Category The Saturday Read

The Saturday Read ‘The Portable Veblen’ by Elizabeth McKenzie

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The Saturday Read this week,‘The Portable Veblen’ by Elizabeth McKenzie is about the life choices we make, via a different kind of Silicon Valley story.

The heroine of the novel is Veblen Amundsen-Hovda, a not so typical,’gig’ economy participant, making a living by combining assignments as an office assistant in Neurology at the Stanford University School of Medicine, translating for the Norwegian Diaspora Project in Oslo, and writing about her namesake Thorstein Veblen. (Yes, that witty critic of capitalism who invented the term ‘conspicuous consumption’.)

Or as the author describes her “independent behaviorist, experienced cheerer-upper, and freelance self, who was having a delayed love affair with the world due to an isolated childhood and various interferences since.”

When we meet Veblen she has just accepted a marriage proposal from Paul Vreeland scientist, and inventor of the Pneumatic Turbo Skull Punch.

Did I mention the squirrels?  One in particular, who appears at her window just after her engagement, seeming to ask: “How well do you know yourself, and all the choices you could make?” 

In her review of the novel, NPR’s Heller McAlpin captured the theme that continues to resonate long after the reader arrives at Appendix G (in Norwegian), “this is ultimately a morality tale about the values by which we choose to live.”

If you have spent time in academia you will appreciate the absurdity of naming your child for the subject of your unfinished doctoral dissertation. You will also recognize the financial pressures of ‘technology transfer’, and ‘monetizing research’ that drive Paul’s decision to work for Big Pharma.

What if you invented something that could save lives? Wouldn’t you choose a firm that promised unlimited resources to expedite the process to market?

It’s easy to understand Paul’s choice. But in the world of bright shiny incentives he misses the point of who he will become as part of an unscrupulous conglomerate.

Fortunately for our couple and squirrel(s), good triumphs over evil in a series of memorable scenes that prove ‘what goes around, comes around’.

In ‘The Portable Veblen’, author McKenzie utilizes humor to narrate this story of choices, change, and consequences. If you’re looking for the perfect read for the recent grad, or are working through conflicting values at work, spend a few hours with Veblen, Paul and a supporting cast of frisky, philosophical squirrels.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Saturday Read ‘A Short Guide to a Happy Life’ by Anna Quindlen

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Do you remember who spoke at your graduation ceremony? The Saturday Read this week is for all of you who forgot, but would welcome a bit of ‘life advice’ in this season of ‘Pomp and Circumstance’.

In 1999, author Anna Quindlen was invited to deliver the commencement address at Villanova University. And then this happened:

“Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and author Anna Quindlen has withdrawn as the commencement speaker at Villanova University this Sunday because of what she said were objections by a “vocal minority” to her support of abortion rights.

Quindlen, who was also to have received an honorary doctorate of humane letters, said in an interview yesterday that she did not want to “ruin the day or cast a shadow” on the graduation ceremony.”

A graduate student requested a copy of the prepared text and posted it on the Internet. (This was before Facebook, Twitter et al.) The post went viral, and the resulting essay was published in 2000 as ‘A Short Guide to a Happy Life’.

Seventeen years later her words still resonate. In the opening paragraphs she signals her values, and offers a hint at why she withdrew.

“My work is human nature. Real life is really all I know…Don’t ever confuse the two, your life and your work…The second is only part of the first.”

Real life collided with an opportunity to address Villanova’s Class of 1999, the alma mater of several of her family members. Fortunately her publisher provided an avenue for Ms. Quindlen to share her personal life experience with a broader audience, to encourage ownership and balance.

“When you leave college, there are thousands of people out there with the same degree you have; when you get a job, there will be thousands of people doing what you want to do for a living.”

“But you are the only person alive who has sole custody of your life. Your particular life. Your entire life. Not just the life at your desk, or your life on the bus, or in the car, or at the computer. Not just the life of your mind, but the life of your heart. Not just your bank account, but your soul.”

“People don’t talk about the soul very much anymore. It’s so much easier to write a resume than to craft a spirit.”

