Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 541

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "City of Fortune: How Venice Ruled the Seas," by Roger Crowley.

The city’s prosperity rested on nothing tangible—no landholdings, no natural resources, no agricultural production or large population. There was literally no solid ground underfoot. Physical survival depended on a fragile ecological balance. Venice was perhaps the first virtual economy, whose vitality baffled outsiders. It harvested nothing but barren gold and lived in perpetual fear that, if its trade routes were severed, the whole magnificent edifice might simply collapse.

They started to advance into the heart of the city. It was true: There was no opposition; no trumpets or defiant martial clamor. They quickly found that “the way was open before them and everything there for the taking. The narrow streets were clear and the crossroads unobstructed, safe from attack.” Stupefied, “they found no one to resist them.” The streets were apparently lined with people who had turned out “to meet them with crosses and holy icons of Christ.” This pacific, abject, trusting, desperate ritual was horribly misjudged. The Crusaders were utterly unmoved: “At this sight their demeanor remained unchanged, nor did the slightest smile cross their faces, nor were their grim and furious expressions softened by this unexpected spectacle.” They just robbed the bystanders, beginning with their carts. Then they started a wholesale sack. 

At this point, the chronicle of Niketas Choniates breaks out into an anguished cry of pain: “O City, City, eye of all cities … have you drunk at the hand of the Lord the cup of his fury?” Over the space of three days, Choniates watched the devastation of the most beautiful city of the world, the destruction of a thousand years of Christian history, the plunder, rape, and murder of its citizens. His account, frequently descending into a threnody of semi-articulate pain, unfolds in a series of vivid snapshots as an eyewitness to profound tragedy. He barely knew where to start: “Which actions of these murderous men should I relate first, and which should I end with?” 

To the Byzantines, Constantinople was the sacred image of heaven on earth, a vision of the divine made manifest to man, a vast sacramental icon. To the Crusaders, it was a treasure-house waiting to be stripped. The previous autumn they had visited Constantinople as tourists and seen the extraordinary wealth of the place. Robert of Clari was one of many openmouthed at the glimpse of riches afforded to the warrior class of underdeveloped western Europe: “For if anyone should relate to you even a hundredth of the richness, beauty, and magnificence that was there in the convents, monasteries, abbeys, and palaces of the city, he would be taken for a liar and you would not believe him.” Now it all lay at their mercy. 

The two Crusader leaders, Boniface and Baldwin, hurried to secure the richest prizes—the sumptuous imperial palaces, the Bucoleon and the Blachernae, “so rich and so magnificent that no one could describe it to you,” where the Crusader deputations had been repeatedly overawed by the wealth of the Byzantine court. Elsewhere there was indiscriminate plunder. All the vows made before the attack were forgotten. The Crusaders targeted both churches and the mansions of the rich. The Greek accounts are vivid with rhetorical anguish: 

Then the streets, squares, two-storied and three-storied houses, holy places, convents, houses of monks, and nuns, holy churches (even God’s Great Church), the imperial palace, were filled with the enemy, all war-maddened swordsmen, breathing murder, iron-clad and spear-bearing, sword-bearers and lance-bearers, bowmen [and] horsemen. 

They battered their way into Hagia Sophia and started to strip the place. The high altar, fourteen feet long, “so rich that no one could estimate its value,” whose surface was “made of gold and precious stones broken and ground up all together,” “blazing with every sort of precious material and wrought into an object of extraordinary beauty, astonishing to everyone”—this was hacked to pieces. The overarching canopy, supported on slim columns, all of solid silver, was dragged down and broken up; the hundred silver chandeliers suspended each by a great chain “as thick as a man’s arm,” the columns studded with “jasper or porphyry or some other precious stone,” the silver altar rails, the golden censers and sacrificial vessels—“and the pulpit, a wonderful work of art, and the gates … completely faced with gold,” all were chopped into transportable lots. Axes, crowbars, and swords hacked, wrenched, and prized out. Every corner of the church was probed for the valuables it might contain, the monks tortured for hidden treasures, casually dispatched for trying to protect a venerated icon or particular relic; women were raped there, men were killed. 

