A Teenager Down The Shore

 

 

 

When I was young, but when I had been in puberty for a few years, I was by necessity very inexperienced and yet very needy. I hardly knew what I was needy of, but of course I knew in general. What I was in need of was a girl. But not just any girl, or at least at first not just any girl. There seemed to be girls who were attracted to me, but that was not enough. I had to be attracted to them, but I also had not to be scared of them. In other words, I think I needed a good looking girl who was attracted to me but was friendly with me so I wouldn’t be frightened, nor repelled. It was a tall order.

In the summers we went down the shore, on Long Beach Island, in New Jersey, an 18 mile long skinny island just over a Causeway of maybe a mile from Manhawkin on the mainland. The Causeway – a word that was only used for this specific connection as far as I knew – consisted of three little trestle bridges and a longer bridge connecting Manahawkin to Ship Bottom via three little islands. Right off one of the bridges on one of the tiny islands was a restaurant called Dutchman’s where they served pizza with clams on it. A kind of exotic favorite, we thought.

Anyway, once you got to Ship Bottom, right in the middle of LBI, you hit a road that went end to end right down the middle of the island. if you turned right, there would be the bay – called Little Egg Harbor here – on your right, and the Atlantic ocean on your left, just over the dunes a couple of blocks away from the central road. There was enough breadth of the island there in the middle for there to be several streets parallel to the central road. Six miles down that road brought you to Beach Haven, the main town on the island, and probably the area with the most breadth. We went there in rented summer houses at first, before I was in puberty. Sometimes my mother would drop me at one of the docks on the bay side and I would fish for hours, with men standing around me. I can’t remember their talking to me, maybe some little jabber, and I can’t remember catching any fish, although I must have, I guess. The sun was comfortable, I hardly wore any clothes, and I had already tanned for the season.

Once wading in the bay I stepped on something, maybe glass, although I was sure it was a crab that bit me, I got a substantial laceration in the ball of my right foot. I was taken to Dr. Dodd’s office, a combined office and residence on the corner of a street in Beach Haven, and he stitched it up. As I remember it, the wound then became infected and I had to be taken back to Philadelphia where I was admitted to the Graduate Hospital for treatment with a new and powerful medicine, penicillin, delivered in crystalline form with injections that hurt like hell every four or six hours. My mother sat with me. She finally convinced me to stop bawling when the nurse came in with the syringe and just turn over to expose my rump, because, she told me, I’m going to get it anyway so I might as well cooperate. Imagine the nurse’s surprise when this change in behavior presented itself. I remember the look of shock on her face, and her saying, well, that’s a change! I suppose my grandmother and maybe some great aunts kept charge of my three younger siblings down at the beach house in Beach Haven while my mother was with me.

But if you turned left when you came off the Causeway, you would travel through Ship Bottom and Surf City – where Sam Alito now lives in the summer, to the everlasting shame of the island – and then through Harvey Cedars and, just before you got to the end of the island and the iconic phallic Barnegat Lighthouse, with Barnegat Bay on your left and the Atlantic ocean on your right, there was Loveladies, name for Sir Thomas Loveladies way in the past, so much in the past that no one could recite exactly how Sir Thomas’ family obtained their surname. Loveladies was at the skinny end of the island, where, after renting usually in Beach Haven and then one year in Harvey Cedars for the summer season, my parents bought a lot on the bay side and built a modern ranch style house, rather than the Cape Cod style houses elsewhere on the island, designed and built by the firm Ullman and Silvermaster, who it turned out were accused of being Soviet spies in the McCarthy era, although they were never convicted. The island was so skinny here that there was no room for roads parallel to the central road, so if you turned left you hit the bay in a couple hundred yards, and if you turned right you hit the ocean in maybe 400 yards over the dunes. My parents had the lot filled with sand that was dredged from the bottom of the bay, thus not only making the lot buildable, but also creating a deeper hole in the bay where you could have a dock with a boat and where you could swim. Then they had gravel put on top of the sand on the lot, and then a house built close to the bay with a big picture window looking out at ground level, with a new window product called Thermopane to look out from the living room onto the bay. Thermopane had two sheets of glass separated by air and it wasn’t supposed to mist up, which it usually didn’t. On the outside of the Thermopane window was a wooden deck, where you lounged on redwood furniture and from which you walked down to the bay if you wanted, and out onto the short dock that my folks had had built if you wanted, and if was winter you could walk out onto the dock and see loads of aboriginal horseshoe crabs with their metallic-appearing carapaces and ancient look scurrying about. There was a little spit of land just on the right of us jutting into the bay that had a house on it and telephone poles, where there were the hugest osprey nests, and where planes came periodically to spray DDT. The whole family marveled at the nature of LBI which we didn’t have much of back in Philadelphia.

