When Neither of the Captains Picking Their Teams Wanted You

November 6, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s been another week of bad news.

I got to watch the Phillies lose to the Diamond Backs in the last two games of the National League Championship Series and it had me re-living my own years playing baseball and, more soulfully, about what it had been like being picked (often from the bottom of the barrel) for the team I’d be playing on.

But even before these misty memories, I was thinking about the men (in particular) who watch sports on TV but never played the game they’re watching despite their baseball caps and enthusiasm. They always strike me as having “no real skin in the game” while living vicariously through a bunch of thoroughbreds who don’t even spend enough hours in their home town to pay a wage tax.

The “never played part” seems hopelessly arms-length to me, while the players who make up the Phillies (or any professional sports team for that matter) fly in the face of every tribal instinct that adds up to “local” as far as I’m concerned. Most of the showboats out on the field don’t care enough about this place to actually live and raise their kids here. So watching this week re-connected me to the sensation of bat-meeting-ball and “that impossible catch” way-back-when, but also somewhat less so because those protean skills were being demonstrated by the best out-of-towners-that-money-can-buy who were pretending to be my home team.

Back when I could do a credible run around the bases, baseball to me was so local that I could almost hit the roof of my house with a homer if the wind was right.

We had two sports seasons back then—Spring and Fall—which roughly coincided with baseball and football. There were several, multiple-kid families near-by and one of them (across the street) had the right-sized backyard and the properly-motivated oldest brother to organize a game almost every afternoon in those swollen hours when exiting the school bus melted towards dinner time.

With winning in each captain’s mind, the biggest hurdle before starting a game was getting picked for your team.

It was more or less the same random sample of players each day so our pluses and minuses were pretty well known, but my memory is that the draft picks were always reduced to the kids that each captain either wanted or didn’t want (until the last rounds gave them only the bad choices) which was where I regularly fell. That meant you were literally in a meat parade every afternoon if you were brave enough to show up for the selection process, and some of the easily-wounded who also lived near-by skipped it altogether, got an early start on their homework, or sat around feeling sorry about being a klutz, a spaz or a cry-baby.

It felt Darwinian because it was.

As one commentator with similar memories—who may also have been watching the end of the same baseball season on TV— noted:

_{“you see yourself, maybe for the first time, through the cold eyes of an appraiser. You are no more than a body in the mind of this person, an object with too many deficiencies to catalog: chubby, knock-kneed, weak-armed, timid, poorly coordinated, scared of the ball, slow.”}

Because every game promised camaraderie, excitement and a fast clock towards nightfall, I always showed up (despite the pain of it) even though I hadn’t yet discovered that I might be able to do something to improve my “low-value status,” or even become “an athlete” someday.

We’ll return to this commentator (and his suspicions that the trauma of this experience can cause permanent scarring) in a minute, but somewhat like him I devised my own “work-around” to this miserable situation, having neither an older brother nor a father who was around enough to show me what I needed to do.

Because the neighborhood draft-pickers already knew my inabilities too well for me to ever game them, I practiced turning myself into something more desirable at school during recess, where a similar winnowing out process for the games we played took place nearly every day. Kick-ball, dodge-ball, whatever it was, I’d focus (in advance) on how to make some kind of indelible impression every single time I got the chance: kicking the ball harder and farther than the last dope, throwing the ball hard enough to smack some asshole who needed impressing, looking at how the “first picks” moved around the field compared to me, stumbling around and seemingly out-of-place.

I didn’t realize how much I was teaching myself about playing a sport, being on a team, becoming “the kind of man” that other men wanted on their team. Sure, I was trying out conformity instead of forging my own singular path, but it was also about getting better at something, and maybe something as worthwhile as self-mastery.

While I was re-living these early, tooth-and-claw chapters of my team-playing evolution, I remembered a New Yorker essay that’s never left me about a remarkable coach (who also happened to be a world-famous art curator) and how he turned a gaggle of 9-year old boys from Manhattan into the Metrozoid’s football team. Among many other things, he had the boys break “that mystical game” down into its component parts so that they could “get good at” each part before getting good at the whole. A few years ago, I wrote here about Kirk Varnedoe’s game mechanics and general wizardry in Who We Go-ToTo Learn How To Get There.

Similarly, I worked at each part of my baseball game and at the-putting-it altogether-part and never stopped until I slowly started inching up the pecking order– or at least high enough to know that I didn’t have to be a passive victim of a selection process that was going to repeat itself for decades and through entire careers.

Somebody else is always going to pick or reject me. So what am I going to do about it?

Some rejects spend the rest of their lives fleeing those first rejections in a kind of “safe harbor” they’ve built for themselves.

Instead of rising to positions somewhere beyond their capabilities (a phenomenon once called “The Peter Principle”) because higher-ups kept falling for these individuals’ confident self-promotion, there is also (in my observation) a category of under-achievers who only go as far as their easiest successes because the risk of being rejected when putting yourself out there is simply too painful to ever attempt again.

The aforementioned commentator (Rich Cohen writing in the Wall Street Journal), sees this kind of pain as plausibly originating at team selections in the course of childhood games and grade-school gym classes, those earliest and, for some, indelible brushes with “natural selection.” He also explains why this might be so:

_{“the feeling of randomness, being misunderstood, underestimated and judged for all the wrong reasons. We will never get rid of it because it’s a pure expression of the human condition.”}

To be judged unfairly. Or maybe (because you really do suck as a ball-player) to be judged fairly, and then to feel badly about it because in its harsh light, somebody else’s judgment has revealed something about you and how you’re viewed by others.

Of course, it’s what you do (or don’t do) next that matters. While he never says anything as matter-of-fact as “just try to get better at taking the test you just failed,” Cohen does seem to see the benefit in working through your suffering somehow.

_{“Maybe it’s better to face [a draft, selection process like this one] and learn to overcome it in the same years that you are learning about the Declaration of Independence and human reproduction [that is, while you’re young]. After all, you only learn to disregard the draft—and, better still, turn it to your advantage—once you’ve suffered it.”}

But the lack of specificity of his thinking here—for example, he never exactly says how one can turn this situation into an “advantage”—made me wonder whether Cohen really thought his way through the traumatizing quandary and out the other end, particularly when he wonders out loud:

_{“Were these [meat-market] auctions the source of all my problems, the insecurities and panics, the angers and paranoia, that still haunt me? Were they the cause of the occasional drinking-binge, meditation retreat and need to write?”}

Could all of that possibly be happening to this day if he’d truly found a way to leave his particular meat-markets stronger instead of weaker?

