Twenty-seven years ago, James Wilson and George Kelling published “Broken Windows” in The Atlantic. It proposed that even “untended disorder and minor offenses” would lead to serious crime and the decay of an urban environment. While responses to the article were wildly mixed, New York City had a seemingly undisputed crime drop in the nineties. But the theory and approach has never been proven with any level of confidence.
Yet this all changed recently. Two studies last year, published in Science and in Criminology, had convincing results (emphasis mine):
While these studies do not settle, once and for all, the question of the relationship between disorder and serious crime, they do provide a substantial body of experimental evidence that fixing broken windows ought to be an integral part of any community’s response to crime. In fact, it’s hard to think of a policy option for fixing a major social problem that is as strongly supported — by both experience and solid research — as is Broken Windows.
As she drove us home in the blue Fiat that first week of fourth grade, my mother began by announcing that it was time for me to begin writing thank you notes. “When you’ve received a present (referring to my new tennis racket), you must follow up by saying thanks with a card or a letter,” she instructed. “It’s good manners.” So there I was. Torn between manners and a racket. Upon arriving home, she introduced me to Emily Post.
While the merits of Emily Post are much-contested (mostly by me for many years), the sentiment had the right intention. The formula is quite simple: when someone does something for you: say thank you. Nothing could be simpler, and nothing could be more valuable.
It was an invaluable piece of advice that I’ve followed in my adult life, writing thank you notes for all things — big, small, monumental, and frivolous. And always within 48 hours of the happening. All very personal. Never a Hallmark. Never a pre-printed affair. Never the same twice. Always something I have to dash off myself.
But there is some fitness to writing the thank you. Or at least a handful of things to keep in mind. Here are my guidelines to writing the critical note:
Thank you notes are tangible notes whenever possible.
These notes are all done by hand whenever possible, sent via USPS mail. A follow-up-thank-you (a thank-you for a gesture on a second occassion) may be done via email, SMS, DM, Facebook, or whatever your choice of media (discretion should be used, depending on nature of thing); regardless, the text should be composed with care.
Thank you notes need not be “notes.”
Write your thank you notes on other objects. Second to notes, I send thank-you books quite often, writing the note of gratitude inside. Thank-you videos are time-intensive, but family members receive them. Newsprint, photos, negatives. There are choices.
You want busy people to read your thank you note too.
Thus, keep it short; do not restate the obvious; and give busy people them something of value to read. Personal contacts and good information they weren’t aware of count as value. Don’t ask busy people for more. (And, of course, under no circumstances, ever, should you write out a URL by hand in a thank you note.)
Set up a thank-you framework.
The biggest obstacle to thanking is sometimes the tools. Phone, email, letter, SMS — options get in the way. Do yourself a favor and set up a thank-you framework. Get some cards, stamps, or even an email template. Next time you have to say it, it’s easy.
Do not send one-word emails of “thanks.”
Thanks.
Regarding thanks, all for this site’s new design goes to my close friend Jason Santa Maria. Without his friendship and design guidance, much would be much less.
Much later on than fourth grade, I was quite troubled to read Socrates urging that “writing destroys memory.” His intention, of course, was that those who use writing will become forgetful, relying on external resources for what they lack. I think these written transcriptions over a past event don’t destroy memory, but might, in fact, preserve it. Clearly, Socrates had just never received a thank you note.
A good case for why for education might return to a pass/fail system and start becoming more human centered, the model that was predominant from 98,000 BC to roughly 1800 AD:
The model of education from its earliest times was one of mentorship, starting with hunter-gatherers taking their children out on the hunt 100,000 years ago, all the way up to the teaching methods employed at the university founded by Thomas Jefferson. The teacher and the students got to know one another. … When a student graduated, the most impressive thing she or he could share with a prospective employer was not a Grade Point Average (GPA) or even the name of the institution attended: it was the name of the teacher. Students of the great teachers of history often became famous themselves because of the thoroughness with which their mentors had inculcated knowledge, understanding, skill, and talent in them.
