Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 476

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Water Dancer," by Ta-Nehisi Coates.

I remember how these young couples would hold one another, each morning before going to their separate tasks, how they would clasp hands at night, sitting on the steps of their quarters, how they would fight and draw knives, kill each other, before being without each, kill each other, because Natchez-way was worse than death, was living death, an agony of knowing that somewhere in the vastness of America, the one whom you loved most was parted from you, never again to meet in this shackled, fallen world.

 

  

 

I think now that my own volume, the one that you now hold here, began there in those moments – in that library. For eventually I began not simply to read but to write. At first it was merely a record of my studies. But soon this record expanded to my thoughts, and then from my thoughts to my impressions, so that I now possessed, not merely a record of my head, but of my heart.

  

 

 

All of these fanatics were white. They took slavery as a personal insult or affront, a stain upon their name. They had seen women carried off to fancy, or watched as a father was stripped and beaten in front of his child, or seen whole families pinned like hogs into rail-cars, steam-boats, and jails. Slavery humiliated them, because it offended a basic sense of goodness that they believed themselves to possess. And when their cousins perpetrated the base practice, it served to remind them how easily they might do the same. They scorned their barbaric brethren, but they were brethren all the same. So their opposition was a kind of vanity, a hatred of slavery that far outranked any love of the slave. Corrine was no different, and it was why, relentless as she was against slavery, she could so casually condemn me to the hole, condemn Georgie Parks to death, and mock an outrage put upon Sophia.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 475

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "We Learn Nothing: Essays and Cartoons," by Tim Kreider.

My friend Lauren once told me that she could totally understand—which is not the same as sympathize with—those losers who kill their exes and/or their exes’ new lovers, that black, annihilating If-I-can’t-have-her-then-no-one-else-will impulse, because it’s so painful to know that the person you love is still out there in the world, living their life, going to work and laughing with friends and drinking margaritas. It’s a lesser hurt than grief, but, in a way, crueler—it’s more like being dead yourself, and having to watch life go on without you. I loved her for owning up to this. Not that Lauren or I—or you—would ever do any such thing ourselves. But I sometimes wonder whether the line between those of us who don’t do such things and the few who do is as impermeable as we like to think. Anytime I hear about another one of us gone berserk, shooting up his ex’s office or drowning her kids to free herself up for her Internet boyfriend, the question I always ask is not, like every other tongue-clucking pundit in the country, how could this have happened? but why doesn’t this happen every day? It makes me proud of all of us who are secretly going to pieces behind closed doors but still somehow keeping it together for the public, collaborating in the shaky ongoing effort of not letting civilization fall apart for one more day.

Memory is also how we learn anything. Even flatworms figure out, after a few bad experiences, to avoid the pathway with the electric shock. By contrast, it took me about four thousand trials to realize that drinking ultimately makes you feel worse. I was scandalized to learn that alcohol is technically a depressant. And once you’ve quit wiping your memory every night and having to reboot your whole personality every morning, your experience becomes cumulative instead of simply repetitive; you can start to see your life as something resembling a linear narrative, with an intelligible shape and possibly some meaning, instead of just a bunch of funny stories. 

We couldn’t go on living like that forever; as the traditional last call has it: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” One by one my old drinking buddies succumbed to the usual tragedies: careers, marriages, mortgages, children. And as my own metabolism started to slow, the fun:hangover ratio became increasingly unacceptable. Eventually a day comes when the lined, puffy, sagging face you see the mirror when you’re hung over does not go away, and you realize that it is now your actual face. The hangovers also acquired a dreadful new symptom of existential anxiety in addition to their more traditional attributes. Self-inflicted brain damage no longer seems so cool and defiant, nor wasting time so liberating. Squandering time is a luxury of profligate youth, when the years are to us as dollars are to billionaires. Doing the same thing in middle age just makes you nervous, not with vague puritan guilt but the more urgent worry that you’re running out of time, a deadline you can feel in your cells. 

I don’t miss passing out sitting up with a drink in my hand, or having to be told how much fun I had, or feeling enervated and depressed for days. Being clearheaded is such a peculiar novelty it feels like some subtle, intriguing new designer drug. I don’t know if it’s one I’d want to get addicted to, though. After a week or so of feeling optimistic and silly, my energy level back up near 100 percent, I start getting antsy and bored. Apparently I’m not content to be happy. Sooner or later you want to celebrate your improved disposition with a cocktail.

Each of us has a Soul Toupee. The Soul Toupee is that thing about ourselves we are most deeply embarrassed by and like to think we have cunningly concealed from the world, but which is, in fact, pitifully obvious to everybody who knows us. Contemplating one’s own Soul Toupee is not an exercise for the fainthearted. Most of the time other people don’t even get why our Soul Toupee is any big deal or a cause of such evident deep shame to us but they can tell that it is because of our inept, transparent efforts to cover it up, which only call more attention to it and to our self-consciousness about it, and so they gently pretend not to notice it. Meanwhile we’re standing there with our little rigid spongelike square of hair pasted on our heads thinking: Heh—got ’em all fooled! 

What’s so ironic and sad about this is that the very parts of ourselves that we’re most ashamed of and eager to conceal are not only obvious to everyone but are also, quite often, the parts of us they love best.

Young adulthood is an anomalous time in people’s lives; they’re as unlike themselves as they’re ever going to be, experimenting with substances and sex, ideology and religion, trying on different identities before their personalities set. Some people flirt briefly with being freethinking bohemians before moving back to the suburbs to become their parents. Friends who seemed pretty much indistinguishable from you in your twenties make different decisions about family or career, and after a decade or two these initial differences yield such radically divergent trajectories that when you get together again you regard each other’s lives with bemused incomprehension. You’re like two seeds that looked identical, one of which turned into a kiwi and the other into a banyan.

I probably don’t have to tell you that getting mad at your own mother for being old and sick does not make you feel like a model son or exemplary human being. Getting irritated at my own irritability did not improve matters. It made me only a little more forgiving of myself to understand that my anger was mostly fear. 

I wonder whether this same fear isn’t beneath our twenty-first-century intolerance for waits and downtime and silence. It’s as if, if we all had to stand still and shut up and turn off our machines for one minute, we’d hear the time passing and just start screaming. So instead we keep ourselves perpetually stunned with stimuli, thereby missing out on the very thing we’re so scared of losing. 

I'd always known I was adopted; it was part of the answer to the Where-did-I-come-from question. The parental talking point was that I had been chosen by people who loved and wanted me, unlike all those other kids who’d just come down the chute by chance. I never felt like I’d been abandoned, or suffered any loss or trauma, or yearned to be reunited with my original parents, imagining that finding them would be some sort of answer to the question of Me. I felt as if I’d won some sort of lottery when I was adopted; a lot of my friends and cousins envied me my parents, who seemed so open-minded and supportive compared to their own. I always imagined that people for whom being adopted was a major issue must have had deficient or abusive upbringings, been damaged or deprived in some way. Having common genes seemed to me almost as arbitrary as sharing a home state or zodiac sign, and anyone who fixated on such a flimsy bond must’ve been groping for any connection at all. 

