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.

The Surprising Effects of Saying the Right Words Out Loud

November 16, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

A lot of people seem depressed to me. It’s particularly disheartening when their rage against the machine casts a pall over the smiles and chat that they’re aiming in my direction.

We all process life’s traumas differently of course, but many of us do so by burying them. it’s just not far enough down to hold our game faces in front of anyone who’s paying attention.

We get depressed for some of the same reasons that we suffer from PTSD.

During America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan—and given the unrepaired damage that lingered from Vietnam 30-plus years before—there was a growing acknowledgement of PTSD (or post-traumatic stress disorder) and, more importantly, how to enable soldiers who had internalized the traumas of these battlefields to reach a kind of armistice with them so they could begin to heal as they made their transitions home.

Two books have changed my thinking about this healing process, and both suggest paths for recovering from traumas that have been branded on our psyches by war or by simply growing up in damaged families and communities. The first, about warriors struggling to find their ways back from war (and so much more), is “The Evil Hours: A Biography of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder” (2015) by David Morris. The second, about recovering from traumatic experiences more generally, is called “The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind and Body in the Healing of Trauma” (2016) by Besel van der Kolk. (It’s telling, I think, that Van der Kolk’s important book is still a top-10, best-selling non-fiction title six years after it was first published.)

Both books are beautifully written and conceived, and both authors observe how pre-modern societies (unlike our own) enabled trauma survivors to recover through community-sponsored, participatory events. For instance, Morris talks at length about the role that performances of Greek tragedies (and the on-stage choruses that echoed audience reactions) had in finally bringing their returning soldiers back into their communities. Van der Kolk devotes some of his most powerful chapters to programs that teach victims how to “perform” their ways through the kinds of traumatic events that have been holding them hostage.

So I found a recent podcast about the healing that can come from reciting carefully-chosen speeches from Shakespeare’s plays to be yet another way to bring “what’s been damaged” out into the open—to give it both a deep breath and a plaintive voice—in an effort to weaken trauma’s hold on how we are and appear to our families and neighbors.

I wondered whether speaking famous lines from a make-shift stage could actually help those who are shadowed by trauma to heal the wounds that still haunt them and are impossible to hide.

Since I spend a lot of time writing, it’s hard to avoid “the slap to the side of my head” that at exactly the same time I’m grinding out another paragraph, fewer and fewer readers are actually reading anything more than the wordstreams that keep flashing across the surfaces of their phones. Maybe a podcast story like this one “about the healing power of literature” can help to reverse the TikTok-ing of our attention spans so that there will be somebody left with the bandwidth to read any book (and mine in particular) someday.

Of course that reversal will happen, I say to myself. It has to.

But whether it’s a book to read or a speech to recite, whenever advice is involved it also depends on “the quality of the uplift” that follows your words on the page or the ones that you’re delivering to an audience.

– So could learning to deliver, say, Gloucester’s speech in Shakespeare’s Richard III (the one that begins: “This is the winter of our discontent”), really help to counteract the conflict and darkness–and more importantly, the buried anger about that conflict and darkness–more effectively than either the “Can’t-you-just-get-over-it” advice or the anti-depressants that our culture keeps prescribing?

– Is Shakespeare’s poetry really that much fuller and more resonant with what we’ve actually been feeling and living than the clinical jargon that gestures “in the direction of” but fails to capture the full dimensions of our discontents?

– Is there also something about the iambic pentameter of Shakespeare’s lines that can fall into sync with our natural body rhythms, thereby slowing us down and calming us in spite of everything that was destabilizing us before?

A recent episode of The Pulse, “a podcast with stories at the heart of health, science, and innovation,” was posing all of these questions and making me wonder about the recognitions that the right words might invite and the healing power of their bodily cadences when we turn them into personal testimony in front of an audience.

– Could transforming Gloucester’s speech or Lady Macbeth’s “Out, Damned Spot” monologue into ones own witnessing about trauma actually relieve some of the pain that’s under the surface but still leaching out?

– Could aspects of “a cure like this” be bottled and taken home for medicinal purposes, effectively turning our living rooms into mini-Globe theaters, instead of venting our inner demons whenever we scream at customer service representatives over the phone, assault flight attendants while we’re traveling, threaten poll workers when it’s time to vote, or lash out at our spouses?

– Could “magical words, passionately spoken” offer any kind of pressure-relief valve for what’s plainly ailing so many of us?

