William Deresiewicz:

When we look around at the American elite, the people in charge of government, business, academia, and all our other major institutions -- senators, judges, CEOs, college presidents, and so forth -- we find that they come overwhelmingly either from the Ivy League and its peer institutions or from the service academies, especially West Point.

So I began to wonder, as I taught at Yale, what leadership really consists of.

What I saw around me were great kids who had been trained to be world-class hoop jumpers.

Why is it so often that the best people are stuck in the middle and the people who are running things -- the leaders -- are the mediocrities? Because excellence isn't usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering.

We have a crisis of leadership in this country, in every institution. Not just in government.

For too long we have been training leaders who only know how to keep the routine going. Who can answer questions, but don't know how to ask them. Who can fulfill goals, but don't know how to set them. Who think about how to get things done, but not whether they're worth doing in the first place. What we have now are the greatest technocrats the world has ever seen, people who have been trained to be incredibly good at one specific thing, but who have no interest in anything beyond their area of expertise. What we don't have are leaders.

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Paul Graham:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

George Friedman:

That is what happened at the CIA: A culture of process destroyed a culture of excellence.

Richard Sennett:

From an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

Roger Cohen:

Being "always on" is being always off, to something.

Winifred Gallagher:

You can't be happy all the time, but you can pretty much focus all the time. That's about as good as it gets.

Solitude and Leadership

George Packer:

Even before Obama was inaugurated, the incoming Administration had set a political trap for itself.

The Recovery Act was meticulously designed to favor the substantive over the splashy, but an unintended consequence was that its impact became nearly invisible.

Tom Perriello, freshman House Democrat:

The surest way to win Obama over to your view is to tell him it's the hard, unpopular, but correct decision.

Packer:

This pride in responsible process is the closest thing to an Obama ideology.

Paul Begala:

But that's not where voters are right now. Citizens are angry and anxious about the economy, not about whether we're too uncivil or partisan or corrupt in our politics.

An aide:

One of the problems with this Administration is it has tried to have a grownup, sophisticated conversation with the public. [But] the President is having a very eloquent, one-sided conversation. The country doesn't want to have the conversation he wants to have.

Packer:

To be an effective communicator, a President needs a strong world view, a fundamental vision of why things are the way they are and how they ought to be, which can be simplified into a few key ideas and images -- in short, an ideology. For Obama and his advisers, there is no worse pejorative.

One Administration official told me that the Obama team remained staffed with young campaign aides, was tightly controlled by a coterie of political advisers, and was devoted more to the President personally than to any agenda. "Ideas aren't that important to them," the official said of the senior White House staff.

Louis Menand:

Ideas are not "out there" waiting to be discovered, but are tools -- like forks and knives and microchips -- that people devise to cope with the world in which they find themselves. Ideas are produced not by individuals, but by groups of individuals -- ideas are social. Ideas do not develop according to some inner logic of their own, but are entirely dependent, like germs, on their human carriers and the environment. And since ideas are provisional responses to particular and unreproducible circumstances, their survival depends not on their immutability but on their adaptability.

Ideas should never become ideologies -- either justifying the status quo, or dictating some transcendent imperative for renouncing it ... [There is a need for] a kind of skepticism that helps people cope with life in a heterogeneous, industrialized, mass-marketed society, a society in which older human bonds of custom and community seem to have become attenuated, and to have been replaced by more impersonal networks of obligation and authority. But skepticism is also one of the qualities that make societies like that work. It is what permits the continual state of upheaval that capitalism thrives on.

David Kilcullen:

People don't get pushed into rebellion by their ideology. They get pulled in by their social networks.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

k:

You want a return to civilized dialogue and respectful disagreement, but you'll have to forgive my cynical laughter.

Viktor Chernomyrdin:

We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.

Obama's Lost Year

Alain de Botton:

Being good has come to feel dishonest. The nun, the parish priest, the self-sacrificing politician; we have been trained to sense fouler impulses behind their gentle deeds.

An exchange:

Father Brendan Flynn: You haven't the slightest proof of anything!
Sister Aloysius Beauvier: But I have my certainty!

"Leonard Nimoy":

It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth?

The answer ... is No.

Paul Graham:

Don't just not be evil. Be good.