To the Greeks, it was as if these Crusaders who had come in the name of God were filled with a kind of terrible madness:

baying like Cerberus and breathing like Charon, pillaging the holy places, trampling on divine things, running riot over holy things, casting down to the floor the holy images of Christ and His holy Mother and of the holy men who from eternity have been pleasing to the Lord God, uttering calumnies and profanities, and in addition tearing children from mothers and mothers from children, treating the virgin with wanton shame in holy chapels, viewing with fear neither the wrath of God nor the vengeance of men. 

Mules and asses were led into Hagia Sophia to carry away the loot but were unable to keep their footing on the polished floors of ancient polychromatic marble and slipped and fell; somehow maddened by this difficulty, the looters slashed the terrified animals open with their knives. The floor became slippery with blood and the muck of excrement from their punctured bowels. A prostitute, evidently not expelled from the camp, was set on the patriarch’s throne “and started to sing a wretched song and danced about, spinning and turning.” 

Some of this ecclesiastical looting was nominally in a religious cause. Abbot Martin Günther of Pairis learned that the Church of the Pantocrator Monastery housed an extraordinary collection of relics. Hurrying there with his chaplain, he entered the sacristy—the depository of the most sacred objects—where he encountered a man with a long white beard. “Come faithless old man,” bawled the prelate, “show me the more powerful of the relics you guard. Otherwise understand that you will be punished immediately with death.” The trembling monk showed him an iron chest, containing a trove of treasures, “more pleasing and more desirable to him than all the riches of Greece.” “The abbot greedily and hurriedly thrust in both hands, and as he was girded for action, both he and the chaplain filled the folds of their habits with sacred sacrilege.” With their robes stuffed with religious treasure, the two men waddled back to their ship, with the old monk in tow. “We have done well … thanks be to God,” was the abbot’s laconic reply to passersby. 

An extraordinary list of the religious treasures of the Orthodox world made it back to the monasteries of Italy and France: the Holy Shroud, hair of the Virgin Mary, the shinbone of Saint Paul, fragments of the supposed crown of thorns, the head of Saint James—the venerated objects were carefully itemized in the chroniclers’ accounts. Dandolo obtained for Venice a piece of the True Cross, some of Christ’s blood, the arm of Saint George and part of Saint John’s head. Many of the great icons and valued religious talismans of the Byzantine Church were just lost in the rampage—probably smashed to pieces by men intent only on precious metal. By the Church of the Holy Apostles, where Constantine himself and all the emperors were buried, they plundered all night, “taking whatever gold ornaments or round pearls or radiant, precious, and incorruptible gems that were still preserved within”; crow-barring open the tombs, they gazed on the face of the great Justinian, builder of Hagia Sophia, dead for seven hundred years. His corpse was not decomposed in the airtight tomb. They looked upon this sight as if it were a miracle—then looted the body for its valuables. 

And everywhere there were acts of terrible molestation: 

They slaughtered the newborn, killed prudent matrons, stripped elder women, and outraged old ladies; they tortured the monks, they hit them with their fists and kicked their bellies, thrashing and rending their reverend bodies with whips. Mortal blood was spilled on holy altars, and in place of the Lamb of God sacrificed for the salvation of the universe, many were dragged like sheep and beheaded, and on the holy tombs the wretches slew the innocent. Such was the reverence for holy things of those who bore the Lord’s Cross on their shoulders. 

The murders and rapes appalled: 

There was no one spared grief—in the wide streets and the narrow lanes; there was wailing in the temples, tears, lamentations, pleas for mercy, the terrible groaning of men, the screams of women, the tearing to pieces, the obscene acts, enslaving, families torn apart, nobles treated shamefully and venerable old men, people weeping, the rich stripped of their goods.