At least until now, the program that was profiled onThe Pulse has been limited to trauma survivors-–both war veterans and others—who voluntarily come together for a kind of group therapy to (1) chronicle their particular injuries; (2) identify the Shakespearean passages that best reflect those injuries; (3) get some distance from the damage that’s been done by enlisting another group member for a dress rehearsal of those theatrical lines; and (4) learn how to sync breathing with delivery to present what amounts to “their own testimony about personal traumas” in front of the group.

The amount of healing that occurs in those who follow this arc was measured and found to be substantial.

According to Stephan Wolfert, the program’s founder, the support of similar group members is essential for trauma-sufferers to begin to heal. As comfort levels grow, participants create an inventory of their past injuries, including insomnia, occasions for shame and guilt, or when they’ve felt betrayed and abandoned. From reading excerpts of Shakespeare’s plays, they notice that some of his characters seem to be tortured by the same experiences. According to an article about Wolfert: participants who had felt “stupid” reading these plays in high school “entered the world of Shakespeare’s verse” as they began to feel a kinship between themselves and these characters.

An early challenge involved matching participant traumas with monologues in particular plays. Wolfert worked with Alisha Ali, who was part of a research team in applied psychology at NYU, to create an algorithm that could help with those matches. For example, someone with recurrent nightmares would be given the lines of a character with tormented sleep. With a “good-fitting” speech in hand, participants then hand off their “personal trauma monologues” to a trusted group member to rehearse and perform, gaining from it:

an ‘aesthetic distance’ from his or her own trauma, and from that distance, being able to feel empathy toward the [other] veteran who is performing [your] monologue. For veterans who are unable to forgive themselves for some wartime trauma, such as the death of a fellow soldier, this distance can provide the veteran with a new self-awareness and a path to self-forgiveness.

Because performing Shakespeare is a physical act that requires training, members of the group then turn to improving breath control for delivering lines that are written in iambic pentameter and, as such, have their own unique stops, starts and rhythms. Through his work with Ali, Wolfert began to notice how closely “the beat” in Shakespeare’s verse echoes the rhythms of the human heart, and how encouraging performers to breathe around each line can reduce “heart rate variability”—a regulator of stress in PTSD sufferers—as well as deepening their appreciation of what they’ve been feeling while reciting them.

In the podcast, one group participant described how this breath-work around Shakespeare’s lines worked for him. By alternating each line with a breath, he noticed that:

it softens, just that breathing between each line, it softens the reading so that the lines almost melt into your breath, ‘cause you’re inhaling and exhaling while you read, almost like you’re not reading it but breathing it, and that’s when the meaning of the words comes in.

At first, the rush of “his sense of aloneness from all directions” overwhelmed him to such a degree that he broke down. These kinds of recognitions and releases of pent-up emotions continued for all participants as they delivered their final testimonies using Shakespeare’s words.

All the while, Ali used scientific measures to document health improvements in the group’s participants. She noticed how “immersion” in the verse and “feeling” its rhymes and rhythms through intermittent breathing counteracts the kind of “shallow breathing” that is common when someone is in a near-constant state of fight and flight, which many PTSD sufferers are. At the same time, she noticed how a new sense of calm enabled participants to hold their traumas in a somewhat safer place.

Ali also noted how this kind of play-acting produces “significant increases in self-efficacy,” with participants gaining a greater belief in their own abilities and competencies by owning and performing their experiences and, therefore, building confidence that they can hold jobs and socialize more effectively in spite of their injuries once they leave the group. Ali went on to record “significant improvements” in heart-rate variabilities and in “EEG” measurements that are associated with improved brain functioning among the program’s participants.

There seems little doubt that these men and women were more prepared to enter their new worlds by gaining a greater measure of control over old world traumas.

_{Another night’s entertainment.}

Below is the front-end of Gloucester’s famous speech from Shakespeare’s Richard III (For its entirety, the last 13 stanzas can be found here.) If you’d like to “make a go” at it, try breathing “in” before and “out” as you recite each line—even if the only one who’s there to hear your testifying is a trusted pet. Notice how surrounding each line with breath deepens your appreciation of the words and how they resonate with your experience. And if you’re not feeling disconnections like these already, try to imagine how it might feel if you were fresh from a battlefield and returning to the supposed relief of an alien world that feels as misaligned as this one does.

Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this sun of York;
And all the clouds that lour’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Now are our brows bound with victorious wreaths;
Our bruised arms hung up for monuments;
Our stern alarums changed to merry meetings,
Our dreadful marches to delightful measures.
Grim-visaged war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front;
And now, instead of mounting barbed steeds
To fright the souls of fearful adversaries,
He capers nimbly in a lady’s chamber
To the lascivious pleasing of a lute.
But I, that am not shaped for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I, that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph;
I, that am curtail’d of this fair proportion,
Cheated of feature by dissembling nature,
Deformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionable
That dogs bark at me as I halt by them;
Why, I, in this weak piping time of peace,
Have no delight to pass away the time,
Unless to spy my shadow in the sun
And descant on mine own deformity:
And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover,
To entertain these fair well-spoken days,
I am determined to prove a villain
And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Maybe you don’t have PTSD today, but are merely suffering the after-effects of lesser traumas in a world that’s still alarming and frequently destabilizing.

Maybe taking a breath–and cushioning the words for such traumas in the moment that you exhale them–can soften the daily body blows, deepen your breathing and slow a racing heart.

Maybe it’s worth it to keep finding “the words” for the traumas around “just plain living and working,” and that one of the best reasons to read may be how books, plays and poems—particularly great ones—can give us more evocative words than we have already to move us from alienation today to a more comfortable world tomorrow. “The right words” can help us to breathe our sufferings in and then out in an effort to move beyond them.

(In the meantime, your captive audience may not always know what’s going on when the stage lights dim and the costumes come out, but hopefully will join you in feeling the air get a little bit lighter after each performance.)

+ + +

This post was adapted from my November 13, 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.

The Sparks That Fly When Work Becomes Play

October 19, 2022 By David Griesing Leave a Comment

I’m probably more driven than you imagine. Which is why it was so healthy for me to get down on the floor the other day and get lost in some play with a simpler version of myself.

I use cut outs with different colors and patterns to make larger canvasses by moving them around and swapping them out. Think of building a quilt with a big dose of randomness so that something unexpected might begin to emerge from the associations you’re making.

If you’ve got enough cut-outs and the right unusual ones, the exercise is totally immersive. You forget where you are in the dexterity of moving these puzzle pieces around. And sometimes you end up with something that almost looks like art.

So it was serendipitous this week to stumble on an interview with a cartoonist (an artist, really), teacher and writer who’s made a career out of this kind of playfulness. I’ll introduce her properly in a minute. In the interview, she was saying something about her grad students (“These are people at the top of their games [with] this laser focus on getting one thing done” in their areas of study) and how much they need little kids to show them how to relax their relentless quests enough for insight and creativity. She was talking about how 3- and 4-year olds approach problem-solving in tactile, immersive and playful ways and how she regularly invites them into the classroom to play with her big kids.

[M]y students had to be on the floor with them working together. They had to try to get into their mind-set. It’s hard to explain, but it changes you. After you spend about 90 minutes with them, you just find that something has loosened up. You get away from that laser-focused, worrisome way of being.
When you’re an adult watching a kid playing with a little toy, you just think that kid’s doing that and there’s nothing else to it. But from the kid’s perspective that toy is playing with them. It’s interactive.” (I added the emphasis here.)

When the value of this mutual encounter penetrates, at least some of her grad students have a second option. Their scholarship is no longer just about the push to shape their field of study, get their book published and find tenure someplace. All of a sudden, their chosen field can be equally involved in pulling them into it and shaping them back, like that child’s toy.

By breaking some of the earnestness down, there’s finally enough freedom for some magic to happen.

This ever-present chance to be taken out of my driven self is one of the great things about having Wally around. There is nothing—nothing—that he wants to do more than play. When I get down on the floor with him and grab a ball he knows what’s coming, because he’s up on his hind legs dancing with delight and purring with expectation. The sad part, I realized after reading this interview, is that I don’t get down on the floor with him enough.

But between the cut-outs the other day and this chance interview encounter, I’m realizing that it’s irresponsible for me NOT to open that space on a regular basis. As this wise woman said, it’s not for everyone (like the chronically under-wired) so this kind of play won’t have:

saving qualities for people who don’t need it. It’s like, some people can’t digest milk, you know? But a lot of people can.