Some may disagree that a resume is easy to write, especially a recent grad who has spent the past months engaged in the job search. A resume is limited to a list of accomplishments, full of key words designed to cut through the barrier of digital applicant screening. It’s the values expressed in that experience that define who you are, your spirit.

The recurring theme of ‘Short Guide’ challenges the reader to question commonly held definitions of success.

“You cannot be really first-rate at your work if your work is all you are.”

“So I suppose the best piece of advice I could give anyone is pretty simple: get a life. A real life, not a manic pursuit of the next promotion, the bigger paycheck, the larger house.”

“Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you. And remember that love is not leisure, it is work.”

‘A Short Guide to a Happy Life’ is a compact book to be kept close for a periodic reread. It’s a reminder to all, at every career stage, that “Life is made up of moments, small pieces of glittering mica in a long stretch of gray cement.”

One of those moments is revealed in the recollection of a conversation with a homeless man on the boardwalk in Coney Island, New York.

“And he stared out at the ocean and said, “Look at the view, young lady. Look at the view.”

Commencement is the beginning of a life of learning, sometimes from the most unexpected of teachers. Enjoy the Saturday Read, and don’t forget to enjoy the view.

 

 

 

The Saturday Read – It’s Independent Bookstore Day!

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

Today is Independent Bookstore Day. Instead of recommending a book this week, I recommend you find your local independent bookstore (not Barnes and Noble) and spend an hour browsing their selection.

One of my favorites – Pages in Manhattan Beach, CA.

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Just what does IBD celebrate?

“Independent bookstores are not just stores, they’re community centers and local anchors run by passionate readers. They are entire universes of ideas that contain the possibility of real serendipity. They are lively performance spaces and quiet places where aimless perusal is a day well spent.

Indie bookstores, whether dusty and labyrinthine or clean and well-lighted, are not just stores, they are solutions. They hold the key to your love life, your career, and your passions. Walking the aisles of a good bookstore means stumbling upon a novel from India that expands your heart. It’s encountering an art book that changes the direction of your life. It’s the joy of having a perfect stranger steer you toward the perfect book.

In a world of tweets and algorithms and pageless digital downloads, bookstores are not a dying anachronism. They are living, breathing organisms that continue to grow and expand. In fact, there are more of them this year than there were last year. And they are at your service.”

Today, day five of #OnTheRoad, I will be visiting Main Street Books in Davidson, N.C.IMG_3337.jpg

Enjoy selecting your Saturday Read!

The Saturday Read from the 2016 winners of the Pulitzer Prize

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Four writers and journalists, whose work was featured in this blog, were among the winners of the Pulitzer Prize announced on Monday. Today, for the ‘Saturday Read’ we revisit the writings of William Finnegan, Kathryn Schulz, Emily Nussbaum and Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Three journalists call The New Yorker home. On Monday, it became the first magazine to be honored with the Pulitzer Prize. Emily Nussbaum and Kathryn Schulz earned Pulitzers in criticism and feature writing respectively, and William Finnegan received the prize for biography.

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“Emily Nussbaum, who has won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, writes essays and reported pieces about television that are fearless, hilarious, and pioneering. Among the pieces submitted to the Pulitzer committee were her standout essays on Joan Rivers, P. Jay Sidney, advertising, and “Mad Men.”

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“Kathryn Schulz, who arrived at The New Yorker less than two years ago, has won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, for “The Really Big One,” her piece on the more than a little troubling geology of the Pacific Northwest. Her evocations of the earthquake in Japan in 2011 and of the earthquake that could occur in the states of Washington and Oregon stay with us much like works of the best fiction, to say nothing of horror films.”

The Saturday Read on December 12, 2015 included excerpts from this ‘long read’.

