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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Americanah," by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie:

He taught ideas of nuance and complexity in his classes and yet he was asking her for a single reason, the cause. But she had not had a bold epiphany and there was no cause; it was simply that layer after layer of discontent had settled in her, and formed a mass that now propelled her. She did not tell him this, because it would hurt him to know she had felt that way for a while, that her relationship with him was like being content in a house but always sitting by the window and looking out.

This was what he now was, the kind of Nigerian expected to declare a lot of cash at the airport. It brought to him a disorienting strangeness, because his mind had not changed at the same pace as his life, and he felt a hollow space between himself and the person he was supposed to be.

She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease; her skin felt as though it was her right size.

“Ifem, this is something a lot of people go through, and I know it’s not been easy for you adjusting to a new place and still not having a job. We don’t talk about things like depression in Nigeria but it’s real. You should see somebody at the health center. There’s always therapists.” 

Ifemelu kept her face to the window. She felt, again, that crushing desire to cry, and she took a deep breath, hoping it would pass. She wished she had told Ginika about the tennis coach, taken the train to Ginika’s apartment on that day, but now it was too late, her self-loathing had hardened inside her. She would never be able to form the sentences to tell her story. 

“Ginika,” she said. “Thank you.” Her voice was hoarse. The tears had come, she could not control them. Ginika stopped at a gas station, gave her a tissue, and waited for her sobs to die down before she started the car and drove to Kimberly’s house.

“What are you reading?” Kelsey turned to Ifemelu. 

Ifemelu showed her the cover of the novel. She did not want to start a conversation. Especially not with Kelsey. She recognized in Kelsey the nationalism of liberal Americans who copiously criticized America but did not like you to do so; they expected you to be silent and grateful, and always reminded you of how much better than wherever you had come from America was.

Because he had last known her when she knew little of the things she blogged about, he felt a sense of loss, as though she had become a person he would no longer recognize.

Finally, he said, “I can’t imagine how bad you must have felt, and how alone. You should have told me. I so wish you had told me.” 

She heard his words like a melody and she felt herself breathing unevenly, gulping at the air. She would not cry, it was ridiculous to cry after so long, but her eyes were filling with tears and there was a boulder in her chest and a stinging in her throat. The tears felt itchy. She made no sound. He took her hand in his, both clasped on the table, and between them silence grew, an ancient silence that they both knew. She was inside this silence and she was safe.

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, 

 

For generations, people had navigated West Virginia in creative ways. Directions are delivered in paragraphs. Look for the white church, the stone church, the brick church, the old elementary school, the old post office, the old sewing factory, the wide turn, the big mural, the tattoo parlor, the drive-in restaurant, the dumpster painted like a cow, the pickup truck in the middle of the field. But, of course, if you live here, you probably don’t need directions; along the dirt lanes that wind through valleys and dry riverbeds, everyone knows everyone else anyway. 

Emergency services have rallied for more formal ways of finding people. Close your eyes and try to explain where your house is without using your address. Now try it again, but this time pretend you’re having a stroke. Paramedics rushed to a house in West Virginia described as having chickens out front, only to see that every house had chickens out front. Along those lanes, I was told, people come out on their porches and wave at strangers, so paramedics couldn’t tell who was being friendly and who was flagging them down.

The slums seemed to have more serious needs than addresses—sanitation, sources of clean water, healthcare, even roofs to protect them from the monsoon. But the lack of addresses was depriving those living in the slums a chance to get out of them. Without an address, it’s nearly impossible to get a bank account. And without a bank account, you can’t save money, borrow money, or receive a state pension. Scandals had exposed moneylenders and scam banks operating throughout Kolkata’s slums, with some residents reportedly committing suicide after losing their life savings to a crook. With their new addresses, more residents of Chetla can now have their own ATM cards, with accounts Subhashis and his staff helped to open at the Bank of Baroda.

Citizens should have a way to “reach and be reached by associations and government agencies,” and to be reached by fellow citizens, even ones they didn’t know before. In other words, without an address, you are limited to communicating only with people who know you. And it’s often people who don’t know you who can most help you.

Even before the earthquake, good maps of Haiti were hard to find. Haiti is not alone. Today, huge swaths of the world are insufficiently mapped, including many cities with more than a million people. It’s no surprise that these places happen to be the poorest places on earth. When asked about snakebite statistics in Brazil, scientist Maurício Rocha e Silva once said there were none. “Where there are snakes, there are no statistics; and where there are statistics, there are no snakes.” Often where epidemics break out, there are no maps either.

