Stop cheaping out on the young ambitious people of the world by offering only “unpaid internships.” It’s class warfare anyway you cut it, and unless you are quite literally a mom and pop establishment, I think you can afford to shell out $3,000 for a summer of exploitative work.

Don’t even try to defend yourselves. You are the Museum of Modern Art. The cost of an intern doesn’t even equal the cost of mounting a single painting. What do you expect me to do? Live in New York City for a summer without even my housing costs covered? Perhaps in your cushy life as a curator you’ve forgotten how expensive your fair island is. Imagine trying to live here, eat here, all in o

rder to simply work here. I will be that reminder: its f***ing expensive.

And we’re just talking about costs. We’re not talking about students who need to make enough money to cover tuition, or school housing, or books. No, we’re just talking about being able to make an internship in New York City, or Boston, or San Francisco, or Chicago a reality.

The unpaid internship is everywhere. It’s become a common facet of the student workplace. And I can see the attraction to employers. A whole summer/fall/winter/spring or even a year of work provided at no cost? All you need to offer is a place for someone to work? Perhaps a letter of recommendation somewhere after the fact?

What a deal indeed. From an employer perspective it’s a steal.

Yes, truly it is theft. It steals opportunities from all students or workers and gives it only to the students who can afford it. Students or workers from secure financial backgrounds. Students or workers with private wealth. Which means that the unpaid internship always acts a social filter, reinforcing the idea that jobs in the arts, in print, in museums, in broadcasting are continually reserved for those in the middle class who can afford them. And students from other backgrounds are kept from even considering these positions.

Employers of the world, stop being socially thrifty. Stop confusing saving money with preserving the class-orientation of higher employment.

It may be true that merit is considered among an applicant pool for unpaid internships. No doubt, the most qualified applicant is selected for the job. But what can be said for the applicants who are not present because they cannot afford to even consider such a position? Their merits have not even been considered. Their perspectives, talents, and qualifications have been erased by a financial bottom line. Your financial bottom line.

So what can you do? It’s quite simple: fund your internships. Here’s the minimum equation: find the average cost of housing in your immediate (10 mile) vicinity for a summer. Add $100 for food a week for the duration of the internship. Then add the cost of a monthly pass for local public transportation. You know have a working idea of how much an internship should promise in terms of funding. It’s probably around $3,000.

If you are charitable soul, consider adding money for tuition/books. It may be a small thing for you, but it will mean the world to your intern. S/he will work harder, and think higher of you.

As will we all.

At a recent Philadelphia Flyers game, in which I saw no less then eight goals (and no more than four fights) I came to the conclusion that not all sports are created equal. In some, scoring is something routine and expected, something that defines the pace of the game. In others scoring is something extraordinary, inspiring, and eventful, something which provides landmarks for the story told by athletes in each game. In these sports, the scoring moment becomes a moment of salvation or damnation, a critical juncture through which the passion of the athlete is bound to that of the spectator.

This why I will always be fan of soccer and hockey over sports like basketball. Basketball suffers from the plight of long distance racing, the only thing that really matters is the end, and on the professional level, teams are rarely out of winning distance by the fourth quarter when the spectator really starts to care. At any instance during the rest of the game, one can get up, hit the bathroom, pick up some popcorn or make a phone call, confident that no single action (save a catastrophic injury or ejection) will alter the course of the game. Instead, baskets will be exchanged, runs will be made, and feats of expertise demonstrated.

But there will be no goals.

The goal is the greatest concept in sports. It is because of the goal, that any minute of a soccer game or a hockey game becomes pregnant with potential to alter the course of the game. Any fan of soccer knows that a game may finish with no goals, so it is a great gift (or horrible calamity) when a goal occurs. It is history, and it always feels like it. A single goal may be all that occurs. And that goal may occur at any moment, creating a sense of time in hockey and soccer that is unique- a sense of time in which virtually all time is equal in the possibility of achieving or witnessing the scoring miracle.