“Just north of the San Andreas, however, lies another fault line. Known as the Cascadia subduction zone, it runs for seven hundred miles off the coast of the Pacific Northwest, beginning near Cape Mendocino, California, continuing along Oregon and Washington, and terminating around Vancouver Island, Canada. The “Cascadia” part of its name comes from the Cascade Range, a chain of volcanic mountains that follow the same course a hundred or so miles inland. The “subduction zone” part refers to a region of the planet where one tectonic plate is sliding underneath (subducting) another. Tectonic plates are those slabs of mantle and crust that, in their epochs-long drift, rearrange the earth’s continents and oceans. Most of the time, their movement is slow, harmless, and all but undetectable. Occasionally, at the borders where they meet, it is not.”

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“William Finnegan, who has been a staff writer since 1987, has won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Biography, for his memoir about surfing, “Barbarian Days.” This project has been Finnegan’s literary obsession for a very long time. It began as a series in our pages more than two decades ago, and came to completion in June, with “Off Diamond Head,” an excerpt from the book, which was published not long after.”

The Saturday Read on August 1, 2015 recommended ‘Barbarian Days, A Surfing Life’.

“When you do a book reading in Manhattan Beach, California you need to use a microphone so the guys with ‘surfer’s ear’ in the back can understand you. Last night New Yorker journalist and lifetime surfer William Finnegan used a mic as he read from his well reviewed new book…

The Q&A at the reading was closer to a book club discussion than a publicity event. Most of those attending had either read the book or the excerpt in the June 1 issue of the New Yorker magazine. This is not just a book about surfing. Mr. Finnegan is a well regarded journalist with a resume that includes reporting from South Africa, Somalia, the Balkans, Central America and Australia. Robert Boynton included him in his conversations with America’s best nonfiction writers in ‘The New New Journalism’.”

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Lin-Manuel Miranda won the Pulitzer for drama, for ‘Hamilton’. “For a distinguished play by an American author, preferably original in its source and dealing with American life.”

“A landmark American musical about the gifted and self-destructive founding father whose story becomes both contemporary and irresistible.”

David Rooney reported on the prize for Billboard. “Miranda wrote the book, music and lyrics for the show, in addition to starring in the title role. The Pulitzer now further cements Hamilton’s status as the toughest ticket in town and the clear frontrunner to take the top musical kudos at this year’s Tony Awards in June.”

I have written about Miranda and Hamilton five times in the past year. My favorite is ‘The Power of Taking a Break & the Unexpected Inspiration of Reading’ on March 4, 2015.

“If Mr. Miranda had not been on vacation, taking time away from work, we may have been deprived of his creativity and ability to connect the dots as he developed his perspective for the play: “Miranda saw Hamilton’s relentlessness, brilliance, linguistic dexterity, and self-destructive stubbornness through his own idiosyncratic lens. It was, he thought, a hip-hop story, and immigrant’s story.”

Ms. Mead’s article tells the story of the evolution of Mr. Miranda’s career, the development of ‘Hamilton’, and the connections he has made along the way with mentors and creative partnerships.

Sometimes we think creativity belongs to the artist and we struggle to find opportunities to relate to our own workplace. But creativity is about imagination and storytelling our way to solving a problem. Taking time away allows for a different view. If we are open to the unexpected we can connect the dots and reframe the narrative. And, maybe be online Sunday to buy tickets and see how it’s done.”

The Saturday Read ‘Hamilton The Revolution’ by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter

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I saw the hat first, ‘A.HAM’ emblazoned on its crown. In the midst of the crowds converging on the campus of the University of Southern California last weekend for the LA Times Festival of Books, a student and her parents were headed to an open house hosted by the School of Dramatic Arts. The black and gold logo was a reminder that the phenomena that is ‘Hamilton’ continues to spark the dreams of the aspiring actor, striving historian, and would-be composer.

First there was Ron Chernow‘s 2004 book, ‘Alexander Hamilton’. Last summer, ‘Hamilton’, the musical debuted on Broadway. In February, the original cast recording won a Grammy for Best Musical Theater Album. This week the ‘Hamiltome’ arrived in bookstores and immediately sold out on Amazon. The Saturday Read is ‘Hamilton The Revolution’ by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter.

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In 2007 Jeremy McCarter, then drama critic for New York Magazine, reviewed a new play, ‘In The Heights’ and posed the question “Could musicals actually be adapting to a new century’s audience?”