“The great enterprise of numbering the houses,” Tantner writes, “is characteristic of the eighteenth century. Without any trace of irony, the house number can be considered one of the most important innovations of the Age of Enlightenment, of that century obsessed, as it was, with order and classification.” House numbers were not invented to help you navigate the city or receive your mail, though they perform these two functions admirably. Instead, they were designed to make you easier to tax, imprison, and police. House numbers exist not to help you find your way, but rather to help the government find you. 

The invention of the house number is not a footnote to history, Tantner tells his readers, but a whole chapter within it.

As historian Vernon Carstensen has described, surveyors ambitiously set out across the country to record millions of acres in precise squares—all, somehow, “on the curved surface of the earth.” Some discharged their duties diligently. Others, whether from ineptitude, lack of proper tools, or drunkenness, drew squiggly lines. One reportedly measured the length of a buggy wheel with string, and then rested on a horse-drawn cart while he counted the rotations. But for the most part the land was laid out into neat parcels, with intersecting right angles. “The straight lines were spread over the prairies, the foothills, the mountains, over the swamps and deserts, and even over some of the shallow lakes,” Carstensen has written. “Like bees or ants or other well-organized societies, Americans, once they fixed upon the rectangular survey, were inflexible in their devotion to the idea.” Ultimately, the surveyors covered about 69 percent of land in the public domain in the Continental United States. 

As in Manhattan, gridding the West converted the land into easily traded gambling chips. But Carstensen, who has closely chronicled the land survey, found in it a higher purpose. “No one will ever know how much the straight lines of the rectangular surveys contributed to the public peace during the Nineteenth Century,” he wrote. In parts of the country where the map looked like a “crazy quilt,” like Tennessee and Kentucky, disputes over land boundaries had led to murderous, generations-long feuds. But gridded lands did not become the subject of vendettas. “Those neat survey lines caused the polyglot country to be able to divide it better. Robert Frost has told us that good fences make good neighbors. He might have told us that clean survey lines make for peaceful land settlement.”

In the United States, a proposal to name a street after King has sometimes ignited a race war. A 1993, in Americus, Georgia, a white fire official said he supported naming half of a street for King, so long as the other half could be named for James Earl Ray, his assassin. In Miami-Dade County, Florida, Martin Luther King Jr. signs were painted over with “General Roert E. Lee.” In 2002, a motorist mowed down newly erected MLK street signs in Mankato, Minnesota, while shouting racist epithets. In 2005 in Muncie, Indiana, a county employee allegedly said that the street name proponents were “acting like ni**ers.” The Department of Justice had to send in a mediator who worked with local citizens for three months.

Hobby Lobby

 

An important breakthrough for me in therapy last year was realizing that the wellness I wish for others I had been reluctant to accept for myself. It came naturally to me to want those around me to make time for themselves and their own self-care, and yet I was unwilling to allow myself room in my own life to practice that.

This year I am taking that lesson one step further. Heretofore, a common question I would ask those I care about was "what are you doing to replenish yourself?" Now, I ask: "Do you have a hobby?"

Of course, my new hobby is golf, which I have greatly enjoyed - playing, naturally, but also meeting others who share this pastime. So it's been fun to have golf as a hobby. But it's also been good to have a hobby, independent of what it is. And that's because it's a step further in the right direction for my wellbeing.

For the longest time, I had many legitimate answers to my first question. Indeed, I took seriously the things that I needed in my life to replenish myself, whether exercise or reading or personal day trips. 

But a hobby is a bigger step. It acknowledges that one is allowed to have an activity that brings you pleasure, and that does not need to make sense for any other reason. 

Now, golf, like many hobbies, serves many practical purposes. It is a form of exercise, it is in nature, it is me time, or it is time to catch up with friends or do business. These are all helpful benefits from this hobby. 

But, golf is at its core a leisure pursuit that I do for fun. And granting myself room to accept that has been good for me in deep ways. In a sense, golf is the first hobby I've had in my adult life. Which is wonderful for me now, but telling that I refused myself the luxury for almost three decades.

So asking the second question, "do you have a hobby," feels like a greater invitation to those I care for, to allow themselves leisure and pleasure, even and especially life's responsibilities, burdens, and hardships. It is the spice that flavors our lives. I couldn't be happier with my hobby, and that I have one. I encourage you to pursue the same.

