Despite everything that’s going on in our country and in the world, we have much to be thankful for, and I hope you do, too. Best wishes to all of you, and thank you for reading.
Category: Miscellany
How to improve your Airpods listening experience if your hearing isn’t what it used to be
If you love to listen to music and your hearing isn’t what it used to be, especially on the high end, I have a life hack for you. I have moderate hearing loss in both ears, and before you start in on me, yes, I listened to very loud music occasionally when I was young, and was in a band, but every older member of my family had significant hearing loss. So in my case it’s more genetic than environmental.
Sign up for free email delivery of Media Nation — and become a supporter for just $6 a month.
The two loudest concerts I ever attended, by the way, were John McLaughlin and Carlos Santana at the Music Hall (now the Boch Center) in 1973 and Miles Davis’ comeback concert at Kix Disco in 1981, where we had the misfortune of being parked directly in front of a speaker column. In both cases I felt the after-effects for days. (You can hear Miles’ great show from that night, mixed in with some material from New York and Tokyo, at a comfortably lower volume on the album “We Want Miles.”)
Anyway, last fall I got hearing aids, and it’s been a life-changer. Immediately I could hear what my students were saying without having to run around the classroom to get closer to them (I told myself it helped me appear energetic), and I could hear my colleagues at faculty meetings (a mixed blessing; just kidding!). When listening to music live, through a Bluetooth speaker or in my car, I’ll adjust the EQ on my hearing aids to boost the bass and turn down the treble, which as best as I can tell approximates what it ought to be for a person with normal hearing.
I can also listen to music directly through my hearing aids, but that proved to be a non-starter. They’re fine for a phone call, but for anything more than that the sound is tinny. Worse, there’s no noise cancellation. So what to do?
I have a pair of Apple Airpods Pro 2, which I love, and so I would remove my hearing aids and use the Airpods. But now that I had a better basis for comparing the sound to what it should be, I discovered that the Airpods were muddy and bassy, even if I chose “Treble Booster” in the EQ. They would OK for podcasts, but audio quality was a disappointment. Theoretically I could wear good-quality headphones over my hearing aids, but that didn’t seem like a smart solution. For one thing, I’d have to buy headphones, and I had my Airpods sitting right there.
So at the suggestion of some Facebook friends, I started exploring the hearing aid option on my Airpods. Problem solved. Here’s what you do if you use an iPhone: Go into the Bluetooth settings and tap on the circled “i” for information next to your Airpods. Choose “Take a Hearing Test.” I took the test, but you also have the option of entering the results from your most recent hearing test. The graph turned out to be pretty much the same as from my last real test.
After you’ve done that, enter “Hearing Assistance” and make sure that “Hearing Aid,” “Media Assist” and “Adjust Music and Video” are all toggled on. You can do the same with “Adjust Calls and FaceTime” if you like. (See the image.)
It turned out to be transformative, as I was hearing music with a brightness and clarity I hadn’t experienced in a very long time. One of the first things I did was listen to the Beatles’ “Abbey Road” all the way through while I was on a walk, with noise cancellation on. I chose “Abbey Road” because I knew it was exceptionally well produced, and I was blown away by the clarity. I’ll tell you, those boys could play! Podcasts sound much better, too.
A couple of weeks ago I listened to Duke Ellington’s first sacred concert and loved it — but it was muddy. Now I can’t wait to listen to it again.
A new biography of John Hancock calls to mind Bill Fowler’s vivid ‘The Baron of Beacon Hill’
John Hancock, better known for his signature than for his accomplishments, is the subject of a new biography, reviewed by Ted Widmer in The New York Times.
“John Hancock: First to Sign, First to Invest in America’s Independence,” by Willard Sterne Randall, is, according to Widmer’s encapsulation, the story of “an 18th-century American who seemed preordained to follow the path of his father and grandfather into the ministry, but then swerved in another direction when his father died and a wealthy uncle offered to adopt him.”
Sounds interesting, but I wish Widmer had mentioned an earlier Hancock biography — “The Baron of Beacon Hill,” published in 1980 by my friend Bill Fowler. I read it as soon as it came out, so I can’t say I remember much about it 45 years later except that it was dauntingly well researched and a great read.
