While my family has been in the loop all along, most of you probably don’t know that I’ve accepted a new position, this one at MIT. I’ll be the new Communications Manager for the Comparative Media Studies program and the Center for Future Civic Media.
It’s a big step in the right direction—lots more web and design work with a larger group of people, including undergrad and graduate students—but it’s about as easy leaving Tufts as it was leaving Houghton Mifflin, i.e., not very. Both set me up for seizing really good opportunities, and that is, after all, why I’m leaving for MIT now.
My last day at Tufts is August 22nd, so I’m keeping myself under the gun to finish a revamped website for the Feinstein Center before then. I start right back up at MIT on Monday the 25th.
And while I’m really excited to focus on web-based work, I will miss getting to edit and design lovely reports like this:
I’ll tell you what, it’s great to have a normal Friday morning. I’ve been back at work for a few weeks now, and I didn’t realize how much I missed hopping on the bus, stopping off at Dunkin Donuts (just about cried my first day back when the women at the Boston Ave. Dunkin Donuts saw me and remembered my regular order after I’d been away four months), and settling back in to all my projects.
One of my favorite moments that first day back was checking my voicemail and having a message from my printer’s rep, a natural salesmen who never lets on that he might actually have other customers. Every time he calls or stops by, we spend ten minutes catching up, usually by talking about the Sox, and then only at the end he asks, “Is there anything else we can do for you? Do you want to talk about timing for any publications you have coming up?” Salesman can get a rap, sometimes deserved, for disingenuous bonhomie—I saw plenty of it in the publishing industry, I mean, I’ve been to sales meetings where they train you in it. But in the voicemail, he wished me the best, having heard about my health issues from my boss, and he never mentioned business. When he stopped by two weeks ago, it was the same, right up until I told him that my fiancee was just about to start a new job at the big public TV station here in Boston. It was the first time he’d ever mentioned another client. “That’s great,” he said. “They’re one of our biggest customers. Give me her name—she’ll get a discount on everything.” He didn’t make her that promise because he’s trying to keep her organization’s business. He said it because she and I would be so touched by such a personal favor that we’d tell dozens of people about it. He’s a salesman and a humanist.
Anyway, work’s been great. I added code to our website that allows Google Analytics to track downloads, which was an essential improvement because most of our work is distributed as PDFs. I caught up on every old email, every site update, every outstanding promotional plan (like getting our RSS feeds added to Reuters AlertNet. . . the contract for that was the last thing I was working on before going out of the office in July). And H.R. has been more than understanding about my few remaining doctor’s appointments (most of which are an hour away by T at the Brigham), not to mention how supportive the rest of my office has been. It’s strange to say, but their actions have given me a dozen reasons to stay here forever, and those same reasons—in the context of having been ill, wanting to follow my office’s example, and knowing I want to do for my family what my family has done for me—get me thinking about some next step.
I managed to take a number of pictures at the Boston Marathon on Monday, of which my favorite by far is this one. Yes, that’s a marathoner; and, yes, that a Miller Lite.
A hearty congratulations to Courtney and the rest of the Tufts Presidential Challenge team.
Tomorrow folks will be hanging out with Jonathan Foer in Allston. I’ll just link to the info since it seems they don’t want a terribly large crowd. Thanks to the Weekly Dig for hosting.
First, go Tufts Boston Marathon team! Today is the greatest day of the year in Boston—half the city has the day off work for Patriots Day, the Red Sox play an 11am game (4-4, end of the sixth, the offense is starting to come around), and someone you know is running the Boston Marathon.
I’m about to head down to Copley to the finish line but wanted to give a quick plug to the top-flight April issue of the Believer. The evaluation of Susan Sontag obituaries—many of them snide, prejudiced, and generally unusually critical—offered a fantastic look into how America deals with its female intellectuals (the short version: not all our smart women are as self-effacing as, say, guy’s gal Doris Kearns Goodwin, and even she didn’t get cut the slack David McCullogh did after their footnoting blow-ups).
The Believer also published a partial transcript of Adam Curtis’ The Power of Nightmares, a documentary that traces the power of ideas—and the persons they’re connected through. The transcript comes from the first episode, which traces the song “Baby It’s Cold Outside” straight on through to 9/11—and it actually makes a bit of sense, scarily enough.
And as always, kudos to the Believer for producing the most distinctive and lovely design in literary journalism.
