Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 510

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Pride and Prejudice," by Jane Austen.

Mrs. Hurst sang with her sister, and while they were thus employed, Elizabeth could not help observing, as she turned over some music books that lay on the instrument, how frequently Mr. Darcy's eyes were fixed on her. She hardly knew how to suppose that she could be an object of admiration to so great man; and yet that he should look at her because he disliked her was still more strange. She could only imagine however, at last, that she drew his notice because there was a something about her more wrong and reprehensible, according to his ideas of right, than in any other person present. The supposition did not pain her. She liked him too little to care for his approbation.

"I dare say you will find him very agreeable."

"Heaven forbid! That would be the greatest misfortune of all! To find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate! Do not wish me such an evil."

"I remember hearing you once say, Mr. Darcy, that you hardly ever forgave, that your resentment once created was unappeasable. You are very cautious, I suppose, as to its being created."

"I am," said he, with a firm voice.

"And never allow yourself to be blinded by prejudice?"

"I hope not."

"It is particularly incumbent on those who never change their opinion, to be secure of judging properly at first."

"Let me thank you again and again, in the name of all my family, for that generous compassion which induced you to take so much trouble, and bear so many mortifications, for the sake of discovering them."

"If you will thank me," he replied, "let it be for yourself alone. That the wish of giving happiness to you might add force to the other inducements which led me on, I shall not attempt to deny. But your family owe me nothing. Much as I respect them, I believe I thought only of you."

Elizabeth was too much embarrassed to say a word. After a short pause, her companion added, "You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged, but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever."

Elizabeth, feeling all the more than common awkwardness and anxiety of his situation, now forced herself to speak; and immediately, though not very fluently, gave him to understand that her sentiments had undergone so material a change, since the period to which he alluded, as to make her receive with gratitude and pleasure his present assurances. The happiness which this reply produced, was such as he had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do. Had Elizabeth been able to encounter his eye, she might have seen how well the expression of heartfelt delight, diffused over his face, became him; but, though she could not look, she could listen, and he told her of feelings, which, in proving of what importance she was to him, made his affection every moment more valuable.

“I have been a selfish being all my life, in practice, though not in principle. As a child I was taught what was right, but I was not taught to correct my temper. I was given good principles, but left to follow them in pride and conceit. Unfortunately an only son (for many years an only child), I was spoilt by my parents, who, though good themselves (my father, particularly, all that was benevolent and amiable), allowed, encouraged, almost taught me to be selfish and overbearing; to care for none beyond my own family circle; to think meanly of all the rest of the world; to wish at least to think meanly of their sense and worth compared with my own. Such I was, from eight to eight and twenty; and such I might still have been but for you, dearest, loveliest Elizabeth! What do I not owe you! You taught me a lesson, hard indeed at first, but most advantageous. By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You showed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.”

Elizabeth's spirits soon rising to playfulness again, she wanted Mr. Darcy to account for his having ever fallen in love with her. "How could you begin?" said she. "I can comprehend your going on charmingly, when you had once made a beginning; but what could set you off in the first place?"

"I cannot fix on the hour, or the spot, or the look, or the words, which laid the foundation. It is too long ago. I was in the middle before I knew that I had begun."

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 509

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Gabriel Garcia Marquez: The Last Interview and Other Conversations."

One Hundred Years of Solitude was, as a perceptive critic once said, like a brick through a window. It let in the real life of the street, the noises and colors and sensations, and presented magical events—a trail of blood flowing across town and into a house, careful to avoid staining the rug; flowers from heaven—so straightforwardly they seem believable. Suddenly all the stories in Latin America were written in its shadow. Solitude was the most famous novel in the world, and perhaps the last (leaving aside the rather extra-literary case of The Satanic Verses) to have a demonstrable effect on it.

MENDOZA: You always have yellow flowers in your house. What significance do they have? 

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Nothing awful can happen to me if there are yellow flowers around. To be absolutely safe, I need yellow flowers (preferably yellow roses) and to be surrounded by women. 

MENDOZA: Mercedes always puts a rose on your desk. 

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: Always. What’s happened quite a few times is that I’m trying to work and not getting anywhere, nothing’s going right, I’m throwing away page after page. Then I look at the flower vase and find the reason … no rose. I shout for a flower, they bring it, and everything starts coming out right.