Proximity to Penn

 

I may have made this list before, so if I'm repeating myself I apologize. But I must note how nice it is that we live near a campus like Penn. Resources, amenities, history, and opportunity freely abound. In no particular order, we are enriched because we have nearby access to:

Job opportunities

Enrichment opportunities

Academic resources

Green space

Cultural events

Retail (40th, Walnut)

Architecture

Historic sites (Palestra, Franklin Field, ENIAC) 

Health care 

Transit

As a Penn alum and former professor, the place itself holds a lot of meaning for me. But even divorced from those connections, there's just so much to tap into. For which I'm grateful.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 368

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Odyssey," by Homer.

 

Yet I tell you great Odysseus is not dead. He’s still alive, somewhere in this wide world, held captive, out at sea on a wave-washed island, and hard men, savages, somehow hold him back against his will. Wait, I’ll make you a prophecy, one the immortal gods have planted in my mind—it will come true, I think, though I’m hardly a seer or know the flights of birds. He won’t be gone long from the native land he loves, not even if iron shackles bind your father down. He’s plotting a way to journey home at last; he’s never at a loss.

 

His own son gazed at him, wonderstruck, terrified too, turning his eyes away, suddenly—this must be some god—and he let fly with a burst of exclamations: “Friend, you’re a new man—not what I saw before! Your clothes, they’ve changed, even your skin has changed—surely you are some god who rules the vaulting skies! Oh be kind, and we will give you offerings, gifts of hammered gold to warm your heart—spare us, please, I beg you!”

“No, I am not a god,” the long-enduring, great Odysseus returned. “Why confuse me with one who never dies? No, I am your father—the Odysseus you wept for all your days, you bore a world of pain, the cruel abuse of men.”

And with those words Odysseus kissed his son and the tears streamed down his cheeks and wet the ground, though before he’d always reined his emotions back.

But still not convinced that it was his father, Telemachus broke out, wild with disbelief, “No, you’re not Odysseus! Not my father! Just some spirit spellbinding me now—to make me ache with sorrow all the more. Impossible for a mortal to work such marvels, not with his own devices, not unless some god comes down in person, eager to make that mortal young or old—like that! Why, just now you were old, and wrapped in rags, but now, look, you seem like a god who rules the skies up there!"

 

But Odysseus aimed and shot Antinous square in the throat and the point went stabbing clean through the soft neck and out—and off to the side he pitched, the cup dropped from his grasp as the shaft sank home, and the man’s life-blood came spurting out his nostrils—thick red jets—a sudden thrust of his foot—he kicked away the table—food showered across the floor, the bread and meats soaked in a swirl of bloody filth.

Speed Reading

I did not plan for my new commuting patterns to alter my reading habits but here we are. Giving up bundling up and fighting car traffic on my bike for riding out on buses and subways has been a welcome change. And it affords me time to do things I can't do while I'm on two wheels, like play Scrabble or check email or fire off texts.

But my favorite commuting activity by far has been reading. Indeed, that plus a newfound laziness for going out of my way has compelled me more often that not to wait for a bus that I know will be slower (because I'm usually riding during rush hour) rather than walk a little further to a subway stop. The latter may be 20 minutes door to door, but only 5 or 6 of those minutes are available for me to read. Whereas the former, if the wait is long and traffic is bad, might take closer to 30 minutes, but at least 20 of those minutes are available for me to read.

In 20 minutes one way, I can usually read a chapter of a book, which let's say the typical book I'd read on the go is 10 to 15 chapters, so that means that I can usually finish a book in a week and change. In parallel, I'm trying to hit more must-read long books, which I do during my usual evening time slot, and those might take upwards of a month per title. 

It's a different way to my usual 50 to 60 books a year, but no less enjoyable. Evening reading before going to bed as absolutely a life habit I look forward to every day. And catching a pleasant read at the beginning and end of the work day is fun too. Who knew how many positive ripple effects would result from a simple decision to trade in my bike for a transit pass?

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Get Out of Your Own Way: A Skeptic’s Guide to Growth and Fulfillment," by Dave Hollis.

There will be a handful of moments you look back on that fundamentally changed your life—when you met your partner, your decision to take a job that ended up propelling you forward, things like that. This talk, this decision we made—that my wife made—to wade into and have a hard, hard conversation about the trajectory of our lives, that was one of those moments for me. 

The day after Hawaii, we sat on our bed and Rachel worked against every ounce of muscle memory in her being. We’re both recovering codependents and confrontation on this scale isn’t something either of us had mastered, but the stakes were too high to worry about that. This was going down. She laid it out in such simple terms, but those terms rocked me to my core. 

“I’m going to reach for a better version of myself every day. I’m going to do it whether you decide to do it or not. Personal growth is one of the most important values in my life, so I’m going to pursue it every single day. Are you going to choose to grow every day, or are you going to tread water? If you aren’t growing and I am, in three months, will we have as much to talk about on date night? In six months, will we still make out as often? In a year, will we still be going on dates? In three years, will we still be married?” 