The game that was now being set out across the waters and shores of the Byzantine Empire was being played for high stakes. Venice and Genoa were involved in a contest for both survival and wealth. By the thirteenth century Europe was in the middle of a long boom from which the Italian maritime republics were uniquely placed to profit. Between classical times and 1200 no Western city had a population that surpassed 20,000. By 1300 there were nine cities in Italy alone of more than 50,000. Paris swelled from 20,000 to 200,000 in a century; Florence had 120,000 by 1320; Venice, 100,000, fed by immigration from the Dalmatian coast. The population of northern Italy was immense. It would continue to climb until an ominous day sometime in early 1348 when an unknown ship from the Black Sea tied up near Petrarch’s house in the Basin of Saint Mark. The population would not be surpassed again until the eighteenth century.

From the fruits of the long boom of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Venice was transforming itself. By 1300 all the separate islets had been joined by bridges to form a recognizable city, which was densely inhabited. The streets and squares of beaten earth were progressively paved over; stone was replacing wood for building houses. A cobbled way linked the centers of Venetian power—the Rialto and Saint Mark’s Square. An increasingly wealthy noble class constructed for themselves astonishing palazzi along the Grand Canal in the Gothic style, tempered with elements of Islamic decoration to which the traveling merchants had been exposed in Alexandria and Beirut. New churches were built and the skyline punctuated with their brick campaniles. In 1325 the state arsenal was enlarged to meet the increased requirements for maritime trade and defense. Fifteen years later, work was begun redeveloping the doge’s palace into the masterpiece of Venetian Gothic, a delicate traceried structure of astonishing lightness and beauty that seemed to express the effortless serenity, grace, good judgment, and stability of the Venetian state. The facade of the Basilica of Saint Mark was gradually transformed from plain Byzantine brick into a rich fantasy of marble and mosaic, incorporating the plunder of Constantinople and the East, and topped with domes and oriental embellishment that took the viewer halfway to Cairo and Baghdad. Sometime around 1260, the horses of the Constantinople Hippodrome were winched into place on its loggia as a statement of the city’s newfound self-confidence. Out of maritime trade, Venice was starting to dazzle and bewitch.

By the time the plague had burned itself out, possibly two-thirds of the Venetian population had perished; fifty noble families ceased to exist. The survivors were literally treading on the dead. For centuries unwary fishermen, stepping ashore on certain deserted islands deep in the lagoon, scrunched on the whitening bones of the hastily buried victims. The Black Death radically altered the outlook of Venetian merchants. For 150 years, Venice had advanced on a rising tide of European prosperity, growing wealth, and booming populations. Maritime ventures, characterized by an optimistic culture of risk-taking, had brought rich returns. But it was the rampant materialism, the expansion of trade routes, and the commercial connections across vast distances that had brought not only silk, spices, ivory, pearls, grain, and fish, but also the plague bacillus from inner Asia. It was the Italian maritime republics who were charged with carrying death to Europe; the consequences were taken to be divine judgment for cupidity and sin.

Just Because I Talk Different Doesn't Mean I'm Stupid (the 2026 Version)

 

My senior year at Penn I was very active in an on-campus Christian fellowship and had the pleasure of getting to know a lot of incoming freshman who expressed interested in getting involved. Penn being Penn, and the faith community being the faith community, it was an incredibly multi-national group. I recall befriending a young man from Hong Kong, who seemed eternally sunny, sometimes comically so like when he told me he liked a hit song on the radio because it had a good beat and a hook that included a phrase he associated as positive, never mind that the song was not so covertly sexual in nature.

Not long into the school year, our friendship had deepened enough that he came to me one day, his usually chipper disposition replaced with a more beaten down countenance. He confided in me that some of his floor mates had been condescending towards him because of his accent. It grated on him that he was being taken less seriously because his English didn't sound as pure as that of native speakers. I could feel the hurt in his voice when he said, "I'm not stupid."