My parents also built a black top tennis court between the house and the central road, the only tennis court on our side of the island, north of the Causeway. It must have been a landmark, because everyone on that side of the island had to drive past it all the time, but I actually never heard it referred to.

People used to stop by the house. My parents had lots of friends, mostly Jews from Philadelphia. In those days life was pretty segregated religion-wise. We four kids and my mother would be on our own during the week, while my father worked in the city. He would come down Friday night – much anticipated – and the pace of life would pick up over the weekend. There would be tennis, and the friends would come over.

Just the other day my sister Kathy recalled for us kids that periodically we would receive visits from the Bookmobile. Excitement! It was a traveling library, an RV back when they didn’t have RV’s to my knowledge, and book lover that my mother was, we were whipped into anticipatory excitement as the time approached for a Bookmobile visit. Imagine that.

So it was in this house in the summers that I first experienced puberty. It wasn’t a very insistent puberty at first, just pubic hair, and an enlarged penis, and erections. It was vague. No one said anything. I imagine I was watched. The oldest kid is always the first one to be experienced by the parents, obviously, and while it was a blessing to be the first, and in some ways therefore the most important one, it was also the one to be experimented on. So I guess they watched me.

Once my mother and father took me aside to tell me that one of the daughters of the friends, maybe her name was Stephanie, maybe, was smitten with me. I hadn’t noticed anything. My mother informed me, and my father backed her up, expressing some disgust that I hadn’t noticed anything. They told me to notice that she followed me around. Me, I didn’t feel anything about it, she wasn’t really very attractive to me although she seemed nice, and I didn’t know what to do about it, but I responded to my parents’ instructions. There was a group of us kids who usually stayed together in a group at our house or at the Finkelstein’s house and I asked this girl if she wanted to go off alone for a little, just the two of us, and she said no, and that was that.

Some years later, it must have been, a year or two anyway, other things turned up. The younger girl from next door put her hand down under my bathing suit when we were alone in one of the bedrooms of he house and felt around and said, what’s that? I was afraid to even tell her. Later on in the water out by our raft that we had all made together and that floated in the area the sand had been excavated from, she and I went to the side of the raft away from the shore and she ducked under the surface and looked between my legs and I pulled my bathing suit down as she wanted, so that she could see, but I was shy and pulled it down, but only so far.

Then one day there was Lucy. Lucy Solomon was tall and lean, with striking dark straight hair that she wore long and she was a bit distant, actually, but she was good looking and I heard my Aunt Bea tell one of her sisters that Lucy had a very nice figure, is the way she put it. She did. We kids nick-named her Looie, I don’t know why, but it was affectionate. She and I were alone in the car one day, as whoever the others were there with us were outside somewhere, and I proposed the Lucy that we make out or something. She was much more an equal than the other girls were, and she went to Baldwin School, and I think to Bryn Mawr later on, and she was smart and poised. She turned me down. She said that her mother, a very pretty lady herself, had told Lucy that once you start you can’t stop. I hadn’t heard that before. I just accepted it, although I thought that she probably wasn’t attracted to me. Good try. Lucy was not actually the daughter of her father, Irv, but as it was told to us, her mother had been married before, and Lucy was the product. I don’t know if they had actually been married, but in those days you didn’t say “a prior relationship.” I wonder what the connection was between Lucy’s origin and her mother’s advice. Many years later I heard that this beautiful woman died of breast cancer in her 30’s.

Then the next year another one of our friends, Judy Wolf, told me she had the perfect girl for me, Laurie Colwin, whose family was visiting LBI from Chicago. This one was younger, I think she was 13 and I was maybe 15, and I took her to the movies and tried to feel her up but she had hardly anything there. Her blond sister Lesley, who was maybe 16 or 17, was more interested and interesting and taught me to drive on gravel in a driveway by their rented house and told me that she hadn’t had sex with her boyfriend Steve and I intoned “good,” as though I were a judge. She shouldn’t have been teaching me just to drive. She really liked me and I really liked her. Later on, I went to the movies with Judy, who had tried to set me up, and I asked her if we could hold hands and she laughed at my awkwardness and said sure. As everyone knows, Laurie went on to become a famous writer and died unexpectedly of a heart attack at age 48 in New York.

Then the next year there was this stacked blond girl from Rahway New Jersey who had a boat over at Loveladies Harbor near the Finkelstein’s house, and who wasn’t Jewish, and I took our 15 foot Correct Craft speedboat, The BuBob, and drove over there and picked her up, and we used her lightning class sailboat to race in the bay one Sunday and we almost won but I forgot to put the centerboard down as we tacked and we lost our place out front. When the Finkelstein’s were over at our house the mother, Leah, said to me, I see you have a new girl friend. I say murmured yeah and later my mother said she could kill Leah Finkelstein for saying something like that. Maybe that was the same girl that I went to a beach party with and she said do I want to take a walk and I went with her and another guy and girl and we were in the dunes and we made out. I might have tried something more and was rebuffed. I think Leah Finkelstein had some vicarious interest, actually, which was strange, because she was rather plain, but she was lively.