I don’t post on Instagram anymore, but I visit regularly and have been captivated by the short videos posted by a former Philly guy (and current New Yorker) who identifies himself as @TheDogist He wanders around the city in his shorts with his camera and whenever he sees an owner with her dog stops, asks if he can take the dog’s picture, interacts with it for a bit, and starts snapping or filming (actually, an invisible assistant does the filming).

His encounters are often magical—like getting down on the ground with a 3- or 4-year old. He has a way with dogs, a dog-oriented gift for gab, and a pocketful of treats at the ready to move each dog’s full attention onto this total surprise of a stranger. I’ve found that @TheDogist’s dog portraits and filmed interactions often perfectly capture their mutual delight.

The pictures of dog’s noses here also capture that curious and playful spirit, I think, which brings me back to Lynda Barry. The interview with her (it’s all great, by the way) appeared a few weeks ago in The New York Times Magazine. She’s best known for a weekly comic strip called Ernie Pook’s Comeek, which I never recall seeing in any of my newspapers. (Interestingly, it was first published in a student newspaper, without her knowledge, by fellow cartoonist Matt Groening, whom you may know from his Simpsons fame in later years.) When Barry’s not drawing, she’s teaching “interdisciplinary creativity” at the University of Wisconsin. It was also telling that she’s living not very far from the place where she was born and clearly belongs.

Over the years, Barry has written (and drawn) several books, including the award-winning, 2008 graphic novel “What It Is,” a hat trick of sorts that is part memoir, part collage and part workbook counseling readers on how to make a space for their own creativity. One of my favorite things about Barry is that she won a MacArthur Fellowship (the so-called genius grant) a couple of years ago, when she was already well into her sixties.

It would not be wrong to say that building playfulness into her life and work has given her access to a kind of fountain of youth.

These days, I treat my time on social media and streaming platforms like Netflix almost like a timed dessert. For example, I only look at Instagram when I’m close to falling asleep, and limit myself to the day’s postings from the few posters that I follow. I also try to take my “other screen diversions” in similarly pre-measured doses because I know they’re like sugar: something I crave but also know are less-than-deadly-for-me ONLY when consumed in small amounts.

YouTube, Twitter, IG. Screen diversions that are always waiting to take you away from reality are addictive: a kind of Mind Candy. These interfaces “know” you well enough to call to you and suck you in like play, but have little-to-none of play’s interactive and real-world upsides. Most of the time, all they are is an escape from reality, especially the reality of your own life and work.

Of course, Barry understands the difference between genuine play and the faux-playfulness of screen time as well as anyone, including in this parable of sorts, where she tells us:

I have I have a friend who’s a writer. No matter what we’re doing or whom he’s around, he’s on his phone. We were sitting out in a parking lot, and there was a guy who came out who was in this full orc costume with a shield. I thought, I’m not going to say anything. Let’s see if my friend looks up. The guy passed right by him and — it was outside a hotel — tried to get through a revolving door. There’s all this bump ba bump ba bump, and if my friend would have looked up, he would have seen an orc [fighting with the revolving door and then] go by! But he never looked up! Then later I told him, and he’s like, ‘That didn’t happen!’ [But] it totally did happen! So something that closes you off to the world that you’re in — I mean, I could be on TikTok all night long. I keep deleting that app because I love it so much. But something that takes you out of your environment, you pay a high price. You miss the orc.

As if she needs to, Barry drives home her point even further:

The main thing about the phone is that you’re no longer where you are. You’re no longer in the room. You’re no longer anywhere. The opportunities to have an interaction with the things [and the people] around you are taken away. I just see the world as richer without the phone.” (my emphases again)

Your alternative focus doesn’t have to be violence on the streets, Vladimir Putin, North Korea, girls cutting off their hair in Iran, babies starving in Pakistan, babies starving in the Horn of Africa, “disturbing images in this video,” rainforests being cut down, a politicized Supreme Court, mass shootings in our schools, smaller containers of coffee for the same price at the grocery store—because those things are only a small part of our daily realities and their din (because that’s what it is) can be escaped with equally small doses of social media time.

For the rest of our lives and our work, playful interaction with the world around us might be a whole lot healthier.

_{My favorite nose.}

The picture of the dog up top was taken by one of the ”teachers” at our favorite day care center @phillydogschoolfairmount The second one is care of @odzi.and.elza, also on IG, and the third from the Dog School folks again on a particularly “nosy” day. I took the last one myself, this morning.

This post was adapted from my October 9, 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.