Writing Boots

I’ve known Mike Long for two decades and worked with him for most of that time. He’s taught speechwriting courses for the Professional Speechwriters Association while hammering away at his own prolific writing that has included two big-selling books in the last few years, The Molecule of More, which he co-wrote, and Taming the Molecule of More, which he wrote solo. We’ve broken bread and drank together and laughed a lot. We’ve agreed wholeheartedly on a lot of things and agreed to disagree on a lot of others.

This is Mike.

But only occasionally have we gone at it like we went at it one morning last week, when Mike emailed me in response to a blog post where I’d quoted a policy I liked on AI writing, from the bloggers at the Admissions office at a prestigious research university we’ll call Tech.EDU:

“Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all blogs on the Tech.EDU Admissions website are written without the use of generative AI/language models. We view the blogs as a relationship between our bloggers and you, our human readers. The bloggers show our respect for that relationship by writing in their own voice and sharing their own perspective, without being filtered or rearticulated by generative AI, so that you can get to know some Tech.EDU students for real, and share a little bit in their subjective and lived experience.”

What was the matter with that?

“If this paragraph were cow manure, one could fertilize all of America’s crops for the next century,” Mike wrote, zeroing in on “[A]ll blogs on the Tech.EDU Admissions website are written without the use of generative AI/language models. … The bloggers show our respect for that relationship by writing in their own voice….”

Wrote Mike:

Replace “without the use of generative AI” with the words below and the jagoff faux-respect pose comes clear: “All blogs are written without the use of … research. Asking around. Making a few calls. Checking with Cindy in accounting. Reading a book. Asking an expert. Asking a rando. Thinking before you write.

You get it. “Writing their own voice and sharing their own perspective” is a Tech.EDU-way of saying “without trying to add clarity and information beyond the four walls of their own head.” But wait! All those other things—research, etc—are peachy. Even asking for an editor to take a look is cool. But not asking … a machine that sorts and collects information much like a person does.

What’s the point of professional communication? To communicate clearly. There are lots of tools that help us do that. But Luddites Unlimited are scared of this one new tool.

As David Byrne put it, “Same as it ever was.”

Busy but game on a Thursday morning, I flashed back and started a conversation not at first meant for any other eyes but Mike’s—and thus referencing a lot of comments he’s made over the last few years as an ebullient-bordering-on-truculent AI enthusiast. Truc-bullient, let’s call him. I wrote:

Yeah, I don’t know how to contend with this, Mike. We differ in our thinking on this and I don’t know how to reconcile it.

The very idea of even asking AI to help me out with the name of a character in a novel I’m writing drains the life and reason out of writing for me.

When I was a journalist working on a story, “asking around” and “making a few calls” and “asking a rando” and even “reading a book” always gave me more energy and excited me more than researching on the Internet, which often drained me of curiosity and interest, even when the results were fruitful. 

And I daresay the stories I wrote that leaned heavily on the first kinds of sources were probably far more compelling than the stories that leaned heavily on the latter. 

So leaning on AI—which adds a whole layer of synthetic aggregation—I know you love it and find it stimulating.

But then, you like asking AI what you should be interested in on a drive from D.C. to Huntsville. I want to find that shit by accident and [consulting with AI] bleaches the interest from the trip.

We’re both humanists, I know. But with different instincts. And I guarantee you mine are as spiritually felt as yours.

And finally, this is the first letter to the editor you’ve sent me in a while. And I’m happy to have it. But why do you care so much about the Tech.EDU Admissions people (and my endorsement of their standards)? It sounds like you think they’re going to be bulldozed like calculator-resistors from the 1950s. Why not just wait until they’re (we’re) plowed under by you AI enthusiasts and your inevitable correctness?

(Hey, maybe I could publish a version of this exchange.)

With Mike’s permission, that’s just what I’ll do—tomorrow and Thursday, on Writing Boots.