William M. Fowler Jr. was one of my favorite professors at Northeastern in the 1970s and was the inspiration for my deciding to get a master’s degree in American history at Boston University. My master’s thesis, “The Boston Massacre and the Press,” came straight out of my love for Colonial New England that Bill had sparked.
There was (and is) a group of journalism students from the mid- to late ’70s who were all members of the Bill Fowler Admiration Society. We took as many classes as we could with him, and we got him to write a column called “Bygone Boston” for the Northeastern News, as the student newspaper was then known (it’s now the independent Huntington News); he wrote a similar column for MetroNorth Magazine, a short-lived venture that I published in 1989 and ’90.
Bill is still doing well. The last time I saw him was about a year ago at the opening of the revamped Archival Center at Northeastern’s Snell Library. Unfortunately, he couldn’t attend a recent alumni reunion we held a few weeks ago because he was on a long-planned vacation.
I could not find any direct evidence that Randall cites “The Baron of Beacon Hill,” although I did find some indirect hints. I wasn’t going to spend $15 on the Kindle version to find out, but at some point I’ll be sure to look. In the meantime, I recommend Fowler’s earlier biography. According to Amazon, the hardcover can be yours for just $286.80.
A long and frustrating ride home on the new, (mostly) improved MBTA
The MBTA is a miracle most of the time. Just the other day I was telling friends who used to live here how much better it’s gotten under general manager Phil Eng. Then there was today.
I had no trouble getting to BU for a conference. But when I left a few minutes after 6, the fun began. The Green Line car I was on stopped moving almost immediately. We were told there had been some sort of emergency, and that we needed to to get out and take a shuttle bus. We walked to the bus stop, and no one could tell us whether a shuttle was showing up or not. A Boston police officer who was there saw someone in a T maintenance truck. He ran over to the guy (in 93-degree heat), came back, and told us the shuttles were leaving from Kenmore Square.
So I walked to Kenmore, broiling the whole way. At this point a large crowd had gathered to take the shuttle. The T workers who were there weren’t sure what was going on. Finally, we were told that we should get back on the Green Line to Arlington Station and pick up the shuttle there.
I got off at Copley and walked to the Orange Line, which proved to be a smart move. I got to North Station in time to take the commuter rail home. A trip that should have taken an hour or less had taken two hours, but it could have been worse.
Things happen. What upset me was the lack of communication and no accommodations for riders who had already paid. Everything should have just been opened, as it sometimes is in such circumstances. Instead, we all paid over and over whenever we switched lines.
Very poor performance today.
At 50 hours, the audio version of Chernow’s Grant biography is scarcely shorter than the Civil War
I gave quite a bit of thought to whether I wanted to spend 50 hours with the audio version of Ron Chernow’s 2017 biography of Ulysses S. Grant before deciding to take the plunge. I knew I was unlikely to find the time to read all 1,074 pages, and I wanted to know more about Grant and his era.
So I started it in mid-October during a drive to Portland, Maine, and kept at it an hour at a time, mainly on walks. I finished on New Year’s Day, and I’m here to report that it took longer for Grant to die than it did Joan of Arc during her interminable burning at the stake in “The Passion of Joan of Arc,” a 1928 silent film that we saw a few years ago accompanied by music written and performed brilliantly by a group of Berklee students.
I had previously listened to Chernow’s biography of Alexander Hamilton, which, at 36 hours, was a romp by comparison. I don’t regret the time I spent getting to know Grant; Chernow is an eloquent writer and a skilled researcher, and, as I had hoped, I came away much more knowledgeable about his life and times.
But the level of detail about every trivial occurrence, and the repetitiveness about topics such as Grant’s alcoholism, military genius and ineptitude when not on the battlefield gets to be enervating after a while. As Janet Maslin wrote in The New York Times: “Chernow likes extreme research; if a Civil War luminary had hemorrhoids, you can read about them here.”
I find that I absorb information from an audiobook about as well as I do from print, but since I’m not taking notes, I can’t really go back and offer much in the way of detail. More than anything, though, what stood out was Grant’s dedication to Black equality. In Chernow’s telling, Grant and Abraham Lincoln were the foremost white advocates of civil rights until Lyndon Johnson. Grant eagerly made use of Black troops during the Civil War, pushed for an expansive approach to Reconstruction, and, as president, dispatched the military to the South to break the Ku Klux Klan.
