Flashes of Panic

If Mark Will-Weber is to be believed, some time in the 70s Duncan MacDonald, a contemporary of Don Kardong at Stanford, was congratulated after a race by a fan who then asked, “I see you on television and I read about you in the papers. How do you do it?”

MacDonald answered, “I don’t watch television and I don’t read the papers.” Whether he meant it in modesty or irritation isn’t clear.

I feel a bit like that about graduate school, except a stellar grad school performance isn’t likely to get me on any television broadcasts. My weakness tends to be the newspapers, although I need to broaden that category to include “any non-academic reading in any format whatever.”