I can only speak to my years being assessed in these ways. It seems to me that the only way to gain some measure of damage-control over selection processes like these is to first off, be clear-eyed about your weaknesses, and then to do whatever you can to mitigate their impact in whatever game you want to be playing in. Then, even if you’re the last one picked—or not picked at all—you’ll have the empowering satisfaction of pushing yourself to the point of improvement.

Of course, this is not just a boys-to-men phenomenon. And, to the extent it is still “a man’s world of business” out there (but one with far more women in it), the girls-to-women cohort needs to deal with these selection processes too—just as endlessly and ad nauseam but also the only way you can deal with them effectively. (It’s one reason I’m a proponent of girls playing team sports: so they too can get familiar with and learn how to triumph over these gruesome dynamics.)

Which was why I was taken aback by Cohen’s citing and then providing his own rationale for a growing opposition to the playground/gym-class draft picking process. Apparently for some time now, the practice is being phased out, and at least part of Cohen seems to approve.

_{“As long ago as 1993, the New York Times headlined a story, ‘New Gym Class: No More Choosing Up Sides.’ Because it traumatizes kids, separates them, leaves a mark on their psyche.”}

(At this point I wondered: Is this what happened to those wimpy, TV sports-team fanboys who shied away from team sports themselves because they couldn’t “live with the rejections that came with it”? Are they seeking a jolt of toughness or even of “masculinity” by watching a team of mercenaries pursue what they never had the fortitude and resilience to pursue on a competitive playing field?

These will have to be questions for another day.)

All I can speak to is my experience once again, and how glad I am that no one was protecting me before I got the chance to prove what I needed to prove to myself.

Because one day, long ago, on the Burn’s family’s Spring-Season baseball field, I actually got picked first by one of the opposing captains. Some other player may have been sick or on vacation that day, providing an opening for the top spot (my memory is a tad hazy about that), but about the moment when I was picked there is nothing but clarity.

One of the captains (maybe Walter) must have remembered my recent hitting, catching and sliding into third-base before he had a chance to recall his earlier impressions of me. And because he wanted to be on the winning side when the game was done, he went for the best player that was available in the first round.

I still remember how proud I felt that day.

I had already felt the empowerment of those prior games, when I’d seen myself improving in all those ways.

Now, when somebody else was finally noticing, I got the first-hand opportunity to view them side-by-side and realized (in some ways, once-and-for-all) that getting your own shit together was the better of the two..

This post was adapted from my October 29, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

The Consolations of Boredom

October 9, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve written about some of the better escapes I’ve been enjoying in posts about “shoe gaze” music and “gourmet cheeseburger” TV, but after having these experiences and telling others about them, I always return to the same place I briefly left behind.

It’s the every-day-to-day where we spend most of our lives—because even when we’re trying to escape it’s routines and foregone conclusions, its mono-tones and tastes, we still carry its most troubling baggage with us. (Have you ever noticed how little you can truly “get away” on vacation?)

So I’ve been wondering for years now about ways to eke more sustenance out of the familiar places we want to escape from while reducing their uneasiness.

The question gained greater-than-normal urgency when we sheltered in place during the pandemic. At the time I argued for establishing everyday rituals to conjure more satisfaction, even meaning, out of a meal or how we get up in the morning (Extra From the Ordinary). I also drew some comfort from seeing how others—like comedian Bo Burnham—not only coped but almost thrived during the isolation because he knew, from being a kind of outsider as a child, “how to turn an uncomfortable situation into comedy” (Why We Gravitate Towards the Work We Do).

Moreover, the bankrupting aspects of everyday life don’t have to be a problem we solve on our own or just with the aid of our immediate families. By expressing our intention to face a common fate together, so-called “intentional communities” that share religious or social convictions can elevate some of the day’s opportunities and relieve some of its burdens by enabling their adherents to approach them together (The Re-Purposing of Ancient Wisdoms).

That time my example was of a kind a modern, Benedictine-Rule-based monasticism. But even then, its high level of commitment to any community made its solution wobble a bit (particularly here in America) where we keep saying we value our freedom and independence far too much to subordinate ourselves to the tyranny of any group. Like Groucho Marx, I feared too many of us would rather be alone than join any club that would be willing to have us.

So if we can’t imagine the long-term community benefits that might come with sacrificing some of our short-term personal preferences, what else might offer a consistent path to less stressful “living and working” on a regular basis? This week—yet another one I found difficult to weather “with my chin up”—I’ve been wondering out loud about the following:

Is it possible to experience a blissful relief within the boring intervals between our occasional escapes?

_{Pictured here (and up top) are different views of an “action sculpture” from 1999’s Wasser[or Water] installation Series by Swiss artist Roman Signer. As a boy, Signer dreamed of navigating white-water rivers and as an adult embarked on kayaking trips in remote mountainous areas until, one day, a companion of his failed to return with him. The kayak has been a recurring element in his work ever since. According to one commentator,“Wasserinstallation creates a vacuum where the beginning and the end of an imaginary journey converge.” You can explore more of Signer’s lifetime of visual artistry here.}

When Robert Signer lost his kayaking companion, he tried to make sense of it, but when he found that he couldn’t he started creating what he called “action sculptures” to help him (along with those viewing them) go inside themselves, into a kind of meditative place, where instead of providing answers to impossible questions “meanings flow into one another effortlessly, without ever taking definite shape,” thereby offering a semblance of peace.

It’s akin to the facility that science-fiction writer and all-around-sage Ursula K. Le Guin was describing when she said once:

_{“To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.”}

—in other words, in times like we’re in today.

Why has another child needlessly been killed in a refugee boat, border war or neglectful home?

Why did the flood sweep away this family or that village?

Why do the venal and wicked always seem to triumph over the honest and virtuous?

Why did my kayaking companion fail to return, but I did?

Then I asked:

How can we learn to sit with questions like these without sadness or remorse, anxiety or recrimination?

Where in our lives and work would finding relief from these gnawing discomforts be possible?

Could it be within our least engaging and most boring activities every day?

Well, that’s exactly what Justin McDaniel wanted me to believe. He’s the Edmund J. and Louise W. Kahn Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania and (to my surprise) he’s been thinking and teaching others about the liberating effects of boredom for more than 20 years. McDaniel talked about the theory and his own experience testing it out on a podcast that I listened to this week.

I wouldn’t have thought of boredom—and in particular doing the kinds of things that we associate with it—as an escape hatch “from stress and darkness,” but for some reason I started playing closer attention as he started to explore the linguistic roots of the word “boring.”