Then there was that time when I was out somewhere with friends and my mother called and said Lee Brown, an old friend of my father, was visiting and he had a daughter and her friend and could they join us. How old are they, I asked, Mr. Sophisticate. My mother said with her trademark sarcasm, kind of like Eve Arden with that intonation I hated, that the girls were “the right age.” When they came over I was bowled over with how sexy these two blonds were. And they were out for boys. Joanie was the friend, and she assumed I would be with Lee’s daughter and she said, where is someone for Joanie? She told me about how great Lee was, about how she could go around the house in bra and panties, and how she could tell in her high school classroom what the teachers’ reactions were to her when they stood up and had to use their hands to straighten out their pants. I liked Joanie, although she was maybe a little scary, and didn’t understand how I hadn’t been paired with her.

This is what they are talking about when they say, if I knew then what I know now. As it was, I knew nothing, I was interested but shy, didn’t have any good models to learn from, and was constantly frustrated, I guess, and I hadn’t yet learned to masturbate – I guess I wasn’t much of an experimenter. One day on the basketball court the subject came up, somehow, and my friend Ed looked at me with disbelief and said, you ought to try it.

Now, I think that our social order doesn’t match up well with our biology. Sex is a constant item of deprivation. In other societies, at a certain age they take the boys to the whorehouse to learn, to be taught – teach him, Madelyn, says the father. There are other ways that teenagers learn. Older men and younger women sometimes get together, for sure. Are there societies where older women teach younger men? You would think one of the mothers might say, hey, would you like me to teach you a thing or two, help you get started? I was talking to a friend the other day, and he recounted how his mother tried to teach him about sex, and what a fiasco it was. Me, my mother handed me two books to read and used the word “intercourse.” One night my father told me to always use a rubber. That was kind of it, before sex ed. Our social structures and processes don’t meet our biology, still, I think.

Long Beach Island was a beautiful island that I remember fondly. We would eat lunch and take the mandatory one and a half hour postprandial rest and play board games and read. I would underline some of the words I didn’t know, knowing that the college boards would be coming up. We went to the ocean with rafts to ride the waves. We went boating and waterskiing and sailing. That’s what we talk about now. The rest of it, being a teenager, we talk about in general terms. I kept a calendar on the wall, counting down the days until I would be 16 and would be able to drive and would at last be able to be alone in a car with a girl. I must have started with 450 days to go. I think the other three kids, being younger than me, spent their puberty years away at camp. So I guess their memories are different from mine. So many girls, so little knowledge.

 

Budd Shenkin 

Voting in the California Primary, 2026

   

Yesterday, I voted. I walked down slowly to the library – my left hamstring is being so uncooperative – and then I sat down on the low brick wall next to the vote deposit box and just sat and watched. Slowly, one after another, people of no particular description walked down the street, looked for the vote deposit box and then spotted it, and with little fanfare put their voting envelope into the depository. The box is a little bit confusing. There is a slot to push your envelope in, not complicated, but for some reason just below the slot there is a one of those drawers that swivel open to take in boxes in a mailbox. Obviously, it's there for no reason – probably left over mail boxes now repurposed. So all of us south Berkeley voters put the envelope in the obvious slot, and then some of us tried to open the package drawer, which didn't open, and we had quizzical looks on our faces for a few seconds and then wandered off, job completed.

As I sat there, there was never any line, but the flow of voters was steady, some in pairs, some singles. We were all doing the same thing. Everyone had the same envelope. Everyone was very casual about it. Everyone was dressed very casually. But at the same time, we had to feel that we doing something serious.

I used to vote in person on election day, and I found some solidarity in the familiarity of going to John Muir School and signing in and filling out the ballot in one of the stations they set up there. I thought I would miss that in switching to the mail-in ballot, but I really haven't. There has been a different sort of solidarity with mail ballots. Sometimes neighbors let neighbors drop off their ballots. And this time I was one of the thread of people drifting down to the library.

When I got home, since it was a Tuesday, my housekeeping gardening couple of 30 years, Jose and Antonia, were there to greet me. Antonia is a citizen now – she's more adept with language, etc., than Jose, so he hasn't taken that final step. I asked her who she had voted for for governor. I thought she might have voted for Becerra, since they had Mexican descent in common. Antonia said that, despite the fact that she is a citizen and Jose isn't, she had relied on his advice. She said that she is always busy with family stuff and the house – they live with their daughter and her family in Oakland – and that Jose keeps up more with politics. So she said that, on Jose's advice, she had voted for San Jose mayor Matt Mahan.

I was surprised – Mahan? He was polling at about 5-7%, I think. What an interesting choice! I asked Antonia, why him? She said, I don't know, we'll have to ask Jose.

