The Good Pain

Whether embedded in my DNA, learned from my parents, or forged through my spiritual journey as a Christian, I feel like there are three characteristics about me that have served me well in both my professional career and the important role I play as a parent.  And they all have to do with pain.

By nature, humans when attacked either clam up, get defensive, or fight back.  Humans, as social creatures, thrive on affirmation and abhor rejection.  And no one welcomes suffering or discomfort.

Lazy Linking, 229th in an Occasional Series

Things I liked lately on the Internets:


229.1 Mumbai taxi ceiling art is lit @thisiscolossal bit.ly/2Da1aTx

229.2 Follow every emoji being posted on Twitter IN REAL TIME @observablehq bit.ly/37wAw5p

229.3 Worldwide declines in coal production, driven by climate change worries, are being more than offset by increases in China @business bloom.bg/2OclI49

 

229.4 Unclean air isn't just bad for environment and health, it's also bad for our brains = developing countries that pollute in the name of economic development won't be as successful @patrickc bit.ly/37xNb83

229.5 Art meets science: solutions to the traveling salesman problem become massive portraits @kottke bit.ly/37yY5KI

 

Stress Test

'Tis the season...to be stressed.  It's bitterly cold, the days are short, end-of-year panic sets in...it's a lot at once, especially for a generation that is already at 11 on the stress-o-meter.  

Hey, in light of that, let's look out for each other, ok?  To that end, I gave my staff the following mental health check-in earlier this month at our monthly staff meeting, which I'm now sharing with you. 

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 201

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Beastie Boys Book," by Michael Diamond:



(Luc Sante)

Rap right now is a direct, mimetic product of the streets of New York City, embodying the city’s verbal agility and aggression, its constantly fractured barrage of traveling sounds, its abrasive textures and juxtaposed incongruities, its densely layered strata of information. And it’s only just becoming apparent how much more can be done with the fundaments of the style: how much stripping down, speeding up, pulling in of other sounds musical and otherwise, and how much textual complexity and nuanced attitudinizing and justified protest and seductive strategizing and flat-out indictment can be brought to the talkover. It is occurring to people all over the city that rap is a sound that can be carved. And so it is occurring to three young city kids, lately in the punk-rock business, that they can use it to make anthems and stage sketch comedy and arrange pinpoint-precise repartee that wears a stupid hat to conceal its sophistication—and that’s just the beginning.

Lazy Linking, 228th in an Occasional Series

Stuff I liked lately on the Internets:

228.1 Rampell, Mankiw, Saez, & Summers debate whether a wealth tax can help combat inequality (spoiler: things get frisky!) @piie bit.ly/344tKln

228.2 You ever think to yourself "being stuck on a crowded plane for hours at a time is awesome!" you're in luck bc now there's a game that simulates exactly that @engadget engt.co/33TYvt7

228.3  Having devoured the Pop Tarts cereal I bought them, my kids'll rejoice to hear Twinkies cereal is in the works @cnbc cnb.cx/33UmlET

228.4 Respect for Yu Darvish who, in light of Astros sign stealing scandal, still owns that he failed in 2017 WS G7, and can see how he's grown from the failure @latimes lat.ms/33SlTHe

 

228.5 Respect for Nick Foles who, whether winning Super Bowl MVP or getting hurt and losing his starting job, gives glory to God and seeks to do His work in all circumstances @sports_spectrum bit.ly/353jGZI

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 200

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst," by Robert M. Sapolsky:




Your heart does roughly the same thing whether you are in a murderous rage or having an orgasm. Again, the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.

It is extraordinary neural circuitry that bucks temporal discounting enough to allow (some of) us to care about the temperature of the planet that our great-grandchildren will inherit. Basically, it’s unknown how we humans do this. We may merely be a type of animal, mammal, primate, and ape, but we’re a profoundly unique one.

Recommended Reads, 35th in a Quarterly Series

Stuff I read recently that I'd recommend:

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World (Winchester).  Well-written and well-organized account of how far we’ve come in our ability to achieve the pinpoint accuracy our modern economy

Robin (Itzkoff).  What a fascinating life Robin Williams led, and how incredibly sad what he struggled with which ultimately took that life away from us.

Never Enough: The Neuroscience and Experience of Addiction (Grisel).  Really neat to learn more about the effect substances have on the brain from someone who is both formerly addicted and now a neuroscientist.

The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created (Leavy).  Man, no matter how many sports/entertainment/political characters we get to follow in today’s 24/7 social media world, we’ll still be talking about the Babe a thousand years from now.

American Like Me: Reflections on Life Between Cultures (Ferrera).  I really enjoyed hearing from other famous peoples’ experiences being hyphenated like me.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst (Sapolsky).  A dense and thought-provoking foray into what drives human psychology and behavior.

Lazy Linking, 227th in an Occasional Series

Stuff I liked lately on the Internets:

227.1 Do open offices = less interaction? @harvardbiz bit.ly/32hsKs4

227.2 A history of the Internet (and tech + pop culture), as told through this list of the 50 most important websites @popmech bit.ly/2qkW1F5

227.3 Sleep literally cleans your brain up, so hey make sure you get enough ok? @wired bit.ly/2Nh2xFU

227.4 Climate expert says NY Times deliberately fear-mongered w/incorrect data+extrapolation of S. Vietnam in 2050 from sea level rise @bjornlomborg bit.ly/2NgCRsV

227.5 More evidence that where I'm going to move in 2029 is by then going to be hopping w/retail+restaurants+residential @phillyinquirer bit.ly/2qgJEdb

227.6 Theodore Roosevelt famously called national parks "America's idea; China plans to build up its own system in the next 10 years @thepandaily bit.ly/2p49MaW

227.7 Nazis are more prevalent now than we think; but Nazis in WWII were less formidable than we remember @notesonliberty bit.ly/34Oa4Ss

227.8 A running list of all of the multi-national brands that have offended and subsequently apologized to China @supchinanews bit.ly/2K8nqRM

227.9 Ascribing intelligence, communication, and empathy to trees isn't animism, it's science @nautilusmag bit.ly/2Q4CcwI

227.10 Dance + theater + tech + lit + AR = super cool & super trippy "book" @thisiscolossal bit.ly/2CHjjrT

An Acquired Taste

The “melting pot” and “salad bowl” analogies, as applied to diversity in America, are somewhat played out, so apologies for rehashing them.  It remains a useful metaphor, up to a point. 

A melting pot kind of blurs everything together into mush, which is at its best bland and at its worst a not so subtle message from the “assimilation” crowd that coming to America means shedding your past distinctiveness and conforming to “our” way of life. 

In a salad bowl, individual ingredients are allowed to be themselves.  Indeed, that’s what makes good salads good: differences, in taste and texture and color, rather than all of one or two things. 

Shut Up and Listen

A recent Plan Philly article asked, "Can Gentrifiers Be Good Neighbors?"  Fred Rogers was invoked, in the spirit of what it means to be a good neighbor.  The thing about gentrification, though, is that complex dynamics come into play independent of the behavior, posture, and motivation of incoming residents.  In other words, given the fraught nature of the past, present, and future of displacement dynamics in urban settings, the very presence of newcomers sets emotions and narratives into motion.

This can seem terribly frustrating for folks who mean well and who want to make life choices that lean into diverse settings.  We want neighborhoods to not be segregated, but our very actions to insert ourselves into new places can set into motion certain dynamics that perpetuate past and present inequities.