Day 85, Wednesday May 29, 2024: Chicago, Illinois to Starved Rock Nature Preserve, Illinois
- Mark Carl Rom
- May 29
- 6 min read
Carnegie libraries visited: Indiana Harbor (also known as Grand Boulevard Carnegie Library), East Chicago, Indiana; Plano, Marseilles, LaSalle, and Spring Valley, Illinois
Days sober: 342
Every time that I spend a night with friends or family, it gets a little harder to get back on the road. I’m sure a pinch of travel fatigue has set in, although I was glad to see the New York Times Wirecutter article today “I Hate Sleeping in a Tent. So I Turned My Car Into a Cozy Camping Haven.” Kathy and Howard didn’t exactly shove me out the door at sunrise, and it was nice to have a leisurely breakfast with them before giving and receiving the warmest of goodbye hugs.
I’ve become more proactive in my travels, writing in advance the libraries for which I have teaser information about the women important to their history. Most often, I don’t hear back. That’s understandable, because who has time to answer a random email from an unknown person who is not local and yet who is putting additional work on my desk. Nonetheless, I shall persist. Maybe.
My route today is a modest 150 miles moving southwest from Chicago to Utica through fields of soybeans and corn. As I prefer, most of my travel will be on state highways, free from the rattle and hum of the Interstates. Before I leave Chicago, I drive by a few more libraries – the Water Works, Little Italy, and East Chicago Baring Branch Carnegie. The Water Works branch is a Lilliputian castle towered over by skyscrapers; the library in Little Italy is a stair-stepping glass box topped by red panels
The Grand Boulevard Carnegie Library in East Chicago, Indiana looks like, well, a Carnegie library. That it looks like this is good fortune. The library was abandoned in 1983 and the interior was sacked by Visigoth raiders and local scavengers. Even as a skeleton, it was placed on the National Historic Register in 2005 and it has since been restored.
Like so many Carnegies, the Plano library’s original entrance faces a park, with access to the front door blocked by shrubs. The newer front is on what once was the back. It is still majestic, while it is also wheelchair accessible, making the library more truly free and accessible for all. The LaSalle Carnegie has had a similar architectural evolution, although the front steps still beckon those who seek knowledge.
I want to give the Charles B. Phillips Memorial Library in Newark a hug, it’s so cute. An addition to the diminutive brick library is a sunroom with windows all around. Marseilles had no library of any kind when it approached Carnegie in 1904 and, with a swift concurrence, its own Carnegie was opened in the very next year.
The gold-as-waves-of-grain trim of Spring Valley Carnegie posed for me with the Spring Valley water tower looking over its shoulder. They remind me of how important public infrastructure is to our common lives. Public infrastructure includes water towers, roads, and sewers – essential services, we might all agree – and also parks, libraries, and sidewalks, goods that may not be necessary for daily life and yet are, I believe, essential for a good life. We can enjoy the former from the privacy of our homes and cars, while the latter are likely to connect us to our friends, our neighbors, and those in our community we might not otherwise associate with. We neglect those elements of infrastructure at the risk of isolation and loneliness, the slow unwinding of our connection to the common good.
If you are following the news these days (well, you are, aren’t you?) you can’t help but find a roiling torrent of articles about artificial intelligence (AI), some of which may have been written by AI itself (themselves?). I had long sought to use emerging technologies in my classrooms. So far as I know, I was the first professor at Georgetown to convert classes into websites, using WordPress. At various times I have given my students options (or requirements) to write blogs, produce videos, and make their own websites for course credit. At the first opportunity, I brought instant voting technology into the classroom so that I could poll (anonymously) students on both factual content, to discover whether they understood the material, and on their opinions, so that they could see how they compared to their classmates. I introduced a course on data visualization, for which I had to learn computer coding. So, yeah, I’m all about using technology appropriately in the classroom.
I was not ready for the AI revolution, however, and I just didn’t want to have to deal with it (reason #7 for retiring). For my policy ethics classes, for example, I would have the students write pro and con memos in which they recommended that some policy be accepted and also rejected. The purpose of this assignment was for my students to consider the moral dimensions of policy choices from differing perspectives. I tried to choose emerging or unusual policies, so that my students would not already have strong moral preconceptions.
This assignment, as I had structured it, is obsolete. I wanted to test what would happen if a student used AI to write (or just draft) their memos, so I instructed ChatGPT “Write a 750 word essay giving three reasons why gender-affirming health care should be legal for minors without their parents’ consent” and boom! in just seconds AI produced a pretty decent essay. I gave ChatGPT several other prompts, and it invariably produced solid responses. Now, agile teachers will be able to figure out how to use AI to advance their educational goals. I no longer felt so agile.
I could use AI to help me write this manuscript. I won’t do that, even though it would probably save me a good deal of time if I did. It’s more important to me that the text reflect genuine effort on my part than it be written efficiently. I want it to be genuine, not fast.
I remember reading an article about fine whiskey that described how much of an art it is. It requires carefully tending ingredients carefully chosen and prepared over many years. The article went on to say that scientists can now precisely identify the chemical compounds contained in the final, sublime, product and so, in principle, they could create overnight in a lab that which might take twenty years in a cask. Whiskey created this way would be vastly cheaper than that produced in the traditional way.
The question thus arises: Which would you rather drink? If the only thing you care about is the taste, the answer is obvious: the cheap chemlab created concoction. The expensive stuff – the real whiskey – would be drunk by the wealthy and the snobbish, or by those for whom authenticity is the most important value.
I have attended several conferences – fortunately, not academic ones – sponsored by the Liberty Fund. These conferences brought a diverse group of intellectuals who were given a common set of readings to discuss over a couple of days. One such conference focused on a book – I can’t remember the name; it was something like Better Than Normal, though not the one featured on Amazon – that raised questions about whether drugs that do not treat diseases but make us, well, better than normal should be legal. The example I remember concerned a medication that would provide orgasmic bliss without effort. Imagine a drug that gives you the exact same feeling that you get when you finally reach the summit, though without the arduous hike to get there. The discussion was intense and thoughtful. Yes, the drug would allow those who literally cannot make that hike, for reasons of physical limitations, to experience the ecstasy of summiting. No, as it cheapens the experience and is likely to produce a public hooked on drug-induced pleasures. I can see merit to both perspectives, and would hope, were such a drug to be invented, to see a policy that would legalize it and still discourage its use for purely recreational purposes.
When I arrived in Spring Valley, I wasn’t ready to settle in for the night, and I didn’t want to work anymore, so I drove out to Starved Rock Nature Preserve. The pictures I saw online were better than the views from Goldfinger. I should have gotten out and hiked along one of its trails.
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