America is a wonderful place, including and especially its diversity. Nowhere else do people from vastly different parts of the world and stations in life come together, regularly and easily and powerfully. And yet, our dominance in the world comes with it a huge blind spot when it comes to the English language that is our mother tongue and only tongue, that we can quite easily and meanly look down on others whose English isn't as smooth as ours. Never mind that it is incredibly intelligent and brave for people like my friend to hack it in a country far from home in a language that is not their primary language. 

Just to bring us to the present, my friend ended up doing just fine at Penn, double-majoring and getting good grades, and has had an extremely impressive career in business since then. I'd say he's not stupid! But, despite the social progress we've made from the mid-1990s to today, I still feel like non-native speakers are written off as less than, because of their thick accents or difficult with American slang. 

This article puts an interesting twist to this point, which is that what people dismiss as "AI slop" sometimes is AI slop but sometimes is a non-native English speaker trying desperately to convert their thoughts into content in a language that is not their primary language. I've noticed that any sort of discourse about AI ends up being, like much of contemporary dialogue, charged with the divisiveness of taking and assuming extreme positions, in the case of AI that either it is the salvation of humanity (and therefore everything about it is good) or else its utter downfall (and therefore everything about it is bad).

I don't think it's an insultingly moderate position to say that there are pros and cons to AI, but it seems patently obvious that that is the case. Which means that, yes, people use AI in lazy or nefarious ways, which yields "slop" which we should see through and be negative about. But, detecting AI-speak can also be an indication that someone is trying their best to communicate in a language that is hard for them so they are leaning on some extra help to do so. 

Perhaps this nuance is harder to parse than, say, someone who is speaking unintelligibly versus someone who is quite intelligent but struggling to speak in English. But it's worth looking for the difference, so that we are not falsely accusing someone of slop who simply needs extra help to convey their point. It would not be kind to automatically conflate the two, so I know I will try harder myself to not jump to that conclusion.

Be Like Dolly

 

Dolly Parton's recent passing has amplified the near-universal adoration she has in our country. There was something special about Dolly that made her among the very few public figures that very different groups of people could claim as someone they admired. Not sure who else you put with her; maybe Mr. Rogers, Morgan Freeman, and Keanu Reaves? (Betty White? Tom Hanks? Bob Ross?)

Is there anything we can do to be like Dolly in this regard? Does it take the fact that she was in the upper echelon of riches, fame, talent, and beauty? Is she necessarily a unicorn, where all we can do is praise her and not realistically emulate her?

Seems to me that, yes, she is a "one of one," and deserves to be praised as such. And yet, it also seems to me that, perhaps in smaller and less prominent ways, we too can represent the best of Dolly's characteristics:

1. She was not without her convictions about divisive social issues, including being a strong advocate of the LGBTQ+ community from which many of her fans hailed. It seems impossible to "take a position" on anything without engendering grumbling or worse from one side. But Dolly seemed so genuine, so accepting, and so much about pure love that even the most hardened partisan could not help but be disarmed. At a time when there is so much performance and so little kindness in our political and social spheres, this is something I hope we can all imitate.

2. Her philanthropy was always targeted, effective, and ego-free. Those she supported were profoundly affected by her contributions. And those who observed her giving saw that it came from a generous and humble spirit, rather than one driven by ego and optics. We may not have Dolly's resources, but we can emulate her quiet but firm conviction that we can help others and should, and that their gain and not our glory should be our objective.

3. Dolly was, in a sense, a caricature rather than a real person, of which there are many such examples in contemporary society. And yet she was both authentic about who she was and good-humored enough to both play the part and let us know she was in on the act, that we couldn't help but accept and adore her. We may never be as unique as Dolly - a country girl from humble beginnings who became a rhinestone-studded beauty icon - but we can embrace our own uniqueness and be both confident and self-deprecating about it.

I think we will all fall well short of Dolly, in glamour and impact and goodness. But, I think it would be a good thing for a society, and a wonderful way to honor this American icon, if we tried to be a little bit like what made her the very best.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 540

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Path Between the Seas: The Creation of the Panama Canal, 1870-1914," by David McCullough. 

