The language of war is standard in politics — to go by bad newspaper copy, lawmakers are always “firing salvos” in “battleground” states — and fight is a word that, in American elections, has not often been interpreted literally.
I have been in digital health for 10+ years and saw early a lot of the issues are social vs. clinical. Loneliness is equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes a day according to an AARP study. Think about that! The pandemic has only strengthened our conviction that companionship is care and being a Pal has a positive impact.
But the physical space around you does have a strong influence–on your mood and even on your behavior. The layout of your town or city changes who you interact with, and what those interactions look like. __In our homes, lighting, smell, and even the arrangement of furniture all affect us in subtle ways, even if we are tied to our screens.__
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act was $787 billion which is like $950 billion in today’s dollars. The bipartisan Covid relief bill that passed in December was about that big and the CARES Act was much larger. But despite that, Biden is talking about doing a bill that’s about double the ARRA in inflation-adjusted terms and he’s saying that’s just going to be the first of two bills.
Many leaders are unsure about how to discuss current events that elicit strong opinions and emotions from their team members and so their default is to say nothing or make only a passing comment. Resist that tendency. You need to instead lean into this moment of disbelief, frustration, anger, fear, and anything else people might be feeling — not only today but from here on out. When something unspeakable occurs, you won’t find the perfect words to calm your people and restore their focus. No one does. But it is important that you acknowledge pain when it is felt. It is top of mind for your employees, and they are waiting to hear from you.
After many months of failing to make progress, Mr. Adams scheduled a solo writing retreat for several weeks at a country manor. Unfortunately, he ended up befriending the hosts, and he spent most of the trip drinking wine. Just weeks before his manuscript was due, Mr. Adams had produced just 25 pages. “I love deadlines,” Mr. Adams has said. “I like the whooshing sound they make as they go by.”
I suspect we will long debate what would have been, in retrospect, the right time to ban Donald Trump from Twitter. What cannot be seriously debated, watching how this ugly week in American history has unfolded, is that the man had any legitimate claim left to using the platform. Increasingly, he has no legitimate claim to any social media platform at all.
Trump is now and always has been delusional. He lives in an imaginary world. His insistence that he won the last election in a “landslide” is psychologically indistinguishable from his declaration on his first day that his Inaugural crowd was larger than his predecessor’s. For four years, the actual evidence did not matter. It still doesn’t. Any rumor that helps him, however ludicrous, is true; every cold fact that hurts him, however trivial or banal, doesn’t exist. For four years as president, any advisor who told him the truth, rather than perpetuating his delusions, had an immediate expiration date. For four years, an army of volunteer propagandists knowingly disseminated his insane, cascading torrent of lies.
People say that your house is the biggest purchase you’ll ever make, but it won’t be the most consequential negotiation. If you’re sane only about 25% or so of your gross income is subject to the results of real estate negotiations. Close to 100% is subject to the results of salary negotiations. Thus, your salary negotiations are probably going to be the most important financial decisions you will ever make.
The Trump Administration jettisoned the Obama playbook. In 2019, H.H.S. conducted Crimson Contagion, a simulation examining the government’s ability to contain a pandemic. Among the participants were the Pentagon, the N.S.C., hospitals, local and regional health-care departments, the American Red Cross, and twelve state governments. The scenario envisioned an international group of tourists visiting China who become infected with a novel influenza and spread it worldwide. There’s no vaccine; antiviral drugs are ineffective.
"Hell yes or no" is a good mantra to apply to almost everything. Every "maybe in the future" and "I'm not sure" fills me with anxiety and regret, even if it's not always obvious.
2020: Look, it’s not just one Year that kills someone; it’s all the Years combined. That’s how Time works.
And just remember: it’s not enough to remove the negative. That simply creates a void. Get the positive things on the calendar ASAP, lest they get crowded out by the bullshit and noise that will otherwise fill your days. Good luck and godspeed!
Keystone Habits are habits that you use to make it easier to do other habits because you perform them regularly already and all you have to do is chain a new habit on at the end. A popular example is brushing your teeth in the morning - you do that already, so if you want to remember to take your meds or fish oil or whatever, do it immediately after and it's going to be much easier to stick to it than if you did it randomly.
I envy voracious book readers. They seem worldly and wise. Also, whatever is happening in their lives, they’re never completely on their own – they always have their books.
Twins Kate and Ruth Greenfield are the only ones credited with playing baby Elora Danan in Ron Howard’s 1988 fantasy adventure starring Warwick Davis and Val Kilmer, with a story by George Lucas. In fact, four girls played the infant – so what are they all up to now?
According to Warwick Davis, the film had the largest ever casting call for little people at the time. Between 225 and 240 actors were hired for the film.
I will never forget the moment I realized they would pass. "How will you grow this to a $1B business?" they asked, and despite all the preparation, we did not have a convincing answer.
