Greetings from the University of New Hampshire! Wow - it’s strange and wonderful to have students back in town. UNH sent all the students home at Thanksgiving in the fall, and they only returned last week - so we didn’t have a significant presence of college students in town for almost the normal length of summer break. I’d kind of gotten used to it, so it was a jolt when they all showed up again. Durham almost doubles in population when UNH is in session, so it’s a noticeable change. I like the cycle. It’s great when the students come back after a long break because it injects life into the town. And it’s great at the end of a semester when they go away, because there is a sense of peace. But I like the change - it’s like the seasons.
Speaking of seasons, we got slammed with about 10 inches of snow on the second day of school. Thanks to COVID, everyone is used to online learning, so instead of canceling class, I just told the students we would do online for that day. Classes went off without a hitch.
Also on the topic of cycles, my wife and I started dieting after the New Year. We are doing basic calorie counting and we’re strict about it Sunday-Friday. But on Saturdays we indulge. So Saturday morning breakfasts have become A Thing. Today I made cheese-filled crepes with homemade blueberry sauce (blueberries from our garden last summer). Eating crepes brings us back to our 25th anniversary trip to Paris a few summers ago, so they are kind of special and romantic in this time of plague. I’ve found knowing there is a cheat day coming allows me to stay on track the other six days of the week. So far I’ve lost about five pounds. It’s not a dramatic weight loss like I had when I did the Food Desert or $3 diets, but I feel like it’s sustainable. We’ll see.
Stay well and stay safe!
Read
What: Aeon, What does it mean to consider yourself a disabled person?
https://aeon.co/essays/what-does-it-mean-to-consider-yourself-a-disabled-person
Why: This is a well-written exploration of what it means to be disabled. Although I have spent most of my adult life working in healthcare, I had spent most of it in the military health system with limited exposure to anything but acute care, and most of that with a relatively young, healthy population. Since coming to UNH, I’ve spent a lot of time with long-term care organizations, and learned about working with disability from my colleagues in occupational therapy, speech disorders, and other departments, as well as my work with Northeast Passage and the Krempels Center. This article is hard to summarize, and I don’t agree with all of the author’s assertions but it is interesting. If you haven’t thought a lot about what it means to be disabled, take a few minutes to read this.
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What: City Journal, Remotely Competitive
https://www.city-journal.org/cities-betting-big-on-remote-work-trend
Why: As I noted in the intro, I’m not going to have snow days mess up my syllabus anymore. I’m just going to tell the students I’ll see them on Zoom, and they won’t bat an eye. COVID has shifted our sense of place and space by necessity. A close friend is an executive with a large bank and his bank has sent almost everyone home a year ago, and he has told me it’s clear that they are not going to bring everyone back. There are large expenses the bank is avoiding, and by having remote workers, they can recruit from a pool of talent that is not geographically restricted. And workers mostly like it.
Even if in the end the share of workers’ jobs that shift to permanently remote is small, I think there will be a disproportionate effect on smaller communities. Small communities don’t have a lot of capacity to absorb large influxes of people. There are currently two houses for sale in all of Durham. Of course more houses would be built, but getting even a small increase in new residents can have large changes on the feel of a town and its economics.
On the flips side, shifts to remote work will disproportionately affect cities and suburbs. It’s an interesting question how this will all play out. When a growing share of the population won’t have to choose where they live based on where they work, will be see rural communities that have been draining population for decades (the North Country of New Hampshire and much of Maine, for example) see that trend reverse? Will new residents bring economic growth back that disappeared when the mills and factories closed? We’ll see.
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Watch
What:David Lee Roth tells the story behind the "no brown M&Ms" legend (6 min)
Why: I was talking about the value of trade in my economics class, and I used the example of preferences and M&Ms. The example was what if two people had three M&Ms - one each red, blue, and green. Imagine further that the first person only eats blue M&Ms and has no interest in the other colors. Assume the second person is indifferent between the colors (because they actually taste the same, regardless). So the first person could trade his red and green M&Ms to the second person, and the second person could give the first person her blue M&M. The first person would be twice as well off as before, and the second person would be ⅓ better off. Win-win. But this naturally led me to talk about Van Halen and it’s contract for no brown M&Ms. This is such a great story about contract verification, enforcement, and incomplete knowledge. I’m pretty sure I’ve shared this link before, but it was a long time ago. So I’m going to share it again because I went back and watched it, and it still makes me laugh.
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Listen
What: Planet Money, Can't Stop GameStop
https://www.npr.org/2021/01/25/960454567/cant-stop-gamestop
Why: You probably heard some variation of the Wall Street Bets - GameStop short squeeze story this week. If you don’t know what a short is, let alone a short squeeze, this Planet Money episode does a great job explaining shorting stocks, how shorts can turn into a crazy, zooming opportunity to make obscene amounts of money, and why shorting should be allowed. Great educational piece if you teach anything about finance.
Thanks for reading and see you next week! If you come across any interesting stories, won't you send them my way? I'd love to hear what you think of these suggestions, and I'd love to get suggestions from you. Feel free to drop me a line at mark.bonica@unh.edu , or you can tweet to me at @mbonica .
If you’re looking for a searchable archive, you can see my draft folder here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1jwGLdjsb1WKtgH_2C-_3VvrYCtqLplFO?usp=sharing
Finally, if you find these links interesting, won’t you tell a friend? They can subscribe here: https://markbonica.substack.com/welcome
See you next Friday!
Mark
Mark J. Bonica, Ph.D., MBA, MS
Assistant Professor
Department of Health Management and Policy
University of New Hampshire
(603) 862-0598
mark.bonica@unh.edu
Health Leader Forge Podcast: http://healthleaderforge.org
'It is the small things, everyday deeds of ordinary folk, that keep the darkness at bay. Simple acts of kindness and love.' - Gandalf (The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey)