Mark Schaver

As a young reporter in North Carolina and Kentucky in the last century, I wrote a few stories about tobacco farming.

I haven’t paid much attention to tobacco farming since then so I was astonished to read a few days ago that the number of Kentucky farms growing tobacco fell from nearly 60,000 in 1992 to fewer than 1,000 in 2022—a decline of 98 percent.

North Carolina underwent a similar transformation. The number of farms growing tobacco there fell from nearly 18,000 in 1992 to 822 in 2022,, a decline of 95 percent.

A professor said this about teaching students to read:

Reading is like exercise. You have to go a little bit beyond what you’re comfortable with, a little bit more than you can really do, in order to get the benefit and to be able to do it easily later.

I’m saving it as a reminder for myself because like a lot of people, I’m finding it more difficult to read books now than I used to.

Adam Grant, a Wharton management professor and organizational psychologist, quoted in the WSJ:

Pre-AI, what was rewarded and valued and promoted was how much information you had in your head; we’re now in an environment where information is a commodity. So the differentiating skill set or capability is: Can you recognize patterns? Can you synthesize lots of disparate pieces of information? Can you figure out what perspectives are credible and which ones aren’t?

What I don’t think AI will be able to crack anytime soon is the hard work of synthesizing (information) into a compelling framework that is memorable, that rings true with human experience, that resonates emotionally, that’s sticky, that is pithy. Maybe what that means is that human creativity is changing, and that it’s much less dependent on idea generation, and much more dependent on idea selection and elaboration as the unique human skills. …

I’ve got a hypothesis that people are becoming increasingly skeptical of written information. So I actually think that the phone and the voice is an underused technology. I’m going to run a little experiment, and people that I would normally shoot an email to with some ideas, I’m just going to cold call them. I’m not going to schedule a Zoom. But I’m just going to try calling people and bouncing some ideas off of them, and see both if what I learn is different, and also if the bond we form is different. Really simple could be really fruitful.

A friend shared this flier he received at his home last week. It links to a website, StopDSAUSA.com, offering similar deep thinking about politics today. For whatever reason, the author isn’t willing to put their name behind their ideas.

It’s good to know there are only two sides to choose from.

I didn’t expect my mother’s death to immediately follow my retirement, but it did.

I am the executor of her estate, so her death will delay my plans to jump into writing again.

Today is my last day with the U.S. State Department.

I turned 65 this month. That’s the mandatory retirement age for foreign service officers.

I haven’t written much publicly since 2014, when I left the Kentucky Center for Investigative Reporting and moved from Louisville, Kentucky to Washington to become a diplomat.

Now that I’m retired, I’m going to do some writing here. About what, I’m not entirely sure, although it will certainly include journalism and diplomacy.