Years ago one of my adopted friends and I agreed over beers that we secretly thought being adopted made us cooler than other people, more American—less encumbered by all the dreary baggage of heritage and history, freer to invent ourselves, like young Jimmy Gatz or Bruce Wayne. This has since proven to be not entirely true. You learn that your personality has a certain shape, with definite, inflexible bounds—bounds you find out about because you keep bonking into them headfirst when you try to change. (An acquaintance who used to grate on me won me over when I overheard her sigh, “D’ya ever wish you could just . . . trade in your whole personality for a new one?”) We are not infinitely malleable. Like it or not, you are a certain kind of person. Life is, in this respect, like that game in which you’re assigned an identity scrawled on a piece of paper that everyone else can see but you can’t, and you have to try to deduce from other people’s hints and snickers who you are. It doesn’t matter if you want to be Pierre Bonnard or Vasco da Gama if what’s written on your card is Barney Rubble. Eventually you give up and ask, Okay: so who am I?

Around the time I turned forty, the age at which physicians recommend you start lying awake worrying about your health, I decided I’d be well advised to request whatever medical history I could get from the adoption agency. This, at least, was my ostensible reason for contacting them, although practicality and self-maintenance are qualities so unlike me that there must have been other, less conscious motives at work. Forty is also an age when our life spans start to look alarmingly finite, and it had occurred to me that my biological mother would be sixty-one by now, which wasn’t old but wasn’t young, either. I didn’t even know for certain that she was still alive. 

I applied to the adoption agency for what’s called “nonidentifying information” about my biological mother—medical and family history, everything but names and places. Unexpectedly, the agency sent me an entire file of information garnered from my mother’s in-take interview, about not only herself and her family but the circumstances of my birth and adoption—the whole nativity story of me. It was certainly more than most people ever get to hear about their own conceptions. I’d hesitated before opening this file, a little reluctant to surrender the privilege of ignorance. After I read it, however unique or interesting my story might prove to be, it would be forever fixed as one thing and not another; the mystery of myself would be solved, limitless possibility replaced with plain old facts. 

It was, of course, an ordinary human story, messy and painful and typical of millions that took place around that time. This is not wholly my own story to tell, so I’ll suffice it to say that my existence turns out to have been contingent on a number of people behaving with extraordinary decency in difficult circumstances. It was also, I feel obliged to mention, contingent on the fact that I was born six years before Roe v. Wade. This hasn’t changed my position on abortion, but it does make me feel like the beneficiary of some unfair historical loophole, like having missed out on the draft. It all made my life seem even more undeserved than it already did, as though the world were a private party I’d gotten to crash.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 474

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything," by Joshua Foer.

Physiologically, we are virtually identical to our ancestors who painted images of bison on the walls of the Lascaux cave in France, among the earliest cultural artifacts to have survived to the present day. Our brains are no larger or more sophisticated than theirs. If one of their babies were to be dropped into the arms of an adoptive parent in twenty-first-century New York, the child would likely grow up indistinguishable from his or her peers. 

All that differentiates us from them is our memories. Not the memories that reside in our own brains, for the child born today enters the world just as much a blank slate as the child born thirty thousand years ago, but rather the memories that are stored outside ourselves—in books, photographs, museums, and these days in digital media. Once upon a time, memory was at the root of all culture, but over the last thirty millennia since humans began painting their memories on cave walls, we’ve gradually supplanted our own natural memory with a vast superstructure of external memory aids—a process that has sped up exponentially in recent years. Imagine waking up tomorrow and discovering that all the world’s ink had become invisible and all our bytes had disappeared. Our world would immediately crumble. Literature, music, law, politics, science, math: Our culture is an edifice built of externalized memories.

If memory is our means of preserving that which we consider most valuable, it is also painfully linked to our own transience. When we die, our memories die with us. In a sense, the elaborate system of externalized memory we’ve created is a way of fending off mortality. It allows ideas to be efficiently passed across time and space, and for one idea to build on another to a degree not possible when a thought has to be passed from brain to brain in order to be sustained. 

The externalization of memory not only changed how people think; it also led to a profound shift in the very notion of what it means to be intelligent. Internal memory became devalued. Erudition evolved from possessing information internally to knowing how and where to find it in the labyrinthine world of external memory. It’s a telling statement that pretty much the only place where you’ll find people still training their memories is at the World Memory Championship and the dozen national memory contests held around the globe. What was once a cornerstone of Western culture is now at best a curiosity. But as our culture has transformed from one that was fundamentally based on internal memories to one that is fundamentally based on memories stored outside the brain, what are the implications for ourselves and for our society? What we’ve gained is indisputable. But what have we traded away? What does it mean that we’ve lost our memory?

The three-pound mass balanced atop our spines is made up of somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 billion neurons, each of which can make upwards of five to ten thousand synaptic connections with other neurons. A memory, at the most fundamental physiological level, is a pattern of connections between those neurons. Every sensation that we remember, every thought that we think, transforms our brains by altering the connections within that vast network. By the time you get to the end of this sentence, your brain will have physically changed. 

If thinking about the word “coffee” makes you think about the color black and also about breakfast and the taste of bitterness, that’s a function of a cascade of electrical impulses rocketing around a real physical pathway inside your brain, which links a set of neurons that encode the concept of coffee with others containing the concepts of blackness, breakfast, and bitterness. That much scientists know. But how exactly a collection of cells could “contain” a memory remains among the deepest conundrums of neuroscience.

But the most striking finding of all from these early studies of chess experts was their astounding memories. The experts could memorize entire boards after just a brief glance. And they could reconstruct long-ago games from memory. In fact, later studies confirmed that the ability to memorize board positions is one of the best overall indicators of how good a chess player somebody is. And these chess positions are not simply encoded in transient short-term memory. Chess experts can remember positions from games for hours, weeks, even years afterward. Indeed, at a certain point in every chess master’s development, keeping mental track of the pieces on the board becomes such a trivial skill that they can take on several opponents at once, entirely in their heads.

As impressive as the chess masters’ memories were for chess games, their memories for everything else were notably unimpressive. When the chess experts were shown random arrangements of chess pieces—ones that couldn’t possibly have been arrived at through an actual game—their memory for the board was only slightly better than chess novices’. They could rarely remember the positions of more than seven pieces. These were the same chess pieces, and the same chessboards. So why were they suddenly limited by the magical number seven? 

The chess experiments reveal a telling fact about memory, and about expertise in general: We don’t remember isolated facts; we remember things in context. A board of randomly arranged chess pieces has no context—there are no similar boards to compare it to, no past games that it resembles, no ways to meaningfully chunk it. Even to the world’s best chess player it is, in essence, noise.

Our subjective experience of time is highly variable. We all know that days can pass like weeks and months can feel like years, and that the opposite can be just as true: A month or year can zoom by in what feels like no time at all. 