“The most obvious of the show’s many virtues is that it doesn’t sound like the half-assed pseudo-pop that clutters up Broadway. Miranda’s score is rich and kaleidoscopic, as it needs to be.”

In the Introduction to ‘HTR’, Mr. McCarter reflects on his time at New York Magazine and his frustration with lack of interest in the possibilities of hip-hop.

“After many disappointments and false alarms, Heights had made me sit up in my aisle seat: Here’s the guy. Lin’s show about immigration in Upper Manhattan fused salsa, hip-hop, and traditional Broadway ballads to make something old and new, familiar and surprising. Best of all, he made the leap that virtually nobody else had made, using hip-hop to tell a story that had nothing to do with hip-hop – using it as form, not content.”

The writer, director and producer McCarter, who studied history at Harvard connected with the composer, lyricist, actor and Wesleyan alum, Miranda and began a collaboration that resulted in ‘Hamilton The Revolution’.

“It tells the story of two revolutions. There’s the American Revolution of the 18th century, which flares to life in Lin’s libretto, the complete text of which is published here, with his annotations. There’s also the revolution of the show itself: a musical that changes the way that Broadway sounds, and alters who gets to tell the story of our founding, that let’s us glimpse the new, more diverse America rushing our way.”

IMG_4314.jpgThe book is a ‘behind the scenes’ look at the development of a musical. It’s a narrative of the creative process and a roadmap for future generations who will replicate the production on high school and summer stages.

In an interview with CBS This Morning, Mr. McCarter stressed the importance of cataloging the moments from the first rap performance at the White House through the six years to opening night.

We wanted to “tell the story which is not about this historical fact or that historical fact, it’s about the emotional reality that these people were living through…This is not just what happened, but this is how it felt at the time. This is the experience that we all went through…So that ten years from now when kids are doing it they can pick up this book and say ‘Oh, that’s how they did it’, now I understand.”

Where do we find inspiration? It’s the curiosity thing. Mr.Miranda is the master of the inquisitive. And he seems to drawn on every life experience and relationship to connect the dots to his project. Here’s one example from the annotations to ‘You’ll Be Back’.

“I was having a drink with Hugh Laurie, with whom I’d worked on his series ‘House’, and I told him I wanted to write a breakup letter from King George to the colonies. Without blinking, he improv’d at me, “Awwww, you’ll be back,” wagging his finger. I laughed and filed it away. Thanks, Hugh Laurie.”

IMG_4308.jpgWe learn from the wisdom of others. ‘Hamilton The Revolution’ introduces us to a serious set of theater luminaries and traces each of their stories as the words and music evolve.

@work we casually use the buzz words creativity and innovation interchangeably. We imagine we are all curious, exemplars of transformational thinking. But most of us can’t reimagine our way out of our comfort zone. Creativity is hard work.

‘HTR’ is the story of a musical. Its value, for those who work outside the theater, is to show us where curiosity can lead and what creativity looks like.

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“The last song in the show captures the bitter historical truth that every one of Hamilton’s enemies outlived him, and they did all they could to efface his memory. By ending with Hamilton’s afterlife, not his death, the show asks us to think about what we leave behind when we’re gone: It invites us to think about legacies.”

When Ben Brantley reviewed the musical for the New York Times, he wrote “Hamilton” is, among other things, about who owns history, who gets to be in charge of the narrative.”

Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter own ‘HTR’, their story, and leave no doubt about who is in charge of the narrative.

“Who tells your story?”

 

 

 

 

 

The Saturday Read ‘Seven Brief Lessons On Physics’ by Carlo Rovelli

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

It was the ‘chirp’ heard around the world. In February scientists announced the discovery of gravitational waves formed by two black holes colliding, confirming the century old predictions of Albert Einstein.

If you’re not a physicist or a physics major, you may have only a passing familiarity with the terms used in the previous sentence. And yet, we just experienced, in a ‘galaxy far far away’, what the New York Times science reporter Dennis Overbye described as a moment “destined to take its place among the great sound bites of science, ranking with Alexander Graham Bell’s “Mr. Watson — come here” and Sputnik’s first beeps from orbit.” 

