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Here are a few quotes from a book I recently read, "The Shapeless Unease  A Year of Not Sleeping," by Samantha Harvey.

Everything is holy. It’s only when we die that the holiness is called up. But it was always holy, all along.

An article explains how fear and anxiety, often conflated, belong to different parts of the amygdala – fear arises in its central nucleus, which is responsible for sending messages to the body to prepare a short-term response – run, freeze, fight – whereas anxiety arises in the area responsible for emotions, a part which affects longer-term behavioural change. Fear is a response to a threat, anxiety a response to a perceived threat – the difference between preparing to escape a saber-tooth tiger that is here and now in front of you (because it’s always saber-tooth tigers in the examples) and preparing to escape the idea of a saber-tooth tiger in case one appears around the next bend. While fear will quickly resolve – you will run away, fight it or be eaten – anxiety has no such resolution. You will need to stand guard in case, in case. Forever in case. Standing guard will make the perceived threat seem more real, which necessitates a more vigilant standing guard. Fear ends when the threat is gone, while anxiety, operating in a hall of mirrors, self-perpetuates. As a friend once said to me: there is no grace for the imagination. You cannot be saved from an assailant that doesn’t exist. 

For me, now, a puzzle emerges. What, then, fuels insomnia – fear or anxiety? Anxiety, everyone says. Anxiety, my hypnotherapist says; you are safe in your bed yet your heart is racing as if a tiger is present. You must learn to see that there is no tiger. 

But there is a tiger: sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation isn’t a perceived threat but a real one, like thirst or starvation. It is the fear of not sleeping that raises the heart rate and tenses the muscles; fear, not anxiety. Here is where insomnia becomes intractable, because it deploys fear to act like anxiety. Where fear is a response to an external threat, insomnia is almost unique in giving rise to a fear that then causes the external threat. Being afraid of the saber-tooth tiger is what makes the tiger keep coming back – not seem to come back, but in fact come back. It is no use to say ‘don’t be afraid’. There is a tiger in your bedroom, you ought to be afraid. But it’s not a tiger you can ever overcome by freezing, fighting or running from, so all your mechanisms for dealing with a real threat fail, giving rise to more fear, which keeps the tiger coming back. A vicious circle of Euclidean perfection.

Sleep. Sleep. Like money, you only think about it when you have too little. Then you think about it all the time, and the less you have the more you think about it. It becomes the prism through which you see the world and nothing can exist except in relation to it.

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Here are a couple of quotes from a book I recently read, "Talking to GOATs  The Moments You Remember and the Stories You Never Heard," by Jim Gray.

 

Over Kobe’s twenty-year career, the two rarely spoke, despite their close proximity. I asked Jack why. “I love Kobe, but I’m not a backstage guy,” Jack said. “I don’t go into the locker room. I’m not looking to hang out with any of these guys, or interfere in anyone’s life. I like it that he is all business all the time. He wants to win. And I want to watch. This is my entertainment, not my social circle. I always hated when someone would come into my trailer during a movie, or want to come on the set. It’s a distraction. I’m trying to concentrate on my job. So I didn’t ever want to interrupt, for the same reason I didn’t want to be interrupted.”

I changed my clothes and got ready for bed. At about one thirty in the morning, I heard a knock on my door. I thought it was the security guard. Maybe he needed to use the restroom or something. I opened the door. It was Steinbrenner. 

“Jim, can I come in?” 

“Sure.” 

Still in his suit and tie, not a hair out of place, he took a few steps inside. I stood there in my shorts, stunned. 

“I want you to know a few things,” George said. “First of all, I didn’t think that interview was that bad. Second, what happened tonight at the stadium doesn’t represent the way the New York Yankees organization feels about you. It doesn’t represent my feelings. You are always welcome at Yankee Stadium. And don’t worry about that player and what he said tonight. He won’t be around here much longer.” 

He continued. “If we are fortunate enough to win this series—and I’m very cautious about counting on anything before it happens—there will not be a single Yankee who will act inappropriately during the trophy presentation. Every New York Yankee from Joe Torre on down will treat you with respect and courtesy. You have my word. You’ve done a great job for a long time. I will stand beside you for the entire ceremony.” 