So we went out front to where Jose was doing some gentle pruning. I asked him, why had he advised Antonia to vote for Mahan? Jose was very decisive. He said that it was because of his family background. His mother had been a housewife, and his father had been a letter carrier. Jose said that he felt that with that background, Mahan would be a solid governor. Interesting! He was voting on the basis of family background, which is like voting for character. He didn't look at individual issues, etc., he wanted a good, solid man, and would trust him to make good choices.

That reminded me of my Maui Uber driver last March. He was a 63 year old Filipino man who had been in construction, and now had semi-retired. I forget how we came to talk about it, but he said that the thing that most disturbed him about Trump was the ballroom. That's the people's house, not his house!, said my driver, with some feeling. Like Jose, he had zeroed in on character, maybe a little idiosyncratically – with Trump, there is no shortage of character issues – but that is the one that stung.

What unites a country? I've always said that sports is an underrated factor. But this process of voting is really so central. We consider things separately, we vote separately, but we discuss collectively along the way, we consult public sources to get our information, and we vote collectively. Separately, but collectively. It just gives us an aura.

It's kind of funny in a way. Voting is built on competition, of people and of ideas. Voting is done by each person individually. But from this competition and this individuality comes a sense of collectivity, something we all do together. That is so important for a country – we all do it separately, but together.

Budd Shenkin

Grossie

We were living is West Philadelphia, and the story goes that my parents went to a parent teacher conference with my fourth grade teacher, Miss Ousey. (“Don't call her Miss Lousy,” my mother warned, “you'll forget some day and call her that in person!”) “He's doing very well,” she assured my parents, “definitely college material.” That was high praise in her eyes, but my parents thought, such a low bar! And with that, all of us kids were enrolled in Friends Central School, one of the numerous Quaker schools in Philadelphia, this one out on City Line Avenue, about 30 or 40 minutes away on city streets, depending on traffic, and an hour and a half for me coming home on bus to 69th Street Terminal, el (elevated subway train) to 44th Street and Market Street, and bus to home at 47th and Osage Avenue. For those who are interested in some down and dirty, the 69th Street Terminal had some temptations – mostly glazed doughnuts where kids who wanted to be down and dirty assembled, and the 46th Street station was half a block from the studios of WFIL, where American Bandstand was located in the afternoons, so I do to see the kids lined up waiting to get in. Me, I just went home. 

Going to Friends' Central in 5th grade was quite a change for me. In fourth grade at the Henry C. Lea Elementary School at 47th and Spruce, I felt as though I were king of the hill. I was the smartest kid in the class, probably the best athlete, our class's representative to student council, we played all sorts of sports in the concrete schoolyard, I had a ring of best friends, and what could be better? FCS,however, was quite another story. Whole new suburban experience, my mother claimed there was a fair amount of anti-Semitism – I imagine there was, but mostly it was a set of kids who had their friends and their social order set before I got there, and new ladders to establish order – was I the best athlete anymore, the smartest, the best card flipper, or what? And yes, there were Jewish kids and WASP kids, and there was a real difference. 

And that's where Jonathan Gross enters the picture. He was one of the Jewish kids, as his name implies, and both of us expected to be the smartest kid in the class. He had come to FCS the year before me, in 4th grade. I guess he already was the smartest. I didn't think about it much, I was more interested in competing in sports, I think. But you know what? As I look back on it now, even though it was all pretty unconscious then, and I always try to downplay it – the truth is, I've always been pretty competitive. Not overtly, maybe – it was just starting to be the age of cool in American society, but I was right in there with it early, cool, be cool. No big celebration when you scored your touchdown, just drop the ball as if that's just doing the expected. Cool. I note with great interest that now, maybe 70 years later, as I'm learning French, one of the common words in French remains “cool.” Which I think is cool as hell. 

I was probably the best athlete in the class – Bob Hall was pretty good, but as time went on, I played shorlstop, I was the best hitter, I was the best basketball player, and I played halfback in football. The first time I set foot on the touch football field in fifth grade and the PE teacher, Frank Grof, threw his pass and I grabbed it and went for a touchdown, I saw him look at me. OK, the new kid looks pretty good. So I was right where I wanted to be in sports. 

Gross sat with me in the gym at the start of 7th grade and we were choosing sports, and he tried to get me to go with him to wrestling. Jon was strong, but slow and not terribly well coordinated. I didn't want to hurt his feelings, but when the young PE part time instructors saw me dribble and shoot, they smiled with relief – Here's someone who knows how to play, they said. No wrestling for me. 