The Saturday Read this week is ‘Seven Brief Lessons on Physics’ by physicist Carlo Rovelli of Aix-Marseille University and the Intitut Universitaire de France. Spend some time with this exquisite book and become a bit more fluent in the language of physics.

“These lessons were written for those who know little or nothing about modern science. Together they provide a rapid overview of the most fascinating aspects of the great revolution that has occurred in physics in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and of the questions and mysteries that this revolution has opened up. Because science shows us how to better understand the world, but it also reveals to us just how vast is the extent of what is still not known.”

Beginning with Einstein’s ‘beautiful theory’ of relativity, Rovelli follows the science beyond gravity to quantum mechanics and quantum gravity.

Is your hair is hurting? Hang in there.

“Physics opens windows through which we see far into the distance. What we see does not cease to astonish us. We realize that we are full of prejudices and that our intuitive image of the world is partial, parochial, inadequate. Earth is not flat; it is not stationary. The world continues to change before our eyes as we gradually see it more extensively and more clearly.”

Are we still talking about science? The magic of Rovelli’s prose is its simplicity in conveying painfully complex theories.

We learn the value of ‘wasting’ time.

“In his youth Albert Einstein spent a year loafing aimlessly. You don’t get anywhere by not ‘wasting’ time – something, unfortunately, that the parents of teenagers tend frequently to forget.”

And that we live in “A world of happenings, not of things.”

Rovelli describes concepts visually.

“…before experiments, measurements, mathematics, and rigorous deductions, science is about all about visions. Science begins with a vision. Scientific thought is fed by the capacity to ‘see’ things differently than they have been previously seen.”

And reminds us that “Genius hesitates.”

The essays originally appeared as a series for the culture section of  Il Sole 24 Ore, the Italian newspaper. Released last month in the U.S., the book is ranked third on the New York Times combined print & e-book nonfiction list.

Why read ‘Seven Brief Lessons on Physics’? Because it will take you on an adventure beyond your comfort zone in the time it takes you to commute to work.

“We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy, we are nothing other than what we can’t help but be: a part of our world.”

 

 

 

The Saturday Read ‘A Sense of Where You Are’ by John McPhee

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In 1964 Bill Bradley was a senior at Princeton University, and a star player on the basketball team. John McPhee was just beginning his career as a writer. In a moment to make networking history, McPhee’s dad, the athletic department physician, suggested John visit campus and profile the Ivy League phenom.

The Saturday Read this week is ‘A Sense of Where You Are’, the original New Yorker article, published in the January 23, 1965 issue.

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As the NCAA tournament narrows the field from 64 to 16 this weekend, let John McPhee be  your ‘throwback Saturday’ guide to Princeton University in the fall of 1964.

“The basketball locker room in the gymnasium at Princeton has no blackboard, no water fountain, and, in fact, no lockers. Up on the main floor, things go along in the same vein. Collapsible grandstands pull out of the walls and crowd up to the edge of the court. Jolly alumni sometimes wander in just before a game begins, sit down on the players’ bench, and are permitted to stay there. The players themselves are a little slow getting started each year, because if they try to do some practicing on their own during the autumn they find the gymnasium full of graduate students who know their rights and won’t move over. When a fellow does get some action, it can be dangerous. The gym is so poorly designed that a scrimmaging player can be knocked down one of two flights of concrete stairs. It hardly seems possible, but at the moment this scandalous milieu includes William Warren Bradley, who is the best amateur basketball player in the United States and among the best players, amateur or professional, in the history of the sport.”

McPhee introduces us to Bradley, his work ethic, and a time when basketball competition provided “a real period of relief from the academic load”.

Stay with me, fellow time traveller. This is not fiction. This is the future Pulitzer Prize winner, and pioneer of creative non-fiction, John McPhee, painting a picture of college life and basketball in the early 1960s.