Our lives are structured by our memories of events. Event X happened just before the big Paris vacation. I was doing Y in the first summer after I learned to drive. Z happened the weekend after I landed my first job. We remember events by positioning them in time relative to other events. Just as we accumulate memories of facts by integrating them into a network, we accumulate life experiences by integrating them into a web of other chronological memories. The denser the web, the denser the experience of time. 

It’s a point well illustrated by Michel Siffre, a French chronobiologist (he studies the relationship between time and living organisms) who conducted one of the most extraordinary acts of self-experimentation in the history of science. In 1962, Siffre spent two months living in total isolation in a subterranean cave, without access to clock, calendar, or sun. Sleeping and eating only when his body told him to, he sought to discover how the natural rhythms of human life would be affected by living “beyond time.” 

Very quickly Siffre’s memory deteriorated. In the dreary darkness, his days melded into one another and became one continuous, indistinguishable blob. Since there was nobody to talk to, and not much to do, there was nothing novel to impress itself upon his memory. There were no chronological landmarks by which he could measure the passage of time. At some point he stopped being able to remember what happened even the day before. His experience in isolation had turned him into EP. As time began to blur, he became effectively amnesic. Soon, his sleep patterns disintegrated. Some days he’d stay awake for thirty-six straight hours, other days for eight—without being able to tell the difference. When his support team on the surface finally called down to him on September 14, the day his experiment was scheduled to wrap up, it was only August 20 in his journal. He thought only a month had gone by. His experience of time’s passage had compressed by a factor of two. 

Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next—and disappear. That’s why it’s important to change routines regularly, and take vacations to exotic locales, and have as many new experiences as possible that can serve to anchor our memories. Creating new memories stretches out psychological time, and lengthens our perception of our lives.

William James first wrote about the curious warping and foreshortening of psychological time in his Principles of Psychology in 1890: “In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out,” he wrote. “But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.” Life seems to speed up as we get older because life gets less memorable as we get older. “If to remember is to be human, then remembering more means being more human,” said Ed.

There is perhaps a bit of Peter Pan to Ed’s quest to make his life maximally memorable, but of all the things one could be obsessive about collecting, memories of one’s own life don’t seem like the most unreasonable. There’s something even strangely rational about it. There’s an old philosophical conundrum that often gets bandied about in introductory philosophy courses: In the nineteenth century, doctors began to wonder whether the general anesthetic they had been administering to patients might not actually put the patients to sleep so much as freeze their muscles and erase their memories of the surgery. If that were the case, could the doctors be said to have done anything wrong? Like the proverbial tree that falls without anyone hearing it, can an experience that isn’t remembered be meaningfully said to have happened at all? Socrates thought the unexamined life was not worth living. How much more so the unremembered life?

Much as our taste for sugar and fat may have served us well in a world of scarce nutrition, but is now maladaptive in a world of ubiquitous fast food joints, our memories aren’t perfectly adapted for our contemporary information age. The tasks that we often rely on our memories for today simply weren’t relevant in the environment in which the human brain evolved. Our ancestors didn’t need to recall phone numbers, or word-for-word instructions from their bosses, or the Advanced Placement USA history curriculum, or (because they lived in relatively small, stable groups) the names of dozens of strangers at a cocktail party. 

What our early human and hominid ancestors did need to remember was where to find food and resources, and the route home, and which plants were edible and which were poisonous. Those are the sorts of vital memory skills that they depended on every day, and it was—at least in part—in order to meet those demands that human memory evolved as it did. 

The principle underlying all memory techniques is that our brains don’t remember all types of information equally well. As exceptional as we are at remembering visual imagery (think of the two-picture recognition test), we’re terrible at remembering other kinds of information, like lists of words or numbers. The point of memory techniques is to do what the synasthete S did instinctually: to take the kinds of memories our brains aren’t good at holding on to and transform them into the kinds of memories our brains were built for.

Every mental athlete has a weakness, an Achilles heel. Ben’s is names and faces. His scores in the event are always near the bottom of the pack. “I don’t tend to look at people’s faces when I talk to them,” he told me. “In fact, I have no idea what lots of people I know really look like.” To get around this problem, he has been developing a new mnemonic system for the event that would assign numerical codes to eye color, skin color, hair color, hair length, nose, and mouth shape. He figures that if people’s faces could only be turned into a string of digits, they’d be a cinch to remember.

The last century has been an especially bad one for memory. A hundred years of progressive education reform have discredited memorization as oppressive and stultifying—not only a waste of time, but positively harmful to the developing brain. Schools have deemphasized raw knowledge (most of which gets forgotten anyway), and instead stressed their role in fostering reasoning ability, creativity, and independent thinking. 

But is it possible we’ve been making a huge mistake? The influential critic E. D. Hirsch Jr. complained in 1987: “We cannot assume that young people today know things that were known in the past by almost every literate person in the culture.” Hirsch has argued that students are being sent out into the world without the basic level of cultural literacy that is necessary to be a good citizen (what does it say that two thirds of American seventeen-year-olds can’t even tell you within fifty years when the Civil War occurred?), and what’s needed is a kind of educational counterreformation that reemphasizes hard facts. Hirsch’s critics have pointed out that the curriculum he advocates is Dead White Males 101. But if anyone seems qualified to counter that argument it is Matthews, who maintains that for all the Eurocentrism of the curriculum, the fact is that facts still matter. If one of the goals of education is to create inquisitive, knowledgeable people, then you need to give students the most basic signposts that can guide them through a life of learning. And if, as the twelfth-century teacher Hugh of St. Victor put it, “the whole usefulness of education consists only in the memory of it,” then you might as well give them the best tools available to commit their education to memory. 

“I don’t use the word ‘memory’ in my class because it’s a bad word in education,” says Matthews. “You make monkeys memorize, whereas education is the ability to retrieve information at will and analyze it. But you can’t have higher-level learning—you can’t analyze—without retrieving information.” And you can’t retrieve information without putting the information in there in the first place. The dichotomy between “learning” and “memorizing” is false, Matthews contends. You can’t learn without memorizing, and if done right, you can’t memorize without learning.

The Other Side Must Be Wrong

I am a well-educated white-collar worker in a big coastal city. I chose this life, and in turn this life has informed my worldview. I know I have biases; indeed, it is good to hold beliefs strongly. 

But I am self-aware enough to know that biases can create blind spots that mar my ability to properly process information and value other human beings. So I work hard to absorb information from lots of different sources. I act with intention in who I interact with and what I read, to get out of my comfort zone and hear from different and even (especially) contrary viewpoints. 

One sign of echo chambers is people are increasingly puzzled as to how the other side can possibly hold its viewpoint. Donald Trump is, of course, a uniquely polarizing figure, but this observation is not limited to his statements and deeds. What happens is that people are dumbfounded as to why someone would hold a certain position or take a certain action. Their immediate conclusion is that the other side must be either uninformed, irrational, or evil. 

Of course, this only exacerbates these divides. Imagine that you hold a certain position. Perhaps you are in the minority, perhaps you are in the majority. How does it make you feel when the other side not only disagrees with you (which, fine) but is incredulous as to how anyone who is good, informed, and level-headed could arrive at that position? 

