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The Edge of the World: A Visual Adventure to the Most Extraordinary Places on Earth by The Editors of Outside Magazine My rating: 5 of 5 stars I've enjoyed the fantastic photography of Outside for decades, back from when I first got involved with fitness, and these photos, along with the accompanying vignettes, are some of the most awe-inspiring shots you will ever see. More than the acrobats, and I am certainly not one of them, the sheer immensity and subtlety of nature brought tears to my eyes, many times. Just wow! View all my reviews

Opinion Anyone that knows me that I read a great deal, and one of the topics I focus on is management and leadership. It has meant attending B-school, reading books on management, as well as reading numerous articles and studies - I definitely prefer to base my ideas on statistical proof - so I think I have a good sense of what research says excellent management and leadership means. After reading a blog post that resonated with me, but I thought overly-specific, I decided to abstract that article's rules into something generic, add some needed items, then convert those items into practice. Making sure one's team has adequate tools, resources, contacts, and training Being a leader, and in that providing vision, expectations, goals, and standards, as well communicating that clearly In one's self, exemplifying excellence, being a role model, maintaining a positive image, having personality and charm, while earning respect In one's team, having excellence, cohesio

In response to a NY Times piece in the Opinion section We Are All Jew-ish Now , with the synopsis "Jewishness” can be the sensibility of whoever feels unsure of who they are — a bit peculiar, a bit funny", I wrote the following: Comment #1 The more basic one, that most Jews would agree about, is Jewish means being of Jewish ancestry. Beyond that, Jews themselves think that being Jewish means remembering the Holocaust, being ethical, working for justice and equality, and for being intellectually curious. Personally, as someone who is married to someone of Jewish ancestry, and whose friends over the past four decades have been almost exclusively Jewish, I've sometimes wondered why. My own musings, based on certain facts of behavior, is that Jews, especially the ones that I know, are highly intelligent, highly verbal, and interactive communicators. Conversation is rarely about taking turns and has always been a bit more intense and intellectual, but then again, that'

Responding to What the Rich Won’t Tell You - The New York Times First, I can see the resentment in the comments, and certainly, some of it is justified, but it is often overgeneralized so that the affluent are presented or assumed to be all one way of another. It is always more nuanced. Second, empathy matters, although not for everyone. If one has friends of different economic classes, older people on fixed incomes, women who've gone through divorces - women suffer more than men when couples divorce -, or those who've become victim to the changing job landscape, those still thriving feel some pain when realizing the tough times others might be going through. One avoids [mentioning] those things that are likely out of the reach of others. Third, for those that are aware of their [fortune] - the 'luck' of having smarts, a good family, social supports, and who lived in a period of government munificence - doing good is another choice, as is charity, not necessarily to

As part of the Damore-related article I responded and posted about , I later wrote responses to other posters in response to a NY Times article An Open Letter to James Damore by Debra Sterling . Additional responses are below: To someone criticizing, rightly, Damore's gender views... In Hofstede's cultural dimension models, the drive for status is part of the masculinity dimension, and it varies a great deal, with the Scandinavian societies on the low end, having equivalent gender expectations, as opposed to the more traditional societies like the US. Although one might find that such traits are heritable, it is obvious that culture has a large influence on social norms. Equally important, Damore does not realize that the men entering the profession have turned the industry toxic, e.g., high pressure, not that the industry was toxic and therefore drove women away, or that what he assumes is the profession is simply emblematic of life in corporate America. Several years

I Am Not Your Negro by James Baldwin My rating: 5 of 5 stars A collection of thoughts, interviews, and snippets from media, a thought-provoking meditation on race in America. View all my reviews

I posted a comment in response to An Open Letter to James Damore by Debra Sterling , below: It doesn't get mentioned, but some of the same stereotypes that Damore claims make women ill-suited for technology, e.g., extroversion and emotional management, are the same traits that in some studies have been shown to make teams more productive. The concern about managing relationships, regardless of gender, has been shown to correlate with more effective team leaders. Extroversion in programmers has also been shown to correlate with team productivity. I'm sure there are findings that might contradict the above, but Damore seems to have a very narrow view of what makes one effective. Leadership, or at least getting to the top, in Damore's view, and in traditional masculine societies, might require a desire for dominance and a penchant for combativeness, but ideal styles of leadership typically require driving consensus, presenting a vision, social cohesion and charisma, obvious

An excellent, incredibly insightful and informative book, somewhat marred by the tedium experienced in the authors' rehashing the ideas of organizations working for change. For most of this book, the writers masterfully tie together concepts in systems, mathematics, consciousness, the environment, society and biology, and for that, it is a brilliant read. My rating: 5 of 5 stars The Systems View of Life: A Unifying Vision by Fritjof Capra View all my reviews

In response to Who Pays on the First Date? No One Knows Anymore, and It’s Really Awkward in the Wall Street Journal I wrote the following: I am by no means a traditional man, but when I was dating via the personals, I paid. I make more than women, by virtue of my gender. I am smart, but only as smart as my now wife, and I am in a well-paying profession in a well-paying industry, but some of that is becuase of the sexsim of our culture. My wife has more education than I have, but works for a non-profit. I am sure, without the limitations placed on our respective genders, she could excel in my field, if allowed. Although I have always paid in the beginning of a relationship, I knew that, if it lasted, the relationship would become a partnership, with each contributing as much as we could. Maybe not always the same amount, but fully.