We moved to Wynnewood after four years at Friends' Central and even though we were closer now to FCSl than when we lived in West Philly, the public schools in Lower Merion were quite good, so my parents stopped paying four private tuitions, and I spent 9th grade at Ardmore Junior High before moving across the driveway to Lower Merion High (years later, this was Kobe Bryant's high school). Imagine my surprise when I found that one of my new classmates at LM was Jonathan Gross. Our class was strong, and I can't say I was the smartest, but neither was Gross, although we both contended. I remember we were in chemistry together, it must have been 11th grade, and we had a standing test like a spelling bee, and if you made a mistake you had to sit down. Jon and I were the last ones standing. Who was smarter? Hard to tell, but I think I always thought that I was. Jon was definitely math and science, but I was across the board. 

But I should also mention this. Gross and I were sure we were the smartest in our FCS class, and no doubt we were, no doubt. In 7th grade we had a new kid come into the class as we moved to the Upper School, a little kid with a big blondish pompadour, Barry Sharpless. My Dad knew Sharpless's dad since they were doctors together in Philadelphia. Their family was of Danish descent. Sharpless was smart enough, but not enough to dethrone Gross or me. He was always playing around with a chemistry set over in the corner of our classroom. Some years later in 2001, it was a shock to both Gross and me when Sharpless, then at Scripps in La Jolla in southern California, his pompadour long gone as he had gone bald, was awarded the Nobel Prize in chemistry. And we were surprised as well when he won his second Nobel Prize in chemistry in 2022. Which just goes to show you how corrupt the Nobel Prizes are, when they can't even tell who is the smartest one in the class. 

 “Known for his groundbreaking work in stereoselective reactions and click chemistry, he is one of only two scientists in history to have been awarded two Nobel Prizes in Chemistry (winning in 2001 and 2022).” 

But to get back to the main story here, after Lower Merion I went on to Harvard, and Jon went down the banks of the Charles to MIT. We saw each other sometimes – Jon was not a particularly romantic fellow, it seemed, but somehow around our junior year in college he had gotten the very pretty Sally Ann Ford, daughter of the Penn athletic director Jerry Ford, pregnant and they had gotten married. Amazing. Jon went on to get his doctorate in math and wound up professor of computer science at Columbia, and I wound up going to Harvard Medical School. Somehow, since I was much the better athlete and the better writer and general humanities student, although I had to concede he was far better at math, I thought I still had the high ground, and he probably felt the same way about himself. I really don't know. 

Here is his retirement summary from Columbia – I have to say, it's so much more impressive than anything I could claim for myself. https://www.cs.columbia.edu/2016/jonathan-gross-retires/. It's so unreasonable that I should hold myself superior in any way – yet that's the way I feel. He has really been amazing in math and as a professor. Such a devoted teacher. Or maybe it's not a competitive thing at all. I have a tendency to assume a role of a father figure. Jon is so naive in so many endearing ways. Maybe that more faithfully describes our relationship. Maybe I'm being unfair to myself. And after all, Jon had so much of a tougher time than I did with family disruption – I won't go into it, except to say that his father acted very badly toward their family, and our mutual friend John Raezer's father helped out by going over to Gross's house and threatening that if his father did some of his shit again he could come over and beat the shit out of him. I think that was the way it worked. 

Our Lower Merion class has stayed in touch over the years, especially since the onset of email, so Jon and I have stayed in touch. We now realize that we are among our oldest friends. Of course my brother and sisters are older friends to me, and Bob Levin, who was my classmate at both Lea School and Friends' Central, and maybe our mutual friend John Raezer who I actually met first in nursery school and who was president of our high school class at Lower Merion and my college roommate for four years and has remained close to both me and Jon for maybe over 70 years now. But other than that, we are each other's oldest friend. And, inevitably, competitor.

He lives just outside of Philadelphia and will soon move to Princeton in New Jersey, but he has come out here to the Bay Area a couple of times to help his daughter when she had a baby a year or two ago, and I drove down maybe twice to visit him and his lovely wife. We correspond on email and he keeps me up on his health. He has Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease, the most common inherited neuropathy, which has led to his using a walker for many years. He does very well with it, considering. 

So, a complicated relationship. Elements of collegiality, competition, nurturing, all of it. Getting older together. Remembering the past. 

And then, a couple of days ago, I got an email from Grossie, as I now call him affectionately. He said, 

Hi Budd, We are both on today’s amethyst Duolingo ladder.  I see that you’ve been addicted to Duolingo for two years more that I have.  Most of the time I’m doing Hebrew.  Sometimes I do German.  What languages do you do on Duolingo?  —Jon  

I wrote back: Budd Shenkin Mar 17, 2026, 10:02 AM      to Jonathan Grossie - I cannot believe that we turned up on the same list - with you ahead of me, naturally.  I can't believe it.  75 years later, and still at it!! Yes, indeed, we are on the same ladder this week! He is at the top, and I am at number 6. Shit! How did he do that? I can't have Gross ahead of me! Can I now? 

Budd Shenkin

The AI Threat - It's a Matter of Distribution

We are worried about AI and mass middle class unemployment. Here's the worry:

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/opinion/ai-labor-work-force-silicon-valley.html.