This has always been the attraction of soccer, and conversely what makes it impossible for the American sports fan to understand about the sport. In the US, sports must serve always serve entertainment and leisure over devotion, which means that American sports must create space within the game for concessions to be purchased, reflections to be made, bathroom facilities to be visited. Baseball has nine innings, with breaks between every half inning for the small things that Americans like to do at sporting events. At soccer games, people only leave during the half. At hockey games, people only leave during intermissions. At least every pitch in baseball (for it is the pitch that defines the pace of baseball, and thus the amount of time between pitches is policed by baseball leagues) comes with the promise of a hit, a play, an out, a home run. In basketball, by contrast, no event can take place in any one possession that ensures a victory. In basketball, there is only time and the score to play against.

It has been said that in soccer, the goal is an orgasm. The goal is a climax of exchanges and progressions, and true soccer fans “feel” the game in a way that betrays a certain sensuality. Because the only way to win is to score, teams become unified organs pulsing with passes and possessions leading toward that overwhelming conclusion.

Hockey proves more fascinating than soccer percisely because it complicates the idea of perfectly equal scoring time with strategic advantages and disadvantages- the power play. With an extra man adding advanatage to a team, hockey creates a time schema not unlike that catholic christianity, which divides the year into ordinary time (in which any team may score with equal potential) and extraordinary time (wherein a goal becomes even more likely). And yet goals are still ever present in hockey, and because of the sport’s speed, we are always just seconds away from the next one.

And then there’s the goalie. Between the goal and the play, he is the mediation between one man’s jubilation and another’s defeat. He’s not quite the anti-hero but he’s close. Because he makes “saves” and “saves” are actions of heroic proportions precisely because they are anti-goals. The goalie is the foil for the goal-scorer, who is always the hero. Except when he’s the villain.

I’ve decided that sports with goals are better. Because you can’t walk away from them, because they don’t have situations like two men on with no outs, or first and goal. Because they are always too dynamic to fall into situational rhetoric where one can distinguish between the importances of moments in a game. Some sports build towards a moment where you know something has got to give, it’s either a field goal for the win or a miss for the loss. That’s cinematic bullshit. Real sports are as organic and unpredictable as life itself. And that’s the way I like them.

They announced that Boston would be hosting the 2010 Winter Classic back in April. I was ecstatic. Never a fan of hockey in high school, a few years of intramural ice time at Brown has made me a devoted fan of the sport. I have gone from hating hockey in every and all permutation to actually catching Bruins games whenever I can. I saw my first B’s game with my Dad just 3 years ago, and even got gifted some tickets from Professor who couldn’t make a game this past November. That game turned out to be a 3-0 upset of Sidney Crosby and the Pittsburgh Penguins.

There was no way I was going miss the Winter Classic. I grew up just a mile from Fenway, and from my Dad’s house you see the lights of the park. I entered the lottery for tickets, not that I could afford them, remembering all those times my Dad and I had managed to get tickets off scalpers. When I finally got a chance to bid on tickets the only ones left were … expensive.

But it was all good. Cuz as a college kid, wandering around the park on game day is often enough to get me stoked for the competition. And that’s what I did for the biggest game in Bruins history ( I mean attendance, of 38,000 or so, but also in terms of prestige and national visibility). On New Year’s Day, I woke up in Boston and headed down to the Park with my friend Ryan to take in the festivities. We wandered around the park, shooting photos, thumbing thru the memorabilia, and scouting out bars. When we finally got to Jillian’s on Lansdowne we knew we were in the right place- no cover, no line, and hundreds of TVs greeted our entrance.

We picked up a prime spot at the bar and watched the first two periods. We winced at the Flyers goal, which was clearly a result of Tim Thomas’ over-anxious check and failure to watch the puck, and applauded the fight. We sat on edge with our Winter Classic souvenir cups praying that Tim Thomas’ miraculous skills would stop the constant Flyers’ threat. And our prayers were answered.

When Recchi scored the game tying goal with 2:31 left, Jillians went crazy. Across the street we could hear the 38,000 at Fenway even louder.

A few minutes later, when Marco Sturm scored the winner, we went absolutely ballistic. Pouring onto Lansdowne, we joined our jubilant Bruins brethern puncuated only occassionally by a Philly fan or two who were taking the loss pretty well (see photos).