It is annoying, to say the least, that someone hasn’t taken the time to understand the inner logic and inherent goodness of your position, and has instead jumped to the conclusion that you’re stupid or wicked or both. Do this enough, and people get radicalized to reciprocate. Substantive discourse turns into people going into their separate corners to surround themselves with other people and information that will make them feel good about themselves. 

It is human nature. But it is also sad and dangerous. I love America because it is diverse. Out of many, one people. Will this grand experiment continue to hold?

How to Read the News

 

One thing I love about reading books about history is seeing when the prevailing wisdom of any given time is not only proven wrong but looked back on with incredulity, like “how could we have not known that.” The amazing thing about the human race is the accumulation of knowledge over time, not always in a straight line, and we do well to learn from the mistakes of those who came before this. 

This requires an ability to process information, keep an open mind, admit when we’re wrong, change our minds, and act on our new beliefs. Which may seem obvious, but I would argue this is exceedingly rare in our divisive times. Consider how many of us gain and process news nowadays: 

1. We turn to our trusted sources even if they are biased (and we either deny they are biased, or we know but don’t care) 

2. We parrot their statements without double-checking or even thinking about them   

3. If an opposing news source says the opposite, we immediately discount it (and usually seek to discredit the source) 

4. If an opposing news source says what we believe, we proudly crow “even they agree with us” 

5. If any news source puts out a more nuanced take (increasingly rare but it still happens), we immediately interpret it as favorably as possible for our position 

I get it. We are all feeling assailed, not only the volume of information but by its content. It’s a lot of bad news out there! Reasonable to take refuge in things that confirm our bias. Human nature to believe we have no bias but can see it in everyone else. 

But, progress in humanity, and our own contribution to and enjoyment of it, requires that we keep an open mind. Which literally means the opposite of the things I listed above that we are all guilty of: 

1. Seeking out additional and differing opinions 

2. Testing our beliefs rather than blindly asserting them 

3. Acknowledging we may be wrong and the other side right, or at the very least that there are redeeming aspects of the other side’s perspective 

4. Having some humility about having “figured it all out,” enough to be open to changing our mind 

5. Treating the other side as fellow humans who we should be kind to and want to learn from 

Will we commit to this? Or are we destined to huddle in our tribes and miss out broader social discourse, clinging to beliefs some of which end up looking archaic? Time will tell.

What Am I Working On

 

As has become my custom every six months, here's what I'm working on now at work. I won't repeat anything from last time that I happen to still be working on, and for confidentiality's sake I have to blur some of the details for some of these studies.

Evaluating an innovation district's multi-year expansion plan midway through.

Quantifying and highlighting the role of foreign-born households on a regional economy.

Estimating the economic and social impact of an elite urban research university and health system.

Providing real estate advisory services for a state system of higher education.

Describing the landscape of small and local businesses in a big East Coast city.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 473

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "The Phenomenon: Pressure, the Yips, and the Pitch that Changed My Life," by Rick Ankiel.

I had what they called a generational left arm, and I knew it from the time I was barely older than Declan. There are plenty of good arms in baseball. There are great arms. There are a few—very few—special arms. I had one of those. The scouts said so. The batters said so. Everyone said so. I couldn’t help but believe them. I wanted to be special. That was the life I had, the one I’d live through that special arm. Until it wasn’t. Mine is the story of what I did with that. It is the story of a childhood that could not be trusted because of a father who could not be trusted, and the story of the arm that carried me away from years of snarling abuse. I was in the major leagues barely two years out of high school, a big leaguer and celebrated phenomenon—that word—at twenty, and at twenty-one the starting pitcher in the biggest game of the only life I ever wanted. 

It is the story of what happened after that. For on that very day, when I asked my arm to be more special than ever, it deserted me. Maybe I deserted it. For the next five years, I chased the life I wanted, the one I believed I owed to myself, the one I probably believed the world owed to me. To the gift that was my left arm. To the work I’d done to help make it special. To the life I thought I deserved. 

My father watched from prison. I was glad for that. I was especially glad for my mother. 

It is the story of my fight to return to the pitcher I was, a fight mounted on a psyche—a will—formed as protection against my own father. There were small victories. There were far more failures. Those pushed me deeper into my own mind, into the dark fight-or-flight corners where the costs in happiness and emotional stability were severe. The fights of my childhood against a drunken, raging father had tracked me into manhood, and now the villain was within me, restless and relentless and just out of reach. For the life I wanted, I thrashed savagely and bled freely. There is a saying that goes loosely like this: Don’t fight the man who does not mind what he looks like when the fight is over. There is no winning that fight. That fight never ends. I stood in for five years, then fought some more. I wish I could have said at the end, “Yeah, but you should’ve seen the other guy.” But when I got done fighting, he looked fine. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

For a long time, we went along. I worshipped him and asked myself not to be too disappointed. And I grew harder. And I asked people to like me. Not out of duty or because of a street address or because of my name or because I could throw a ball. Because of me. The alternative was more disappointment. More violence. The alternative was watching Phil go off to jail too, because of the drugs, because of where that started, selling them and using them with the man who should’ve helped raise him and instead made him an accomplice. I was too small, and then I was too afraid, and even when I grew up there remained the notion that to challenge one’s father was to call out the whole universe into the middle of the street to decide who was the better man. And how long would that have lasted? A punch or two? And what would that have cost my mother in bruises? 

He’d have beaten the shit out of me, and nothing would change. Or I’d have caught him with fists and anger and youth, and he’d laugh and be back tomorrow. So I kept my mouth shut, and usually I forgave myself for it. I wished for peace for my mother. I’d lie in bed and close my eyes as tight as I could and wait for the shouting, the screaming, the cries for help to pass. When he left I hoped it was forever, and I knew better. A day later we’d be in the backyard, me and the guy who had terrorized my mother and left her crying again, lobbing a baseball back and forth, talking about the Braves’ rotation, trying those knuckleballs on each other, laughing when the ball would wobble and sail. We’re safe, I’d whisper. Mom’s safe too. It’s going to be all right. It’s going to change.

I wasn’t just some twenty-year-old rookie with a fastball and a tough-guy act. The shit I’d seen, that I’d put up with, that I’d lived alongside and defended myself against—that was real. That left scars. Think some baseball game at Shea Stadium is scary? Try staying one room ahead of a lousy-drunk father pissed because you swung at ball four in an American Legion game. Try getting caught and made to run laps for it. Try being the one telling your mom it’s fine, it’s OK, because if she stepped in I’d be picking her up off the floor too. Try finding bags of pot where the toilet paper should be or dustings of coke on the kitchen counter and then being told you’re the good-for-nothing idiot.

My whole life I’d carried a shield, forged from the belief of who I thought I should be. What a man should be. That is, impenetrable. It’s what I became as a ballplayer too. I followed the best arm plenty of people had ever seen, and if it wasn’t the best, it was close enough, and that made me invincible. What was I without it? The only place that would have me unconditionally—a ballpark—looked me over and said, “Prove it. Try harder. Want it more. Suffer.” 