The truth is that all the canal projects proposed, every cost estimated, irrespective of the individual or individuals responsible, were hopelessly unrealistic if not preposterous. Every supposed canal survey made by mid-century was patently flawed by bad assumptions or absurdly inadequate data. Assertions that the task would be simple were written by fools or by men who either had no appropriate competence or who, if they did, had never laid eyes on a rain forest.

The idea of digging down to sea level was thoroughly unrealistic if one understood the terrain and ought to be discarded without further fuss. Those who talked of diverting the Chagres River in some fashion were sadly misinformed and deceiving themselves. They were allowing the triumph at Suez to distort their capacity to see things for what they were. Suez and Panama must not be regarded as comparable, he said. The environmental conditions were opposite in the extreme. “At Suez there is a lack of water, the terrain is easy, the land nearly the same level as the sea; in spite of the heat, it is a perfectly healthy climate. In tropical America, there is too much water, the terrain is mostly rock, the land has considerable relief, and finally the country is literally poisoned.” To act in the same manner in places of such opposite character, he declared, would be to “outrage nature” instead of to benefit by it, “which is the primary goal of the engineer.”

Roosevelt, however, looked upon the canal quite differently than de Lesseps had, differently, in fact, than nearly everyone. It was very well for others to talk of it as the dream of Columbus, to call it a giant step in the march of civilization, or to picture as de Lesseps so often had its immeasurable value to world commerce. Roosevelt was promoting neither a commercial venture nor a universal utility. To him, first, last, and always, the canal was the vital—the indispensable—path to a global destiny for the United States of America. He had a vision of his country as the commanding power on two oceans, and these joined by a canal built, owned, operated, policed, and fortified by his country. The canal was to be the first step to American supremacy at sea.

Others in the Cabinet fell into line, without apparent qualm, nor with anything approaching Roosevelt’s solemn air of righteousness. Attorney General Knox, having been asked by Roosevelt to construct a defense, is said to have remarked, “Oh, Mr. President, do not let so great an achievement suffer from any taint of legality.” At another point, during a Cabinet meeting, Roosevelt talked of the bitter denunciations in the press, then entered into a long, formal statement of his position. 

When he had finished, the story goes, he looked about the table, finally fixing his eye on Elihu Root. “Well,” he demanded, “have I answered the charges? Have I defended myself?” “You certainly have, Mr. President,” replied Root, who was known for his wit. “You have shown that you were accused of seduction and you have conclusively proved that you were guilty of rape.”

Sailing days for Panama were occasions remembered for years afterward, with thousands of women gathered at the wharf to bid the men farewell. “I never saw so many Negro women in my life,” wrote the correspondent. “All of them in their gayest Sunday clothes, and all wailing at the top of their voices.” Royal Mail steamers sailed with every inch of space occupied, the number on board generally averaging seven or eight hundred. The nearly twenty thousand men recruited at Barbados during the years of construction represented 10 percent of the island’s population and approximately 40 percent of all the adult males. Virtually every able-bodied man went off to build the Panama Canal and the money they sent home to the island was something over $300,000 a year.

But it was also in the closing years of the task that the great locks took form for all to see and they were the most interesting and important construction feats of the entire effort. They were the structural triumphs at Panama. In their overall dimensions, mass, weight, in the mechanisms and ingenious control apparatus incorporated in their design, they surpassed any similar structures in the world. They were, as was often said, the mighty portals of the Panama Gateway. Yet they were something much more than monumental; they did not, like a bridge or a cathedral, simply stand there; they worked. They were made of concrete and they were made of literally thousands of moving parts. Large essential elements were not built, but were manufactured, made in Pittsburgh, Wheeling, Schenectady, and other cities. In a very real sense they were colossal machines, the largest yet conceived, and in their final, finished form they would function quite as smoothly as a Swiss watch. They were truly one of the engineering triumphs of all time, but for reasons most people failed to comprehend.