While looking for this awesome commemorative hat (which I did not find and cannot find anywhere) I followed the advice of a fellow fan and actually walked into Fenway. I was looking for a souvenir shop, but finding it lacking my desired hat, simply continued down the concourse into the heart of the stadium. There was no one there to stop us, so we walked out into the grandstand. And there was the rink, perched in a stadium of snow, looking like magic.

Hockey has never looked so beautiful.

its been a long time since i’ve read a paper copy of the new york times. its been an even longer time since i read a copy of the boston globe. yet everyday, i manage to peruse these publications in great depth, because their websites have become better and better, and i am spending more time (and getting more acclimated to) reading print content online.

electronic media will have the texture or the type of light reflection or the feel of paper. the kindle, for all of its e-ink hype is not a device to replace paper, but to emulate it enough so as to allow digital media technology to work behind a better reading interface. what will inevitably allow the kindle to gain marketshare on books, will not be its impressive simulation of paper reading surfaces, but it’s ability to make print dynamic. this means that the readers of the future are eventually going to overcome their paper-codex fetishism for the practicalities of digital technology. we’ve seen this in sound reproduction (in an arc from the phonograph to the ipod) and in video (from celluloid to dvd) and no we are going to see it happen to paper.

making print dynamic is the real mission of the emerging field of new media journalism. i using the term new media journalism in partial homage to john pavlik’s seminal text on the subject “journalism and new media.” its worth a read if you want to get situated in why the standard practices producing journalism for the past fifty years are suddenly being overthrown. a quick google serach however we reveal that the ‘new media journalism‘ is an operative buzz word being used by j-schools and media pundits alike. going back to ‘making print dynamic’ most definitions of new media journalism underscore the fact that unidimensional journalism (reporter writes story) have become insufficient in the digital age. this is for two reasons:

1. new digital based technologies like digital cameras, audio recorders, and computers have become cheap enough, light enough, and easy enough for journalists to use in the field
2. new digital markets (most notably the internet) have an infinitely insatiable desire for more content

digital technology has thus supplied both the means and the ends of new media journalism. synthesizing the points above, new media journalism aspires to produce multidimensional journalism, or put it more literally, multimedia journalism (its a tragedy of semantics that the word ‘multimedia’ has become a somewhat dated term for cheesy graphics and limited interactivity circa 1997). and multimedia journalism in turn, is what is enabled and expected in the increasingly digitally mediated world we live in.

the first instantiation of the new media journalist did what the boston globe (aka boston.com) continues to do today. instead of just writing a story, the journalist might make a short accompanying web video, something like a tour of the neighborhood the article deals with, or a short interview with a person being profiled. eventually, the web video became something more akin to bite-sized broadcast journalism. something like what the wall street journal did recently on badminton players in san francisco (see below).

photo galleries and discussion threads round-out new media journalism 1.0. again, good old boston.com is replete with photo galleries and discussion threads, sometimes even producing photo galleries for things that are not best suited to be displayed as a slides (see this morning’s irish film round-up). the problem with misapplying new media solutions (thinking let’s make this more dynamic) is that these mistakes reiterate the problems new media journalism wanted to escape from in the first place. if there was an ethos of new media journalism, it would be conscious consideration of which media best allows a subject to be expressed. and if you thought a slide show was best for movies, you were wrong.

it isn’t too hard to figure out that moving images need moving images to report on them. which is why the new york times (or nytimes.com) “anatomy of a scene” features are so wonderful. as an example of what to do, “anatomy of a scene” presents a short section of a major film, and gives its director the ability to discuss the section as a sort of introduction for his/her directorial impulses (see the ‘Quantum of Solace‘ one, or the more recent ‘Watchmen‘ gloss). allowing a user to see a film as they learn about it reinforces the particular media being interrogated, and fulfills the ethos of new media journalism.

beyond nmj 1.0, there is the dream that digital technology will not only allow multimedia engagement of a subject, but produce entirely unique interfaces to learn and engage a subject. this is, put simply, the dream for journalism to develop the ability to publish its own applets and software. where else could journalism go in this digital age, save into the terrain of developing reporting platforms based on the paradigms of the computer itself.