In September of his senior year, Bradley competed on the U.S. Olympic basketball team in Tokyo, defeating Russia for the gold medal. In December, he was elected a Rhodes Scholar. He opted out of an opportunity to play for the NY Knicks to study at Oxford.

“Bradley says that when he was seventeen he came to realize that life was much longer than a few winters of basketball. He is quite serious in his application to the game, but he has wider interests and, particularly, bigger ambitions.”

Last year Marc Tracy revisited McPhee, the profile that began his career at The New Yorker, and Bradley’s last NCAA tournament.

“Fifty years earlier, McPhee had good reason to be at the Palestra for a basketball game, and for looking more than simply interested. He was covering an N.C.A.A. tournament game between Princeton and Penn State. Princeton won and then, at College Park, Md., defeated North Carolina State (whose zone press had just handled Duke) and Providence to advance to the Final Four in Portland, Ore. There, it lost to Michigan and, in the consolation game, devastated Wichita State, 118-82.”

The profile, which was later expanded into a book of the same title, provides a tutorial on basketball, and the life of one true ‘student-athlete’, as he balances his academics, sport, and community involvement.

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About that title:

“I asked him what he called his over-the-shoulder shot. He said that he had never heard a name for it, but that he had seen Oscar Robertson, of the Cincinnati Royals, and Jerry West, of the Los Angeles Lakers, do it, and had worked it out for himself. He went on to say that it is a much simpler shot than it appears to be, and, to illustrate, he tossed a ball over his shoulder and into the basket while he was talking and looking me in the eye. I retrieved the ball and handed it back to him. “When you have played basketball for a while, you don’t need to look at the basket when you are in close like this,” he said, throwing it over his shoulder again and right through the hoop. “You develop a sense of where you are.”

In 1964 his classmates predicted Bradley might run for governor in his home state of Missouri, and one day run for president.

With Bradley off to Oxford, McPhee closed his profile with this sentence.

“And like Hank Luisetti, of Stanford, who never played professional basketball, he will have the almost unique distinction of taking only the name of his college with him into the chronicles of the sport.”

That was not the end of the story.

Bradley returned after earning a masters degree at Oxford to play ten seasons with the NY Knicks, and was inducted into the Basketball Hall of Fame in 1983. He served as the U.S. Senator from New Jersey (not Missouri) from 1979-1997. And he ran for president in 2000.

In the 2015, NY Times article,“Bradley explained what the book’s title means to him”.

“You have a sense of where you are in life,” he said. “You don’t get carried away. You know who you are. You understand the environment, the context in which you’re living, and you make decisions based upon the centeredness.”

He added, “You’re also always working on who you are.”

 

 

 

The Saturday Read ‘LIT UP: One Reporter, Three Schools. Twenty-Four Books That Can Change Lives.’ by David Denby

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If you believe that the humanities are as critical as STEM skills in the 21st century workplace, take a trip back to high school with David Denby and this week’s Saturday Read, ‘LIT UP’: One Reporter. Three Schools. Twenty-Four Books That Can Change Lives.

We have this basic disconnect in our workplace today that is pitting generalists against specialists. The consequences are trickling down into our public education system.

If you’re a parent considering where to invest in your child’s college education, you’re probably looking at ‘vocational’ programs that ‘guarantee’ a job at graduation. If you’re that same parent, but now in the role of organization executive, you realize your recruiting efforts must consider ‘cultural contribution’; potential in addition to skill set. If you’re a student, you hear ‘STEM good, humanities bad; or worse, a waste of time’.

Writing in The New Yorker in February, Mr. Denby addressed the challenge in advocating for the humanities in today’s skill driven education/employer complex. He cited recent state government efforts to offer ‘bonus premiums’ in financial aid to students enrolled in STEM degree programs by cutting funding to students in the humanities.

“Lifetime readers know that reading literature can be transformative, but they can’t prove it. If they tried, they would have to buck the metric prejudice, the American notion that assertions unsupported with statistics are virtually meaningless. What they know about literature and its effects is literally and spiritually immeasurable. They would have to buck common marketplace wisdom, too: in an economy demanding “skill sets”—defined narrowly as technical and business skills—that deep-reading stuff won’t get you anywhere.” 