Alain de Botton:

In flight from dogmatism, we stand transfixed by the dangers of moral convictions. In the political arena, there is no faster way to insult opponents than to accuse them of trying to undertake the impossible task of improving the ethical basis of society.

One wonders whether the idea of freedom still always deserves the deference we are prepared to grant it; whether the word might not in truth be a historical anomaly which we should learn to nuance and adapt to our own circumstances. We might ask whether for developed societies, a lack of freedom remains the principal problem of communal life. In the chaos of the liberal free-market, we tend to lack not so much freedom, as the chance to use it well.

Freedom worthy of its illustrious associations should not mean being left alone to destroy ourselves. It should be compatible with being admonished, guided and even on rare occasions restricted -- and so helped to become who we hope to be.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Benjamin Franklin:

It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.

The Limits of Freedom

Lydia Davis:

When you're very young, you're usually happy -- at least you're ready to be. You get older and see things more clearly and there's less to be happy about.

Lisa Moore:

It has always been this way. Finite. But at forty-five you realize it.

Davis:

When you slide by it all, so fast, you think you won't ever have to get bogged down in it again -- the traffic, the neighborhoods, the stores, waiting in lines. We're really speeding now. The ride is smooth. Pretty quiet. Just a little squeaking from some metal part in the car that's jiggling. We're all jiggling a little.

David Foster Wallace:

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us. It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

Davis:

My sister came to visit, one time -- I'm thinking of her bags leaning in a group against my furniture. I was nearly paralyzed, not knowing what to do with her or even without her -- I didn't want to leave her alone in a room. I wasn't used to having company, or at least I wasn't used to having her there. After a while the panicky feeling passed, maybe just because time passed.

Davis:

I look across the road here at how still the cows stand, a lot of the time.

Virginie Tisseau:

We carve life into spaces and name them as if they were animals. As if they were people ... as if we owned them.

This is not my home.

Everyone Is Invited

William Deresiewicz:

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone.

We are nothing to one another but what we choose to become, and we can unbecome it whenever we want.

We seem to be terribly fragile now. A friend fulfills her duty, we suppose, by taking our side -- validating our feelings, supporting our decisions, helping us to feel good about ourselves. We tell white lies, make excuses when a friend does something wrong, do what we can to keep the boat steady.

We have sought to prolong youth indefinitely by holding fast to our youthful friendships, and we have mourned the loss of youth through an unremitting nostalgia for those friendships. One of the most striking things about the way the 20th century understood friendship was the tendency to view it through the filter of memory, as if it could be recognized only after its loss, and as if that loss were inevitable.

James Sloan Allen on Jacques Barzun:

Although he does not make a point of it in Dawn, he surely sees the degradation of friendship in the exaltation of self-indulgence that, among other things, signaled to him Western culture's descending decadence in the twentieth century.

Nicholas A. Christakis & James Fowler:

Each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%.

The Economist:

Financial progress is about learning to deal with strangers in more complex ways.

Bill Gurley:

Customers seem to really like free as a price point. I suspect they will love "less than free."

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Deresiewicz:

Facebook's very premise -- and promise -- is that it makes our friendship circles visible. There they are, my friends, all in the same place. Except, of course, they're not in the same place, or, rather, they're not my friends. They're simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.

Noteworthy in 2006:

Social networking is the 21st century equivalent of collecting baseball cards.

Deresiewicz:

There's something faintly obsce... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Faux Friendship

John Lanchester:

The general public's first sustained look at Richard Fuld came when he testified to Congress in the aftermath of his bank's destruction. His strange and strong affect was immediately apparent: a man who gave the impression of having to fight very hard, at all times, to rein in a powerful feeling of anger. He looked angry on the way in, he looked angry on the way out, he looked angry when he was offering a non-apology for what had happened, and he looked angry when Congressman Henry Waxman was asking him if it was true he had taken $480 million in compensation out of the collapsed company in the years since 2000. To many viewers, Fuld also looked like what Wall Street would look like if it allowed its mask to slip: arrogant, furious at criticism and perceived slights, and so far gone in its own sense of embattled entitlement that it seemed to have lost touch with reality.

Cory Doctorow:

The real reason to wear the mask is to spare others the discomfort of seeing your facial expression ...

Richard Fuld, on short sellers:

I want to reach in, rip out their heart and eat it before they die.

A banker:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

Lanchester:

The official rules of the market are different from what actually happens.