He held out his hand and we shook. You find out a lot about people in situations like that. You find out what they are beneath the images presented by the media. George was, of course, a polarizing figure, a man forever known as the Boss—and the nickname cut both ways. He defended traditional values. Players on his team couldn’t wear long hair or grow beards. One of his favorite expressions was, “If you don’t have a hernia, you’re not pulling your fair share.” But he also became a caricature, firing twenty managers in his first twenty-three years as owner and once posing as Napoleon on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Those loyal to him will point to the seven World Series championships secured during his tenure. His detractors bristle that he did little more than buy them by luring free agents with outrageous salaries. 

That night, when he stuck out his hand, George Steinbrenner was simply a man who could be trusted. I’ll never forget that, either.

Contemplating the Future of Cities

One of my fellow principals at work is a big sci-fi fan.  He tells me it reconciles with his love for economics, because in both disciplines you take a few premises and try to extrapolate the future from those premises.  So reading sci-fi is pleasurable and instructive for him, because he enjoys seeing what interesting futures sci-fi authors come up with based on a certain read of the present.

Sci-fi isn't necessarily my genre now, but I'd like to get into it, for the same reasons my work colleague likes it.  The thing about sci-fi is that it's fiction, so it's somewhat safe to explore the characteristics of the present that lead to futures that are dystopian or bleak.  But in the real world it's scarier to consider we're heading down a path that takes us to a place that leads to ruin or injustice.  

At my firm, we just launched something called ESI Center for the Future of Cities, and in doing so we are taking a decidedly optimistic and active look at the years to come.  The future of cities could be quite bad.  Climate change, social injustice, a COVID-induced hollowing out of density...these are all dreary to contemplate.  

But, what they mean is that now is a moment to envision a more bullish outlook on cities, and to work hard to make that vision a reality.  As someone once told me, the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago, but the second best time is today.  Today we have an opportunity to work towards environmental resilience, economic vibrancy, cultural flourishing, and social justice.  I'm excited we have a new initiative at work where we are going to do just that.  Let's get to it.  

Glad to Have Served, Glad to Have Stepped Down

Can it have been six months since I stepped down from serving on the Philadelphia Board of Education?  I am so honored that Mayor Kenney tapped me to be one of the initial nine Philadelphians to serve on the newly locally appointed governance board for the School District of Philadelphia, and so glad to have served alongside eight of the most good-hearted and dedicated people you could possibly find.  

I learned so much from the experience.  It was quite a thing to carry the responsibilities of the position, whether the sheer scale, the complexity, the never-ending challenges, or the very public-facing nature of it all.  It was often not easy and at times it was very painful, but I remain deeply grateful for every moment and every decision and every interaction.  I'm thankful for everybody I met through the process - staff, students, parents, advocates - all of whom are precious souls trying to do their best, and all of us want the same thing, which is for our kids to be safe and to succeed.  

I will reserve for private discussion any commentary on lessons learned throughout my tenure or on current issues.  But I will say that, when I was a public official, I deeply appreciated the incisive reporting provided by our star journalists in the local education space here in Philadelphia.  What an important and grave role they play in this whole process, and how tireless and enthusiastic was their effort in fulfilling that role.  We all benefit from the transparency and access made possible by their articles and tweets.

I will forever be glad I said yes to the opportunity.  But I am equally glad to have stepped down when I did.  Being president of a consulting firm and being a parent of three kids is literally more than two full-time jobs, so adding the time commitment and emotional burden of being a school board member was something I knew I could only do well for a short season before exiting to let others carry the torch.  

I recall the first Thursday after I officially stepped down, after new school board members had been sworn in.  I immediately fell right back into the same routines that governed my life three years prior.  A lot of my clients are looking for their reports by end of week, so Thursdays are critical days in the office to get stuff done and shipped.  That Thursday was, like many days, a whirlwind of meeting after meeting, using the precious spaces in between for longform content generation and internal check-ins with team members, all with an eye on the clock to be responsible to impending deadlines.