It’s easy to say yes to a future commitment because it doesn’t affect your present self. You can ignore the commitment for days, weeks, or months, but eventually, you will have to do the work that your future self promised. Now, whenever Kevin gets invited to do anything in the future, he mentally swaps the due date with “tomorrow.” So, “Can you give a keynote speech at our conference in Tulsa three months from now?” Becomes “Can you give a keynote speech at our conference in Tulsa tomorrow?” It’s much easier to decide whether you want to do something when you make this change to the question.
One of the things that’ll kill you is equating wealth with self-worth and constantly comparing yourself to your peer group. The money ball bounces too randomly around here and because of outsized returns from new ventures, being at the right company in the right role during the right few years can be worth $$$$$.
It’s all the emails in the middle that are the slog. Emails that need attention, but they aren’t exciting. They require work, but work that really doesn’t amount to much. There is some satisfaction to getting through them all, but it’s unfortunate that that bulk of work is ultimately going to be worth so little.
Stress has also robbed us of another anchor that grounds us in time: a conception of the future. When jobs are unstable, school schedules are up in the air, and rules regularly shift, it’s hard to envision what might happen next.
Whether in a rural town with limited provider options, an underserved community without quality clinics, or a bustling metropolis with shockingly few available doctor’s appointments, too many people cannot access the care they need, when they need it.
At the same time, there are caveats to fulfilling the promise of virtual care, including a murky regulatory environment and a knee-jerk reaction to simply bringing a broken system online.
Even those that aren’t experiencing symptoms are desperate for clinically-sound education from a medical professional or trusted clinical resource. That’s another incredible opportunity in which telehealth can rise up. It possesses the power to both address the concerns of the “worried well” through education while providing a smarter means of triage and care navigation to those potentially infected by the virus.
When I walked into the jazz cafe, I had been walking for 25 days across the country and had never once worried about my safety. It's not that I feel especially unsafe when walking around the US, but I feel the constant hum of violence in the background. In contrast, on this walk in Japan everyone was courteous. Lovely, even. Sometimes a bit bossy, but never malicious. Did I have to sneak out of a barely functioning inn in the middle of the night because the room smelled overbearingly of urine? Sure. But what I saw around me were people who were taken care of—by their families, communities, government—a feeling which, in turn, made me feel hopeful in the biggest, most cosmic way of being hopeful.
Many of the interactions we have that are ostensibly for us are actually for other people. Once we can see who it’s for, it’s a lot easier to do it well.
...I don’t understand the most American of products: the 30-year fixed-rate fully prepayable mortgage.
Like it or not, while politicians may trumpet the finest members of their political tent to supporters, they’re also liable for the worst members, at least as perceived by their enemies. Just as Trump was pegged as at least passingly sympathetic to, if not outright supportive of, white nationalists with his failure to renounce their sordid lot during the Charlottesville tragedy, the same dynamics hit Biden with his political coalition. I’m afraid you can’t quite have the Bernie wing inside your tent without that rhetoric coming to signify your candidacy, at least partially, to those who view such tendencies with suspicion.
When the pressure mounts to be productive every minute of the day, we have much to gain from doing all we can to carve out time to play. Take away prescriptions and obligations, and we gravitate towards whatever interests us the most. Just like children and baby elephants, we can learn important lessons through play. It can also give us a new perspective on topics we take for granted—such as the way we represent numbers.
The book points out that the major value in a flying car (as with supersonic) would not be in taking the same trips you do now, only a bit faster. Instead, it would be in taking the trips you don’t take now, because they’re too inconvenient. A flying car would shrink your world, expanding the radius of what you would consider for a commute, a shopping trip, a visit to friends, a business meeting, or a weekend vacation. Indeed, Hall cites literature from travel studies finding that people in all societies travel on average about an hour a day, whether walking barefoot or driving on the highway. And he points out that increasing the effective radius for each of those trips increases the effective area open to you quadratically (doubling your travel radius means four times as many destinations).
I started to outline the idea that Trump is both a symptom and an accelerant of a trend that started as the Cold War ended. To put a tidy date on it, I chose August 17, 1992, the day Patrick Buchanan delivered his famous “Culture War” speech at the Republican National Convention. Nut graf from said speech:
In a strange way, liberals needed to believe this, too. The shock of Trump’s election provoked a crisis of self-confidence for his opponents. Humans have an innate need to believe events with profound importance must have profound causes. Trump’s success must reveal some vast and terrible secret. They — Trump’s America — must be, if not more numerous, then at least more authentic, bound together by a secret bond inaccessible to the rest of us. Trump benefitted from polling errors both in 2016 and 2020 that imbued him with a mystical aura, a wizard possessing a secret connection to the heartland that was invisible to the elite.
Given that more than a dozen investigations and civil suits involving Trump are currently under way, he could be looking at an endgame even more perilous than the one confronted by Nixon. The Presidential historian Michael Beschloss said of Trump, “If he loses, you have a situation that’s not dissimilar to that of Nixon when he resigned. Nixon spoke of the cell door clanging shut.” Trump has famously survived one impeachment, two divorces, six bankruptcies, twenty-six accusations of sexual misconduct, and an estimated four thousand lawsuits. Few people have evaded consequences more cunningly. That run of good luck may well end, perhaps brutally, if he loses to Joe Biden. Even if Trump wins, grave legal and financial threats will loom over his second term.
