Having watched the Sopranos again, from start to finish, ends with the series finale, “Made in America,” and the controversial, iconic final scene: Holsten’s. “Don’t Stop Believin’” on the juke. The rising tension as the family, Carmella, AJ, and then Meadow–struggling to parallel park–trickle in late. The lone customer, his sidelong glances, sitting at the counter and then going into the bathroom. Cut to black.

Back in 2007, I watched it the night it debuted. My oldest son had popped out of bed and came down the hall, and I picked him to lull him back to sleep and stood in the hallway, watching. When the credits rolled, my mouth was agape and I needed to talk to some adults pronto.

So… did Tony Soprano die?

This question still lingers some 13 years later. Much has been made of an interview that Chase did with TV critics Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz. Chase had conceived of Tony’s death at the hands of the New York family years prior, with Tony driving through the Lincoln Tunnel to a sit-down, and not coming back. He refers to it as “that death scene,” and Zoller Seitz nails him:

“You realise, of course, that you just referred to that as a death scene,” prompts co-author Matt Zoller Seitz. There’s a big pause, then Chase replies: “F*** you guys.”

But the scene that Chase describes has almost nothing to do with the final scene of “Made in America.” Besides the predictive value of Chase saying he had conceived of killing Tony and visualizing a scene, and the cut to black, there’s not much that ties the two scenes together.

Let’s back up for a sec: we can whack this discussion into two camps:

1. Tony died in the finale, and;
2. Tony didn’t die.

TV critics Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall co-authored The Sopranos Sessions, and in an extended excerpt on Vulture, point out a couple of observations both for an against the case that Tony died in the final episode. First, there’s a “preponderance of imagery related to death”:

• At the episode’s outset, Tony is asleep–but appears to be lying in state;
• In a prior episode, Bobby Baccala says, “You probably don’t even hear it when it happens, right?”–and then gets got in “The Blue Comet” episdoe;
• It’s cold outside at the end of the season;
• Less central to the point, but related in my mind, is the shooting of Gerry Torchiano [1]

On the other hand, Zoller Seitz and Sepinwall point out that the show has really never been cagey about anything. Yes, there are dream sequences. Yes, psychiatry is a–perhaps the–theme of the show. But as Sepinwall writes:

The Sopranos tended to keep its plot cards face up. You knew virtually everything important that was going on, not only with Tony, but with all his enemies and allies. At this moment in “Made in America,” nobody that we know of wants Tony dead. Phil is gone, Butchie made peace with New Jersey, and anyone else who might wish Tony a violent end is out of the picture.

This is the spirit in which I spent the final minutes of the show: Phil was dead, and even Butchie, who had encouraged Phil’s most murderous impulses, wandering from Little Italy only to find himself in Chinatown, backs down from going to the mattresses and even tells Tony that he can do what he needs to do regarding Phil.

Tony was able to breathe freely, if but for a time.

There is a third camp, though. It’s a path that students of the liberal arts and literature, for example, would embrace, and the philosophically minded as well. And that path? It doesn’t matter. We. Don’t. Know.

Consider this conversation with Chase and Jeremy Egner from The NY Times.

I think the point isn’t whether or not Tony was killed. It’s the uncertainty that’s the point, and the way the scene’s crazy tension makes us aware of the passage of time and how choices shape the brief bit of life we get. Most people can’t control when or how they die, but the choices are ours. Is that totally off base?

No, that’s not off base at all.

I think there’s some hope in it.

You’re the first person who’s said that. There is some hope in it. “Don’t Stop Believin’” is the name of the song, for Christ’s sake. I mean, what else can you say?

Chase wrote an expository of the direction of the final scene for the Directors Guild of America, and he avoided the issue almost entirely.

Either it ends here for Tony or some other time … I thought the possibility would go through a lot of people’s minds or maybe everybody’s mind that he was killed … Either it ends here for Tony or some other time.

Maybe knowing the answer isn’t the point. The point, in fact, is uncertainty. As James Poniewozik wrote in the Times:

But I don’t know the truth any more than you do. The ending of “The Sopranos” creates an atmosphere of tension in which Tony could die, or not. Then it leaves you without certainty; it leaves you knowing that you could die and never see it coming; it leaves you to wonder what ending you were hoping for and why.

It’s fun, yes, to discuss whether you think Tony was murdered that night, why “Don’t Stop Believin’” was on the jukebox, if the guy in the Members Only jacket was there to kill him–or not. But it’s not the point. One more quote, from Zoller Seitz in The Sopranos Sessions from the Vulture excerpt:

But what he said, specifically — and he was directing it toward everybody — was, “Whether Tony Soprano is alive or dead is not the point. To continue to search for this answer is fruitless. The final scene of The Sopranos raises a spiritual question that has no right or wrong answer.” I think the most important two words in those two sentences are “spiritual question.” And if we fixate on anything other than that, we’re missing the point.

In “Thoughts on Working from Home,” I mentioned being able to make coffee the way I want. Most days, it’s this:

Thats about 62 grams of beans and 800 grams of water, or a ratio of 13:1 water to coffee. It’s not the only way I make it, but it is the most often.

The Verge, on Microsoft Word now flagging two spaces after a period:

The software giant has started to update Microsoft Word to highlight two spaces after a period (a full stop for you Brits) as an error, and to offer a correction to one space. Microsoft recently started testing this change with the desktop version of Word, offering suggestions through the Editor capabilities of the app.