Thunk. 

I wasn’t impenetrable. I was transparent. Anybody with a passing interest, anybody in a Cardinals cap and the mildest curiosity, would see who I was, what I’d become. I couldn’t have that. I’d earned the other life, the one I’d had before, the one with the great arm and the future that had caused grown men to whistle and say almost out loud, “Goddamn, would you look at that.” 

And I cried. Sitting in my own living room across from a man I’d met once before, who a couple hours earlier I didn’t know whether to call Doctor or Mr. Dorfman or Harvey or what, the tears soaked my face and then my shirtsleeve trying to mop them up. Of the two of us, only Harvey had known they were coming. 

“It’s OK, Rick,” he said. “You were never taught how to deal with this. Starting today, we’re going to rebuild your foundation, if you want. We’ll start pouring the cement today.”

I nodded OK. I just wanted to throw a ball straight. I wanted people to like me, to think I was a decent person, to forgive me for hiding from the person who’d hurt my own mother. For not smashing a Louisville Slugger over my dad’s head and being done with it.

I wanted to feel better about myself. I wanted to feel good about tomorrow. At the same time, I didn’t want to care so much. I didn’t want to carry a few lousy hours at the ballpark around with me all the time. Baseball had always made me feel special, and then, starting one afternoon, I didn’t ever want to think about it. Before, baseball was the light that drew me through the day, that pulled me out of bed in the morning and sang me to sleep. Now it haunted me. Taunted me. 

I needed a break, and yet the routine was relentless. Every day was filled with baseball, which meant failure, or the brink of failure, or the recovery from failure. Even on the good days, and there were good days, there was no avoiding tomorrow, which I tried to assume the best of. I suspected the worst. 

There were ways I could have coped. I could talk to Harvey. I could practice distraction, optimism, and focus. I could count my breaths and ask my heart to settle. I could go to the ballpark every single day and work, and throw, and believe, until I was physically and emotionally spent. I could smoke dope and drop ecstasy. I could drink beer and pretend I was fine until closing time. 

Because I was desperate to win my career back and be a reasonable human being and forget what an effort it was, I chose all of it. I ran every lap. I showed up for every drill. I threw every bullpen. I read every self-help book.

Harvey showed me how, sometimes simply by asking, “OK, what the fuck you gonna do about it?” Emphasis on the profanity, hard like that, as if to say, It’s a big-boy world out there, Ank, and bad stuff happens, and then you decide: I’m in or I’m out. I answered that question every day, every damned day, and in the end I was prouder of that than I was the home runs and the strikeouts and the money and even the uniform. What the fuck was I going to do about it? Win. Work. Try. Show up. Laugh. Cry. Fight if I had to. I was going to stand up to the big-boy world, all of it, and they could carry me away if that was what it came to. Maybe I couldn’t always throw a strike. Maybe I couldn’t always hit the slider. But sometimes I could.

Too Short for a Blog Post, Too Long for a Tweet 472

 

Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Tools Of Titans: The Tactics, Routines, and Habits of Billionaires, Icons, and World-Class Performers," by Timothy Ferriss.

I think of Siddhartha’s answers often and in the following terms: 

"I can think” → Having good rules for decision-making, and having good questions you can ask yourself and others. 

“I can wait” → Being able to plan long-term, play the long game, and not misallocate your resources. 

"I can fast” → Being able to withstand difficulties and disaster. Training yourself to be uncommonly resilient and have a high pain tolerance. 

This book will help you to develop all three.

Amelia [Boone, obstacle course racing champion] loves doing training runs in the rain and cold, as she knows her competition is probably opting out. This is an example of “rehearsing the worst-case scenario” to become more resilient.

Top professional athletes occasionally visit Laird [Hamilton, surfer] to test-drive his famed pool workout. If a big musclehead comes in with an attitude, he’ll suggest they go “warm up” with Gabby [Reece, volleyball player]. This is code. Gabby proceeds to casually annihilate them, leaving them bug-eyed, full of terror, and exhausted. Once they’ve been force-fed enough humble pie, Laird will ask “Okay, are you ready to start the workout?” As Brian [MacKenzie, founder of CrossFit Endurance] has put it: “The water goes, ‘Oh, mighty and aggressive? Perfect. I’ll just drown you.’”

[Dan Engle, psychiatrist and neurologist] “[Floating in an isolation tank] is the first time that we’ve been without sensory experience, sensory environmental stimuli, since we were conceived. There is no sound, no sight, no temperature gradient, and no gravity. So all of the brain’s searching and gating information from the environment is relaxed. Everything that was in the background—kind of ‘behind the curtain’—can now be exposed. When done consistently over time, it’s essentially like meditation on steroids. It starts to recalibrate the entire neuroendocrine system. People who are running in stress mode or sympathetic overdrive start to relax that over time, and you get this bleed-over effect into everyday life. It’s not just what happens in the tank. It continues outside of the tank. You see heart rate normalize, hypertension normalize, cortisol normalize. Pain starts to resolve. Metabolic issues start to resolve."

[Jane McGonigal, futurist] “'Any useful statement about the future should at first seem ridiculous’ by Jim Dator. Also, ‘When it comes to the future, it’s far more important to be imaginative than to be right’ by Alvin Toffler. Both are famous futurists. These quotes remind me that world-changing ideas will seem absurd to most people, and that the most useful work I can be doing is to push the envelope of what is considered possible. If what I’m doing sounds reasonable to most people, then I’m not working in a space that is creative and innovative enough."

Each week, I sent [US Gymnastics National Team] Coach [Christopher] Sommer videos of my workouts via Dropbox. In my accompanying notes at one point, I expressed how discouraging it was to make zero tangible progress with this exercise. Below is his email response, which I immediately saved to Evernote to review often. 

It’s all great, but I’ve bolded my favorite part. 

Hi Tim, 

Patience. Far too soon to expect strength improvements. Strength improvements [for a movement like this] take a minimum of 6 weeks. Any perceived improvements prior to that are simply the result of improved synaptic facilitation. In plain English, the central nervous system simply became more efficient at that particular movement with practice. This is, however, not to be confused with actual strength gains. 

Dealing with the temporary frustration of not making progress is an integral part of the path towards excellence. In fact, it is essential and something that every single elite athlete has had to learn to deal with. If the pursuit of excellence was easy, everyone would do it. In fact, this impatience in dealing with frustration is the primary reason that most people fail to achieve their goals. Unreasonable expectations timewise, resulting in unnecessary frustration, due to a perceived feeling of failure. Achieving the extraordinary is not a linear process. 

The secret is to show up, do the work, and go home. 

A blue collar work ethic married to indomitable will. It is literally that simple. Nothing interferes. Nothing can sway you from your purpose. Once the decision is made, simply refuse to budge. Refuse to compromise. 

And accept that quality long-term results require quality long-term focus. No emotion. No drama. No beating yourself up over small bumps in the road. Learn to enjoy and appreciate the process. This is especially important because you are going to spend far more time on the actual journey than with those all too brief moments of triumph at the end. 