Responding to Men Don’t Want to Be Nurses. Their Wives Agree. in the NY Times: The US has some deeply ingrained aspects that make this situation intractable, a traditional culture that appreciates work in which men are supposed to succeed, along with a social system that denigrates women's work, and a socioeconomic system that provides no protection for labor, particularly service work, the kind of work traditionally done by women. Where can it be improved? Ideally, at least for someone like me, we would move towards an egalitarian society where quality of life matters more than work, that provides some degree of social welfare to buffet against the harms the economy can bring, and that protects labor, particularly service work. Seriously, I doubt that the US will become a culture that focuses on quality of life over work. I would also doubt that the sociopolitical world would change to protect service work. The only bright spot for male-type labor would be in the growing green

A minor article, Where Anti-Tax Fervor Means ‘All Services Will Cease’ , highlighting a small town's cutting of it's nose to spite its face, ala a No Taxes credo. Although much of the effective drive against taxes can be traced to 'astroturf' political organizations, American short-sightedness paired with its individualism, has helped create high inequality and low taxes, resulting in little money in people's pockets and in government coffers, required to sustain decent lives.

My response to the NYT article Therapists Offer Strategies for Postelection Stress garnered many likes, so I thought I'd repost it here: Reduce the crap, avoid the hype, read the best sources. Get a life. Regardless of how miserable the idiot-in-chief and his cronies, the quality of your life matters, and don't let them ruin it. Get involved. Instead of worrying about the harm of the Republicans, get busy, not from home, but get out and help to bring about change.

Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650-1750 by Jonathan I. Israel My rating: 5 of 5 stars Excellent book and ideas, with some flaws I found irritating. First, some quotes are provided without translations - I wish my French was better, and I have no real understanding of Dutch - and it would have been nice to link to the translation, if not had it displayed in the text. Second, the history is very detailed, a bit too much for my taste, and I would have preferred a somewhat higher-level view of the actions of the various actors in the enlightenment drama, although as I pored on, the complexity of the story was very engaging. View all my reviews

I was active in a thread on the NY Times site, discussing how lifestyle choices correlate with lifestyle choice. First Post: This is nothing new. Diversity, is both cause and effect of openness to experience. Open-minded people, as per the Big Five and/or OCEAN personality inventories, tend to be liberal, and their lifestyle choices reflect that. They tend to get educated, move to cities, and enjoy a greater variation in travel, reading, and music. They enjoy urban, dense environments with a range of identities. People with low openness, or for the sake of simplicity, the close-minded, tend to stick close to home, favor family and church, and tend to distrust urban, diverse environments. This dimension seems to also informally correlate with disgust and fear of the unknown, something seemingly related to a fear of the foreign.  You likely have guessed, or assume, that I am very liberal, and I am an fairly empathetic person, but I would not find engaging with such people enjoyable

Cultures and Organizations: Software of the Mind, Third Edition by Geert Hofstede My rating: 4 of 5 stars A detailed and fascinating review of Hofstede's dimensions, by the researcher himself, showing broad high-level insights into history and culture, although a bit tedious, as it often describes in detail relationships many of us implicitly understand. View all my reviews

My response to the NYT article Who Will Watch the Agents Watching Our Borders? : The attack dogs are quite happy to have unfettered access to fresh meat. Restraining them, so that they would be fair and humane, and maybe even useful, runs counter to the savage mentality they embody. We have all read how immigration is actually a benefit, reducing crime, increasing salaries, improving the lives of immigrants as well as their surroundings. What would an animal like that attack dog about value or humanity, since it only wants more fresh meat, with comfort in knowing that they won't be restrained in the future...

I wrote a few responses to an article, Why More Democrats Are Now Embracing Conspiracy Theories in the The New York Times, first here and then here . The text of the first: If nothing else, conspiracy theories allude to things, while not absolutely true, are certainly possible, or hint at things that, while not an outright takeover, are concerns. Trump only needs an excuse, a terrorist incident, a violent leftist response, to initiate quasi-fascist control, a reduction in rights, harsh military responses to protests, increased surveillance, etc. His coziness with Russia, if not quite indicating a puppet-in-chief, indicates a lack of wariness that might be necessary when Russia does decide to invade another Eastern European country, or say, deploy military that threatens Europe. The fact that his advisors are all financial people, military hawks, with a [secretary] of state from Exxon, point to a possible war. A conspiracy theory would be that they are there to create a war,

My response to Disabled, Shunned and Silenced in Trump’s America in the The New York Times: Thank you for this article. I had not read that the buffoon had removed the Disabilities section. It foreshadows what we know to come, hatred, ignorance, and abuse of the idiot in chief...

As part of an online back in forth on Google+, after a person claimed that US immigration ruined developing economies, I collected bits of useful information regarding the effect of emigration on the sending country. I used fairly open search terms, emigration effects, and although there were studies that were mixed about emigration, they were few, and one of those is not a study. One idea I've read, although did not find corroborating evidence of, stated that the drive to emigrate drove up the capabilities of the people left behind. Yes, developed countries often take the best of the developing world, but the drive to emigrate focuses many on education, so the ones left behind, and the country they inhabit, are better off. As an example, if you have 100 people in a country, and you have a system that says 10 can leave that score highest on an exam. Sixty (60) try to raise themselves by studying. At the end, 10 leave, leaving 50 more educated than when they started. So yes, the 1

Citizen: An American Lyric by Claudia Rankine My rating: 5 of 5 stars Not quite poetry in the traditional sense, thoughtful and powerful writing. View all my reviews