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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions Into Adulthood," by Lisa D'Amour.



Many girls experience the physical changes of puberty as simply gross. On top of that, girls’ bodies part with childhood at a moment girls don’t select and may not like. To make matters even worse, puberty advances at a speed girls can’t control. Given that girls are striving to part with childhood, you’d think that they’d all welcome the biological shift to womanhood. But they often don’t. Here’s why: girls like to part with childhood on their own schedule. You may have noticed that one minute your daughter lobbies to download songs with raunchy lyrics, and the next, she curls up on the couch in the exact same position she adopted at age six to read a book she enjoyed at age eight. Her seemingly paradoxical behavior is actually brilliant. She’s parting with childhood while regulating the process. She’s sending developmental troops forward to conquer new ground (such as flirting, or considering philosophical questions) and then letting her troops fall back to safe, established base camps (playing with dolls, reading childhood books) when they need to rest and regroup. But then here come the physical realities of puberty! These troops disregard their leader and march ahead on their own. What adults advertise as a joyous blossoming feels to some girls like an all-too-public mutiny.

The Not-so-Secret Formula to Human Flourishing

I wrote a few months back about how the urban form enables way more and way easier interactions with people, because lack of reliance on a car means being able to see more people and have more chance encounters.  This frequency and ease of interactions is an important ingredient to innovation, because breakthrough happens not in a singular burst of inspiration but through rapid iteration across multiple players.

Maybe We Need the Rain

The weather is a common topic of conversation during those awkward moments of silence between strangers in the locker room or on the elevator.  "Beautiful day, huh?"  "Hot enough for you?"  "Stay safe now, OK?"  These are common utterances, for which the socially acceptable response is supposed to be something like "yup" or "tell me about it" or "same."

Lately, though, if someone complains about the rain, I've decided to buck convention and try something else: "maybe we needed it."  Don't take me to be a lover of rain.  I don't like splashing around in rain coat and galoshes, although I know the rain is good news for some who do.  Nor am I thinking about crops or water quality, although it is on account of those things that my statement has a whiff of truth to it.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Playing with Fire: The 1968 Election and the Transformation of American Politics," by Lawrence O'Donnell:

Sitting in the makeup chair, Nixon offhandedly mentioned to Ailes how silly it felt to try to reach voters by appearing on an afternoon talk show like this one instead of a news show like Meet the Press. The Mike Douglas Show was targeted at housewives and usually populated by B-list showbiz celebrities. In response, Ailes instantly rattled off a list of every bad move Nixon had ever made on TV. It was a long list. Ailes was a teenager when he had seen some of these things. This was not the way people talked to former vice president Richard Milhous Nixon. There was none of the deference Nixon had been accustomed to for decades. And he loved it. 

Nixon made Ailes an offer he couldn’t refuse: instead of trying to make Mike Douglas America’s biggest afternoon TV star, make Richard Nixon America’s next president. 

With Ailes on the media team, the Nixon campaign was ready to make the move from being the worst TV campaign to the best. “We’re going to build this whole campaign around television,” Nixon told his media team. “You boys just tell me what to do and I’ll do it.” 

Roger Ailes’s career in Republican politics, which included every day he ran Fox News, turned out to be longer than Richard Nixon’s. Ailes became more influential in Republican politics than Nixon ever was. We have reason to wonder who would be president today if Richard Nixon had not provoked Roger Ailes in The Mike Douglas Show makeup room. Such are the seeds that were planted in American politics in the 1968 presidential campaign.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Where the Past Begins: Memory and Imagination," by Amy Tan:

The characters arrive with stiff personalities or histrionic ones. They will remain caricatures until I can truly feel them. At several points in the writing, I will realize I have embarked on an impossible task. I will have fewer than a hundred pages, always fewer than a hundred, and they are all bad. I will be seized with paralyzing existential dread that I will never finish this book. Who I was an hour ago no longer exists. This is not writer’s block. This is chaos with no way out. The metaphoric connections have been cut. The wonders are gone. The worst has happened. I am no longer a writer. And then, after another five minutes of self-flagellation, I start writing again. 

The Power of Diversity to Get Really Big Things Done

Yesterday I had the pleasure of participating at an event at the National Constitution Center, and in the process met its president and CEO, Jeffrey Rosen, who was gracious enough to not only host the event but take the time before we started to tell me all about what has been going on at the Center lately.  I am so grateful, as an American and a Philadelphian, for this treasured institution.

The event was put on by Philadelphia Education Fund and it featured William Hite, superintendent of the School District of Philadelphia, as well as seven of us members of the Philadelphia Board of Education.  Sitting on stage with everyone, I couldn’t help but think about the men who came together in this same city 230+ years ago to craft what would become the supreme law of our land, the Constitution of the United States of America.  Those men were farmers and financiers, merchants and doctors, northerners and southerners.  And they were brought together, not long after the formation of a new nation and a new experiment in government of/for/by the people, to establish a set of laws clear enough to inform all situations yet fluid enough to adjust over time to new situations. 

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Sisters First: Stories from Our Wild and Wonderful Life," by Barbara Pierce Bush and Jenna Bush Hager.



Many times, though, my mom says the most without saying anything at all. When Barbara and I went off to college, she gave us each a photograph of her and my father as a young, newly married couple, before they had children. But it was not just any photograph. The snapshot, taken in their backyard, was given to an adoption agency after they had tried for years to conceive and had not succeeded in having a baby to love. When she handed the photo to me, my mother said, “Doesn’t this just look like two people who desperately want to be parents?” I still keep the framed picture by my bed. It was her way of reminding us that we were wanted long before we were born; that to her, we came first.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Bellevue: Three Centuries of Medicine and Mayhem at America's Most Storied Hospital," by David Oshinsky.

Some New Yorkers saw cholera as a blessing in disguise. “Those sickened must be cured or die off,” wrote an unforgiving official, “& being chiefly of the very scum of the city, the quicker [their] dispatch the sooner the malady will cease.” For him and his allies, the answer lay in restricting the flow of immigrants to America and quarantining those who did reach its shores. 

Others disagreed. The Irish were here to stay, they thought, and not likely to change on their own. Cursing their filth and intemperance, while a natural response, did little to prevent epidemics that put the entire city at risk. A more practical approach was to focus less on the moral failings of these immigrants, which city officials couldn’t effectively control, and more on the environmental causes of disease, which they could. If foul vapors and general filth were the cause of cholera and other epidemic diseases, then why not whitewash the tenements and close down the stinking wells?