The word’s root is “to bore,” of course, like putting a hole in a container and (by doing so) “rendering it useless” because it can no longer hold what it was intended to hold. In other words, it’s still a vessel, just not one that can also do something else, like hold water. In much the same way, many of our daily activities are similarly without much broader “use,” particularly when we refuse to fill them with some higher agenda, like “being more productive.”

When simply done “for their own sake” with no broader purpose, boring activities can be “incredibly liberating” according to McDaniel, allowing us to find simple relief in the task itself and not in what we’re getting done or producing. As a result, activities that are “boring” and effectively “useless” in this positive sense can trigger “a new beginning, a reset,” as he calls it, from the negativity that regularly weighs us down.

It’s a principle that’s been institutionalized for centuries by Buddhist monks in Southeast Asia where McDaniel studied as a student. Their days (and his) were consumed with tasks, repeated daily (like sweeping the same path or washing the day’s fruits and vegetables) that allowed them to empty their minds of everything beyond the task itself—like “boring a hole in yourself” and letting the extraneous out. Instead of aiming to do more, the point of boring/repetitive activities is actually to do less. In essence, McDaniel and the monks he was learning from found escape in boredom, or the repetitive monotony that characterizes many of our days too–at least when we refuse to compound the monotony with worry.

To somebody like me, who often feels overwhelmed by a 24/7 overload of “bad news” and my inability to absorb (let alone respond to) even a portion of it, hearing about an escape into boredom sounded like Relief. It was then that McDaniel started talking about how our brains “crave nothingness, crave non-productivity.” Stepping back from his remarks, I recalled making a similar point in a post from a couple years back called We Don’t Have to be Productive All the Time. But what McDaniel gestured towards was something that had been more elusive back then, namely, the potential cure that was offered by the non-productive activities that I perform all the time in the course of living and working.

It’s the every-day boredom of tasks at home: the cleaning, dressing, washing, eating, shopping, mowing the lawn, taking the dog out. It’s the daily boredom of tasks at work: research, writing, emailing, calling, meeting, promoting, monitoring information flows. All of these tasks have a repetitive monotony in them. To find their relief, I just need to strip them of their larger goals, objectives, the anxieties that I’m (somehow) not meeting them, and everything else I might be worrying about.

It really is like turning all the charging switches off while leaving the boring one on.

During his podcast appearance, McDaniel gave a beautiful illustration of this healing kind of boredom, and as he recounted it I realized he was talking about something he clearly does himself.

As a chaired professor at a prestigious university, his book-filled office likely hosts many “highly charged” but also “anxiety inducing” activities that could benefit greatly from the relief of a little boredom. For example, the students who visit it may want an “A” in his course, his endorsement for an internship, or a letter of recommendation that will flatter them when the time comes. As a professor, he might be hosting an ambitious colleague seeking tenure, a rival being competitive, or the professional pressure to do more impactful research himself. What all of these purposeful acts have in common, said McDaniel, is “do, do, do.”

But at that point in the podcast, he tried to offer us the same view that he simultaneously has of the books on his office’s bookshelves. “Who cares what’s in them,” he exclaimed (without the reverence I might have expected from a scholar.) What I do sometimes is “just look at them, and all the variety of the colors on their covers.” At that point I realized, that’s exactly what Justin McDaniel can be found doing in his office sometimes, particularly when his brain “craves non-productivity” and all the “do, do, do” that’s around him needs “a reset.” In these intervals, hiis books don’t have the higher purpose of scholarship or greater wisdom but simply the boredom of covers with many colors.

To me, this everyday and always-available peace is not unlike what Roman Signer is also offering in another one of his kayak-related installations.

Good luck with the boredom this week! I’ll see you next Sunday.

This post was adapted from my October 8, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Are We More (or Less) Ignorant Today?

April 26, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I suppose it’s good that I’m surprised by what I don’t know almost as often as I am by what seems to have escaped other people.

“Ignorant” is a kind of general, all-encompassing category when you’re describing somebody. I don’t think I’m ignorant as a rule. It’s more that I lack essential and meaningful information about certain kinds of things, like combustion engines or how to use ChatGPT to write this newsletter.

An area where I’ve taken some pride in my comparative lack of ignorance is in the area of geography. (I first saw those maps in grade school and couldn’t stop looking.) That means that I’m also aware—somewhere near the periphery of my consciousness—that maps often get the scale of countries wrong, and sometimes even exaggerate their size and significance in the scheme of things, to the mapmaker’s advantage.

Still I was surprised to discover the apparent enormity of the African nation of Sudan (much in the news this week for its outbreak of political violence). Not only was I unaware that Sudan is the third largest country in Africa by area, I was equally surprised to learn that Algeria (of all places) covers the most ground on that continent. So I guess this brought some light to another corner that was darkened by my ignorance, at least until “this week’s realizations” get pushed to the side by more pressing information in need of my limited “mind space” and I “forget” all about these countries’ comparative size (“What was that about Sudan and Algeria?”).

As this anecdote hopefully illustrates, “ignorance” comes and goes in certain domains and is best viewed from several different vantage points if you’re interested in discovering its origins and impacts.

In recent annals, few have taken on this task more delightfully and accessibly than Peter Burke in Ignorance: a Global History, a book whose opening is like encountering a familiar yet mysterious world. Despite the considerable weight of being an emeritus professor of cultural history at the University of Cambridge, Burke uses his “senior status” to have curious fun with the voluminous dimensions of our “ignorance,” including (but not limited to) listing 40 different ways in which it manifests itself in the book’s appendix.

This can be a bad thing (just when you thought matters couldn’t get any worse, here’s more varieties of stupidity) but also a good thing (like with Sudan, it can be helpful that ignorance returns in some areas so we have room for more pressing information).

I have to admit. At least at first, I wasn’t drawn to Burke’s “global history” by regular confrontations with my own ignorance. It was because of all those other people’s thoughtlessness.

For example, I’m still boggled by the recent revelations that a 21-year old, at a military reserve unit, could not only have access to materials from the NSA and Joint Chiefs of Staff but also take them home to share with his gamer friends. I understand that “information technology specialists” need some system access to do their jobs, but how can any “journeyman” with this role “play with” top secret information, entirely undetected, for months without our senior, so-called “intelligence” officials knowing about it? After all, we’re talking some high-level and pretty consequential ignorance here. And where the initial reports were about security breaches from earlier this year, the New York Times reported yesterday that they began shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and went undetected for 14 months!