In ‘LIT UP’ David Denby is searching for the magic that transforms a young reader into a lifetime reader. “How do you establish reading pleasure in busy screen-loving teenagers – and in particular, pleasure in reading serious work? Is it still possible to raise teenagers who can’t live without reading something good? Or is that idea absurd? And could the struggle to create such hunger have any effect on the character of boys and girls?”

He chooses to go back to school for the 2011-12 academic year at Beacon, a New York City magnet high school, at the time located on West 61st St, observing teacher Sean Leon‘s tenth grade English class.

“School was the place to find out. And students in the tenth grade, I thought, were the right kids to look at. Recent work by neuroscientists has established that adolescence, as well as early childhood, is a period of tremendous “neuroplasticity”. At that age, the brain still has a genuine capacity to change.”

The book is structured by months, and reading selections. Mr. Leon introduces each book with inventive assignments, questions and at one point, a ‘digital fast’. Mr. Denby provides thumbnail plot sketches to shake the cobwebs from our ‘required reading’ memories. And we meet the students, by pseudonym, in their reactions to the literature.

At one point, the author gives the students a questionnaire to find out what books they read on their own, and their favorite authors. He finds three ‘real readers’ in a class of 32. “…unfairly or not, I was sorry that among Mr. Leon’s students there were no mad enthusiasms, no crazy loves, no compulsive reading of every book by a single author…”

In writing the book, he was encouraged by colleagues to create a scalable review, contrary to his initial approach, resisting quantification, and observing “a single place where literary education seemed to be working.” 

He realized that you can’t clone Beacon’s Sean Leon. He wanted other teachers to learn from Leon’s methods, but realized additional perspectives would add to his narrative.

“Typicality and comprehensiveness remained impossible to achieve, but variety was not. I delayed finishing the book, and, in the academic year 2013-14, I visited tenth-grade English classes in two other public schools – shuttling up many times during the year to James Hillhouse High School, an inner-city school in New Haven with a largely poor African American population; and five times in the spring to a school in a wealthy New York suburb, Mamaroneck, a “bedroom town” in the language of the fifties, where people sent their kids to good schools.”

Mr. Denby’s appendix includes the reading lists for each of the schools he visited and a ‘where are they now?’ college destination roster of the Beacon English Class of 2014. “There is, of course, no ideal reading list, no perfect syllabus, no perfect classroom manner, but only strategies that work or don’t work. In a reading crisis, we are pragmatists as well as idealists.”

“Teenagers, distracted, busy, self-obsessed, are not easy to engage – not by their teachers or by their parents. To keep them in the game, the teachers I watched experimented, altered the routine, changing the physical dimensions of the class. They kept the kids off balance in order to put them back in balance. They demanded more of students than the students expected to give.”

This is a book for parents, parents who are business leaders; teachers and the politicians who minimize their value; and students. We’re in a reading crisis and we need folks who have emotional intelligence, who can think, judge, make decisions and create a vision for an enterprise within a global world view.

“Teachers are the most maligned and ignored professionals in American life. In the humanities, the good ones are as central to our emotional and moral life as priests, ministers, rabbis, and imams. The good ones are not sheepish or silent in defense of literature and history and the rest. They can’t be; the children’s lives are right before them. In high-school English, if the teachers are shrewd and willing to take a few risks, they will try to reach the students where they live emotionally. They will engage, for instance, with “naïve” existential questions (what do I live for?) and also adolescent fascination with “dark” moods and the fear of being engulfed by adult society. Shakespeare, Mary Shelley, Poe, Hawthorne, Twain, Stevenson, Orwell, Vonnegut, and many others wrote about such things. And if teachers can make books important to kids—and forge the necessary link to pleasure and need—those kids may turn off the screens. At least for a few vital hours.”

The Saturday Read ‘Worklife: Rethinking the office for an always-on economy’

Eileen Kohan Leave a comment

The Saturday Read this week is a compilation of articles that appeared in the February 28, 2016 ‘work issue’ of The New York Times Magazine.