Theodore Roosevelt never returned to Panama; he never saw the Panama Canal. The passage of the Pacific fleet through the locks in 1919 took place seven months after his death. Nor did he live to see the United States pay Colombia an indemnity of $25,000,000 (in 1921) for the loss of Panama, a move that had been initiated during the Wilson Administration, much to Roosevelt’s fury.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 539

 

Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success," by Ross Douthat. 

Decadence, deployed usefully, refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay, and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development. It describes a situation in which repetition is more the norm than innovation; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private enterprises alike; in which intellectual life seems to go in circles; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, underdeliver compared with what people recently expected. And, crucially, the stagnation and decay are often a direct consequence of previous development. The decadent society is, by definition, a victim of its own significant success.

If you want to feel like Western society is convulsing, there’s an app for that, a convincing simulation waiting. But in the real world, it’s possible that Western society is really leaning back in an easy chair, hooked up to a drip of something soothing, playing and replaying an ideological greatest-hits tape from its wild and crazy youth, all riled up in its own imagination and yet, in reality, comfortably numb.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 538

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Aesop's Fables."

Two Travelers & a Bear

Two Men were traveling in company through a forest, when, all at once, a huge Bear crashed out of the brush near them.

One of the Men, thinking of his own safety, climbed a tree.

The other, unable to fight the savage beast alone, threw himself on the ground and lay still, as if he were dead. He had heard that a Bear will not touch a dead body.

It must have been true, for the Bear snuffed at the Man's head awhile, and then, seeming to be satisfied that he was dead, walked away.

The Man in the tree climbed down.

"It looked just as if that Bear whispered in your ear," he said. "What did he tell you?"

"He said," answered the other, "that it was not at all wise to keep company with a fellow who would desert his friend in a moment of danger."

The Wild Boar & the Fox

A Wild Boar was sharpening his tusks busily against the stump of a tree, when a Fox happened by. Now the Fox was always looking for a chance to make fun of his neighbors. So he made a great show of looking anxiously about, as if in fear of some hidden enemy. But the Boar kept right on with his work.

"Why are you doing that?" asked the Fox at last with a grin. "There isn't any danger that I can see."

"True enough," replied the Boar, "but when danger does come there will not be time for such work as this. My weapons will have to be ready for use then, or I shall suffer for it."

The Stag at The Pool

The Hart was once drinking from a pool and admiring the noble figure he made there. “Ah,” said he, “where can you see such noble horns as these, with such antlers! I wish I had legs more worthy to bear such a noble crown; it is a pity they are so slim and slight.” At that moment a Hunter approached and sent an arrow whistling after him. Away bounded the Hart, and soon, by the aid of his nimble legs, was nearly out of sight of the Hunter; but not noticing where he was going, he passed under some trees with branches growing low down in which his antlers were caught, so that the Hunter had time to come up. “Alas! alas!” cried the Hart: “We often despise what is most useful to us.”

Remarks at JWS Dinner, 2026 August 18

 

I did not get a chance to read this exact speech at the Joseph Wharton Scholars opening dinner earlier this week because it was too dark in the restaurant to see my printout, but this is what I had prepared to say to the incoming freshman class, the Class of 2030, exactly 35 years removed from when I was in their seat in the fall of 1991 when I first arrived in Philadelphia.

Thank you Utsav for inviting me to this and hello to the JWS Class of 2030!

Wow saying that makes me feel old. But I guess I am. 

I was in your shoes some 35 years ago, a fresh-faced kid from suburban San Jose California. 

I had Penn on my radar because Wharton was the best undergrad business school in the land.

But I picked Penn because of JWS. I was dead set on staying local and going to UC Berkeley. I'd been on campus a million times, would be staying with some of my closest high school friends, even looked up what classes I wanted to take.

My parents insisted on taking me on a college tour of East Coast schools I'd gotten into, and I remember the day I was at Penn was a dreary April morning, a big contrast to the sunny skies I was used to back home.