And well we should worry. In the end all innovations produce new jobs, just different jobs from those that were displaced. Neoliberalism, it's called, let the market take care of it. That was the thinking about open trade and offshoring – what would happen to the American workers who would be displaced? Eventually, other jobs would open up. But that's long term. “Eventually.” But without planning for the government to step in and help, affirmatively finding ways to help on the way to “eventually,” we saw a we see a lot of wasteland.

Imagine a farmer about 100 or 200 or 500 years ago. Farming is tough, morning to night, all the work of growing crops, and the other kinds of farming, ranching, working the land. Backbreaking work. I bet some of those farmers long ago thought, what if there were machines that could do this work? What if we had machines to plant, machines to water, machines to fertilize, machines to pick, etc. What if we farmers could just use those machines to do this repetitive muscular work, and we farmers could just watch and supervise the machines? Would that be a great life, or what?

And then, in time, the machines appeared. It would actually be possible for farmers to do just that, just what they wished they could do. But, the world being perverse as it is, instead of their living a relaxed life on the farm, the forces of capitalism took over, and companies owned the machines, and companies owned larger and larger amounts of the land, and the processing plants, etc. What happened to those dreamy farmers? Why, those families were displaced, and they had to find other lines of work. Their lands were more fertile than ever, the work was physically easier than ever, but the proceeds flowed to others than the dreaming farmer.

What would have been better? It would have been better if the farmers could have been cut in on the deal. It would have been better if the farmers had not been displaced, if they had some ownership of the new entities that worked the land, so that they could remain in the small towns where they lived, where they could have had more relaxed lives, where they could have pursued lives of contentment right where they came from, so that they could then find other work. If they had been cut into the deal, they could have gotten more educated, perhaps, and things would happen there in their home towns because they would have money, and where there are people with money, enterprises spring up. It's a question of how the wealth that comes from progress is distributed.

If you are coding for computers, it's not unlike the farmers. Work, work, work, and why can't machines do that? The knowledge is inside my head, can't it be operationalized in machines? Then I could relax some, let the machine do it, and I would have some free time, or the ability to do something else. The output would be the same or better, but the work put into it would be less.

But this time, it's not just the coders who are like the farmers, it's a whole lot more of society, where the jobs done can be done by AI instead. The gross product of the nation, if it is ranked in terms of good and services and not in terms of money-value assigned to those goods and services, is increased. But who benefits? It's a question of distribution.

Not everything is solved by markets and capitalism. Somehow, we have to find a way that resources (money) are distributed to people at large, not just to a small band of owners. We have to weaken that tight link between work and income. We are very bad at doing that now. Our prosperous society has a concentration of wealth at the top, and huge swaths of the nation are strapped, living paycheck to paycheck, or without a place to live, or are food insecure. We hae a severe problem of maldistribution.

That's the problem. Our floor need to be not a cold concrete basement floor, but a soft and forgiving and pleasant upstairs floor. We need a higher level of the lower floor of society. Not that it's easy to design, but so many other countries do a better job of it than we do.

We should not stop innovating. Productivity and prosperity are good. We just have to find the way to distribute our prosperity so that everyone benefits from it, so that it's not arrogated by the wealthy few. Leaving it “to the market,” making it “someone else's problem,” would be a very stupid thing to do.

Budd Shenkin

 

Tom Had To Leave Kaiser To Get Better

  

Finally, Tom Got Better When He Was Treated At Stanford, Not Kaiser

Today I talked to an old friend and season ticket partner at our annual divvy up the Giants tickets meeting. I said, “Tom, you look great! My God, is it retirement?”

He said, “I'm well for the first time in 10 years!”

“What's up with that?”

“I was sick and I didn't even know it.”

So he told me his story. Key to the story – he was a Kaiser patient. He did what he was supposed to, went to his appointments, was feeling gradually worse and worse, and they told him that his liver tests were getting worse and worse. Tom isn't particularly a drinker. They tried to adjust his life style. They didn't tell him what was wrong. Finally, Tom left Kaiser and went to be treated at Stanford. Tom said that within three days, they had gotten to records and studies done at Kaiser and done a complete workup on him, including MRIs. They found that Tom had extensive AVM's (arterio-venous malformations) in his liver, that he had the underlying condition of ameloidosis, and that he had impending heart failure. They put him on the liver transplant list and he stayed there for a year, moving up from number 265 to the 100's. It would be a while.

One day they called him in and said that they wondered if he would consent to be the first patient at Stanford, and the second in the United States, to undergo a liver transplant done completely by robotics, pioneered by the Japanese. They would be importing one of their specialists from Japan to supervise the operation.

“What's in it for me?” asked Tom.

“Well,” they said, “you would move up in the waiting list.”

“How far would I move up? “ he asked.