I know I’m not alone in facing news like this everyday and wondering out loud, really, have we fallen this far? (One newspaper columnist observed this week: “The U.S. has become a country where fantastic events occur almost weekly.” And while he ascribed this escalating problem to a lack of accountability on the part of our public servants, it is hard to miss that “the ignorance factor”—willful or otherwise—is also at regular play nearly everywhere we look.)

In addition, on nearly every “cultural issue,” all sides of these divides have no doubt whatsoever that everybody who sees the situation differently is an idiot. So on top of my own shortcomings, I also feel that I’m confronted by other people’s ignorance more often than I used to be—but on either score (mine or theirs), am I really?

Burke’s book puts all kinds of helpful qualifiers around this answer, and I’d like to share a few of them with you so that you might pick up his fascinating book to discover even more of them too.

One of the concerns driving Professor Burke to grapple with human ignorance in the first place was his alarm about all of the knowledge we used to have but have somehow managed to lose in little more than our own lifetimes. As one of his book reviewers quoted and then summarized:

‘Although we are well aware that we know much that earlier generations did not, we are much less conscious of what they knew that we do not,’ [Burke notes]. He is especially troubled by our impressive ignorance of geography [again], history, religion (our own and others’) and the Greek and Roman classics.

These losses, taken one by one, may seem trifling, but together they indicate a loss of multiple perspectives that compound our already limited frames of reference. For example, almost any amount of historical perspective might convince us that our safety, health and economic circumstances are better today than ever, qualifying at least some of the doom-and-gloom that seems to oppress everyone. You think our politics are fraught or our families dysfunctional, read some Sophocles or Aeschylus.

Moreover, how could we ever hope to understand places like the Middle or Far East, with deep ethical and religious traditions that (in material ways) could not be more different from ours, without more knowledge and curiosity about them?

That America could “ride to the rescue” in places like Iraq and Afghanistan (yesterday) or Taiwan (tomorrow) without more knowledge than we have today about the roles that religion and ethical tradition play in such places is the essence of Ancient Greece’s notion of hubris—or as Burke would say, the kind of ignorance where we’re arrogant enough to think that we actually “know better.” Even though we’re aware that these kinds of knowledge exist, through “selection bias” and “delusions of grandeur,” we simply decline to tap into them.

In this regard, he writes scathingly about “the full spectrum ignorance” of the Vietnam War in which civilian policymakers, military commanders, the public, the press, and even the soldiers on the ground could not speak the cultural language of either their allies or enemies. We knew it was different there, could have learned “that language” but chose not to, then adding to our folly in exactly the same ways—this kind of fatal repetition, the definition of insanity—in Iraq and Afghanistan.

According to Professor Burke, the assault of 24/7 “news coverage,” which places more information at our fingertips than ever, leads to an equally confounding kind of ignorance.

If foreign policy and other “experts” indulge in “active ignorance” (or refusal to be informed by the available information), he argues that far too many of the rest of us subscribe to what he calls “lay ignorance,” a kind of “passive resistance to intellectual labor of any kind.” Cosseting ourselves in feedback loops that reinforce “the limited amounts we think we already know” reinforces these essentially lazy impulses. That ignorance is bliss is similar: if I don’t know about it, it won’t bother me.

These particular flavors of ignorance sometimes operate in tandem with healthier, more intentional preferences. As I’ve argued in recent posts, the hour-after-hour assault of horrors, calamities and stupidities can cause us to “turn off the information switch”—or remain in the ignorant dark—because we know that our brains are simply not wired for “bad news” at volumes and magnitudes we are helpless to comprehend let alone respond to. This is how Burke characterizes the phenomenon:

In the past, a major reason for the ignorance of individuals was the fact that too little information was circulating in their society. Some knowledge was what the historian Martin Mulsow calls ‘precarious,’ recorded only in manuscripts and hidden away because the authorities in both church and state rejected it. Today, paradoxically enough, abundance has become a problem known as ‘information overload.’ Individuals experience a ‘deluge’ of information and are often unable to select what they want or need, a condition that is also known as ‘filter failure.’ In consequence, our so-called ‘information age’ enables the spread of ignorance just as much as the spread of knowledge.

The key to countering “lay ignorance,” as well as a lapse into torpor or despair in the face of this onslaught, is for more of us to learn how to filter what we need to live and work today (and will need for living and working tomorrow) so that we remain hopeful enough to tackle whatever’s coming next.

There are many more varieties and permutations of ignorance that Professor Burke invites us to explore. But I want to end today with some more of his observations about geography, along with a couple of my own.

Despite Thomas Friedman’s contention that the world is “flatter” these days and therefore more accessible to us than ever, it is hard to overstate how little most of us know about almost anywhere else. Writes Burke, we have not even begun to crack the surface of humanity’s ignorance in this regard:

It would be fascinating to read a global study of what people in each part of the world did not know about the rest, but such a study would depend on a multitude of monographs that have not yet been written. What follows will therefore concentrate on the ignorance of Europeans concerning the world beyond them, as well as discussing their lack of knowledge about Europe itself. [emphasis mine]

Burke notes, with some amusement, that “Westerners like us” have sometimes even admitted their cluelessness about the substance of the “great global game” they were playing. For example, a century and a half ago, after Europe’s great powers divided up the continent of Africa between them at the 1884-1885 Berlin Conference, Burke reports that the British prime minister (Lord Salisbury) felt obliged to admit that “we have been giving away mountains and lakes and rivers to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains, rivers and lakes were.” In the spirit of Salisbury’s remark, both America and the EU should leave to Ukraine the lions-share of determining “who should get what” at an eventual peace table with Russia.

I had a different perspective on European ignorance this weekend with Emily, who was visiting fresh from a recent trip to see friends in Vienna. At a party there with highly-educated young Austrians, she was struck by their “fixation” on America, their eagerness to interrogate her about America’s divides on guns, abortion, immigration etc., and to essentially charge her with complicity in a catalog of recent horrors. I tried to explain the ignorant place where this kind of rudeness came from (in part because I’ve unexpectedly found myself on the same kind of hot-seat when I’ve met similarly-fixated Brits, French and Germans).

For the duration of their lives, young Europeans have been inundated by what’s often been presented by their own compatriots as the superiority of American art, fashion, entertainment, advertising, money-making, Apple, Google, Tesla, Beyonce, LeBron James, Pee Wee Herman (you get the picture) and they either feel let down by America’s attendant shortcomings or derisive about them given America’s cultural dominance. You (Emily) or me (David) show up as “the American” and get their fixation/disappointment/derision tapes as if we embody all of these contradictory signals and are somehow responsible for the worst of them. In other words, these reactive Europeans are ignorant to turn any individual into a scapegoat for their home country’s sins just like it would be ignorant for either of us to impute (say) responsibility to these young Austrians for their grandparents’ Nazi encouragements.