Certainly celebrate the moments of triumph when they occur. More importantly, learn from defeats when they happen. In fact, if you are not encountering defeat on a fairly regular basis, you are not trying hard enough. And absolutely refuse to accept less than your best. 

Throw out a timeline. It will take what it takes. 

If the commitment is to a long-term goal and not to a series of smaller intermediate goals, then only one decision needs to be made and adhered to. Clear, simple, straightforward. Much easier to maintain than having to make small decision after small decision to stay the course when dealing with each step along the way. This provides far too many opportunities to inadvertently drift from your chosen goal. The single decision is one of the most powerful tools in the toolbox.

We’re wired completely opposite in that sense. Basically, he’s betting against change. We’re betting for change. When he makes a mistake, it’s because something changes that he didn’t expect. When we make a mistake, it’s because something doesn’t change that we thought would. We could not be more different in that way. But what both schools have in common is an orientation toward, I would say, original thinking in really being able to view things as they are as opposed to what everybody says about them, or the way they’re believed to be.” - Marc Andreesen about Warren Buffett

[Chris Young, chef] “I distinctly remember him saying not to worry about what I was going to do because the job I was going to do hadn’t even been invented yet. . . . The interesting jobs are the ones that you make up. That’s something I certainly hope to instill in my son: Don’t worry about what your job is going to be. . . . Do things that you’re interested in, and if you do them really well, you’re going to find a way to temper them with some good business opportunity.” 

[Luis Von Ahn, CEO of Duolingo] “My PhD advisor [at Carnegie Mellon was] a guy named Manuel Blum, who many people consider the father of cryptography [encryption, etc.]. He’s amazing and he’s very funny. I learned a lot from him. When I met him, which was like 15 years ago, I guess he was in his 60s, but he always acted way older than he actually was. He just acted as if he forgot everything. . . . “I had to explain to him what I was working on, which at the time was CAPTCHA, these distorted characters that you have to type all over the Internet. It’s very annoying. That was the thing I was working on [later acquired by Google], and I had to explain it to him. It was very funny, because usually I would start explaining something, and in the first sentence he would say, ‘I don’t understand what you’re saying,’ and then I would try to find another way of saying it, and a whole hour would pass and I could not get past the first sentence. He would say, ‘Well, the hour’s over. Let’s meet next week.’ This must have happened for months, and at some point I started thinking, ‘I don’t know why people think this guy’s so smart.’ Later, [I understood what he was doing]. This is basically just an act. Essentially, I was being unclear about what I was saying, and I did not fully understand what I was trying to explain to him. He was just drilling deeper and deeper and deeper until I realized, every time, that there was actually something I didn’t have clear in my mind. He really taught me to think deeply about things, and I think that’s something I have not forgotten.” 

[Scott Belsky, venture capitalist] “It is essential to get lost and jam up your plans every now and then. It’s a source of creativity and perspective. The danger of maps, capable assistants, and planning is that you may end up living your life as planned. If you do, your potential cannot possibly exceed your expectations.”

Who do you think of when you hear the word “successful”? 

[Chris Fussell, aide de camp to General Stanley McChrystal] “I’ll answer it this way, and I don’t know if this gets to the exact point. I had a great mentor early on in my career give me advice that I’ve heeded until now, which is that you should have a running list of three people that you’re always watching: someone senior to you that you want to emulate, a peer who you think is better at the job than you are and who you respect, and someone subordinate who’s doing the job you did—one, two, or three years ago—better than you did it. If you just have those three individuals that you’re constantly measuring yourself off of, and you’re constantly learning from them, you’re going to be exponentially better than you are.”

Advice to your 20-year-old self? 

[Will MacAskill, philosophy professor] “One is emphasizing that you have 80,000 working hours in the course of your life. It’s incredibly important to work out how best to spend them, and what you’re doing at the moment—20-year-old Will—is just kind of drifting and thinking. [You’re] not spending very much time thinking about this kind of macro optimization. You might be thinking about ‘How can I do my coursework as well as possible?’ and micro optimization, but not really thinking about ‘What are actually my ultimate goals in life, and how can I optimize toward them?’ “An analogy I use is, if you’re going out for dinner, it’s going to take you a couple of hours. You spend 5 minutes working out where to go for dinner. It seems reasonable to spend 5% of your time on how to spend the remaining 95%. If you did that with your career, that would be 4,000 hours, or 2 working years. And actually, I think that’s a pretty legitimate thing to do—spending that length of time trying to work out how should you be spending the rest of your life.”

In A Christmas Carol, Scrooge is visited by the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present, and Future. In the Dickens Process, you’re forced to examine limiting beliefs—say, your top two or three handicapping beliefs—across each tense. Tony [Robbins, motivational speaker] guides you through each in depth, and I recall answering and visualizing variations of: 

What has each belief cost you in the past, and what has it cost people you’ve loved in the past? 

What have you lost because of this belief? See it, hear it, feel it. What is each costing you and people you care about in the present? See it, hear it, feel it. 

What will each cost you and people you care about 1, 3, 5, and 10 years from now? See it, hear it, feel it. 

Why does this appear to work so well? I asked Tony months later, as I saw persistent personal results, and he sent me the following example via audio text: 

“If they are coughing like crazy right now [from lung cancer], how do they keep smoking? They say to themselves, ‘Well, I smoked for years and it was never a problem.’ Or they say, ‘It will get better in the future. After all, George Burns lived until 102 smoking cigars.’ They find the exception to the rule because no one knows what the future is. We can make it up, we can convince ourselves it’s going to be okay. Or we can remember a past time in which it was okay. That’s how people get out of it. 

“When we feel pain in one time zone—meaning past, present, or future—we just switch to another time zone rather than change, because change brings so much uncertainty and so much instability and so much fear to people.” 

The Dickens Process doesn’t allow you to dodge any time zones. 

Naturally, it’s one thing to read about swimming, and another to go swimming. The live process took at least 30 minutes, with Tony on stage and 10,000 people in the audience. I could hear hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people crying. It was the straw that productively broke the camel’s back of resistance. Confronted with vivid and painful imagery, attendees (present company included) could no longer rationalize or accept destructive “rules” in their lives. As Tony put it to me later, “There is nothing like a group dynamic of total immersion, when there is nothing around to distract you. Your entire focus is on breaking through and going to the next level, and that’s what makes the Dickens Process work.” 

After you feel the acute pain of your current handicapping beliefs, you formulate 2 to 3 replacement beliefs to use moving forward. This is done so that “you are not pulled back into [old beliefs] by old language patterns.” One of my top 3 limiting beliefs was “I’m not hardwired for happiness,” which I replaced with “Happiness is my natural state.” Post-event, I used Scott Adams’s (page 261) affirmation approach in the mornings to reinforce it. Now, I’m well aware how cheesy this all might sound on paper. Nonetheless, I experienced a huge phase shift in my life in the subsequent 3 to 4 weeks. Roughly a year later, I can say this: I’ve never felt consistently happier in my entire adult life. 