I think there’s tremendous potential for mentornship. Share the success of learning among the students and teachers so it becomes a human-centered approach, not a transactional one.
Michael Chabon reading from a piece titled “The Amateur Family:”
Perhaps there is no perfect word for the kind of people I have raised my children to be: a word that encompasses obsessive scholarship, passionate curiosity, curatorial tenderness, and an irrepressible desire to join in the game, to inhabit in some manner—through writing, drawing, dressing up, or endless conversational riffing and Talmudic debate—the world of the endlessly inviting, endlessly inhabitable work of popular art. The closest I have ever come for myself is amateur, in all the best senses of the word: a lover; a devotee; a person driven by passion and obsession to do it—to explore the imaginary world—oneself. And if we must accept the inevitable connotation of hopeless ineptitude that amateur carries, then at least let us stipulate that we shall be hopeless and inept like Max Fischer, the hero of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore: in the most passionate, heedless, and whole-hearted way.
Ray Eames, August 08, 1950 at the Eames’ Pacific Palisades home, also known as Case Study House #8. Photographer: Peter Stackpole. Photographs for LIFE.
When things get interesting is when the apparently risky is demonstrably [less safe] than the actually risky. That’s when we sometimes become uncomfortable enough with our reliance on the apparent to focus on the actual. Think about that the next time they make you take off your shoes at the airport.
If “cadence” were a word in the dictionary (OK, it is, but you know what I mean), Bach in the Goldberg Theme has found one of its less-often-used meanings; one of the fun ones; and he locates this meaning with the help of the “words” that he uses to lead into it … through their implications … This paradoxical hinging of the cadence (return) on the back end of the arch (departure) gives a sense of motion and transcendence to the conclusion: it puts wings under earth.
The annosphere tells time, but more usefully, it presents time. It shows you sunrise and sunset, the start of spring and the winter solstice. It lets you see on your desk what you can’t see in the world: the steady pace of time, the subtle day to day changes in sunlight and shadow, the cycles that run through each year. Any cheap wristwatch with a ticking second hand will be more precise than the annosphere. But from year to year, when you wonder if winter will ever end, and long for the day you’ll awaken in sunlight, the time told by the annosphere will be more valuable.
When we first got our Casio watches in the ‘80s, I remember noticing a significant semantic shift. It bothered me we stopped thinking in terms of a “quarter past eight” and instead thought and said, “eight thirty-two.” That precision begat a real sense of how time was moving. Something was lost.
The aspects of things that are most important for us are hidden because of their simplicity and familiarity. (One is unable to notice something because it is always before one’s eyes.) The real foundations of his enquiry do not strike a man at all.
A recent study suggests that contrary to what seems logical, nonsense may provide space for the brain to detect patterns in it would otherwise miss.
Researchers familiar with the new work say it would be premature to incorporate film shorts by David Lynch, say, or compositions by John Cage into school curriculums. For one thing, no one knows whether exposure to the absurd can help people with explicit learning, like memorizing French. For another, studies have found that people in the grip of the uncanny tend to see patterns where none exist — becoming more prone to conspiracy theories, for example. The urge for order satisfies itself, it seems, regardless of the quality of the evidence.
Regardless, short films and music should be part of all school curricula.
In a 1906 edition of Appleton’s Magazine, John Sousa predicts a deterioration of music and musical taste — “impending harm” — because of the introduction of “music reproducing machines.”
Sweeping across the country with the speed of a transient fashion in slang of Panama hats, political war cries or popular novels, comes now the mechanical device to sing for us a song or play for us a piano, in substitute for human skill, intelligence, and soul. …. From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful. And now, in this twentieth century, come these talking and playing machines, and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things, which are like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful, living, breathing daughters.
For technophobes, this is nothing new. Ars Technica covers in terrific detail what fears these emerging technologies bring out in rightsholders. From the introduction of writing itself to radio to television to the digital camera, there’s been handwringing over the destruction to the natural state of things bought by advances in technology.