But American travelers bring with them a kind of ignorance too, I told her. Americans are often startled by perceptions of them in Europe (and elsewhere) because we fail to appreciate just how dominant our culture has been and the resentments (along with occasional admiration) it engenders. We don’t know how we appear to strangers on the world’s stage, at least in part because we know so little about “the rest of the world” and our home country’s impact (for better and worse) upon it.

The best book review I read about Ignorance: A Global History was in the Washington Post because that review captured “how selective” our ignorance almost always tends to be—an aspect of this world-shaping phenomenon that Professor Burke returns to over and over again. The reviewer reaches his final, 5-star judgment by quoting Burke on how, by necessity, every society “focuses attention on a few features of reality at the expense of others,” and that the losers in this selection process are consigned to the dustbin of ignorance. But in illustrating this point, this reviewer gets personal, as if his own father had lived in a different country:

My father could identify edible mushrooms, point out the constellations, name all the varieties of trees in the woods and recognize the tracks of a dozen animals.

[Not so long ago] people, quite ordinary people, knew such things. No more. For many of us in the 21st century, the natural world mainly consists of pretty bushes along a hiking path. What matters to us instead is knowing how to use a computer and a cellphone. After all, we no longer need to learn anything ourselves when we have ‘influencers’ to guide us, chatbots to do our writing and every kind of information just a keystroke away. Somehow, though, I can’t help but wonder if the trade-off has been altogether worth it.

However much we think that we know, we can swallow a much-needed dose of modesty by never losing sight of all the ways that we choose to remain ignorant.

This post was adapted from my April 23, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.

Patagonia’s Rock Climber

February 19, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

Some food for thought (if you find that you’re hungry for it today) from Yvon Chouinard.

(He pronounces his name yuh-vaan shwee-naard if you’re wondering.)

Throughout, I’ll just call him Yvon, because he seems to invite that kind of familiarity with his plain-speaking forth-rightness.

I’m going to be excerpting some quotes from a recent interview for you to chew on, while adding a few of the associations I made from his storytelling, although I encourage you to listen to what he has to say because you’ll know what I mean about “his plain-speaking and forthrightness” the moment you hear the sound of his voice.

When you see Yvon’s name you might expect French Academy, but when you hear him introducing himself it’s pure Lewiston Maine, which is where he was born from stock that likely wandered down from somewhere around Quebec. That’s why, maybe confounding our expectations, he comes across as a salt-of-the-earth American.

So if you haven’t heard of him or recognize him from his picture, who is this guy anyway?

Yvon’s interview, called “Giving It All Away,” was recorded just before Thanksgiving and I heard it just before I edited and sent out last Sunday’s post. The interview title speaks to the fact that he gave away the entirety of his billion-dollar company earlier this year in an unprecedented act of philanthropy. But perhaps even better, Yvon has been “giving it all away” for most of his life, spending himself in ways that I can only imagine.

So I guess if there’s nutrition to be found in his words, it comes from the arc of his remarkably fertile life and thinking about how we’ve lived and continue to live while he tells us about who he is and what he’s been doing.

Yvon Chouinard is the founder of outdoor clothing and sporting goods company Patagonia. In many people’s minds, the company is almost synonymous with sustainable manufacturing practices and products, protecting wild places (most notably in Patagonia itself, which comprises the southernmost tip of Argentina and Chile), and creating a kind of “hive mind” brand of enlightenment in the company’s workspaces.

Moreover, while striving “to do good,” Patagonia has also consistently ticked off that other big box when it comes to American success stories, namely profitability. Yvon’s company (until recently, solely owned by him, his wife and two kids) will bring in an estimated $1.5 billion in revenues in 2022.

So what does he have to say for himself?

_{Some outdoorsmen and women that Patagonia corralled into wearing clothing from its “shell” line of sportswear in a recent mail-order catalog. On top of everything else, it’s about looking good and having fun while pushing one’s mental and physical limits.}

The interview begins with Yvon’s “changed my life” story. This 81-year-old tells us that he was a “serial climber” early-on, which his poor parents interpreted as something that was pretty grounded until they were watching a local news program in California, where they lived at the time, and the news clip shows (in his words):

a helicopter coming by the North American wall of El Capitan [in Yosemite National Park]. And then it zooms in on these guys hanging from hammocks underneath this big overhang 2000 feet up. And one of ’em is their son. They always thought when I said I was going climbing that I was [just] going hiking.

So boy were they surprised, but he’d already been “a serial climber” for years (which shows, among other things, how little parents know about what their kids are doing) explaining: “I’d spent two years just climbing cracks. I’d spent five years just climbing big walls, like in Yosemite. I’d spent years and years learning ice climbing.” And eventually all that verticality and danger took him to the Himalayas, to a fateful climb that ended in an avalanche, to him somehow surviving while others in his company did not, and to how he felt about the bookends of his existence from that point forward.

[I]t kind of changed my life. I’ve had a lot of close calls, near death experiences, but always afterwards you go around sniffing the flowers and being really happy to be alive and everything…but after that climb, all of us were deeply depressed for several months afterwards, and I’ve read stories about people that have kind of died and come back and you resist coming back. And in fact, it’s taught me that there’s nothing to fear about death itself. It’s a pretty pleasant feeling [when you find yourself face to face with it].

I heard it as a kind of relief, a comfort, once you glimpse that just as much as living, an ending “without fear “also belongs to you.

For the sake of his parents and his own growing family, Yvon cut back on extreme climbs after that, but the experience allowed him to settle into his life in a whole different way. “[Y]ou know, when my time comes, I’m gonna go out pretty peacefully.”

At first, I wondered how he could be so sure about that.

I’d already been reading a new book by Susan Cain, who is most famous for her TED talk and a previous book about introverts. She calls this new one “Bittersweet: How Sorrow and Longing Make Us Whole.” It reminded me of the lengths our culture goes to minimize or hide sorrow, suffering and death even though all of them are universal experiences. So I could understand that when he was taken to a cliff edge by an avalanche at the top of the world, Yvon came to a kind of acceptance that his end was now as much a part of his journey as his moving-on from there, that there was a kind of peace that was waiting for him beyond the physical experience, and that there was a tremendous sense of relief in that deep-seated knowledge.