STREITFELD: I liked one other quote from The Paris Review article, where you told the writers who had long sentences that you had to use “breathing commas.” 

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: My idea of a literary text is actual hypnotism. It’s very important that the rhythm does not have any stops and starts, because when you have a stop or a start, the reader can escape. There are too many other books waiting. Any hurdle and the reader will go pick up something else. Commas may seem like a grammatical sign, but I use them for respiratory purposes. The reader must not wake up.

STREITFELD: There is a stamp in Colombia with your face on it. 

GARCÍA MÁRQUEZ: I hope it’s only used for love letters.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "One Hundred Years of Solitude," by Gabriel García Márquez.

“This is madness, Aurelito,” he exclaimed. 

“Not madness,” Aureliano said. “War. And don’t call me Aurelito anymore. Now I’m Colonel Aureliano Buendía.”

Pietro Crespi exhausted all manner of pleas. He went through incredible extremes of humiliation. He wept one whole afternoon in Úrsula’s lap and she would have sold her soul in order to comfort him. On rainy nights he could be seen prowling about the house with an umbrella, waiting for a light in Amaranta’s bedroom. He was never better dressed than at that time. His august head of a tormented emperor had acquired a strange air of grandeur. He begged Amaranta’s friends, the ones who sewed with her on the porch, to try to persuade her. He neglected his business. He would spend the day in the rear of the store writing wild notes, which he would send to Amaranta with flower petals and dried butterflies, and which she would return unopened. He would shut himself up for hours on end to play the zither. One night he sang. Macondo woke up in a kind of angelic stupor that was caused by a zither that deserved more than this world and a voice that led one to believe that no other person on earth could feel such love. Pietro Crespi then saw the lights go on in every window in town except that of Amaranta. On November second, All Souls’ Day, his brother opened the store and found all the lamps lighted, all the music boxes opened, and all the clocks striking an interminable hour, and in the midst of that mad concert he found Pietro Crespi at the desk in the rear with his wrists cut by a razor and his hands thrust into a basin of benzoin.

On the eve of the execution, disobeying the orders not to bother him, Úrsula visited him in his bedroom. Encased in black, invested with a rare solemnity, she stood during the three minutes of the interview. “I know that you’re going to shoot Gerineldo,” she said calmly, “and that I can’t do anything to stop it. But I give you one warning: as soon as I see his body I swear to you by the bones of my father and mother, by the memory of José Arcadio Buendía, I swear to you before God that I will drag you out from wherever you’re hiding and kill you with my own two hands.”

The truth was that Úrsula resisted growing old even when she had already lost count of her age and she was a bother on all sides as she tried to meddle in everything and as she annoyed strangers with her questions as to whether they had left a plaster Saint Joseph to be kept until the rains were over during the days of the war. No one knew exactly when she had begun to lose her sight. Even in her later years, when she could no longer get out of bed, it seemed that she was simply defeated by decrepitude, but no one discovered that she was blind. She had noticed it before the birth of José Arcadio. At first she thought it was a matter of a passing debility and she secretly took marrow syrup and put honey on her eyes, but quite soon she began to realize that she was irrevocably sinking into the darkness, to a point where she never had a clear notion of the invention of the electric light, for when they put in the first bulbs she was only able to perceive the glow. She did not tell anyone about it because it would have been a public recognition of her uselessness. She concentrated on a silent schooling in the distances of things and people’s voices, so that she would still be able to see with her memory what the shadows of her cataracts no longer allowed her to. Later on she was to discover the unforeseen help of odors, which were defined in the shadows with a strength that was much more convincing than that of bulk and color, and which saved her finally from the shame of admitting defeat. In the darkness of the room she was able to thread a needle and sew a buttonhole and she knew when the milk was about to boil. She knew with so much certainty the location of everything that she herself forgot that she was blind at times. On one occasion Fernanda had the whole house upset because she had lost her wedding ring, and Úrsula found it on a shelf in the children’s bedroom. Quite simply, while the others were going carelessly all about, she watched them with her four senses so that they never took her by surprise, and after some time she discovered that every member of the family, without realizing it, repeated the same path every day, the same actions, and almost repeated the same words at the same hour. Only when they deviated from meticulous routine did they run the risk of losing something. So when she heard Fernanda all upset because she had lost her ring, Úrsula remembered that the only thing different that she had done that day was to put the mattresses out in the sun because Meme had found a bedbug the night before. Since the children had been present at the fumigation, Úrsula figured that Fernanda had put the ring in the only place where they could not reach it: the shelf. Fernanda, on the other hand, looked for it in vain along the paths of her everyday itinerary without knowing that the search for lost things is hindered by routine habits and that is why it is so difficult to find them.