Thus it’s more than a little disconcerting to come to the end of Grant’s presidency in 1877, when Northern support for Reconstruction was waning, and learn that he believed the Civil War — which claimed an estimated 750,000 lives — had all been for naught. It’s hard to disagree, as slavery in the South morphed into Jim Crow and lynchings, a reign of terror that extended into the 1960s and whose legacy has still not been entirely put behind us.
Media notes
• Unpacking New Orleans and Las Vegas. Around this time Thursday, authorities were reportedly investigating whether the terrorist in New Orleans had accomplices and if the Las Vegas Cybertruck explosion might somehow be tied in. Then, too, Donald Trump was parroting a false report from Fox News that the New Orleans attacker had driven across the border from Mexico. Today, we know that none of it was true. As the “Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook” from the public radio program “On the Media” puts it: “In the immediate aftermath, news outlets will get it wrong” and “There’s almost never a second shooter” — or, in this case, a second attacker.
• A challenge to the AP. Reuters and Gannett are planning to offer some sort of subscription-based service to regional and local news publishers, according to Axios media reporter Sara Fischer, marking the next step in a partnership that began last spring. This is potentially bad news for The Associated Press, which has been losing customers because of its high prices. But it’s not clear how the arrangement will work. Reuters is a high-quality source of national and international news. Gannett, which publishes USA Today and owns some 200 local news outlets, is notorious for slashing its newsrooms and cutting their reporting capacity.
• Why local news matters. The Los Angeles Times has lost some 20,000 subscribers since owner Patrick Soon-Shiong killed his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris and began embracing various Trump-friendly ideas, according to media reporter Oliver Darcy. Not good — but far fewer than the 250,000 who canceled their Washington Post subscriptions over owner Jeff Bezos’ similar moves. The LA Times was starting from a smaller base, but there’s an additional factor that may be at play.
Under Bezos’ ownership, the Post reinvented itself as a nationally focused digital publication — making it relatively easy to cancel, since there are plenty of other sources of national and international news, starting with the Post’s ancient rival, The New York Times. By contrast, the LA Times is primarily a regional publication, not unlike The Boston Globe. Canceling the LA Times would mean losing access to important local and regional stories that no one else has.
Happy New Year!
Happy New Year, everyone! Our family faced some challenges in 2024, and but we overcame them, and here we are. Nationally, we all know what’s coming. The best we can do is persevere and work for change in whatever ways we’re able. I hope that you all have a healthy and prosperous 2025.
Happy Thanksgiving!
On this Thanksgiving, I’m thankful for my family, my friends, my community and my good health. I wish all of you the blessings of the day.
A Taste of West Medford
Music, food and beer — what more could you want? Sponsored by the Medford Chamber of Commerce.
Bright thoughts on a dark day
It’s snowing. We’re stuck in the house. And there are two and a half more months of winter left. So I thought I’d offer a little bit of hope today.
I recently learned that the earliest sunset of the year, 4:11 p.m., takes place on Dec. 7, even though the days keep getting shorter until Dec. 21, the first day of winter. Today is Jan. 7, and sunset will be at 4:27. That’s a 16-minute improvement — and you may have noticed recently that there’s at least some daylight now up until 5.
On Feb. 7, sunset will be at 5:05, and on March 7 it will be 5:44. And then, blessedly, the clocks move ahead once again. On March 10, sunset will be at 6:45.
Do you use Venmo? Then do this right away.
Now here’s some news you can use. If you’ve been forced to use Venmo, you may be sharing far more personal information than you realized. I knew they had turned off the public feed a couple of years ago (whoever thought that was a good idea?), but I didn’t know that was just the tip of the iceberg. Brian X. Chen explains in The New York Times.
If you can’t get past the Times paywall, don’t be concerned. The steps you need to take are simple. On Venmo, choose “Me” (lower right) on the home screen, then settings (the gear thingie in the upper right). Choose “Privacy,” then select “Private.” Scroll down to “Friends List” and set that to “Private” as well. Finally, turn off “Appear in other users’ friends lists.” That’s it.
Update: I forgot to mention that you should also go to “Past Transactions” and choose “Change All to Private.”