At this point in the interview, I wondered where I’d found that kind of confidence in the limits of my playing field.

I also marveled at how Yvon described finding his career path. It’s been a preoccupation of mine in several posts (for example, Why We Gravitate Towards the Work That We Do) as well as a theme in my book writing.

I never wanted to be a businessman. I was a craftsman and I was a climber. And I just, every time I’d go into the mountains, I’d have ideas on how to make the gear better. The gear was pretty crude in those days. It was all made in Europe. So I just got myself a forge and an anvil and a book on blacksmithing, and I taught myself how to blacksmith. And that led to making these pitons and eventually ice axes. And crampons and all the gear for mountain climbing and never did it thinking that it was a business. It was at first it was just making the stuff for myself and friends and then friends of friends. And pretty soon I’m making two of these pitons an hour and selling ’em for a dollar and a half each. Well, not too, not too profitable, right? I kind of backdoored becoming a businessman.

I’m sure this sounds more home-spun than it actually was, but meeting his own needs and the needs of his outdoorsy friends was clearly the initial spark. It prompted me to replay my own journey from Perry Mason to courtroom, grade-school Show & Tells to writing in public. (For all of these reasons, if you have a few moments to spare after you finish here, I’d love to hear about the sparks that brought you to the work that you ended up doing too.)

When Patagonia (the company) got to the deliberation phase of its business, it had already begun to lose its way. Demand was growing faster than the company’s capacity to meet it, so Yvon had an extended conversation with his key collaborators about what was most important to them in moving the company to the next level. Those priorities grounded a kind of business philosophy that became Yvon’s 2005 memoir, “Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman.”

I mean the name of my book is ‘Let My People Go Surfing’ cuz we have a policy. If your child is sick, go home, take care of ’em, uh, no matter what. I don’t care when you work, as long as the job gets done and if the surf comes up, drop everything, go surfing. None of us liked authority. We really disliked authority and none of us wanted to tell other people what to do. So our management system is kind of like an ant colony. You know, an ant colony doesn’t have any bosses. The queen just lays there and lays eggs. There’s no boss in an ant colony but every single ant knows what his job is and gets it done. And they communicate by touching feelers, and that’s about it.

I’d call what he describes here the hive-mind of an enterprise. Unfortunately, I’ve only experienced it once, and never in “the regular course” of any business that I’ve been involved with. The notable exception was a school.

Several years ago I was a teacher in a school for autistic kids, some with significant challenges and all with unbelievable amounts of energy. Only in the inspired chaos of this place, with a teacher-to-kid ratio that approached 1-to-1, did I experience anything like Yvon’s collective working spirit, manifested in the “touching feelers” of my co-workers.

The immediacy and aliveness of every working minute at Benhaven School in New Haven reminded me (years later) of how Rebecca Solnit’s described lower Manhattan’s citizen rescuers coming together after 9/11 and NOLA’s citzen rescuers after Hurricane Katrina, exploits that she chronicles in “Paradise Built in Hell: the Extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster.” As I conjured hive-minds like these, and apparently at Patagonia too, I couldn’t help thinking about all of the other places where I’ve worked over the years and how far they’d fallen short of the workers-paradise (at least to me) that Yvon and some remarkable others have helped to create.

Sustainability is another ground-breaking concept for him. It’s about how you make something, but also (his company believes) what you do as a business once one of your products begin to wear out or your customers just get tired of having them around any longer.

For instance, you show your customers how to repair the zipper on, say, your “Reversible Shelled Microdini jacket” or replace the buttons when they‘ve fallen off your “Organic Cotton Mid-Weight Fjord Flannel Shirt.” And when a Patagonia product’s useful life has ended for you, Patagonia even takes it back to try and refurbish it so somebody else can get a second life out of it too, or recycle it into something else if that’s not possible. Because if you pay a lot for quality from a company like this—instead of for one- or two-season throw-away clothes—shouldn’t that item have serial lives too?

Here’s Yvon again, about the lifecycles that Patagonia is enabling for its products:

[Some years ago] we did an ad in the New York Times on Black Friday that said, Don’t buy this jacket, and there’s this photo of this jacket and it said, Don’t buy this jacket without thinking twice. Do you really need it? Are you just bored? Uh, and if so, you know, don’t…[So] If they [our customers], if they made a commitment to think twice about purchasing, we were gonna back it up with our own commitment, which was guaranteeing that jacket for life, repairing it when it needed repair. Helping people find another owner for that jacket. And finally, when it’s absolutely shredded and can’t be used at all, we’ll recycle it into more clothing. And so to do that, we had to build the largest garment repair facility in North America. And we have a van going around to colleges and stuff, showing people how to repair clothes and repairing people’s clothing. We produced a bunch of videos on how to sew a button on so people can repair their own stuff. Cause that’s the best thing you can do is to buy the very best thing you can and try to keep it going as long as possible. And so we’re helping people do that.

When I heard him tell this story I was sorry that I’d recently given my first Patagonia, a full-length rain and wind jacket in a beautiful kind of orange (it had been a really big purchase for me at the time) to a church clothing drive instead of returning it to the company for renewal and transition. Because a circular economy like this is a kind of mind-set, a discipline that can be applied to almost everything if it becomes more engrained in our lives “as consumers”–but I’d never even considered what he’s offering here.

Yvon talks about many other things in this interview (and in his other interviews and writings and speeches over the years) and you might find it edifying to dive into more of his wit & wisdom as a result. But I want to leave you with one of my favorites from last Sunday’s gabfest, where he somehow manages to combine his first career with his current one—which involves lots of interactions with companies that see things differently and governments that almost always do.

How do you convince these people to change the unsustainable and unhealthy ways that they’re doing things when you’re a powerful company like Patagonia or a powerful individual like its founder?

I’ll tell you a little story about mountain guiding. There’s two types of mountain guiding. One is democratic where you, you’re guiding somebody up the Grand Teton, which is a pretty safe mountain. And the client starts freaking out. So you pull out your harmonica and you play your harmonica a little bit. You calm ’em down and you kind of, you know, take your time and, and you get up it, a very effective way to guide on a non-difficult mountain. Let’s say you’re guiding on the Matterhorn and you know, you’re 60 years old, and the guide and you got a family. And you know, you remember the client is always out to kill you. A mountain like that, it’s rotten rock. It’s thunderstorms every afternoon. And the client freaks out. The guide screams at him, pounds on ’em, calls them names, tugs the rope and gets ’em to the top. So what happens is the client is more afraid of the guide than the mountain. And that’s basically how we have to treat our government [and many of our corporations].