When 5 o'clock hit, I raced over to where Asher was doing remote kindergarten to pick him, got him settled at home, and then went back to work.  Then dinner, then more work.  Then bedtime stories, then still more work.  At around 9 o'clock, right before I was about to get into bed to read and then fall asleep, I decided to check on Twitter feed one last time.  At the top of my feed were a series of live-tweets from the Inquirer's incomparable education reporter, Kristen Graham, the last one noting the beginning of the public speaker portion of the meeting.  

"Oh yes, it's Thursday night, which means there is a school board meeting tonight!  And judging by the tweets, that meeting looks to be going on for at least another couple of hours!  Oh my!  Good thing I'm going to bed now!"  

Part of me misses those meetings and all of the engagement that went into them.  We're talking about our kids here, and I had an extraordinary vantage point from which to help figure out how to do right by them.  I commend anyone who is serving in this capacity or wants to.  Do it for the kids, and I will cheer you on.  Even if we may quibble about the little things or even the big things, I salute you for being on the field, the most important field of them all, which is that our kids are being taken care of.  

But another part of me is so, so glad to be able to, after a long day of work, go to bed at a reasonable hour on a Thursday night.  I'm glad to have served.  But I'm glad to have stepped down.  

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Truman," by David McCullough.

Both were men of exceptional determination, with great reserves of personal courage and cheerfulness. They were alike too in their enjoyment of people. (The human race, Truman once told a reporter, was an “excellent outfit.”) Each had an active sense of humor and was inclined to be dubious of those who did not. But Roosevelt, who loved stories, loved also to laugh at his own, while Truman was more of a listener and laughed best when somebody else told “a good one.” Roosevelt enjoyed flattery, Truman was made uneasy by it. Roosevelt loved the subtleties of human relations. He was a master of the circuitous solution to problems, of the pleasing if ambiguous answer to difficult questions. He was sensitive to nuances in a way Harry Truman never was and never would be. Truman, with his rural Missouri background, and partly, too, because of the limits of his education, was inclined to see things in far simpler terms, as right or wrong, wise or foolish. He dealt little in abstractions. His answers to questions, even complicated questions, were nearly always direct and assured, plainly said, and followed often by a conclusive “And that’s all there is to it,” an old Missouri expression, when in truth there may have been a great deal more “to it.”



“Harry, the President is dead.”

Truman was unable to speak.

“Is there anything I can do for you?” he said at last.

“Is there anything we can do for you,” she said. “For you are the one in trouble now.”





The President’s physical well-being impressed nearly everyone. “Churchill and Stalin were given to late hours, while I was an early riser,” Truman would later comment. “This made my days extra long….” Yet he seemed above fatigue. He was out of bed and dressed by 5:30 or 6:00 regularly every morning and needed no alarm clock or anyone to wake him. Subordinates found him invariably cheerful and positive. He was never known to make a rude or inconsiderate remark, or to berate anyone, or to appear the least out of sorts, no matter how much stress he was under. From first to last, he remained entirely himself. “There was no pretense whatever about him,” recalled the naval aide, Lieutenant Rigdon, who was charged with keeping the daily log. The great thing about the President, said Floyd Boring, one of the Secret Service men, was that he never got “swagly.” “He never came on as being superior…. He could talk to anyone! He could talk to the lowly peasant. He could talk to the King of England…. And that was, I think, his secret…. He never got swellheaded—never got, you know, swagly.”



Far from being downcast or tentative about his new role as a “minority” President, he had returned from Florida tanned, rested, eager to get going. He had accepted the verdict of the people in the spirit, he said, that “all good citizens accept the results of any fair election.” The change in Congress did not alter the country’s domestic or foreign problems, and in foreign affairs especially it must be “a national and not a party program.” Of course, conflicts would arise between a Republican Congress and a Democratic President. That was to be expected. But he, Harry Truman, would be guided by a simple idea: “to do in all cases…without regard to political considerations, what seems to me to be for the welfare of all our people….”



“I kept reading about that Dewey fellow,” said another man, “and the more I read the more he reminded me of one of those slick ads trying to get money out of my pocket. Now Harry Truman, running around and yipping and falling all over his feet—I had the feeling he could understand the kind of fixes I get into.”