When Did We Last Walk a Mile in Someone Else's Shoes

 

I was lucky to be invited by a work colleague of mine to a meet-and-greet with state representatives last month. Both were Republicans representing districts in or adjacent to big cities, one in western Pennsylvania near Pittsburgh and one in Northeast Philadelphia. Given how divisive things have become in politics, at a national and state and local level, someone asked during Q&A just what does it look like to work across the aisle to get things done for the state. Both politicians gave answers along the lines of making it a point to physically go to different parts of the state to meet people, for what better way to see and understand concerns at the human level so that they can use their political power to do something about it. 

It's a good answer, but one that is harder to actually than to just say. Hat tip to these two electeds for practicing what they preach, as I know they log a lot of miles, oftentimes away from their loved ones and their own constituents, in order to see firsthand what is happening all throughout the diverse communities that make up the state of Pennsylvania. 

Now, not all of us are elected officials charged with the wellbeing of an entire state. But, to the extent that we are both politically informed and want to make a difference in our generation, I think the same invitation to “walk a mile in my shoes” applies. It is all too common for all of us to lament that things don’t get done, that politics has become so toxic, and that the other side just doesn’t get it. But very few of us get to truly enclave ourselves among those just like us with no need to influence or be influenced by others not like us. 

Of course we may try. Where we live, where we bring our kids to play, and who we hang out with on Saturday night may feel like a comfort zone of others who think like us and share the same complaints and aspirations as we do. But the thing about our modern political system is that there’s no escaping the fact that everything that makes up our lives is influenced by political bodies that consist of people we voted for and people we didn’t vote for. Philadelphia, as blue a city as they come, is within the United States, whose president is the Republican candidate Donald Trump. Rural Pennsylvanians may not have any concentrations of Democrats for miles and miles, but their wellbeing is influenced in part by how well our largely blue metro areas are doing in industry and health care (and those largely blue metro areas, in turn, are depending on the reddest parts of this state for things essential to life, like energy and food). 

But here I’m speaking about relatively complicated things, which not all of us have bandwidth to weigh, like economic development policy and tax mix and immigration reform. More simply, how often have we truly walked a mile in the shoes of those whose political positions are diametrically different than ours? If you are a city mouse, would you not want country mice to see that our urban areas are not cesspools of crime and corruption but rather cathedrals of commerce and culture? If you are a country mouse, would you not want city mice to see what a more rural existence looks like, to better understand what your concerns are and why you hold them? 

I assume I am speaking to a more metro than rural audience, but let’s start with those country mice. When was the last time you spend more than 24 hours in a city, and really walked amongst its streets without getting into a car or holing up in a hotel room? If it's been a while, yet you hold negative opinions of such places informed by media or friends, how is that fair?

Now let me address the city mice. Tell me, when was the last time you hunted or fished or farmed or done any number of activities far from tall buildings and cell towers? Maybe it's been a while? Maybe never? Maybe not only never but "oh god I would never"? If so, how can you possibly claim to know or care about those different from you?

We are the fulfillment of our own worst fears of a divided society and the stalemate that causes in getting important stuff done, because we refuse to go to places different from what we’re used to. Kudos to the two state representatives I met last month. Sure, it’s partly their job to travel the state. But they were the first to say not all of their colleagues on both sides of the aisle share that commitment. Let’s hope more of them, and more of us, are more willing.

A Nation of Process, A Nation of Action

 

 

A central point of the controversial book, “Abundance,” by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, is that the modern Democratic Party has become the party of process rather than the party of action. As avowed left-leaning thought leaders, Klein and Thompson lament that Democrats are the ones who want government to do things for people and communities, and yet when Democrats are in power too often they block rather than stoke progress. 