I don’t know about you, but I’m a sucker for truth-telling when it’s wrapped up in a musical story like this.

So I hope you’ve enjoyed reading some of his words, that you’ll have a chance to listen to Yvon Chouinard saying them too (because the atmospherics he weaves around them simply can’t be duplicated on the page), and that he’s given you some food for thought to take into the days ahead.

_{Yvon Chouinard is 81 today, which puts him in his mid-70s when this picture was taken in March 2016, “on a classic local route somewhere out West during a new hire orientation.”}

Thanks for reading. Have good week. Signing off today as day-vid gr-icing (since I’m told that some people also find my name unpronounceable).

This post was adapted from my December 4, 2022 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right

Reading Last Year and This Year

January 12, 2023 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

It’s been a busy week for me, and not in a good way.

It was probably RSV that took down the first three days of it in a torrent of congestion and runny nose, until I felt my old self begin to return on Thursday, only to discover while heading out for necessities, that the rapid thaw had burst two pipes in our carriage house (which holds both car and office) so I ended up spending all of my relief mopping, moving, drying and hoping that my plumber would come to the rescue.

By Friday I was tired, back to recovering and not yet relieved again, but Andrew the unflappable pipe fixer had come and gone and it now appears that I’ll finally be getting rid of the old computer equipment that’s been gathering out there because I never got around to removing “the sensitive bits” before it’s composting until now.

If all of this has to happen, it might as well be in this dangling participle of a week, lodged between a culmination of sorts (on Christmas) and a new beginning (today, on New Years). While I was casting about for a headline image this morning, it seemed to me that the one above is either about capturing the last or the first light, and therefore, just that kind of inbetweeness. (Photographer Sasha Elage gets my thanks for it.)

In a similar vein, this is also a time of year for looking back on some of its high points and maybe anticipating some new ones. I covered some of the songs that held my ear in 2022 last week, and today it’s a short dash through things I’ve read that have left their mark on me this year and might do the same for you.

However, before turning to my short list of books, essays and stories, a observation about the current state of our literacy (more generally) from, of all people, Henry Kissinger. Nixon’s Secretary of State is 100 years old now and looking a bit like Stephen Hawking while he retreats into his business suit at gatherings, but God-Bless-Him the man is still raising concerns and speaking out about them given his undiminished sense of public duty. It’s remarkable, but also invaluable—especially because so few of our “public figures” work up the gumption to do so today.

_{Henry Kissinger as the Ghost of Christmas Past, Present and Future.}

Above everything, Kissinger is concerned that our culture is losing the academic-and-life-long commitments to “deep literacy” that its road warriors seemed to have earlier in his career. That is: To know what our greatest minds are thinking about, to be able to talk about those things too, and most importantly, to discern the most telling insights in this cultural conversation and apply them to how we live and work, govern ourselves and interact with strangers. He believes that there used to be more public-spirited individuals with a deep understanding of history, world affairs and human interaction (from literature, among other sources) who were prepared to lead their communities or countries.

Kissinger fears we are losing the farm teams and even the starting benches of leadership that our civilization once depended on because the men and women who are drawn to public service no longer bring “the deep literacy” that our colleges and universities once fostered. There are lots of reasons for this of course, including an emphasis on “vocational” education (or only-study-now-what-you-can-get-paid-to-do-later) and on the STEM disciplines (given remarkable advances in science and technology and the high-paying jobs that accompany them).

But Kissinger cites two other culprits, both related to the growing dominance of electronic communication today. Increasingly, “we gain what we know” from pictures or tweets instead of from reading about something (anythng) in any greater depth. A constant barrage of brief impressions has caused us to have shorter attention spans and made us less likely to take any kind of dive (let alone a deep one) into complicated subject matter. Kissinger fears that our leaders and “the educated strata” in our societies that once produced their brain trusts are becoming increasingly “less literate,” with consequences that we can unfortunately see all around us.

It’s a point that social psychologist Jonathan Haidt also made this year in an Atlantic article called “Why the Past Ten Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid.” Anticipating Kissinger’s alarm, this article was already “one of the year’s best reads” and the subject of my Divided We Fall post six months ago. Haidt argues that social media, and its appeal to emotion instead of reason, has increased our civic illiteracy, making it harder to safeguard the institutions and commitments we profess to hold in common. While, like many of you, I was briefly heartened by the U.S. mid-term elections in November, the coming year is likely to remind those of us in the US (with our new Congress) and elsewhere (given widening conflicts and fresh horrors) just how fleeting that “good news” really was.

Today’s undermining of literacy is not somebody else’s problem. I know only too well how much “easier” it is for me to scroll through photo or video-sharing sites or watch “what Netflix recommends for me next” than to commit to a lengthy essay or a new book. So I sense the cognitive degrading in and around me too, a lassitude that the pandemic and other travails has only amplified, and I actively try to vote against it—although not as much as I’d like.

So with that somewhat sobering preface, allow me to share my other favorite “reads” of the year and hopefully an occasion or two for you to cast your own votes for “deeper literacy” over easier diversions.

_{(photo by Leo Berne)}

2 MORE ESSAYS AND ONE STORY

– Eula Biss, “The Theft of the Commons,” in The New Yorker, June 8, 2022. I have one of you to thank for this one (“Happy New Year, Tedd!”) This essay is about private property versus the land as well as the other privileges and freedoms that we still hold “in common.” It turns on the author’s visit to the farming community of Lawton in rural England where the common resources that everyone depends on have somehow resisted the private interests that keep wanting to gobble them up.

Laxton has a tight center where the farmers all live within walking distance of the pub. This makes it distinct from all the rural places I have known. Standing at the center of the village, I had the feeling that I was standing inside an idea, an idea about how to live in relationships of necessity with other people. I felt at home in the idea, and I puzzled over this for a moment, feeling held close by the tight center of a village where I had never been, wondering if I was making myself at home in my own imagination.

It’s imagination that we need now in places like the unclaimed oceans and polar regions, the Amazon and Congo River basins, the rainforests and coral reefs, and where the water flows down the Colorado and towards an American desert that tries to sustain more people than it ever expected.

– Lucas Mann, “An Essay About Watching Brad Pitt Eat That is Really About My Own Shit,” at Hobartpulp.com, August 16, 2022. From its title, you might be wondering what this could possibly have to do with “making the world a better place” at the humanities end of the pool. Well I wouldn’t have found out either if I hadn’t already been thinking about Brad Pitt’s screen persona and the impact that seeing somebody like him over and over might have on an even mildly susceptible person.