this is where the question of the user and interactivity so crucial to web 2.0 become absorbed into the task of new media journalism. where print, audio, and video provided merely playback content, web 2.0 journalism stresses interactivity. interfaces like this recession map (from nytimes.com) or this new england foliage map (from boston.com) allow informatics to become interactive news items through which users learn through their own agency. clicking and pointing, dragging and dropping, changing and selecting, the user in web 2.0 journalism gains a new ability to control what they learn and how. for the new media journalist, this means finding new ways to tie information together, and finding new ways to give a user (through an applet interface) the ability to control that information. a good example of this, is the superbowl tweets map (from nytimes.com) which tied the superbowls time, score and narrative, to twitter activity mapped onto the united states. tying three entirely separate bodies of information together (geography, tweets, sports scores) this superbowl map created a journalistic report that would be impossible to communicate in print, video, or audio. it is only though digital technology that this story could be told.

this is the journalism we stand on the brink of: a journalism that tells new stories by culling, correlating, and displaying information through digital media. it doesn’t replace journalism, it augments it, adding new dimensionality to the work of the journalist, and placing new tools (and challenges) before journalism. by embracing these tools, and working within digital media, journalism will discover that it is not so much changing as growing. print reporting will remain a core value without which journalism will be lost (for what would we do with copy and editorial perspective?) photography, audio, and video will remain important tools for documentation, for how else are we to communicate/preserve the experience of linear reality? no, new media journalism is not an end but a beginning, and i for one am more than ready to start reading.

• for further readings/examples of new media journalism follow my “digital journalism” and “flash” tag on delicious. i come across a lot of stuff i consider ‘new media journalism’ and have tons of examples that i didn’t touch on in this post.

here is a story about stories; with a question about whether stories are still stories and whether we are beginning to live in a post-story age.

the already cool mit media lab has founded a “center for future storytelling.” the purpose of this “labette” as the initiative is described, is to engage in studying and possibly saving the narrative.

or as the official press release states:

to revolutionize how we tell our stories, from major motion pictures to peer-to-peer multimedia sharing. By applying leading-edge technologies to make stories more interactive, improvisational and social, researchers will seek to transform audiences into active participants in the storytelling process, bridging the real and virtual worlds, and allowing everyone to make their own unique stories with user-generated content on the Web.

in the recent new york times article on the center’s founding, the proposition is posited that the narrative is danger amongst the flood of new technologies, and patterns of cultural storytelling that are disrupted by them. but of course, disruption is really re-direction, if not re-intrepretation, so while some might cry wolf and see the founding of the c.f.f.s as a sign of the academy overreaching its aims, i think that the project should actually have great implications for current, future, and past narrative-producers. not because it will develop an essentialist theory of the narrative (though there is CERTAINLY a danger that this is how the initiative will begin, or be misconstrued by the public) nor because the narrative is really in need of rescuing. rather, i think narrative studies are entirely under-represented in media & cultural research, and if our unique technological moment is indeed as seismic as has been suggested, then the inflection we stand upon needs thorough, and engaged interaction.

it’s a story i can’t wait to read.

especially if i get a chance to help write.

so. i have finally escaped the northeast united states. the last time i did that was almost two years ago, when i roadtripped down to st. petersburg, florida for the first, and last time. since then, i’ve only made it as far south as cape may, and as far west as… philadelphia.

it’s been getting kinda boring.

imagine my excitement then, at getting up friday morning and getting on a plane to go out west. by 2:15, i was hanging out in the terminal at O’Hare, and realizing while having a very bad plate of chinese food, this terminal was where cris columbus filmed the running through the airport scene in home alone 2.

another thing i noticed, was that they had a flu shot cart right in the middle of the terminal. for $35, you can get the flu injected into you in time for a flight to california.

i decided not to go through with it.

the flight to california seemed really long. i am realizing that as awesome as sitting on the aisle is (i like to stretch out and not feel scrunched) i really miss looking out the window. it got dark as we were flying into SFO, and when i looked out from the window, i thought we were going to crash into the ocean. totally forgot about the whole “bay” part of the “bay area.”