I don’t agree with everything in their book, but I do see this dynamic play out at a national level with the actions of the occupant of the White House and the media response to those actions. Donald Trump is a divisive figure in many ways, of course, from his bombastic image to his reckless comments to his vindictive ways. But one way he is engendering both applause and condemnation is by flouting process and taking action. For example. the East Wing renovation project and the military capture of the president of Venezuela come to mind as recent events that provoked both horror and celebration that process was subordinated to action.

Some of this must come from his being uncontrollably impulsive and massively egotistical. But I suspect some of this comes from the fact that the majority of America prefers action over process. I can’t quite say if this has always been the case or if it is a more recent phenomenon borne of Democratic inaction at all levels. Either way, I find it utterly predictable and potentially catastrophic. 

We are absolutely, as a young nation that is now about to turn 250, a nation of action. Restless, churning, ambitious action has characterized our country since its inception. We announced our independence from and then fought a war against the then greatest nation in the world, led the planet through both an industrial revolution and then a technological one, and for better or worse have thrown our military weight around in every corner of the globe. It is not surprising that the citizens of such a republic would want their elected leaders to “get sh*t done,” not debate policies and hold committee meetings. 

However, and this is a big “however.” We are also a nation of process. “Checks and balances” is a cheat code for reining in man’s worst impulses and fostering political stability. There are many instances throughout history in which power has been vested in one person and that person is able to make war and seize property and subjugate entire communities. Americans hate that kind of political form. Process is a dear value deeply embedded in our DNA. 

“Process” and “action” can go together but often come in conflict. China is responsible for massive human rights violations AND its centralized form of government allows it to build out infrastructure to link and power a vast country. California is a leader in progressive policies designed to protect equality and the environment, but it has not been able to build a single mile of high-speed rail in over a generation. 

I am as horrified at a government that is all process, no action as one that is all action, no process. But I am not surprised when we have the former type and some are happy and others aren’t, nor am I surprised when we have the latter type and some are happy and others aren’t. What I wonder about is if we can find it in our republic to hold our leaders to account to run a government that respects process and compels action. That is, I think, what we truly want. It is when we are not offered it, and instead only offered one extreme or the other, that we differ in what we prefer. Right now, Donald Trump is deeply unpopular with some and quite popular with others, and I think that is the reason for that.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence," by Michael Pollan.

I filed that story away, until a year or two later, when Judith and I found ourselves at a dinner party at a big house in the Berkeley Hills, seated at a long table with a dozen or so people, when a woman at the far end of the table began talking about her acid trips. She looked to be about my age and, I learned, was a prominent psychologist. I was engrossed in a different conversation at the time, but as soon as the phonemes L-S-D drifted down to my end of the table, I couldn’t help but cup my ear (literally) and try to tune in. 

At first, I assumed she was dredging up some well-polished anecdote from her college days. Not the case. It soon became clear that the acid trip in question had taken place only days or weeks before, and in fact was one of her first. The assembled eyebrows rose. She and her husband, a retired software engineer, had found the occasional use of LSD both intellectually stimulating and of value to their work. Specifically, the psychologist felt that LSD gave her insight into how young children perceive the world. Kids’ perceptions are not mediated by expectations and conventions in the been-there, done-that way that adult perception is; as adults, she explained, our minds don’t simply take in the world as it is so much as they make educated guesses about it. Relying on these guesses, which are based on past experience, saves the mind time and energy, as when, say, it’s trying to figure out what that fractal pattern of green dots in its visual field might be. (The leaves on a tree, probably.) LSD appears to disable such conventionalized, shorthand modes of perception and, by doing so, restores a childlike immediacy, and sense of wonder, to our experience of reality, as if we were seeing everything for the first time. (Leaves!) 

I piped up to ask if she had any plans to write about these ideas, which riveted everyone at the table. She laughed and gave me a look that I took to say, How naive can you be? LSD is a schedule I substance, meaning the government regards it as a drug of abuse with no accepted medical use. Surely it would be foolhardy for someone in her position to suggest, in print, that psychedelics might have anything to contribute to philosophy or psychology—that they might actually be a valuable tool for exploring the mysteries of human consciousness. Serious research into psychedelics had been more or less purged from the university fifty years ago, soon after Timothy Leary’s Harvard Psilocybin Project crashed and burned in 1963. Not even Berkeley, it seemed, was ready to go there again, at least not yet.