Dr. William Whitney, the person who would be my JWS advisor so Utsav's predecessor, told me all about Philly and Penn and Wharton and JWS, and I was intrigued by the access to the honors offerings and small class sizes and extra attention.

But what really got me was one of his students burst into the office while we were talking, and she was really excited and told him she'd just gotten a random opportunity to study marine biology in Hawaii, and Dr. Whitney said, "well of course you're going to go," and she replied "but I'm a finance major" and he just said "go; finance will wait, you won't regret doing something fun and different"

The fact that I can tell you about a conversation from 35 years ago tells you it left a mark on me, and so if there's any advice you'd be willing to receive from me, it's be open to new and seemingly random activities, because they end up helping shape your life perspective in ways that can be hard to predict at the time 

In closing, I'll only add that you don't have to go all the way to Hawaii to access unique experiences

Most of you are not from Philly, and I venture to say that for most of you, Philly wasn't the primary reason you picked Penn and Wharton and JWS, or perhaps it wasn't a factor at all; I know it wasn't for me when I was in your shoes

The fact that I'm here, 35 years later, living and working in Philadelphia, tells you I fell hard for Philly

But even if you're just here for 4 years and go somewhere else, make the most of your time in this great city

The thing about undergraduate education in the year 2026 is that it can't just be in the classroom

Your future success depends on you learning about and eventually solving problems and having impact in the real world, out there

And here, in Philadelphia, "out there" is right here, meaning you will scarcely have a more accessible chance to understand and engage with real-world people and real-world issues and real-world platforms

Go to a city council or school board meeting, get involved in a local non-profit, read the local paper - these things don't feel as sexy as taking that class with the famous Wharton professor or snagging that coveted internship on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley, but you will find they are no less important in shaping your worldview and preparing you to make a difference in the world

And with that, I leave you to 4 great years here, and I hope we can stay in touch if only so I can have the pleasure of watching you grow into what will be a fantastic career and life

Thank you 

The Most Important Skill in Life is Being Able to Count (the Votes)

 

"Survivor" premiered in May 2000, and represented the dawn of a new era of reality TV that took the formula from previous offerings like MTV's "Real World" (unscripted chaos among ordinary Americans) and added a new twist, that of austere conditions and arduous challenges. Naively, I thought to myself that the show would reward sheer brawns and brains; I mean, the title of the show seemed to suggest that the winner would be the one that could physically and mentally outlast the others.

Sure enough, some of the early people "voted off the island" were those that either lacked the ability or motivation to contribute to the community's ability to make it through the night. But along the way, something else kicked in. Those that found success and ultimately won were those who could form alliances, build trust, backstab when advantageous, and among all things have a very good understanding of whether they had enough votes to live to play another day.

Life is not a reality show in which we're stranded on a desert island and left to fend for ourselves. But the human nature observed on "Survivor" is the same that governs how we behave in civilization. 

Some of us had cultural upbringings and educational resources that allowed us to view the world as a place where if we worked hard and played fair, we would find success. Others of us had a less sheltered childhood existence, left to fend for ourselves, learning the code of the streets in the process. The former is a solid foundation for a respectable existence. The latter is woven over and under that, sometimes dooming people to a harder life and sometimes allowing people to soar to the very highest levels of power and wealth.

As noted above, early people voted off on "Survivor" were those who were deemed least able or willing to contribute to the group's survival. But, later on, it was often the opposite: those who were physically and mentally strongest to contribute were also seen as the greatest competition for the prize, and so it made sense for others to gang up on them and compel a sufficient number of votes to eliminate them from the competition. Which, as harsh and illogical as that might sound, actually makes the most sense, because it is clear if you have opted to play this game that the goal is not for the group to thrive but for you to win.

I'll let you draw your own conclusions about pockets of your life that resemble this dynamic. I'll only say, in closing, that after having told a similar story from my career journey to a group of college students, I left them with a frank statement of: whether you like it or not, there is an aspect of life that is like a game, and that game has rules, and some of those rules are not fair, so you will have to decide whether you want to play the game or not, or change the game or not, but there will be consequences to whatever you choose.