i took the very cool, very space age air train to the bart, where i got lost trying to get to berkeley, but appreciated the speed of the train, and eventually stepped out into a cold (i daresay new england) fall evening, and ran right into lucas zipp.

my brother, grady, who had taken a bus up from pomona in la, was right behind lucas. i had been told to give him a big hug from my mom, my dad, and one for myself. i gave him four hugs, in the spirit of the “and one for good luck” ideology that is central to my family.

with that, we were off to a hawaiian burger place. and to explore berkeley california. it had been 13 hours since i left boston.

in the next 24 hours, the berkman center will celebrate one web day in part by unveiling a radical new interface through which blog posts, tweets, youtube videos, flickr images, and raw urls will coexist as a dynamic bodies of information situated within a totalizing system. using tags as display criterion, users will be able to construct, deconstruct, assemble and reassemble heterogeneous media which share common tags or content types. much of this interface responds to david weinberger‘s idea of the folksonomy, outlined in everything is miscellaneous.

the individuals responsible for this interface (i balk at calling at art piece because it has such utilitarian value as not exist merely as aesthetic) are a barcelona-based technology group called bestiario. bestiario have been leading a reassessment of information aesthetics (or the aesthetics of informatics as i like to call it) and are interested in finding new ways of visualizing information so as to give users more control/insight into the interrealatedness of data.

to be perfectly frank, david weinberger is the reason that the berkman center (and i) became involved in collaborating with bestiario, and reimagining the ways in which a whole bunch of media could be creatively re-visualized. i became involved with the project, because seth young, communications guru, asked me to reconsider the berkman website and the horde of content we had from this spring’s berkman@10 conference. how should this be packaged? how should this be organized? how should this be made complete? seth asked me.

i didn’t necessarily know. but i did know that the existing system was not working. within a week at the center, i compiled a list of all the materials we had from berkman@10. there were photostreams, twitter categories, youtube videos, blog posts, official videos, wikis, delicious items, and more. the only way i had to effective corral them, was to make a masterlist of hyperlinked items, and a separate delicious feed. it feel ineffective and one-dimensional, no way to related the material meaningfully or to demonstrate the ways in which this closely related set of data actually fit together.

david weinberger found me in the kitchen one afternoon and asked what i was up to. i responded by telling him about my problem of multiplicious media, an idea i did not yet know was a bit of his specialty. he mentioned the bestiario group, and showed me the work they’d done with the TED talks. i expressed my deep enjoyment of the work, but wondered: how could bestiario manage tagged content across various media types.

to skip towards the conclusion, bestiario under the guidance of santiago ortiz, had a way of relating multiple media types. they called their 6pli system, and it worked by creating a dynamic interface of an individual’s delicious feed. other groups have played with graphic re-rendering delicious as interface, but few groups if any, have worked as hard as bestiario to make that interface totalizing. i mean totalizing in the sense that it stops being a list of links taking you out of the space, and more like a browser opening content within the space.

where the hyperlink as been the building block of web1.0, related data has become the essential part of web2.0. as a result of this progression, the need has emerged for a space where one can judged the interconnectedness of data, and simultaneously engage the individual data elements. it is a new way of seeing information, one that situates the view of the data/media within context before providing it individually. this effectively reverses the current traditions of the internet, which hide such contextualization, even on a micro scale in favor of one to one hyperlink relations.

this is the domain of the scroll, the need to move vertically up and down through information as list. but following the nomenclature of the world wide web, bestiario reimagines information as webbed rather than listed, and as a result, i believe that there “view” of data actually provides a robust new viewing scheme, that adds an intelligence previously expected of the user alone. that is, the expectation that connections are made across the arrays of informatic regimes currently used by people from google to wordpress, up/down informational organization.

the domain of the scroll is the rearticulation of print, within dynamic digitalia, a possibly unnatural carryover from print to code culture like the decorative columns are a carryover from greco-roman building into an architecture that does not need them structurally, only symbolically. in this way, we must wonder how else our digital paradigms are still contigent upon print traditions, and whether the continuation of those traditions is really necessary.