Perhaps it’s time for you to take a temporary break from pursuing goals to find the knots in the garden hose that, once removed, will make everything else better and easier? It’s incredible what can happen when you stop driving with the emergency brake on.

Kevin [Costner, actor] described a rare heart-to-heart conversation with his dad, who was critical of Kevin becoming an actor. By this point, Kevin was an adult and had succeeded. His dad was sitting in the bathtub: 

“He looked at me and he says, ‘You know, I never took a chance in my life.’ I was almost in my own Field of Dreams moment. There were some tears coming down. He says, ‘I came out of that goddamn fucking Dust Bowl, and when I got a job, Kevin, I didn’t want to lose it. I was going to hold on to that, because I knew there would always be food on the table.’ And I said, ‘There was. There was.’ There was really kind of just an amazing moment, my dad sitting there.”

Once you’ve realized—and it requires a monthly or quarterly reminder—how independent your well-being is from having an excess of money, it becomes easier to take “risks” and say “no” to things that seem too lucrative to pass up. 

There is more freedom to be gained from practicing poverty than chasing wealth. Suffer a little regularly and you often cease to suffer.

[Naval Ravikant, CEO of AngelList] "I recently learned a neologism that, like political correctness, man cave, and content-provider, I instantly recognized as heralding an ugly new turn in the culture: planshopping. That is, deferring committing to any one plan for an evening until you know what all your options are, and then picking the one that’s most likely to be fun/advance your career/have the most girls at it—in other words, treating people like menu options or products in a catalog. 

Even children are busy now, scheduled down to the half hour with enrichment classes, tutorials, and extracurricular activities. At the end of the day they come home as tired as grownups, which seems not just sad but hateful. I was a member of the latchkey generation, and had three hours of totally unstructured, largely unsupervised time every afternoon, time I used to do everything from scouring The World Book Encyclopedia to making animated movies to convening with friends in the woods in order to chuck dirt clods directly into one another’s eyes, all of which afforded me knowledge, skills, and insights that remain valuable to this day. 

This busyness is not a necessary or inevitable condition of life; it’s something we’ve chosen, if only by our acquiescence to it. I recently Skyped with a friend who had been driven out of New York City by the rents and now has an artist’s residency in a small town in the South of France. She described herself as happy and relaxed for the first time in years. She still gets her work done, but it doesn’t consume her entire day and brain. She says it feels like college—she has a circle of friends there who all go out to the café or watch TV together every night. She has a boyfriend again. (She once ruefully summarized dating in New York: “Everyone is too busy and everyone thinks they can do better.”) What she had mistakenly assumed was her personality—driven, cranky, anxious, and sad—turned out to be a deformative effect of her environment, of the crushing atmospheric pressure of ambition and competitiveness. It’s not as if any of us wants to live like this, any more than any one person wants to be part of a traffic jam or stadium trampling or the hierarchy of cruelty in high school; it’s something we collectively force one another to do."

In any situation in life, you only have three options. You always have three options. You can change it, you can accept it, or you can leave it. What is not a good option is to sit around wishing you would change it but not changing it, wishing you would leave it but not leaving it, and not accepting it.

I sent an email to all of my direct reports along the lines of “From this point forward, please don’t contact me with questions about A, B, or C. I trust you. If it involves less than $100, please make the decision yourself and take a note (the situation, how you handled it, what it cost) in one document, so we can review and adjust each week. Just focus on making our customers happy.” I expected the worst, and guess what? Everything worked, minus a few expected hiccups here and there. I later increased the threshold to $500, then $1,000, and the “reviews” of decisions went from weekly, to monthly, to quarterly, to—once people were polished—effectively never. This experience underscored two things for me: 1) To get huge, good things done, you need to be okay with letting the small, bad things happen. 2) People’s IQs seem to double as soon as you give them responsibility and indicate that you trust them.

For the last 5 years, I’ve asked myself, in effect, “What can I put in place so that I can go completely off the grid for 4 to 8 weeks?” To entrepreneurs who are feeling burned out, this is also the question I pose most often. Two weeks isn’t enough, as you can let fires erupt and then attempt to repair things when you return. Four to 8 weeks (or more) doesn’t allow you to be a firefighter. It forces you to put systems and policies in place, ditch ad-hoc email-based triage, empower other people with rules and tools, separate the critical few from the trivial many, and otherwise create a machine that doesn’t require you behind the driver’s wheel 24/7. 

Here’s the most important point: The systems far outlive the vacation, and when you come home, you’ll realize that you’ve taken your business (and life) to the next level. 

[Jamie Foxx, entertainer] “I ended up going to this Evening at the Improv, the Improv in Santa Monica. I had never been there. I noticed that 100 guys would show up, and 5 girls would show up. The 5 girls would always get on the show because they needed to break up the monotony. [The producers would pick randomly from the list of people who showed up.] So I said, ‘Hmmm, I got something.’ I wrote down all of these unisex names on the list: Stacy Green, Tracy Brown, Jamie Foxx . . . and the guy chooses from the list. He says, ‘Jamie Foxx, is she here? She’ll be first.’ I said, ‘No, that’s me.’ ‘Oh, okay. All right, well, you’re going up. You’re the fresh meat.’ They were shooting Evening at the Improv, this old comedy show back in the day. He said, ‘You’ll be the guy we just throw up to see if you get a laugh or two. It’s gonna be a tough crowd.’ . . . People [in the crowd] are like, ‘Who’s the kid? Is he on the show? Oh, he’s fresh meat. He’s an amateur.’ So then they started yelling my name—‘Yo, Jamie! Hey, Jamie!’—but I’m not used to the name. So now they think I’m arrogant. ‘This motherfucker . . . he’s not even listening to us. . . .’”

[Sekou Andrews, poet] “The letters I-M are all that lies between ‘Possible’ and ‘Impossible’ Which means ‘I’m’ the only thing between ‘Possible’ and ‘Impossible’ So every day I choose to do the I’mpossible.”

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Here are a few excerpts from a book I recently read, "Palaces for the People: How Social Infrastructure Can Help Fight Inequality, Polarization, and the Decline of Civic Life," by Eric Klinenberg.

Epidemiologists have firmly established the relationship between social connections, health, and longevity. In the past few decades, leading health journals have published dozens of articles documenting the physical and mental benefits of social ties. But there’s a prior question that scientists have not explored as thoroughly: What conditions in the places we inhabit make it more likely that people will develop strong or supportive relationships, and what conditions make it more likely that people will grow isolated and alone? 

After the heat wave, prominent Chicago officials publicly declared that the socially isolated people who died had effectively chosen their own fate, and that the communities they lived in had sealed that fate. The mayor, Richard M. Daley, criticized people for not looking after their neighbors, and the human services commissioner, Daniel Alvarez, complained to the press about “people that die because they neglect themselves.” But when I spent time in Chicago’s most vulnerable neighborhoods, I observed something different. Those who lived there expressed the same values endorsed by residents of more resilient places, and they made genuine efforts to help one another, in both ordinary and difficult times. The difference was not cultural. It was not about how much people cared about one another or their community. It was that in places like Englewood, the shoddy social infrastructure discouraged interaction and impeded mutual support, whereas in places like Auburn Gresham the social infrastructure encouraged those things.