“You would be number one,” they said.

Well, that was a question that answered itself, of course. He consented, they moved him up, and within three weeks he had his operation. Now, a year later, he couldn't feel better – and, I would add, he couldn't look better.

Oh, yes, Stanford also discovered in the Kaiser notes that they had indeed discovered the AVM's over ten years previously, and they had in their notes that they had not informed him of what they knew.

One of the major differences between Kaiser and Stanford is how they are paid. Kaiser is a prepaid integrated network, where they get capitated patients per month, no matter what costs they incur. Stanford is paid in the traditional fee for service system. You can see the difference in their advertising. Kaiser advertises, “Thrive! We will keep you healthy!” They want well patients. Stanford, on the other hand, boasts in their advertising how adept they are in handling illnesses. “Have a bad heart? Come see us at Stanford!”

Did anyone at Kaiser really care about what happened to Tom? Not according to their notes and his course. If you are a prepaid plan, you depend on well patients, and treating sick patients costs you money. Did they decide that Tom was untreatable? Treating patients aggressively in Kaiser depends on professional ethics, since the financial incentives cut the other way. In addition, I don't believe that Kaiser has a system for organizational learning. If they make a clinical mistake, does it get fed back to the members of the organization so they can improve, and perhaps feel bad about what they missed? I don't think so.

Do they care more at Stanford? I don't know. My anecdotal evidence is that they are superbly organized for things such as knee replacements, and that they show great compassion. But anecdotal evidence is just that, not to be trusted.

It is sobering to think that Kaiser, and other prepaid integrated care systems, have been lionized for years as the serious and sober and cost-savings way to go. It's an old-fashioned construct – the efficient factory, units coming through. The latest iteration is Medicare Advantage, where plans can make money by denying care – as Kaiser did with Tom – as well as over-billing, which they specialize in. The government is actively promoting Medicare Advantage, despite evidence that it is costing them money. Private business interests, especially health insurance companies like United Healthcare, are influential and benefit from Medicare Advantage.

Tom looked great and felt better.

Budd Shenkin

The Presidential Pardon - Book Review of a MAGA-inspired book

 

A few years ago, my next door neighbor David Levine, and I were talking. We’ve been next door neighbors for umpteen years, maybe 40 or so, so we know each other pretty well. When he goes out his kitchen door and I go out our kitchen door, we each confront our trash cans. So I say we engage in a lot of trash talk.

So on this particular day I told him I had been thinking about the presidential power of the pardon, which Trump was busy abusing. I wondered if it would be a safeguard if the power were altered to require a second signature. I thought maybe it could be the Speaker of the House. It wouldn’t be perfect – today, Mike Johnson’s signature would be automatic, but back then, Nancy Pelosi’s wouldn’t have been.

So one thing led to another, I wrote the idea up for a blog post – all my major writings have for years gone to David for editing and suggestions before publishing – and then the two of us collaborated to turn it into an official legal publication. It takes a professor of law to do that! He labored mightily. The resultant paper was well received and well reviewed. https://buddshenkin.blogspot.com/2019/12/presidential-pardon-long-article-and.html.

We even got a short article in The Hill out of it. https://buddshenkin.blogspot.com/2021/01/revising-pardon-hill-article.html. Then we were contacted to do a book review on a complex and interesting book on the power of the pardon through history and literature from a professor of English and Law at Stanford, Barnadette Meyler – https://buddshenkin.blogspot.com/2021/06/theaters-of-pardonning.html. That was a really fun assignment, hard to do, but worth it.

And then, a few months ago, we were contacted again by the Society for US Intellectual History for another book review. This one was an attempt to write a primer on the power of the pardon by a law professor at the University of Virginia. The first couple of chapters were fine, but then it deteriorated terribly into MAGA-speak – and I mean horribly. The author, Saikrishna Bangalore Prakash, graduated from Stanford and Yale Law. But then he clerked for very conservative Laurence Silberman on the DC Court of Appeals as a Reagan appointee, and then Clarence Thomas on SCOTUS. Mystery solved.

We enjoyed the challenge! My tendency to call a spade a spade fought against David’s more circumspect and polite commentaries. We’re both very happy with the result. It’s pretty amazing to live in these times when MAGA-speak can show its intellectually corrupt face and hope for a judgeship, perhaps, instead of intellectual shunning, which is deserved.

It’s 1,500 words exactly. I hope you like the taste of it. Piquant.

Our editor, Audrey Clark, professor of history at the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, loved it:

Dear David and Budd,

Please find your excellent book review published and featured on the Society for US Intellectual History’s website:

https://s-usih.org/https://s-usih.org/

I will go ahead and send your review to Harvard University Press. Thank you for your terrific work for S-USIH. I hope you will write for us again soon!