in march of last year, i was in new york for a meeting when i decided to hit the museum of modern art. the museum was hosting an exhibit called “design and the elastic mind” and i was so impressed with its content and convictions, that i began to reassess the ways in which human design influences human cognition. one of the most virulent threads woven through that exhibition was what i later called the aesthetics of information in a paper i wrote some weeks later. projects like re-wiring the spy, flight patterns, or we feel fine attempted to reassess the presence of information with new aesthetic treatments. treatments that allowed new patterns to form within the information, and patterns that revealed hidden meanings in the data.

i feel that the bestiario project, to which i have served ironically as a mediator, is a project within which the aesthetics of informatics are carried towards overthrowing the scroll/print regime in digital culture. where tags and folksonomies led to a reassessment of how information could be organized, it seems that bestiario’s interface for the berkman@10 conference might provoke a reevalution of the ways that information, data, and media are displayed in digital systems. this is not to say that it is a perfect product or that it is the future of digital structuration of information, but rather that it does something powerfully new which may yet lead to an overturning of a leaf, or the discovery of a leaf hidden in the cacophony of meaning just in front of us.

it’s time for me to come to grips with myself. it’s time for me to admit it to myself, i want to be a yuppie.

yep, that’s a right a goddamn yuppie.

i’m not talking about a moderate yuppie. i am not talking a semi or a psuedo yuppie. not someone who kinda lives in a gentrifying neighborhood, or occassionally goes to the better restaurants, or sometimes is a pretentious, looking-at-you-down-their-nose asshole.

no, i want to be the real thing. i want to be a yuppie.

boston is a great city for yuppies. there are whole enclaves where they hang out, and have breed so thick as thieves that they almost represent a 100% saturation point.

by this point, the south end is THE destination for 20 to 30 year old yuppies. i know this because i grew up watching my dad work for yuppies, and i saw the boutiques come as the bodegas went. i saw a water bar replace an age old water hole, and a dance troupe take over a seedy cyclorama.

nowadays, boston has even more proto-yuppie enclaves. places like jamaica plain (aka “jp”), somerville (once known as “slummerville”) and, of course, the mother of all yuppie-hubs, cambridge, massachusetts.

after a summer of working almost exclusively in cambridge, it has become clear to me that the first city to approve gay marriage is almost definitely yuppie eden. quiet single family homes and sweet loft apartments sit nestled on tree lined streets just blocks from the restaurants, bars, and shopping of mass ave. in harvard, kendall, porter, and central squares, cool bookstores, art stores, and chic shoe outlets sell cool back to people who feel like they are now too old and too rich to not pay for it. factor in the buzz of a booming technology industry and the vibes of intellect prevasive through the town (harvard+mit =wicked smaht people) and you got one happening hive of yuppiedom.

why i want to be a yuppie

is simple. i am attracted to the visible components of the lifestyle. things like having clothes that need to be dry cleaned, and having a go-to dry cleaner. things like having a new yorker subscription, but not cuz you read it, but because it looks yuppyish to put new yorkers all over your house

there are also a few cornerstones of the yuppie lifestyle to which i am notably committed.

1. expensive, well behaved dogs (such as this black lab)

which always operate as a sort of child-substitute. yuppies don’t get pregnant not because they’re on birth control, but because they have dogs.

2. vespa scooters/posh, efficient means of transportation

the vespa is the choice to beat, because it is stylish, a healthy amount european (which is totally yuppie) and really gay (which is SUPER yuppie).

3. the yuppie apartment,

is the keystone of the yuppie lifestyle. it must be spacious yet well designed (which is to say that it does not feel decadent but rather “informed”). it must be bold. it must assert non-american styles (see round purple rug above) which is to say, it must have avant-garde qualities (which is to say parts of it must be unimaginably ugly.)