Different kinds of social infrastructure play different roles in the local environment, and support different kinds of social ties. Some places, such as libraries, YMCAs, and schools, provide space for recurring interaction, often programmed, and tend to encourage more durable relationships. Others, such as playgrounds and street markets, tend to support looser connections—but of course these ties can, and sometimes do, grow more substantial if the interactions become more frequent or the parties establish a deeper bond. Countless close friendships between mothers, and then entire families, begin because two toddlers visit the same swing set. Basketball players who participate in regular pickup games often befriend people with different political preferences, or with a different ethnic, religious, or class status, and wind up exposed to ideas they wouldn’t likely encounter off the court. 

Social infrastructures that promote efficiency tend to discourage interaction and the formation of strong ties. One recent study, for instance, shows that a day care center that encourages caregivers and parents to walk in and wait for their children, often inside the classroom and generally at the same time, fosters more social connections and supportive relationships than one where managers allow parents to come in on their own schedules and hurry through drop-off and pickup so they can quickly return to their private lives. Because much of our hard infrastructure—highways, airports, food supply chains, and the like—is designed to promote efficient circulation of people or vital resources, it can accelerate the trend of social atomization. Think, for example, about the contrast between a village where everyone gets their water from the same well and a city where everyone gets their water from faucets in their private homes.

Not all hard infrastructure leads to isolation. A recent ethnographic study of the New York City subway system, for instance, shows that people forge “transient communities” as they ride through the metropolis. The daily experience of spending time on crowded train cars rarely leads to long-term relationships, but it helps passengers learn to deal with difference, density, diversity, and other people’s needs. It fosters cooperation and trust. It exposes people to unexpected behavior and challenges stereotypes about group identity. The subway is not only New York City’s main social artery but also its largest and most heterogeneous public space.

By the 1950s, swimming pools had become flash points for racial segregation, and occasionally outright violence, throughout the North. (There were hardly any swimming pools for blacks in the South, and those that existed were formally segregated with official police enforcement.) Wiltse recounts the story of a Little League Baseball team in Youngstown, Ohio, that celebrated its city championship in 1951 at a beautiful municipal pool in South Side Park. The team had one African American player, Al Bright, and lifeguards refused to let him past the perimeter fence while the other players swam. When several parents protested, the supervisor agreed to let Al “enter” the pool for a few minutes, but only if everyone else got out and Al agreed to sit inside a rubber raft. While everyone watched, a lifeguard pushed Al around the pool, shouting, “whatever you do, don’t touch the water!” 

This was not an isolated incident, nor was it restricted to certain parts of the United States. Two years later, in 1953, the great African American film star Dorothy Dandridge dipped her toes in the swimming pool at the Last Frontier Hotel in Las Vegas, which welcomed her as a performer but banned her, and all other blacks, from the water. The hotel responded by draining the entire pool.

There is another community that has suffered devastating losses since Facebook and other big tech companies began setting up shop in the Bay Area: poor, working-class, and middle-class residents of the region, who have been steadily priced and crowded out. Gentrification hardly seems like a strong enough word to describe what’s happened in the Bay Area during the historic tech boom. Housing costs in San Francisco are so outrageously high that few members of the middle class can afford to live there. Research by the University of California’s Urban Displacement Project shows that 47 percent of all the region’s census tracts, and 60 percent of low-income households, are in neighborhoods at risk of or already experiencing displacement or gentrification pressures. San Francisco’s African American population is declining sharply, while low-income and middle-class families are moving farther from urban centers and spending ever more time on long commutes. The impact is apparent everywhere. There’s heavy traffic on local roads and freeways, insufficient parking on city streets and at malls. A few decades ago, Silicon Valley was full of pristine suburbs that provided a high quality of life; today it is terribly congested and on the brink of being overrun. 

For all their emphasis on software engineering, there’s no question that companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple appreciate the value of real social infrastructure: the physical places that shape our interactions. Their campuses are stunning, with verdant gardens, juice bars and gourmet restaurants, manicured athletic fields and exercise facilities, hair salons, day care centers, theaters, libraries, cafés, and ample space for social gatherings, both indoors and out. These are private social infrastructures, there for the pleasure and convenience of first-tier staff members whose color-coded badges grant them access, but, crucially, not for the low-level temps and contractors who cook and clean in the same organization, and not for neighboring residents or visitors. These expensive, carefully designed social infrastructures work so well for high-level tech employees that they have little reason to patronize small local businesses—coffee shops, gyms, restaurants, and the like—that might otherwise benefit far more from the presence of a large employer.

What Does the Market Want

 

 

Growing up in the suburbs and now living in a city, I follow the YIMBY conversation on social media quite a bit. YIMBY stands for “Yes in My Backyard,” and was formed in response to what people called NIMBYism (“Not in My Backyard”), namely that anything new proposed in your community was often knee-jerk opposed. 

You can understand the sentiment, whether or not you think it is right or not. We make location choices based on that location’s characteristics, so we are naturally leery about things that may fundamentally alter those characteristics. 

As a capitalist and economist, I take particular interest in one sub-strand of this NIMBY/YIMBY debate, which is “what does the market want”: 

* NIMBYs consider YIMBYs to be elitist urban social engineers, that the typical American wants a single-family detached home in the suburbs and it’s the other side who think they’re so smart that they should be able to impose their preferences for density and transit. In this telling, if we leave housing up to “the marketplace,” the demand is for suburban product and the supply will follow. 

* YIMBYs counter that the suburbs are entirely a man-made creation, and one with explicitly racist and classist intentions, namely that things like zoning classifications and minimum lot sizes have been created to ensure segregation of neighborhoods, to the detriment of low-income families and households of color. A market-based solution would free us of these artificial constraints, and more dense, multi-family product would follow. 

There’s more I could say to set this topic up but I’ll leave it at that. Another market dynamic I want to make sure is accounted for in this discussion is that, in a perfect world, we have priced energy appropriately, such that for example the significant social and environmental costs that driving imposes on all of us would be reflected in things like gas prices and access to parking. 

Complaining about how much it costs to gas up our cars or find a spot to park them is a near-universal human activity, but one can credibly argue that the problem is actually the exact opposite: it is way to cheap to own, run, and store a car, and if all of those things were properly priced, the market would adjust accordingly, preferencing locations that didn’t require a car and punishing locations that were auto-dependent. 

Realistically, I’m not sure there’s a path to that future scenario. And so we’re left with a marketplace defined by a certain portfolio of housing product (which, while durable, does depreciate over time), and an ever-evolving demographic of households seeking places to live (which, in general, are skewing more non-white and urban). What does this mean for what housing policies make sense, which either activate or supplement the market forces that govern the demand for housing and the supply of housing? That, to me, is the big question of the day.