On occasion, the LSD produced genuine insight, as it did for Brand himself one chilly afternoon in the spring of 1966. Bored, he went up onto the roof of his building in North Beach and took a hundred micrograms of acid—Fadiman’s creativity dose. As he looked toward downtown while wrapped in a blanket, it appeared that the streets lined with buildings were not quite parallel. This must be due to the curvature of Earth, Brand decided. It occurred to him that when we think of Earth as flat, as we usually do, we assume it is infinite, and we treat its resources that way. “The relationship to infinity is to use it up,” he thought, “but a round earth was a finite spaceship you had to manage carefully.” At least that’s how it appeared to him that afternoon, “from three stories and one hundred mikes up.” 

It would change everything if he could convey this to people! But how? He flashed on the space program and wondered, “Why haven’t we seen a picture of the earth from space? I become fixed on this, on how to get this photo that would revolutionize our understanding of our place in the universe. I know, I’ll make a button! But what should it say? ‘Let’s have a photo of the earth from space.’ No, it needs to be a question, and maybe a little paranoid—draw on that American resource. ‘Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?’” 

Brand came down from his roof and launched a campaign that eventually reached the halls of Congress and NASA. Who knows if it was the direct result of Brand’s campaign, but two years later, in 1968, the Apollo astronauts turned their cameras around and gave us the first photograph of Earth from the moon, and Stewart Brand gave us the first edition of the Whole Earth Catalog. Did everything change? The case could be made that it had.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams," by Matthew Walker.

Through speech or song, expecting parents will often thrill at their ability to elicit small kicks and movements from their in utero child. Though you should never tell them this, the baby is most likely fast asleep. Prior to birth, a human infant will spend almost all of its time in a sleep-like state, much of which resembles the REM-sleep state. The sleeping fetus is therefore unaware of its parents’ performative machinations. Any co-occurring arm flicks and leg bops that the mother feels from her baby are most likely to be the consequence of random bursts of brain activity that typify REM sleep. 

Adults do not—or at least should not—throw out similar nighttime kicks and movements, since they are held back by the body-paralyzing mechanism of REM sleep. But in utero, the immature fetus’s brain has yet to construct the REM-sleep muscle-inhibiting system adults have in place. Other deep centers of the fetus brain have, however, already been glued in place, including those that generate sleep. Indeed, by the end of the second trimester of development (approximately week 23 of pregnancy), the vast majority of the neural dials and switches required to produce NREM and REM sleep have been sculpted out and wired up. As a result of this mismatch, the fetus brain still generates formidable motor commands during REM sleep, except there is no paralysis to hold them back. Without restraint, those commands are freely translated into frenetic body movements, felt by the mother as acrobatic kicks and featherweight punches. 

At this stage of in utero development, most of the time is spent in sleep. The twenty-four-hour period contains a mishmash of approximately six hours of NREM sleep, six hours of REM sleep, and twelve hours of an intermediary sleep state that we cannot confidently say is REM or NREM sleep, but certainly is not full wakefulness. It is only when the fetus enters the final trimester that the glimmers of real wakefulness emerge. Far less than you would probably imagine, though—just two to three hours of each day are spent awake in the womb.

Perhaps more remarkable, as we analyzed the sleep-spindle bursts of activity, we observed a strikingly reliable loop of electrical current pulsing throughout the brain that repeated every 100 to 200 milliseconds. The pulses kept weaving a path back and forth between the hippocampus, with its short-term, limited storage space, and the far larger, long-term storage site of the cortex (analogous to a large-memory hard drive).II In that moment, we had just become privy to an electrical transaction occurring in the quiet secrecy of sleep: one that was shifting fact-based memories from the temporary storage depot (the hippocampus) to a long-term secure vault (the cortex). In doing so, sleep had delightfully cleared out the hippocampus, replenishing this short-term information repository with plentiful free space. Participants awoke with a refreshed capacity to absorb new information within the hippocampus, having relocated yesterday’s imprinted experiences to a more permanent safe hold. The learning of new facts could begin again, anew, the following day.