It is also one that we’ve asked enough these past few years to be able to parrot back a familiar litany of answers. We tell ourselves that it is because white America is racist and male America is sexist and rural voters are fearful and we actually don’t know anything about Latino voters because that’s a socially constructed category into which we’ve stuffed a whole bunch of different people of Iberian and African and Indigenous descent and also because there is so much disinformation and there is Fox News and Facebook and the Boomers are weird. We tell ourselves that if this particular candidate had run a more effective campaign or had policies that better align with the policies we personally like that it would have been different. We correctly identify that the Electoral College is a big dumb racist albatross.
It doesn’t feel like shock, like 2016. It doesn’t really feel like rage. It feels like exhaustion soaked in national and personal grief, which is also a fitting description for the last eight months. “My head knew it would go like this,” the writer Seyward Darby tweeted this morning. “My heart—apparently—wanted something different. I am trying today to bridge the gap between those parts of myself.”
With nearly every tweet, Trump gave us a new 10-car pileup from which we couldn’t look away. But in the process of making us look at him, Trump forced many of us to actually look for the first time. By turning us into a nation of rubbernecks, he has pushed us to reckon with why things are crashing in the first place and to examine the faulty infrastructure of our democracy.
What changed? The continued spread of Wifi, but also the mass adoption of laptops — from work, or, in my case, for grad school — and then, of course, the smartphone. Gmail happened. Your email became a repository for bills, for endless advertisements, for eCards and alumni news. Very occasionally, there might be something interesting or novel, but most of actual, valuable interactions had been siphoned off elsewhere: to Facebook, at least at first, and then to text and Instagram.
But the lessons that ought to have followed the election—lessons about the importance of understanding other Americans, the necessity of resisting tribalism, and the centrality of the free exchange of ideas to a democratic society—have not been learned. Instead, a new consensus has emerged in the press, but perhaps especially at this paper: that truth isn’t a process of collective discovery, but an orthodoxy already known to an enlightened few whose job is to inform everyone else.
The great popularizer of psychedelics, Aldous Huxley, gave us a somewhat sobering description of what might be our future in “Brave New World”, and many in the West have been terrified of these substances for quite a while.
Ideology is like body odor: someone else's absolutely reeks if strong enough, but you can't even notice your own. If you remain convinced, in the year 2020 AD, that this or that national outlet remains the megaphone of disinterested chroniclers and selfless truth-seekers, then the BO in question is surely your own. But don’t expect everyone else to put up with the stink.
Stuttering is a neurological disorder that affects roughly 70 million people, about 3 million of whom live in the United States. It has a strong genetic component: Two-thirds of stutterers have a family member who actively stutters or used to. Biden’s uncle on his mother’s side—“Uncle Boo-Boo,” as he was called—stuttered his whole life.
Bringing my toddler to the Donald Judd retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art when it opened last winter forced me to recognize the ways Judd’s objects resemble playground equipment: the diagonal ladder of red-painted wood with its single purple rod, or the red-enameled iron tube that slyly evoked (at least to my toddler-adjacent eyes) an empty kiddie pool. When we visited shortly after the show opened in February, my daughter wanted to climb on all the objects—or up them, or through them, or over them. The objects. I had trained myself not to call them sculptures, because Judd himself hadn’t thought of them that way. And neither did my toddler! She wanted to crawl through the silver aluminum boxes lined with blue Plexiglas, to bang her tiny fists against a green-lacquered galvanized-iron slab. The one thing she didn’t want to do was stay in her stroller.
Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
The core idea of Smart Notes is that purely extracting highlights is generally a waste of time. A highlight speaks to you when you take it, but if you don't capture the idea that the highlight gave you, you're unlikely to remember the importance of that highlight later. Or even if you do feel some spark when revisiting the highlight, it might be a different interpretation.
We weren’t built for multi-tasking, so transitions between projects are very tough. We end up getting lost in procrastination. Even when we manage to transition quickly into our next project, our brain is still thinking about the last project.
If people had to visit a bank to withdraw cash, they might spend less and save more. This is not mere speculation – for instance, research reviewed by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Richard Thaler shows that people will pay more for an item with a credit card than with cash. Arguably, a little friction to slow us down would have enabled both institutions and individuals to make better financial decisions.
Sugar, tobacco, soda, and many more companies have built billion dollar brands on the back of deceptive advertising. The average consumer fell for it for decades, and government agencies in the U.S. were extremely slow to respond to the growing evidence of what was going on. The first research linking tobacco and lung cancer came out in 1912, but in the 1950s you could still advertise tobacco on TV and radio.
After months of working from home, I now realise that there was something incomplete about this account. New experiences are indeed important for planting a rich crop of memories. But, by itself, that is not enough. A new physical space seems to be important if our brains are to pay attention.
After months of working from home, I now realise that there was something incomplete about this account. New experiences are indeed important for planting a rich crop of memories. But, by itself, that is not enough. A new physical space seems to be important if our brains are to pay attention.