I believe in songlinesObvious and not
19 March 2024
Released.
Rather.
Anywhere.
Vanishing.
18 March 2024
Obligation.
We all – adults and children, writers and readers – have an obligation to daydream. We have an obligation to imagine. It is easy to pretend that nobody can change anything, that we are in a world in which society is huge and the individual is less than nothing: an atom in a wall, a grain of rice in a rice field. But the truth is, individuals change their world over and over, individuals make the future, and they do it by imagining that things can be different.Look around you: I mean it. Pause, for a moment and look around the room that you are in. I’m going to point out something so obvious that it tends to be forgotten. It’s this: that everything you can see, including the walls, was, at some point, imagined. Someone decided it was easier to sit on a chair than on the ground and imagined the chair. Someone had to imagine a way that I could talk to you in London right now without us all getting rained on. This room and the things in it, and all the other things in this building, this city, exist because, over and over and over, people imagined things.We have an obligation to make things beautiful. Not to leave the world uglier than we found it, not to empty the oceans, not to leave our problems for the next generation. We have an obligation to clean up after ourselves, and not leave our children with a world we’ve shortsightedly messed up, shortchanged, and crippled.
Decide.
The idea of a revolution in the workplace may, to cynics, sound overstated or maybe even wholly irrelevant, in a world where we all have a million things to do. I’d like to say the stakes are small. After all, what’s one more bit of philosophical framing or another “organizational recipe” in a company like Zingerman’s that already has an abundance of both? And yet, I have become convinced that dignity would make an enormous difference.I am not alone in this belief. Twenty years ago, Wendell Berry published an essay entitled “Imagination in Place”:We are destroying [our country] because of our failure to imagine it. … This is a terrible thing to know, but it is not a reason for despair unless we decide to continue the destruction. If we decide to continue the destruction, that will not be because we have no other choice. This destruction is not necessary. It is not inevitable, except that by our submissiveness we make it so.Dignity, learned from the courage of people in Ukraine resisting the Russian invasion, has given me a new way to “imagine it.” The idea of a revolution of dignity in the 21st-century workplace is my attempt to offer, and adopt, a different and much more positive path forward. The choice, as Berry says, is ours to make. In the Epilogue of the pamphlet, I share this quote from Anastasia, one of the protestors on the Maidan in Kyiv in 2013-4, as shared in historian Marci Shore’s wonderful book, The Ukrainian Night:Everyone needs to decide… It’s necessary to believe and it’s necessary to act. Today it seems to me a time of responsibility for every person, every person concretely. Every person is responsible for our future. Every one. Every person needs to decide.If we don’t make that decision, it seems clear that, as Wendell Berry has written, we will be destroying so much of what we have created and failing to fulfill what we could become. It is, after all, a dearth of dignity that leads to misogyny, racism, anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, malice, and maliciousness. Whenever dignity is absent, antipathy is sure to follow.
17 March 2024
Happy Birthday, Oudry
Quality.
16 March 2024
Abstractions.
“Now we’re not only a college-dominated profession,” wrote David Brooks not long ago, citing a study that found that more than half of writers at The New York Times attended one of the 29 most selective institutions in the country; “we’re an elite-college-dominated profession.”The result is that contemporary journalists have a relationship to ideas that is more or less the opposite of the old school’s. It begins before they even get to campus. Students at elite colleges are drawn overwhelmingly from the upper classes, with roughly two-thirds coming from the top 20% of the income distribution. (Given the kinds of starting salaries that journalism pays, it’s fair to assume that those who go on to join the field skew even more heavily toward the higher end of the scale.) They grow up not only having little contact with ordinary people, but amidst the class of experts. Their parents—and their friends’ parents and their parents’ friends—are doctors, lawyers, bankers, executives, policy professionals, professors: people who work with abstractions and symbols, not things. They learn to see the world from the point of view of experts, to have faith in expertise, to speak its language and accept its values. Their epistemology is top-down: they start with ideas and come to tangibilities, to concrete facts, only later, through their lens.Then comes college—and not just college, but the college of today. The college of Critical Theory and “studies” departments. This isn’t liberal arts school, either. You do not start with texts, with philosophy and literature and history, and see what they have to teach you. You start with theories and impose them on texts. You do not argue and debate; you write down what the teacher says. (If you ever do “debate,” you are careful to do so within the parameters laid down by Theory, by the ideology.) You do not think; you are handed a set of abstractions—patriarchy, intersectionality, late capitalism, and so forth—and let them do your thinking for you. Your institution’s goal is to teach you to be not a skeptic, an intellectual, but an activist.