I went on to test participants inside a brain scanner after they had slept, and could see how this delightful skill benefit had been achieved. Sleep had again transferred the memories, but the results were different from that for textbook-like memory. Rather than a transfer from short- to long-term memory required for saving facts, the motor memories had been shifted over to brain circuits that operate below the level of consciousness. As a result, those skill actions were now instinctual habits. They flowed out of the body with ease, rather than feeling effortful and deliberate. Which is to say that sleep helped the brain automate the movement routines, making them second nature—effortless—precisely the goal of many an Olympic coach when perfecting the skills of their elite athletes.

I therefore wondered whether the brain during REM sleep was reprocessing upsetting memory experiences and themes in this neurochemically calm (low noradrenaline), “safe” dreaming brain environment. Is the REM-sleep dreaming state a perfectly designed nocturnal soothing balm—one that removes the emotional sharp edges of our daily lives? It seemed so from everything neurobiology and neurophysiology was telling us (me). If so, we should awake feeling better about distressing events of the day(s) prior. This was the theory of overnight therapy. It postulated that the process of REM-sleep dreaming accomplishes two critical goals: (1) sleeping to remember the details of those valuable, salient experiences, integrating them with existing knowledge and putting them into autobiographical perspective, yet (2) sleeping to forget, or dissolve, the visceral, painful emotional charge that had previously been wrapped around those memories. If true, it would suggest that the dream state supports a form of introspective life review, to therapeutic ends.

The giant insurance company Aetna, which has almost fifty thousand employees, has instituted the option of bonuses for getting more sleep, based on verified sleep-tracker data. As Aetna chairman and CEO Mark Bertolini described, “Being present in the workplace and making better decisions has a lot to do with our business fundamentals.” He further noted, “You can’t be prepared if you’re half asleep.” If workers string together twenty seven-hour nights of sleep or more in a row, they receive a twenty-five-dollar-per-night bonus, for a (capped) total of five hundred dollars. 

Some may scoff at Bertolini’s incentive system, but developing a new business culture that takes care of the entire life cycle of an employee, night and day, is as economically prudent as it is compassionate. Bertolini seems to know that the net company benefit of a well-slept employee is considerable. The return on the sleep investment in terms of productivity, creativity, work enthusiasm, energy, efficiency—not to mention happiness, leading to people wanting to work at your institution, and stay—is undeniable. Bertolini’s empirically justified wisdom overrides misconceptions about grinding down employees with sixteen- to eighteen-hour workdays, burning them out in a model of disposability and declining productivity, littered with sick days, all the while triggering low morale and high turnover rates.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard," by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

Usually these topics are treated separately—there is “change management” advice for executives and “self-help” advice for individuals and “change the world” advice for activists. That’s a shame, because all change efforts have something in common: For anything to change, someone has to start acting differently.

To pursue bright spots is to ask the question “What’s working, and how can we do more of it?” Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet, in the real world, this obvious question is almost never asked. Instead, the question we ask is more problem focused: “What’s broken, and how do we fix it?”

If you are a manager, ask yourself: “What is the ratio of the time I spend solving problems to the time I spend scaling successes?” 

We need to switch from archaeological problem solving to bright-spot evangelizing.

When you’re at the beginning, don’t obsess about the middle, because the middle is going to look different once you get there. Just look for a strong beginning and a strong ending and get moving.

The growth mindset, then, is a buffer against defeatism. It reframes failure as a natural part of the change process. And that’s critical, because people will persevere only if they perceive falling down as learning rather than as failing.

Perhaps her most distinctive change, though, was to the grading system. Under her new system the only grades offered at Jefferson County High School were: A, B, C, and NY. 

Not Yet. 

In Howard’s view, the students at Jefferson had accepted a “culture of failure.” In a fixed-mindset way, they acted as though they were failures to the bone. Students often didn’t do their homework, or they turned in shoddy work. Getting a D or an F was an easy way out in a way. They might get a poor grade, but at least they would be done. 

In the new system, the students couldn’t stop until they’d cleared the bar. “We define up front to the kids what’s an A, B, and C,” said Howard. “If they do substandard work, the teacher will say, ‘Not Yet.’ … That gives them the mindset: My teacher thinks I can do better. It changes their expectations.” 

