy water.

Muddy water settles, but it takes a while. I used to carry a small vial of water and sand – the centerpiece from an art piece I installed my junior year – from apartment to apartment early in my life. Each time I packed my things, the water would turn dark and muddy. I’d put it in a place of pride in the new apartment and wait for it to settle. One day, I’d glance at it and it would be clear water and sand again.

And that’s what’s happening right now in my right eye. One day away from the surgery, the world through my right eye looked like a Mark Rothko painting. Yesterday, I’d made it as far as later Monet. Today, the world through my right eye looks like a 1950s Playboy shoot, the kind with heavy vaseline on the lens.

I’d figured that the challenge of healing would be forcing myself not to be dumb, not to race right back into reading and writing email. Truth be told, it simply hasn’t been possible. I can’t read at all without closing my right eye, and that’s painful to do more than a few minutes at a time.

And so… I’ve spent the last three days watching the first season of The Wire, and playing Grand Theft Auto. (Not the new one – I never finished San Andreas.) All of which seems to be helping, though I feel like an absolute and total slug. Aside from not using my eyes, my doctor has ordered me not to work out or even go for a walk at least for the first week of recovery. Turns out I’m very, very bad at sitting still.

The good news, however, is that the surgery was a complete success. I’m just looking forward to some moment in the future where I’ll actually be able to see those results. And I’m beginning to get my head around the idea that it might be another week before that happens.

My friend Andrew travels more than I do – which is a dubious sort of achievement – and with at least as much joy in his peregrinations. He tells me that one of his favorite moments is that instant where the boarding door closes, where you have to shut your laptop and power down your cellphone, and you’re irrevocably cut off from the world. For a day, a week, a month, your vacation message reads, “I’m sorry, but I’m in Timbuktu and won’t be able to get back to you in a timely fashion. Please harass my assistant/business partner/underpaid intern instead.” You are, in other words, off the hook.

I share Andrew’s joy in that moment where the phone goes silent and the wifi fades away – I suspect everyone who’s overwhelmed by demands on their time does. (And I suspect almost everyone is overwhelmed by demands on their time.) However, the signature joy of that moment, for me at least, is that I get to read everything that I’ve been saving up for the days or weeks between flights. And that’s not an option for this particular downtime.

Tomorrow morning, I’m having “23-gauge pars plana vitrectomy” on my right eye. In my past experience with less intrusive, laser-based procedures, I’ve recovered distance vision very quickly, but had a very tough time getting my eye to the point where I can read. I’ve heard varying prognoses on recovery from vitrectomy, from two weeks through six. A lot depends on what the doctor finds inside the eye, whether scar tissue on my retina has caused a tear, which would make recovery longer and much less comfortable.

My plan is to take a week off from driving and at least three off from reading. For those attending Berkman@10 – and you should, as it’s going to be a great event – I have high hopes of seeing you there (with one or two eyes) but offer no guarantees. I’m also planing on ignoring the blog and email for the duration. My wife and other friends have promised to help me keep up with incoming missives, but I offer no guarantees on my ability to respond.

Several friends have offered the wonderful suggestion that I ask blog readers to read to me during the weeks I can’t read to myself. I love the idea conceptually, but am a bit worried about asking friends to help me finish reading Paul Starr’s “The Creation of the Media”, for fear that nasty, toothy lawyers from Basic Books will come chasing after me. That said, I wonder whether asking if people are interested in reading academic papers would somewhat reduce the risk. I’d really love to read “Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks” by McPherson, Smith-Lovin and Cook (30 pages) and “Self-Segregation or Deliberation” by Farrell, Lawrence and Sides (26 pages) in the net couple of weeks. If you’re interested in getting together with a friend or two and recording a podcast of either paper, let me know and I’ll have Rachel send you the PDF (use the comments to leave your email address and your willingness to read…) (And for any of the paper authors – if this isn’t okay, let me know and I won’t circulate the papers.)

Thanks for all the kind words and good wishes I’ve received thus far and for any that are to come. Have a wonderful May, and hope to see/read you in three weeks or so.

My friend David Weinberger has famously observed that “In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.” (Modestly, he has noted that he’s probably not the first person to make this observation.) David makes the point that fame in an internet age can be a very different phenomenon than fame in the broadcast age. When there are only three channels on the television in a nation, being famous means becoming famous to an entire nation; in the age of participatory media, we’ll see thousands of microcelebrities, people who are famous to their own small or large communities.

David is right, of course. (He usually is.) But being famous to fifteen people is a very old phenomenon, not just a very new one.

I spent last evening in the small, stuffy gymnasium of the high school I graduated from 19 years ago. Like three hundred others, I’d come back to Danbury, CT, to celebrate the brilliant fifty year teaching career of Korb Eynon. Korb was – unhappily but steadfastly – the headmaster of the school when I enrolled in 1984. By the time I graduated, he’d returned to his natural environment, the classroom, introducing seniors to King Lear. His technique included offering himself as a picture of the half-mad king in his declining years. I bet that trick works even better twenty years later.

After patiently receiving praise from five decades of students, Korb took the stage to explain, “It’s not me, it’s the institution.” Patiently – as if we were especially slow pupils struggling with iambic pentameter – he explained that he was simply “part of the Pantheon,” part of an ever-rolling stream of teachers who’d preceded him and who now follow him. He invoked their names – Hobart Warner, Joe Grover, Donald Schwartz, Aaron Coburn, John Verdery – to murmurs of respectful approval from the crowd.

Don’t bother Googling those names – they’re not famous men. This is a small school – in just over eighty years, there are probably no more than a few thousand students who’ve passed through, and perhaps a thousand who’ve shared a classroom with each of these local legends. But in that gymnasium, to that audience, those names resonate like those of biblical prophets or Red Sox MVPs. Looking around the room – my sister to my right, three of my closest high school friends to my left, the older sister of my first girlfriend seated behind me, old friends and rivals scattered about – I saw an extended family, a small tribe. There are only a few hundred references to Korb Eynon on Google, but to that tribe, he’s Plato, Bobby Kennedy and Carl Yastremski rolled into one.

It’s easy to think of this “new” type of fame as being smaller, less profound than the broadcast model of fame. But this older fame is more personal, more intimate and likely much more important.

Driving home late last night, I realized he’d done it again, 19 years after I left his classroom for the last time. Korb hadn’t impressed his thinking on me – he’d shared something that caused me to explore my own line of thinking. In other words, he’d taught. Just like he’s been doing for five decades. Thanks, Korb.