High-Agency.
Changer.
Execupundit on relationships ...
Here's a rule of life: you have to be there. You have to listen and laugh and argue and comfort the people around you in a multitude of exchanges where life's mystery means you may not know just which exchange was the most important.
I can recall off-hand conversations from long ago that seriously affected my life and even my world view.
You never know, but that raised eyebrow, that quiet reassurance, that brief pat on the back may be another person's life changer.
Don't hide away. Get out among 'em.
There is a student in our school, Clementine, who stops by my classroom every single morning for a brief chat before heading upstairs to her homeroom. We aren't in any classes together, but in the past I've had her siblings, Ruby, Olive, and Violet (no joke). Clementine makes my day with her smiles, her corny jokes, and the fact that she usually brings a friend in tow, a student that, most likely, I'd never have gotten the chance to meet. Some of Clementine's friends have begun Clementine's routine on their own, so now I'm meeting drama club kids, skater kids, kids who cook, new kids who don't speak a word of English, kids whose siblings are classroom legacies, kids who teach me dances, handshakes, and suggest good books I should read.
This year, walking the hallways is quite a different experience. Kids rule!
(Oh! I've been told by these kids that saying "Good morning" to students I don't know is creepy and they won't respond [this happens]. Instead, they've taught me to say, "'Sup" [it works]. We often discuss what I call "reading the room"; they call it "matching energy." We're both learning.)
Thanks to Clementine and Mr. Wade.
Find.
15 March 2024
Beyond.
Indespensible.
Beware.
Beware.
14 March 2024
Released.
Introduced.
Happy Birthday, Murphey
Beyond.
Happy Birthday, Einstein
Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.
Happy Birthday, Telemann
Yet who is this ancient, who with flowering pen, full of holy fire, the wond’ring temple charms? Telemann, none but thou, celestial music’s sire.
Frans Brüggen plays the Fantasie No. 3 ...
13 March 2024
Schubert, Trio No. 2, Op. 100
Reward.
12 March 2024
Denigrate.
I don't like rap music, but I don't mean to denigrate those who do. And for the people who like rap music, denigrate means "put down".
Possibilities.
In what may be the best-known study of the importance of self-control, psychologist Walter Mischel and colleagues found that hungry 3- to 5-year-olds who were able to distract themselves from a delectable treat beckoning them from a table right in front of them not only received a later reward, but performed better academically and socially in adulthood than the children who immediately stuffed their faces."Self-control" and "grit" are today's buzzwords in education. There's no question that they are important for learning and achievement. But educators underappreciate how much daydreams of a more enticing future can fuel grit by increasing our ability to inhibit more fleeting, momentary desires.Turning attention away from the external world can also allow us to tap into our wellsprings of creativity. Many highly creative writers, artists, and scientists were major daydreamers as children. The long list of highly accomplished daydreamers includes Einstein, Newton, the Brontë family, W. H. Auden, and C. S. Lewis.Some of the most creative ideas of all time leaped out of a daydream. A number of studies show that our best creative ideas don't emerge when we are focused intensely on a goal. Instead, they arise in those moments when our mind has wandered away from the task at hand to other worlds and possibilities. The Aha! moment typically arises when we make an unexpected connection between offline musings and a problem we've been working on.
Always keep a tin whistle or recorder nearby.
Act.
11 March 2024
Beaming.
10 March 2024
Happy Birthday, Scholz
Follow.
BUTLER: Follow what you love. If you're a painter, look through the entire pantheon of art and look at the things that you love and affect you and then use those as a base to create your own stuff. Originalities are very strange thing, it's a very Western concept, you know, it didn't apply in the Renaissance, it doesn't apply in Chinese, Japanese, ancient art. You always built on the back of Masters and, though people these days claim that originality is the be all and end all, it really isn't because they're building on past Masters, too. So don't worry about originality. If you follow your own direction and your own love, you will find an originality.