A group of journalists and writers contributed coverage on a variety of work/life topics, adding new perspectives from groundbreaking research, demonstrating that, regardless of profession, it’s all about the culture. And the culture is in need of change.

Organization culture determines who succeeds, fails, and communicates ‘hints’ through recruiting practices, and the daily process of getting things done; meetings, teamwork and office space.

“We do often work at home. But we also work at work, before going home to work more. The office has persisted, becoming even bigger, weirder, stranger: a symbol of its outsize presence in our lives.”

The ‘work issue’ is an interesting survey of some of the most pressing issues @work today. The sampling of the content below is meant to serve as an introduction, with a recommendation to take the time to read the edition in its entirety.

NYT staff writer, Susan Dominus challenges us to think about balance beyond policies by ‘Rethinking the Work-Life Equation’, reporting on the research of Phyllis Moen of the University of Minnesota and Erin Kelly of M.I.T.

“Workers in the experimental group were told they could work wherever, and whenever, they chose so long as projects were completed on time and goals were met; the new emphasis would be on results rather than on the number of hours spent in the office. Managers were trained to be supportive of their employees’ personal issues and were formally encouraged to open up about their own priorities outside work — an ill parent, or a child wanting her mom to watch her soccer games. Managers were given iPods that buzzed twice a day to remind them to think about the various ways they could support their employees as they managed their jobs and home lives.

The research found that employees in the experimental group met their goals as reliably as those in the control group, and they were, in short, much happier: They were sleeping better, were healthier and experienced less stress. Other studies examining the same workplace found that the effects even cascaded down to employees’ children, who reported less volatility around their own daily stresses; adolescents saw the quality of their sleep improve. A year out, and then three years out, employees in the experimental group reported less interest in leaving the organization than those in the control group.

…sometimes there is little more than tradition holding organizations back from making meaningful changes that bring tremendous peace of mind to their employees.”

Five years ago, Google decided to determine what makes a ‘perfect team’. Pulitzer prize winning New York Times reporter Charles Duhigg reports on the results in an excerpt from his new book, ‘Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business’.

“For Project Aristotle, research on psychological safety pointed to particular norms that are vital to success. There were other behaviors that seemed important as well — like making sure teams had clear goals and creating a culture of dependability. But Google’s data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.

However, establishing psychological safety is, by its very nature, somewhat messy and difficult to implement. You can tell people to take turns during a conversation and to listen to one another more. You can instruct employees to be sensitive to how their colleagues feel and to notice when someone seems upset. But the kinds of people who work at Google are often the ones who became software engineers because they wanted to avoid talking about feelings in the first place.

What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.”

Nikil Saval, who wrote about the evolution of the office in ‘Cubed: The Secret History of the Workplace’, writes about new experiments with office space, ‘Labor/atories’

“The sudden efflorescence of the tech industry in the late ’90s took us from the desert of cubicles to the milk-and-honey offices of today. Many of the dot-commers had graduated from (or, very often, dropped out of) cozy university campuses to toil in big corporations. Starting their own companies, they recreated the effortless drift between work and play that characterized their college lives. The cubicle walls came down, and in the wide, open warehouse and loft spaces they occupied, exceptionally long workdays would be punctuated by frenzied Mario Kart races or fierce Ping-Pong battles. Creating a playful office became one of the standard ways of attracting skilled employees in a competitive environment: The hope was that a talented engineer wouldn’t leave a tech behemoth for the dinky start-up next door that didn’t have a gym and a resistance pool. Thus has the ‘‘fun office’’ spread throughout the world.”

Each of the articles provides a ‘take away’ to apply @work. If you’re a leader, you’ll rethink your approach as you begin to understand what your competitors are doing to recruit and retain employees. As a manager, you’ll learn ways to improve the daily routine of meetings, but more important, reinforce behavior that will encourage employees to be productive. For the rest of us, a window has been opened to view alternative approaches to work and workplace. What will you do on Monday to turn policy into practice?