To the Editor:
Re “Why American Jews Still Weep for Willy Loman,” by Eric Alterman (Opinion visitor essay, April 18):
Mr. Alterman’s surprise at why he and his father cried at “Death of a Salesman” (which I’ve performed over the a long time that I’ve seen the play) solely confirms my long-held perception: that it adjustments perspective relying on the age of the viewer.
Sitting within the viewers is perhaps a younger one that wonders if that is the story of his father. What does he do for a dwelling? Will he have the ability to help us?
Beside him, his middle-aged father wonders: Will this be my destiny? Will I have the ability to maintain my job? Am I a good father? And the grandfather whispers, “There but for the grace of God go I.”
No different play, for my part, has this potential to be learn in a different way by totally different generations at the identical time. Not Shakespeare, Chekhov, Ibsen or Albee. And that is what makes “Death of a Salesman” timeless.
Mashey Bernstein
Santa Barbara, Calif.
To the Editor:
Surely you don’t should be Jewish to weep whereas seeing “Death of a Salesman.” It’s sufficient to grasp what propelled males like my father and two brothers to embrace salesmanship. Not simply as a strategy to make a dwelling but in addition — what Arthur Miller understood so nicely — as a method of life.
My father all the time instructed me, “Son, whatever you do in life, you have to sell yourself.” Which is why I by no means wished to be a salesman.
But that conviction captures the existential nature of salesmanship: Every profitable sale is an affirmation of self-worth. My elder brother particularly relished the problem of making a chilly name (calling on somebody who didn’t know him or the producers he represented) and strolling away having made a new buyer.
The draw back is that each failure might be interpreted as a failure of self. Isn’t that half of what finally led Willy Loman to take his personal life?
I’ve seen 5 Broadway productions of “Death of a Salesman,” and I do know why I cried profusely each time.
Kenneth L. Woodward
Chicago
To the Editor:
Regardless of how Arthur Miller meant to painting Willy Loman in “Death of a Salesman,” over time many ethnic teams have felt a reference to the doomed protagonist and his household. Such is the ability of the play.
Years in the past, I heard Miller converse at a Jewish neighborhood heart in Manhattan. During the Q&A interval, somebody requested whether or not audiences ought to assume that the Lomans are Jewish. Miller stated no — and famous with some amusement that when the play was staged in Boston, a native critic praised it as “an honest depiction of the Irish American experience.”
Philip Berroll
New York
A Remedy for Patients Who Use Chatbots
To the Editor:
Re “As He Warned of A.I.’s Danger, His Father Turned to Chatbots” (entrance web page, April 16):
Joe Riley’s story is devastating. It can be not uncommon. We see variations of it each week in our clinics and in our inboxes, with sufferers utilizing A.I. to interpret signs, diagnoses and therapy choices.
Clinicians hardly ever ask sufferers whether or not they’re utilizing chatbots to debate their medical circumstances. Without these conversations, we threat lacking a highly effective, typically invisible affect on affected person understanding.
We lately wrote the primary sensible information for clinicians on the right way to deal with this. The method is straightforward: Ask instantly. How do you utilize chatbots? What medical subjects are you discussing with A.I., and what’s it telling you? What adjustments have you ever made to your well being as a consequence?
But this can not stay solely in a physician’s workplace. Families must be asking too. Not as surveillance however as dialog.
The aim is to not scare folks off these instruments, as many are getting actual worth from them. The issues are isolation and silence. When a chatbot quietly turns into somebody’s most trusted adviser, and nobody in his or her life is aware of it, we lose the prospect to step in.
Ask the questions. Then maintain asking.
Nina Vasan
Saneha Borisuth
Dr. Vasan is a psychiatrist and the director of Brainstorm: The Stanford Lab for Mental Health Innovation. Ms. Borisuth is a analysis fellow at Brainstorm and a world drugs scholar at the University of Illinois College of Medicine.