Dagger. To. The. Heart.

But the biggest thing I’m learning during my immersion in self-help is the tie between growth and fulfillment. You can find things short-term to make you happy, but if you want to truly be fulfilled you need to be growing. And in order to grow, you need to put in the time, do the work, and learn to kick the lies putting limits on who and what you can be.

The truth that counters the lie that I’m defined by my job? 

I am defined by my impact. 

Impact is agnostic to job title. Impact can come irrespective of the name of your company. There’s freedom in untangling what you do from who you are. Once you know your “why,” you can find fulfillment in being challenged to chase it, no matter what your business card says.

If you want a meaningful life, you must create situations that make you uncomfortable. 

Comfort is a casualty of growth. 

If you aren’t willing to put your comfort at risk, you’d better prepare yourself to settle for a mediocre life. I don’t want mediocre. You don’t either. If we’re going to chase more, it’s going to come with the reality that we’ll have to risk more. We’re going to have to risk our usual, safe, normal lives. It’s going to feel uncomfortable—because that’s where the growth comes from. 

Muting discomfort doesn’t feed growth; it stifles it. I get that now.

The sooner you can shift the way your mind interprets the indiscretions of the past—from a lifetime indictment of you as a person to a lapse in judgment that you can learn from—the sooner you can apply the lessons to achieving your goals. Some of the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my life have become cautionary tales that now inform how I love my wife, how I lead my team, how I parent my kids. Many of them have shown themselves in retrospect to have been the vehicle for some great breakthroughs, setting me up for success by providing a map for how not to navigate what’s in front of me next time.

Today’s culture has demonized failure, which means it’s on each of us to reframe it in a positive light as something you absolutely have to have if you want a rich, full life that continues to be better tomorrow than today. It means measuring success against a set of criteria tied not to how little you fail but how fast you get back up, how much you learn when you stumble, how the resources you needed to solve your mistakes have become part of your arsenal going forward.

The only thing that defines what you can become is you. Letting something external determine your worth or your trajectory is what is called a limiting belief. Limiting beliefs, in fact, are what all the chapters in this book are about: lies that hold us back in some way. 

When I first heard this term it sounded like therapy-speak, like something someone who jumps up and down at a personal-development seminar at the local hotel ballroom talks through on the third Saturday of each month. But here’s the thing: it’s not that at all. It’s not fancy. It’s actually pretty simple. Limiting beliefs are things we mistakenly hold as truths about ourselves. As they inform our identities, they give us permission to pursue certain dreams, act in a certain way, have confidence or no confidence in our abilities, or think we do or don’t have the right to do certain things. We think these are laws, that we have to learn to live within their bounds. But this is simply not the case. 

You create the limits for what’s possible in your life. You decide. You choose that reality. You. Choose. That. Reality

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 366

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "We're Going to Need More Wine: Stories That Are Funny, Complicated, and True," by Gabrielle Union.

BECAUSE I’VE DONE SO MANY BLACK FILM PRODUCTIONS, HAIR HAS NOT always been the focal point of my performance. But on white productions, it is like another actor on set with me. A problem actor. First of all, they never want to hire anyone black in hair and makeup on a white film. Hair and makeup people hire their friends, and they naturally want to believe their friend who says they can do anything. “Oh yeah, I can do black hair,” they say. Then you show up, and you see immediately that they don’t have any of the proper tools, the proper products, and you look crazy. If you ever see a black person on-screen looking nuts? I guarantee they didn’t have a black person in hair and makeup.

The actresses in the generation before mine were well aware of their expiration dates, and they furiously tried to beat the clock before Hollywood had decided their milk had gone bad. Yes, there were some supremely catty women in Hollywood who actively spread rumors about younger stars so that they could stay working longer. But there were also way more amazing women who thought big picture. They trusted that if they uplifted each other, in twenty years, there might just be more work to go around. Women like Regina King, Tichina Arnold, Tisha Campbell-Martin, and Jenifer Lewis went out of their way to mentor and educate the next generation. That empowerment is why we have Taraji P. Henson, Kerry Washington, Viola Davis, Sanaa Lathan, and more starring in TV shows and producing films. That creates yet more work for the next woman up. That’s what can happen when we mentor and empower.