The school was reborn. Students and teachers became more engaged, the school’s graduation rate increased dramatically, and student test scores went up so much that remedial courses were eliminated. In 2008, the National Association of Secondary School Principals declared Howard the U.S. Principal of the Year, out of 48,000 candidates.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law," by Mary Roach

With a predatory attack, the survival strategy is the opposite. The rare predatory bear attack begins quietly, with focused intent. Counter to common assumption, it’s more often a black bear than a grizzly. (Though with both species, predatory attacks are rare.) The bear may be following at a distance, circling around, disappearing and reappearing. If a bear starts to charge with its ears laid flat, you’re the one who needs to look scary. Open your jacket to make yourself look larger. If you’re in a group, get together and yell, so you look like one big, loud creature. “Try to give the message, ‘I am not going to give up without a fight.’ ” Aaron says. “Stomp your feet, throw rocks.” 

The same holds true for an attacking cougar. Take inspiration from the Kansas pioneer N. C. Fancher, who in the spring of 1871 noticed a cougar eyeing him as he stood inspecting a buffalo skeleton. As recounted in Pioneer History of Kansas, Fancher shoved his feet inside the dead buffalo’s horns, banged its femurs over his head while jumping up and down, and “bellowed desperately.” The cougar, and really who wouldn’t, took off. 

And if the animal goes ahead and attacks anyway? “Do whatever you can to fight back,” Aaron says. If it’s a bear, go for the face. Aaron points in the direction of his nose, a red chapped thing. “Don’t play dead.” If you play dead at that point, there’s a good chance you shortly won’t be playing. 

The worst thing you can do in any situation where a predator seems bent on attack is to turn and run. This is especially true with a carnivorous hunter like a cougar, because running (or mountain-biking) away triggers the predator-prey response. It’s like a switch, and once it’s flipped on, it stays on for a surprisingly long time unless a kill is made.

Deaths, when they happen, tend to occur in the half hour or more it takes for the squad to arrive. Upon discovering elephants raiding their crops, villagers rush out of their homes, yelling, throwing stones, lighting torches and firecrackers.† A village may have freelance “elephant chasers” wielding spikes and carrying out other non–Best Practices. Bulls and dominant matriarchs may charge in defense, and normally placid females and calves may panic and stampede. In the dark of unlit fields and paddies, people stumble and fall and elephants are running blind and, as my mother liked to say, somebody’s going to get hurt. 

“The elephant we can guide easily,” says Officer Raj. “To guide the people is the hard part. They are not in the condition to listen.” They’re upset, and that is understandable. Village farmers work hard and have little to show for it. A single Asian elephant may consume three hundred pounds of vegetation in a day. Between the raiding and the trampling, a small herd can quickly torpedo a season’s labor and livelihood. An elephant among the crops is a powerful impetus to unwise action. 

Throw in the wobbly judgment and dimmed impulse control of inebriation, and the results can be dire, Naha says. He squats in front of a speaker, untangling a spaghetti heap of wires. “This is what we see. A group of people are drunk. Someone wants to be the hero, so he goes in front of the animal, harasses it, and that animal in self-defense …” Naha, too, avoids the verb kill, with its undertone of intent. “There is an accident.” By his own data, 36 percent of the people killed by elephants in North Bengal between 2006 and 2016 were drunk. Later, I would see this head-line in the Hindustan Times: “Drunken Man Challenges Elephants’ Herd, Trampled to Death in Jharkhand.” (Jharkhand borders West Bengal.) “He tried to fight with them,” a forest ranger told the reporter. “Them” was eighteen elephants. 

Dangerously, an elephant also enjoys a snort. In North Bengal, elephants drink what the villagers drink: haaria, a home brew fermented and stored in quantities sufficient to inebriate an elephant. (Because elephants lack the main enzyme that breaks down ethanol, it takes less than you’d think.) According to Officer Raj, two things happen when elephants liquor up. Most just stumble away from the herd and sleep it off. But every herd seems to have an aggressive drunk—the matriarch, often, or a bull in musth. Whatever you do in this life, stay away from an inebriated bull elephant in musth.

Shweta points out that people’s ire is for the government as much as for the leopards. If there were school buses, children wouldn’t have to walk two miles at dusk, when the risk of a leopard attack is greatest. If there were hospitals and ambulances, an attack might not mean a life lost. But there are not. A leopard is an expedient outlet for their anger. 