Longtime friend Dan Danbom—once the funniest corporate speechwriter I knew, now the funniest bookstore owner I know—lost his beloved older brother Dave back in June. Here were the opening lines of his eulogy:

My name is Dan Danbom. I’m Dave’s brother.  I knew Dave for 75 years ten months, three weeks and five days, so I consider myself qualified to share some of the things I know about him.

As I thought about what to say today, it became obvious to me that Dave and I were lucky to have lived as long as we did.

I say that because as kids, we had easy access to firecrackers, knives, and BB guns.  We had peashooters. We had a water-propelled rocket. I had a bullwhip, and Dave once had a blowgun—a blowgun! We rode bikes without helmets. We took turns throwing dirt clods at each other in the summer and pelted each other with snowballs in the winter. We once nearly started a fire in our house playing with a candle. And without even wearing gloves or eye protection, we melted lead over fires we started in our backyard.

All these things we did before Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy declared them safe for children.

Sorry for your loss, Dan. Glad you’re still here, in body and—clearly—in spirit.

Dan and Dave, left to right.

Despite some of my writings lately, I am really not interested in becoming some kind of anti-youth-sports nag, you’ll be relieved to know.

But the conversations about my book Soccer Dad continue—at an upcoming appearance at the Printers Row Literary Festival in Chicago, two more in Ohio, a gathering of parents at a big suburban school district, a book club on Zoom and various long-form podcast interviews. And like it or not, I’m being asked for my philosophy about all youth sports, beyond the intimate one-family story I tell in the book.

I’m being asked by other parents: What are we doing?

An unlikely but maybe important insight came from recently rereading Women With and Without, a 42-year-old novel by my mother Carol Murray, now 36 years dead. I think one page begins to answer a question about why so many parents are willing to spend so much time and money (and sacrifice so many other ways to spend family time together) in support of so many kids whose sports talents are unlikely to get take them anywhere great.

My mother’s main character plays piano—well enough to have had a single performance at Carnegie Hall, which she considered a failure. In the book, she wonders why her parents supported her singleminded pursuit.

Is that it for some of us, travel sports parents? I mean, as much as we enjoy drinking our cocktails out of red plastic cups in the lobbies of Hampton Inns and eating at Panera Bread 100 times a year …

Is it that, while we know our kids probably won’t achieve real sports glory, and that their sporting adventures won’t begin to compensate financially or spiritually for the Total Commitment our families have made to this madness—we also can’t think of anything more exciting, fulfilling or lasting to steer them toward?

We think or we know that they’re going to end up as beauticians—or far worse, as unhappy corporate drones—and we’re so depressed by that thought, that we’re willing to spend tens of thousands on lottery tickets and moments of happy anticipation that our sports numbers might come in.

My family’s numbers did come in, with a Division I scholarship. A vast majority’s numbers don’t. Meanwhile, my wife and I actually did enjoy a lot of the experience of travel soccer, Hampton Inns and Paneras notwithstanding. And had my daughter not played college soccer, I’d still have a lot of happy memories of tournaments. As I wrote in an account of one such tournament, in Soccer Dad, when my daughter was about 13:

It isn’t long before the parents are back in the Radisson lobby, drinking again.

What are we drinking for, beyond relieving the awkwardness of meeting quirky grown-ups for the first time, none of whom will ever divulge the real reason they’re here? (Division I scholarships dance in our heads.)

We’re drinking because it’s fun to drink.

We’re drinking because it’s fun to drink in hotel lobbies.

We’re drinking because it’s fun to drink in hotel lobbies out of Solo cups.

We’re drinking because it’s fun to drink in hotel lobbies out of Solo cups with people you know you’ll only ever know casually. (It feels like college, in the dorms.)

And we’re drinking because we are all sad—and we all know we share this deep and deepening grief, though it’s rarely spoken directly—that our little girls aren’t our little girls anymore.

I wonder if we’re also drinking because we worry that, not just for us, but also for our children, growing up at this moment in America: We can’t think of anything better for them to do, or to strive for. It seems to me that some sports parents ought to take a week off the travel soccer circuit to do some more imaginative dreaming, for our kids. And the sooner the better.