You can tell a man is serious when he uses the most threatening, the most gravitas-laden word in the modern lexicon: 'appropriate'.

Judith Hertog:

I love the word "rectify" when I'm angry. It's so proper and so obscene at the same time!

Lanchester:

For the free-marketers, the idea of endless bail-outs was just so obscene that the temptation to walk the walk of market discipline would somewhere, sometime, have proved too great to resist. Lehman did not create the reality of Too Big to Fail, it merely exposed it to general view. There was a brief moment when the general horror at the new state of affairs seemed likely to lead to change; but as stock markets and liquidity have recovered, that moment is receding, and we seem to be settling back into the status quo ante, with a few cosmetic changes about bonuses. We the paying public can't do anything much except admit defeat and settle back for the next set of bills.

The Shoveller:

We struck down evil with the mighty sword of teamwork and the hammer of not bickering.

Bankocracy

Jeffrey Kaplan:

The machinery offers us an opportunity to work less, an opportunity that as a society we have chosen not to take.

By 2000 the average married couple with children was working almost five hundred hours a year more than in 1979.

We are quite literally working ourselves into a frenzy just so we can consume all that our machines can produce.

The comfort of consumption:

Lisa: Hey, Tubby! Want another Pop Tart, Tubby?

Bart: I'm comfortable with the way I am.

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

Randall Munroe:

What if I want something more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment brought by a parade of ever-fancier toys?

To spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming?

Is there an app for that?

Paul Markillie:

However you do it, you won't beat the computer.

Jeffrey Kaplan:

Citizenship requires a commitment of time and attention, a commitment people cannot make if they are lost to themselves in an ever-accelerating cycle of work and consumption.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Stefan Klein:

We are not stressed because we have no time, but rather, we have no time because we are stressed.

Robert Sapolsky:

The truth is we're lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren't working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it's time to try something new.

Dan Soltzberg:

There's a funny Zen saying: "Don't just do something, sit there." It's a reminder to let yourself take things in as well as output them.

Nora Johnson:

In our unending search for panaceas, we believe that happiness and "success" -- which, loosely translated, means money -- are the things to strive for. People are constantly surprised that, even though they have acquired material things, discontent still gnaws.

David Foster Wallace:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

Andy Carvin:

Several weeks ago, the family of information studies professor Phil Agre reported him missing, saying that they had not heard from him in over a year.

Charlotte P. Lee:

All of us had lost touch with him over the years. How would you know if one of your friends not only lost touch with you, but had also lost touch with almost everyone they know? You wouldn't.

Decius:

I regularly read Agre's Red Rock Eater News Service around the turn of the decade. I've also seen Agre speak at a conference. He was very interesting -- a real heavyweight.

I, too, was a long-time reader of RRE, and had seen him at CFP '99. I remember when he moved from UCSD to UCLA. I own Technology and Privacy, which Agre co-edited with Marc Rotenberg in 1997. On the Friends page, I see familiar names like Michael Froomkin, Keith Dawson, Siva Vaidhyanathan, and Philip Greenspun.

Phil Agre, I hope you are well.

Sterling Hayden:

To be truly challenging, a voyage, like a life, must rest on a firm foundation of financial unrest. Otherwise you are doomed to a routine traverse, the kind known to yachtsmen, who play with their boats at sea -- "cruising", it is called. Voyaging belongs to seamen, and to the wanderers of the world who cannot, or will not, fit in. If you are contemplating a voyage and you have the means, abandon the venture until your fortunes change. Only then will you know what the sea is all about.

Sanford Schwartz:

If Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Jeffrey Young:

The scholar apparently had many professional contacts but few close friends. An expert on privacy, he was always guarded about his own, say those who know him.

Libby Purves:

There is a thrill in switching off the mobile, taking the bus to somewhere without CCTV and paying cash for your tea. You and your innocence can spend an afternoon alone together,... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

The Mysterious Disappearance Of Phil Agre

Randall Munroe:

What if I want something more than the pale facsimile of fulfillment brought by a parade of ever-fancier toys?

To spend my life restlessly producing instead of sedately consuming?

Is there an app for that?

Decius:

Wow, life is boring.

Louis CK:

Maybe we need some time ... because everything is amazing right now, and nobody's happy ...

Carolyn Johnson:

We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries.

iPhone or Droid

David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

This Is Water