THERE WAS A REASON. HOLLYWOOD IS EXTREMELY SEGREGATED. The whole idea of Black Hollywood, Latino Hollywood, Asian Hollywood—it’s very real. And it all stems from who is with you in the audition rooms as you are coming up. Because you are generally auditioning with people who look like you, over and over again, simply because of how roles are described. When it got down to the wire for the role of “Sassy Friend #1,” these were the people I saw. That’s how I got to know Zoe Saldana, Kerry Washington, Essence Atkins, Robinne Lee, Sanaa, and all the Reginas. Sassy Friend #1 was a black girl between x and y age, and that meant a very shallow casting pool. When it came time to cast a family, I would meet an array of actors who all looked like me. Sitting in those rooms for hours at a time, multiple times a week, you get to know people. As you all start to rise, it’s the same people, who are now deemed the “it folk,” who you sit in better rooms with. And those people become your community; they know the struggle you went through, because they went through it, too. And the rooms pretty much stay that way, no matter how high you rise, because for the most part Hollywood doesn’t really subscribe to color-blind casting.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 365

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Them: Why We Hate Each Other--and How to Heal," by Ben Sasse.

It turns out that the massive economic disruption that we entered a couple of decades ago and will be navigating for decades to come is depriving us psychologically and spiritually at the same time that it’s enriching us materially. The same technology that has liberated us from so much inconvenience and drudgery has also unmoored us from the things that anchor our identities. The revolution that has given tens of millions of Americans the opportunity to live like historic royalty has also outpaced our ability to figure out what community, friendships, and relationships should look like in the modern world. As reams of research now show, we’re richer and better-informed and more connected—and unhappier and more isolated and less fulfilled.

There’s an interesting military phenomenon that applies to this political moment—and even to my TGI Fridays outburst. In urban combat training, there is a well-documented tendency to shift our focus from a distant but important target to a less important but closer target. If you’re being attacked and your threat is fifty yards away, but a closer target pops up, you’ll turn your attention to the new target—even if it’s less of a threat. We tend to want to knock down the easier stuff. Conversely, we want to ignore or deny challenges that are farther out or more difficult. 

It seems clear that in America today, we’re facing problems that feel too big for us, so we’re lashing out at each other, often over less important matters. Many of us are using politics as a way to distract ourselves from the nagging sense that something bigger is wrong. Not many of us would honestly argue that if our “side” just had more political power, we’d be able to fix what ails us. Fortunately, we can avoid addressing the big problems as long as someone else—some nearer target—is standing in the way of our securing the political power even to try. It’s easier to shriek at the people on the other side of the street. It’s comforting to be able to pin the problems on the freaks in the pink hats or the weirdos carrying the pro-life signs. 

At least our contempt unites us with other Americans who think like we do. 

At least we are not like them.

Above all, this book is an urgent call to name the problem that’s ripping us apart. 

It’s not taxes or tweets; it’s not primarily politics or polarization; it’s neither an unpredictable president nor the #Resistance that wants to impeach him. It’s not a new bill or a blue-ribbon commission. The real culprit has less to do with us as a polity and everything to do with us as uprooted, wandering souls. 

Our world is nudging us toward rootlessness, when only a recovery of rootedness can heal us. What’s wrong with America, then, starts with one uncomfortable word. 

Loneliness.

A senior producer at one of America’s largest cable news networks once let me in on “rule one” of their segment selection: “We only do two kinds of stories,” he told me—“those that make people who love us love us more, and those that make people who hate us hate us more.” Following the New Yorker’s piece, I asked some publishing executives about this line. The responses were nearly uniform: the same logic is becoming the norm at print publications as well. I asked them to unpack this logic. 

“There are no possible 70-percent-of-America audiences anymore,” one executive explained. “All we can do is try to create ‘stickiness’ among the 1 percent of the readers we have a shot at. So that means getting attacked is almost as valuable as being loved.”

“Oh, come on!” the host replied. “You know how the game is played. You’re a big boy, and it’s just a game.” 

No, it’s not—at least not to me. 

I don’t fly away from my wife and kids five days a week to be part of some high-stakes Harlem Globetrotters show. I actually believe that America is an exceptional nation and that the republic is worth struggling to preserve. I don’t much care about their treatment of me, but I am disgusted by the way so many media personalities view our nation as their personal vending machine. In exchange for wild accusations and exaggerations, they get rich and famous—and we, their viewers and listeners, get a shallower, angrier, less workable America.

No responsible parent would willingly hook her child on heroin. No careful mom and dad would let their kids eat nothing but cake and candy. But there’s compelling evidence that many of the apps on our tablets are as addictive as heroin and as unhealthy as an uninterrupted diet of sweets—and by design. We know the harms of drugs and sugary foods. 

The new digital addictions are at least as dangerous.