Daring Fireball’s John Gruber, delightfully pedantic on the issue:

The two-spaces thing has been a “debate” only in the way that wondering if the earth is round, or if man landed on the moon, or if you should smash up a couple of cherries and orange wedges while mixing an Old Fashioned, have ever been debates. One side has all the experts in agreement; the other side is wrong. Go look at a few professionally-typeset books — every single sentence on every page in every book has one space after the period.

Pas de Merde quotes Nate White, an Englishmen, in his response on Quora about why some British people don’t like Donald Trump:

There is never any under-layer of irony, complexity, nuance or depth. It’s all surface. Some Americans might see this as refreshingly upfront. Well, we don’t. We see it as having no inner world, no soul.

The rest is worth reading as well.

British Writer Pens The Best Description Of Trump I’ve Read – Pas De Merde

The school district for whom I work has been closed due to the coronavirus/COVID 19 since March 17th. This means that I moved to working from home.

I have always been interested in working from home. I’m very much an introvert, although I do enjoy the social exposure I get at work. I have often said that the people I work with are largely why I like working–I got enough social exposure during the day that I could recluse by night.

I remember attending a conference when I was in graduate school, and a woman I was sitting next to said that she left a job where she worked from home preparing documents (did page layout, for example) for customers–and made more money doing it. As a person who worked doing proof-reading and some page layout while in grad school, I couldn’t understand why someone who did this–and made more money than she did as a school psychologist–would give up what I considered a very desirable job.

(She had the best reason of all–she wanted to make a difference and work with kids).

So these last couple of weeks have been a different experience. Schools, if you’ve never worked for one, place a huge premium on “being there.” For students, we call it “seat time,” and you can lose credit for the school year by missing too many days, or, if you’re younger, courts can fine you for not sending your child. Absent teachers cost money in the form of substitute teachers, and there are clear instructional implications for absences, so again, attendance is a big deal. And for those of us, like me, who provide some level of supervision, being on-site and visible is the difference between being useful and not. When I left my 14-year-long job as a school psychologist for my first job in administration, an assistant principal I worked with advised: “Be visible.”

Visibility is different in this brave new world. I set up meetings via Google Meet to discuss challenges that teachers are having. Our leadership team met with direct service providers (speech therapists, for example) to discuss moving to an online service delivery model. I’ve created tutorials and screencasts to provide assistance for teachers.

Some miscellaneous observations, in no particular order or end of the good/bad spectrum:

1. I can make coffee the way I want; cup number two is no longer from a K-Cup.
2. I can read the news in bed before I get up, because (see number 3)
3. The time between “I better get up” and “I have to start working” is measured in seconds.
4. There’s food around (bringing a light lunch to the office precludes bad decision making, nutritionally speaking).
5. I don’t use my iPad very much for work, which I kind of miss; however…
6. … I get to use my desktop rig all the time now.
7. T-shirts and shorts replaced shirts and ties.
8. I can get up a little later.
9. My phone doesn’t ring.
10. Saving mad bank on gas.

Agenda’s most notable feature is the ability to pin a note to a particular date, and most notably, an event on your calendar. (It also inserts a link to the note in the calendar event, so that you can refer to the note from two places: Agenda itself, or your calendar).

An Agenda Note Link in Fantastical

In a meeting, inevitably a task or action will occur to you (or be assigned to you); I think best practice in GTD would be to add it to your task manager (OmniFocus, in my case). If you’re referring to your task manager and reviewing weekly, you won’t miss this commitment or open loop.

The one thing I’ve struggled with is taking notes in meetings and then tossing them into the digital abyss of history. It’s easy to type notes during a meeting and never look at them again. They are there if you ever need them, but a once-over can help you process anything of importance or remind you of something you might not have realized deserved your attention.

To this end, using Agenda’s “Mark New Notes as On the Agenda” preference can create a kind of digital inbox of meeting notes that you can add to your weekly review. This feature, as it says, puts any new note that you create on Agenda’s, ahem, agenda, and you can simply click on the “On the Agenda” menu item in the Overview pane.

Mark New Notes on the Agenda

My practice is to leave all new notes on the Agenda until I’ve performed a weekly review. Simple yet powerful.

This week, still on the agenda

Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger have created Rt-Covid–19, a visually rich expression of “a key measure of how fast the virus is growing”:

The metric being tracked here (Rt) represents the effective reproduction rate of the virus calculated for each locale. It lets us estimate how many secondary infections are likely to occur from a single infection in a specific area. Values over 1.0 mean we should expect more cases in that area, values under 1.0 mean we should expect fewer.

I’m not familiar with the validity of the measure, but the visualization is immediately understandable. New Jersey, my home, is on the cusp of “breaking the back of the virus,” as our governor likes to say.

Tim Nahumck echoes a great point made by Jason Snell and Myke Hurley regarding the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro:

Now that I’m working from home for the foreseeable future, I’m using the iPad Pro in a “docked” manner, where it sits off to the right in a stand connected to an external monitor; for input, I use the Logitech K780 keyboard and – new to my home office setup – a Magic Trackpad 2. In this scenario, the Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro obviously wouldn’t be used, just like my Smart Keyboard Folio sits below my monitor.

As Jason and Myke said, the Magic Keyboard isn’t for turning your iPad into a desktop workstation. If you want to use your iPad at a desk, get a stand and a keyboard (and maybe a trackpad or mouse). This beast is for turning it into a laptop.