The day after the election, the staff of the Post had sent a telegram asking him to attend a “Crow Banquet,” to which all newspaper editorial writers, political reporters, pollsters, radio commentators, and columnists would be invited. The main course was to be old crow en glâce. Truman alone would be served turkey. Dress for the guest of honor would be white tie, for the others, sackcloth. In response Truman had written that he had “no desire to crow over anybody or to see anybody eat crow figuratively or otherwise. We should all get together now and make a country in which everybody can eat turkey whenever he pleases.”

Recommended Reads, 41st in a Quarterly Series

 

Stuff I'd recommend from the past three months:

Assume Nothing: A Story of Intimate Violence (Selvaratnam).  A harrowing and incisive memoir.

Innovate Like Edison: The Success System of America's Greatest Inventor (Gelb/Caldicott).  Some people are naturally more innovative than others, but it isn't true that you can't learn how to be innovative or institute a process that leads to more innovation.

The First Word: The Search for the Origins of Language (Kenneally).  So interesting to explore how we learned to speak and whether and how we are different from animals.

Girl on a Train (Hawkins).  I don't usually do fiction but I want to, and this was worth the read.

All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake (Miles).  An amazing, inter-generational account.

13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don't Do: Raising Self-Assured Children and Training Their Brains for a Life of Happiness, Meaning, and Success (Morin).  Oops, I do a lot of these things.  Time to do better.

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Here are a couple of excerpts from a book I recently read, "13 Things Mentally Strong Parents Don't Do: Raising Self-Assured Children and Training Their Brains for a Life of Happiness, Meaning, and Success," by Amy Morin. 

 

Like many kids who have been taught “mistakes should be prevented,” Mason put more energy into hiding his mistakes than learning from them. His mother had spent so much time focusing on the importance of doing everything right that he wasn’t sure what to do when he did something wrong. 

When kids get the message that mistakes are bad—whether they think mistakes are embarrassing or they don’t want someone else to be upset—they become good at covering them up. But unless they acknowledge these mistakes, they won’t ever learn from them.

When your child succeeds: Discuss areas where he can improve. Recognizing mistakes is key to challenging him to do better next time. But make sure you also congratulate him on what he did well. Focusing too much on his mistakes could backfire. 

When your child fails: It doesn’t matter whether you talk about the positive or the negative. What matters is that you talk about it. So ask your child what he learned and how he thinks he did. Although talking may be the last thing your child wants to do when he messes up, debriefing is what turns a failed venture into a learning opportunity.

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Here's an excerpt from a book I recently read, "Unfu*k Yourself: Get Out of Your Head and into Your Life," by Gary Bishop.

 

Relentlessness doesn’t mean charging into the fray headfirst, swinging and flailing your arms every which way. It’s focused, determined action. Again and again and again. 

You’re not bashing your fist against a brick wall until it’s bloody and bruised. You’re using your hammer and chisel to slowly, methodically chip away piece by piece until eventually there’s a hole. And then the hole gets bigger. And bigger. And before you know it, you’re like Alice stepping through the looking glass to a whole new world.

 

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Here's an excerpt from a book I recently read, "Begin Again: Your Hope and Renewal Start Today," by Max Lucado.

The story is told of a man on an African safari deep in the jungle. The guide ahead of him had a machete and was whacking away the tall weeds and thick underbrush. The traveler, weary and hot, asked in frustration, “Where are we? Do you know where you are taking me? Where is the path?” The seasoned guide stopped and looked back at the man and replied, “I am the path.” 

We ask the same questions, don’t we? We ask God, “Where are you taking me? Where is the path?” And he, like the guide, doesn’t tell us. Oh, he may give us a hint or two, but that’s all. If he did, would we understand? Would we comprehend our location? No, like the traveler, we are unacquainted with this jungle. So rather than give us an answer, Jesus gives us a far greater gift. He gives us himself. 

Does he remove the jungle? No, the vegetation is still thick. 

Does he purge the predators? No, danger still lurks. 

Jesus doesn’t give hope by changing the jungle; he restores our hope by giving us himself.