However cynical and harsh that might be for a young person just starting out at university to hear, I feel it is a fair and helpful sentiment to convey. It is a hallmark of our modern democracy that we balance rule by the majority with protection of the minority, which is to say that those who have more votes get to be in power, and we have checks and balances in place to make sure that power isn't used to punish those out of power. 

We have a conflicting feeling about power, in that it is easy to abuse and easy to covet, but that doesn't substitute for the fact that if you want to get something done you have to have power, and if you want to have power then you need to do things to get it. Which, I learned from "Survivor" over 25 years ago, isn't necessarily being the strongest or smartest, but rather being able to seek, count, and secure votes.

Recommended Reads, 56th in a Quarterly Series

 

 

Stuff I'd recommend from the past three months. 

War and Peace (Tolstoy). It turns out one of the most famous books in the world is a really good read.

Native Son (Wright). Gripping narrative; I could not put this book down.

My Broken Language (Hudes). There's something about this book that kept drawing me in.

Talking to Strangers: What We Should Know About the People We Don’t Know (Gladwell). Gladwell at his best, probing something everyone thinks they know but from a fresh new angle.

Frankenstein (Shelley). I finished this book in two days, that's how into it I got.

Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism (Wynn-Williams). An incredible look into the company behind the website everyone's on.

Leonardo da Vinci (Isaacson). The subject is one of the most interesting people ever, and the author does a great job of bringing us into his fascinating life.

It (King). One of the great horror books of all time and a clear inspiration for "Stranger Things."

Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal (Roach). She is one of my favorite authors, seamlessly blending humor and scholarship such that I am constantly simultaneously learning and laughing.

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Here is an excerpt from a book I recently read, "The Little Book of Common Sense Investing: The Only Way to Guarantee Your Fair Share of Stock Market Returns," by John Bogle.

Successful investing is about owning businesses and reaping the huge rewards provided by the dividends and earnings growth of our nation’s—and, for that matter, the world’s—corporations. The higher the level of their investment activity, the greater the cost of financial intermediation and taxes, the less the net return that shareholders—as a group, the owners of our businesses—receive. The lower the costs that investors as a group incur, the higher the rewards that they reap. So to enjoy the winning returns generated by businesses over the long term, the intelligent investor will reduce to the bare-bones minimum the costs of financial intermediation. That’s what common sense tells us. That’s what indexing is all about. And that’s the central message of this book.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "Talking Back, Talking Black: Truths About America's Lingua Franca," by John McWhorter 

There is a term for people whose casual and formal speech differs to this degree: diglossia, from the Greek for “two tongues.” However, I have held off on introducing that term, because giving this bidialectal linguistic existence a label implies that it is exotic, when in fact it is extremely common and even a norm. Around the world, if a language has a strong written tradition and is also spoken widely, then often its spoken versions have drifted from the conservative written standard to varying degrees. As often as not, this means that there is a gulf between the way people chat and the way they speak. They speak the written version; they talk the other version. As such, there is ample diglossia in many languages of South Asia, across Indonesia, and in Tibetan, Swahili, German, and Italian itself, as well as in Greece, China, parts of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, and elsewhere. If anything, what merits a special term is monoglossia—speaking always basically one thing. 

Black Americans are disglossic—perfectly normally diglossic. Whether they would be allowed to use Black English in a job interview is as loopy an issue to focus on as whether a Moroccan would defend his master’s thesis in Moroccan Arabic—almost as different from Standard Arabic as French is from Latin—or whether a Finn who gets a job as a newscaster would talk on the air the same way as she does to her mom.

I want you to be truly comfortable with the idea that there is indeed a black way of speaking, that there isn’t anything wrong with it, that it would be bizarre if such speech did not exist, and that it is spoken alongside Standard English, not in opposition to it. However, Black English (and there is a such thing!) is spoken in a society in which racism still exists, and the issue of what we do about racism is decidedly complex.