A cool footnote

Let’s go behind the scenes. Here’s how the sausage gets made.

A month ago, after encountering the earth-shattering accusation that the 19^th century official Bao Shichen had exaggerated the cargo-carrying capacity of ocean-going junks, I went to the library and borrowed William Rowe’s biography of Bao. In a footnote, Rowe referenced James Polachek’s Inner Opium War in a way that intrigued me. After some cursory research indicated that Inner Opium War was a highly regarded piece of scholarship, I decided I would have to read that work too. But I was curious: If Polachek was so great, why hadn’t I heard about him?

Some more Googling revealed that my ignorance was likely due to the fact that Polachek left academia not too long after publishing Inner Opium War and embarked on a second career in international finance. I also learned that he had suffered from bipolar disorder throughout his life and was a classically trained musician. Oh, and his dissertation adviser at Berkeley was the great Frederick Wakeman, whose wife Carolyn was my master’s thesis adviser at Berkeley’s school of journalism.

I also discovered a heartfelt note posted on Instagram from Polachek’s daughter, Caroline, a musician in her own right, memorializing her father’s death from Covid in 2020. That led me to a fabulous profile of Caroline Polachek in the New Yorker by Jia Tolentino, recounting the musician’s first live concert after the pandemic shut everything down.

By this point in my afternoon I had left all thoughts of soybean fertilizer statistics behind. When the flow is strong, one has no choice but to follow! So I started listening to Polachek on Spotify. Hmm, I thought, this sounds like music my children would enjoy, and I texted them a question as to whether they were familiar with the new-to-me artist. “LOL” my daughter replied. “Yes she’s amazing. Eli specifically is a big fan.”

I was reminded of all this again this morning, when Eli posted a snapshot of their “Spotify Wrapped” breakdown of 2023 music listening habits on Instagram. Caroline Polachek was one of their top five most-listened to artists.

Yeah, yeah, “everything is connected,” blah blah blah.

But still! That was a cool footnote. I love cool footnotes.