Pitt has never chosen to not be Brad Pitt in the image on-screen. Even as he’s taken strange, anti-careerist roles, earned that character-actor-trapped-in-a-leading-man cliché, each performance comes attached to the promise of Brad Pitt’s body. He may have done a wacky Irish Traveler accent in Snatch, but he was still a boxer, and there was a slow-motion break in the movie’s frantic comedy to watch him pull off his shirt. It’s almost as if he’s set himself a lifelong artistic challenge — I can believably be anybody, even when I look like this. Or there’s that lingering, glorious possibility that he hasn’t considered his body enough to wonder whether it’s a gift or a hindrance. Or maybe it’s a moral decision, honoring what has always been the money-maker, refusing to take on that greatest and easiest bit of artifice, the physical kind, even in a profession all about playing pretend.

By getting an imprint like this into the right author’s head, great literature (and this comes close) can change the way that you see the world. Mann confronts the shame of his personal cravings around food, his tendency to be overweight, and his desire that his new daughter be free of these burdens in the shadow of Pitt’s treating food like another accessory to his preternatural good looks. Above even Mann’s powers of observation and serious writing chops, this autobiographical tour-de-force is about how “what we see” might never stop affecting “who we are” once “it gets under our skin.”

“Watching Brad Pitt Eat” is another cautionary note in an era that’s full to the gills with damaging, media-driven impressions, and not just the ones that are made on vulnerable, 13-year-old girls (although in my post next week, called Watching in 2022, one of my favorites was a advertisement for Dove soap that showed “the nearly parental effect” that Instagram or TikTok can have when it’s urging these same 13-year olds to strive for greater beauty.)

– Alyssa Harad, “To Live in the Ending,” in Kenyon Review, July-August, 2022.

When you live in a time that can feel almost apocalyptic you deeply appreciate new ways to frame “the imminent threats” you’re constantly facing. In gorgeous “braids” of storytelling, Harad manages to do just this by weaving several endings in her own life with the “end times” stories that echo around her in order to make more manageable sense out of the harrowing times in which we live. For example, the voice of an environmentalist that she’s followed:

offers a way to think about the end of the world not as a singular explosive event—something true only from the long view of geological time—but as a Chinese box or a matryoshka doll. In a time of climate emergency we live in a series of nested crises. When we emerge from one, the larger one is always there waiting for us. And inside the big troubles—the global rise of fascism, a kleptocratic presidency, white supremacist police violence, concentration camps on our southern border, a pandemic—the smaller crises of ordinary human life continue—a broken heart, a sick child, the rent falling due—all of it framed, structured, intensified, and continually interrupted by the ongoing alarm of the climate crisis.

So how does nesting these crises cushion their blows? Because doing so allows us to acknowledge the occasional victories that occur within them and, when that happens, to feel their respites (if only briefly).

The rolling flow of Harad’s narrative allows us to experience what she means by this: the epiphany of blue flowers in a dying lakebed or of the heroism of a public defender who works “within but against a violent system, quietly, in an obscurity that makes the work possible, trading purity for efficacy, jimmying open the places where the edges don’t quite come together, to make room for a few more people to breathe.”

_{Shadow & light packets.}

BOOKS

– I have piles of unread books, but not a finished one that’s worth sharing since I extolled the virtues of a slim volume about effective writing and a short memoir by “one of our great innovators in modern autobiographical writing” over the summer. In a post called The Relaxing Curiosity That Is Also August, I have more to say about Verlyn Klinkenborg’s “Several Short Sentences About Writing” and Margot Jefferson’s “Constructing a Nervous System: a Memoir.” (Both of them are still sending me reminders.) You’ll find quotes, links to reviews and other impressions that I had about them in that post.

– I follow the second half of the year-in-books quite closely, in particular the National Book Award finalists and longlist for American writers, the same winnowing down for the Booker Prize given to a book that’s written in English this year, and the “notable” and “best” books according to book editors at the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and other literary arbiters. I do it because I want to know what I should be reading next.

One compilation of note came via a daily post from the publishing industry—a kind of compilation of compilations for the year’s fiction and non-fiction books and “the 10 Very Best Books for 2022 Overall” when the categories are combined. This is how Publisher’s Lunch (yes, it conveniently drops at lunchtime everyday) describes the operation of this remarkable annual service:

Below as usual are our top 10s for the year — based on 61 ‘votes’ from a variety of highly selective lists from critics and reviewers, award nominees, bookseller and librarian picks, book club selections and more.

(“And more!”) You see, they’re aiming to measure quality here, not the quantity of books sold. So in the coming year, if you’re looking for a book to read that comes highly recommended by (apparently) all the right people, their “10 Very Best Books for 2022 Overall” are as follows:

_{1. Trust, Hernan Diaz
2. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin
3. Our Missing Hearts, Celeste Ng
4. If I Survive You, Jonathan Escoffery
An Immense World, Ed Yong
6. The Rabbit Hutch, Tess Gunty
I’m Glad My Mom Died, Jennette McCurdy
8. Babel, R.F. Kuang
Constructing a Nervous System, Margo Jefferson
Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver
All This Could Be Different, Sarah Thankam Mathews.}

(I am at a loss as to why there are 11 books on their top 10 list. It must be the “ties” at #8 that are responsible.)

– And last but hardly least, here are the 3 books that I’m currently standing-in-line to take out of my local library. One I was after long before I saw the list above (Ed Yong’s “Immense World” about the infinite varieties of living experience that are flourishing around us but that we know so little about).

A second is also on the list, but I only got interested in it after the buzz from delighted readers I trust gradually became so deafening that I felt like I’d be missing out otherwise (Gabrielle Zevin’s “Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” about the origin story of video games and how friendships can sometimes be “as complicated, perplexing and rewarding as a great love story.”)

Finally, a book that came to my attention outside of any list (Claire Keegan’s “Foster,” set in rural Ireland and full of the rich details of daily life, but composed with an artfulness that promises to linger and gnaw. What I know of the plot—about a temporarily-loved girl—has shown me more than enough about why this just might be true.)

If these three live up to their evangelists, I may be writing to you about them here in coming months too.

In the meantime, to you and your loved ones, I wish you all the best in the coming year. Keep in touch and may the wind be at our backs in the months ahead.

This post was adapted from my January 1, 2023 newsletter. Newsletters are delivered to subscribers’ in-boxes every Sunday morning, and sometimes I post the content from one of them here. You can subscribe (and not miss any of them) by leaving your email address in the column to the right.