4. my-culture-is-better-than-your-culture-framed prints

like this fellini, which begs n00bs to ask ‘what is 8 1/2? a movie or something?’ to which the yuppie responds, ‘it’s a vocation, a calling within a calling, a form of relevation in celluiod’ while thinking (i am soooo f@#$ing witty)

or this ironic, misogynistic bond poster, which i imagine would look good on a black matte, maybe a crimson one (see that style sense? yuppie-in-training here)

or this daft punk poster, which screams cool. (and all kidding aside, i would really like as a framed print. like not kidding anymore, 4real, i needs this poster)

5. the accoutrements,

which have to be referred to as accoutrements, and pronounced overly-correct in french. and by accoutrements, i mean nice stylish silverwear, and radios, and desks, and shit like that.

example given, these plates, which are expensive, and have people drawn on them (like, whoa.)

or this chess set, that has a special glass and light structure that causes pieces off the board to become opaque. (seriously though, that’s contemporary magic or latent modern alchemy at least).

in short

i want to be a yuppie. i like its materialism. and while i’ve yet to penetrate/observe its social structure. i’m sure that’s just dandy.

at the end of the day, you’re at least a pretty rich young person (isn’t that the definition, young urban professional? i.e. attractive money making single person?) so life can’t be that bad.

so people will be disgusted by this post (zack, you want to be a yuppie? that’s like saying you want to work for haliburton). and to them, i say, i just want to be a yuppie, and you are gonna love my house, and my dog, and my cool shit.

4real.

it has been an enchanting summer working at the berkman center for internet & society. everyday, i get to hang out with some of the most brilliant people on the planet. we talk, we write (emails), we blog, we laugh, we play rock band. and when things need to get done, we stay late hyped on free coffee and leftover food.

it is a distinct honor to be considered a peer among such excellent people. and i am not just talking about the fellows, staff, and faculty, though they are all outstanding. no, i mean my peers as in my fellow interns, who are almost definitely the ripening next generation of changemakers.

one of them is adam holland, a 1996 olympic rower and certified international rowing master. as an athlete, holland long ago proved his worth, but despite his olympian stature, he is kind, compassionate, and supremely brilliant. in addition to always having a clever wit about the center, adam is also a mythology and science fiction expert, and recommended that i read the player of games, my great read of the summer.

today, adam invited anyone interested from the berkman center to come down and learn to row at harvard’s 100 year old men’s boathouse. naturally, i took him up on the offer, partially because on i’ve always wanted to learn how to row, and partially because this is harvard, rowing on the charles is the very image of the made cambridge, massachusetts man.

harvard’s boathouse alone was worth the trip. built in 1900 (ish), the structure has a classic, late victorian feel. the sides of the building are lined with slate, and various porches protrude out from the building’s second floor to take in vistas of the charles or of harvard’s athletic fields on the other side of storrow drive. inside, wide bays hold dozens of rowing shells, while upstairs locker rooms and training facilities look as though they were still haunted by the ghosts of yesteryear. not to get into cliches, because the harvard boathouse is more of a icon realized that cliche manifest.

one of the other attendees, john randall, was amazed by the amount of wood used in the construction of the building. “everything is made out of wood,” he remarked.

“keep in mind it was built a hundred years ago,” adam responded.

as we walked down from the locker room, adam pointed out his singles scull. i had already seen it, and had a feeling it was his, as its name was a little… unique. the “sisyphus heureux” as i believe the boat was named, clearly nodded at the greek king who insulted the gods and was condemned to roll a boulder up a hill for the rest of his life in the underworld. heureux, means happy or content. so it seems that adam enjoys arduous, repetitive tasks… like rowing.

we took a brief tour of the building, eventually taking our first lessons on the mechanics of rowing in on the building’s ancient indoor rowing tanks. this tank, apparently added over 80 years ago, was so compellingly old school that i became absolutely in love with it, and forced a group photo in the tank to remember the afternoon.

rowing was hard, but intuitive. the sport seems to be more about developing proper mechanics and sharpening instincts that powering through the water using whatever means necessary. getting out on the water was quite relaxing, and each stroke felt remarkably powerful, i can see how one who be interested in rowing up and down the charles river, as it gives on the opportunity to reflect on everything else going on around them.

like sailing.

i had long thought then when i would first learn to row, i would be immediately disappointed that i was not sailing. because sailing would seem so much more effective. that did not happen, as rowing is SO efficient.

after rowing at the end of a string that adam held for about ten minutes, i came off the water and let some of the other guys take the practice shell out for a jaunt. it was wonderful.

on my way home, i enjoyed a glorious bike along the banks of the charles. it would have better rowing.