Naha has held awareness camps at many of these villages. He encourages parents to have their children walk home from school in groups. He tries to discourage people from dragging their dead livestock onto the road for the vultures, because the carcasses also attract leopards. Attitudes and behavior change slowly in a small village like this. Twenty years ago, Naha recalls, there were cases of Pauri women being nabbed by leopards as they squatted in the brush to relieve themselves at night. Indoor toilets were eventually built, but people wouldn’t use them at first. “Slowly they are understanding it’s okay to shit indoors.”

Such is the inside-out history of conservation in America. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the word came to mean what it means to us now. Wildlife and wilderness weren’t conserved for their intrinsic value. They were conserved for hunting and fishing. Mighty tracts of wilderness were protected from agricultural and other development to ensure there would always be places and things to hunt and fish. And the ducks were protected from the crows.

Least—or most fleetingly—effective is the stationary predator decoy. The internet abounds with photographs of pigeons roosting on great horned owl replicas and Canada geese relaxing in the shade of fiberglass coyotes. The classic cornfield scarecrow may actually attract birds, because they start to associate it with food. To a flock of migrating blackbirds, it’s the golden arches on the side of the highway, the Bob’s Big Boy sign, a reason to pull off for a large, fattening meal.

Drive Has Always Been the Difference

 

 

 

 

Last month Google announced “Learn Your Way,” which they state will revolutionize the educational experience by providing you with content in different forms that suit your preferred learning style. Millions of users are already using various artificial intelligence tools to do just that, like an ever-patient and all-knowing sidekick who you can feed question after question about things you want to learn more about. These aids will only get better, faster, and cheaper, and probably at an accelerated rate. 

Many are observing this progress and predicting the demise of the university as we know it. After all, isn’t that what college is for? If I can learn anything I want, effectively and instantaneously and cheaply, why would I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and four years of my life instead? 

Leave aside for a second that the traditional university experience has many other purposes, so these are not perfect substitutes. What I want to probe today is that it’s always been the case that the difference-maker for anyone who wants to accomplish anything in life – get a good job, rise up in the ranks, have real influence in the real world – is the drive to want to learn and the discipline to put in the time to learn. 

I have a friend who is a professor and loves the topic he teaches. But he understands that his students are not like him. He spent years studying his area of expertise and is now spending his entire career teaching it, researching it, and soaking it in to his heart’s content. His students, on the other hand, are not on the same track; they just want the class to get the degree, and the degree to get the job, which will in 100 percent of the cases not be as a university professor. 

And that’s ok, for that’s how education works and that’s how sorting works. But, take this to the extreme and see how it can be problematic. If I told you you could go to school for four years, go through the motions of going to class and writing papers and studying for finals, and then get a good job after, well: my friend would be horrified, because it’s the learning that is inherently pleasurable and useful, but most people would take that proposition. 

But how does the world actually work? Does it function through performance and signaling and credentials? Or does it require that people actually do things, which entails knowing how to do them, which in turn entails taking the time to learn how to do them?

 In every generation, there are the go-getters who welcome tools like “Learn Your Way” from Google. They can’t wait to accelerate their knowledge acquisition and put it to productive use solving real problems in the real world. And, in every generation, there are others for whom education is transactional: if I make a show of the educational process, then I get a degree, and if I have a degree, then I can land a job, and if I have a job, then I get a seat in the room when the real decisions are being made. 

AI tools have merely accelerated both the go-getters’ ability to get ready for their future and the slackers’ ability to mime the educational experience. What will that mean for our future productivity and equity? Time will tell.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 503

 

Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "The Infinite Game," by Simon Sinek.

When we lead with a finite mindset in an infinite game, it leads to all kinds of problems, the most common of which include the decline of trust, cooperation and innovation. Leading with an infinite mindset in an infinite game, in contrast, really does move us in a better direction. Groups that adopt an infinite mindset enjoy vastly higher levels of trust, cooperation and innovation and all the subsequent benefits. If we are all, at various times, players in infinite games, then it is in our interest to learn how to recognize the game we are in and what it takes to lead with an infinite mindset. It is equally important for us to learn to recognize the clues when finite thinking exists so that we can make adjustments before real damage is done.