All my best,

Audrey

Here it is:

https://s-usih.org/2026/03/david-i-levine-and-budd-n-shenkin-on-saikrishna-bangalore-prakashs-the-presidential-pardon-the-short-clause-with-a-long-troubled-history/.

Budd Shenkin

Life Is Unpredictable

Life is unpredictable. There are always the statistics. You do better if you exercise and don't drink to excess. You get education and you have more possibilities for employment. You drive at the speed limit. You do what you can.

But essentially, it's unpredictable. You just don't know.

Thursday night I had dinner at the house of an old friend and his wife. She is recovering. From what? Two years ago she got a call that her 53 year old son, in perfect health and with excellent life habits, was at the table when his face fell onto his plate and he was dead. My friend's wife was struck, she was just struck. Her son, her pride, a father and husband and son, just up and died. I went out to dinner with her husband, my old friend, shortly afterwards and he didn't know what to do for her. He would have done anything, but it seemed like the only thing he could do was hang in there with her, which he did. His concern must have helped. At dinner Thursday night she was doing awfully well. She is quite a good cook and a lovely woman. She told me that her younger son told her that she had to survive and do well, for the benefit of the rest of them. That was very helpful to her. She looked at me and said, you either go up or you go down, and I'm going up, I have to.

On Friday I went on a walk and then to lunch with a lady who sits with me on a board, whom I've know for maybe 15 or 20 years, but not well. She picked me up in her Ford SUV with her cute little 11 year old dog Jack and we drove out to the Lafayette Reservoir for a three mile walk around it. It was a nice, cool, sunny day and we walked easily around the lake. It was nice to have the little dog trailing right behind us with his quick little legs and big brown eyes and interest in every other dog he met.

Afterwards we went to my favorite restaurant in Lafayette, Millie's American Kitchen, a 10 table restaurant in a little house it seems like, where I know the two owners well, Victor and Aimee. I sat there with my friend, very satisfied to introduce her to the restaurant. She said, even before the food was served, that she will come back to this restaurant. A restaurant is place, people, and food, and you know when you like it. I hadn't known all her story, but we were feeling close and it was easy for her to tell it. She grew up blue collar and became a nurse and escaped from her collegiate nursing school at Binghamton to the Bay Area maybe 40 or 50 years ago. She and her husband were in tech early, in the 80's, and they did very well. They had three daughters and they arrived at their place in Tahoe one night. As they usually did, she took the kids to bed while her husband went out to the street to turn on the water. Most people turn off the water right at the house but he did it at the street. He didn't come in for a while and my friend went to look for him. It was actually a neighbor who found him, she said. He had had to dig out some snow to get to the faucet and when he did the snow bank fell on him and he suffocated. He was airlifted to Reno but it was no use.

She got married again and had another child but this marriage was a mistake and they got divorced.

Her mother lived in Florida. She had lost her second husband six months previously when my friend visited her. They went out to eat. As they usually did, they went out to eat at an Italian restaurant. Uncharacteristically, her mother ordered a Bloody Mary. Also uncharacteristically, she ordered osso bucco, which she never did. Something was different about her mother, ordering like that. The osso bucco was too much for her. She lost her breath and my friend, a nurse, went behind her and tried to do the Heimlich maneuver, but old bones are brittle, and she was unsuccessful and her mother died. My friend called her sister to tell her, and her sister said, That is just like the bitch to do that. They hadn't had a good relationship.

This sister had had trouble all her life. She was bipolar and had a very difficult life, very unhappy. She barely survived. Then she got the initial symptoms of Alzheimer's. She started being cooped up at home because she would get lost when she went out. Her life was unbearable – it has always been unbearable, but now it was more so. So finally my friend took her to just outside Basle, Switzerland, and they assisted her suicide. They made it as beautiful as they could, with a beautiful vase for her ashes, and friends.

I think people feel freer now to tell me these things since I lost my wife to Alzheimer's. Somehow, maybe they think I'll understand. Or maybe I can be there with them as a member of the club. I don't know. I really don't.

But one thing I do know. Life is just unpredictable.

My brother called me at about the same time., I think in between these two events. He's got a tough life right now, and he was unhappy when he called me. He has a fair amount to be unhappy about, I won't go into it, but I'm amazed he keeps it up, with all he has to put up with. I think it helped for us just to talk. We've known each other for 80 years.

So today is Saturday. It was nice out, but I just stayed home all day and finished the first draft of a book review that my neighbor David and I are writing together. It's a nice challenge, a new book about the presidential power of the pardon. David and I wrote a paper on that subject a few years ago, so this is the second time we've been asked to review a book on the subject. I finished the draft and passed it back to him, so I'll be able to turn back to my French assignments for this week.

We are all survivors. Not in the colloquial sense of having gone through a challenge and come out the other end intact after a challenge, congratulating ourselves for acts of will. We're just the ones left behind alive, for a while.

I had some pasta for dinner. It was pretty good.

 

Budd Shenkin