1. My Gender-Fluid Senior Prom by Ara Halstead from. . . Olympia, WA.
2 . The Spy Who Came Home. What do Fallujah and Savannah, Georgia have in common? Find out from Patrick Skinner, who I find inspiring on so many levels. Then follow him on Twitter.
3. How Bike-Friendly Is My City? Not as friendly as Fort Collins, Colorado or Wausau, Wisconsin.
4. Jerusalem opens a bike tunnel in a sewage tunnel.
5A. Silent soccer.
5B. Young swimmers may have to wait to dress like Katie Ledecky.
First, Friedman in praise of greed or “economic self interest”.*
Oliver Hart and Luigi Zingales on what Friedman and his fellow free market true believers got and get wrong:
“. . . the conclusion is that this idea, which seems to have taken hold that companies should be all about making money and that indeed managers, the CEO, they have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to be concerned only with the bottom line. We think this is wrong — a serious mistake. Actually if they want to act — be loyal to their shareholders — which is what fiduciary duty means, they should actually ask them what they want. That’s the loyal thing to do. Rather than just assume that it’s making money at the expense of all else.
* Seriously underrated. . . Phil Donahue’s hair.
You may not have known it, but Caroline Kitchener says:
“Millennials, in staggering numbers, are choosing to start their married lives under high eaves and exposed beams, looking out over long, stripped-down wooden benches and lines of mason jars.”
If you’re thinking of getting married in a barn, be sure to follow the template.
“Even if a couple isn’t actually getting married in a barn, there’s a good chance they’ll make their venue look like one, said Gabrielle Stone, a wedding planner based in Boston, Massachusetts. ‘There is this term that people use now: rustic chic.’ Typically, that means couples will fill the space with homemade chalkboard signs and distressed, vintage furniture. ‘And wooden water barrels,’ Stone said. ‘Lots of water barrels.'”
And start saving.
“According to one widely-cited set of statistics, the average wedding cost has been steadily increasing, from $27,021 in 2011 to $33,391 in 2017. But, despite these price tags, many young couples today don’t want to be showy about it. Happier at a brewery than a fancy restaurant, accustomed to wearing jeans to work, many Millennials are proudly casual. There is a certain social capital that, as a 20- or 30-something, comes with being labeled ‘laid-back’ and ‘chill.'”
More analysis.
“It’s about the couple—who they are, and what they want to represent. More than ‘How do I want other people to see me?’ it’s ‘How do I want to see myself?’” Many live in urban areas and have a fantasy about a life that is ‘calmer and less complicated’: a life removed from the big city, where couples and their guests can be one with the animals (or—if none are available—at least the spaces they could theoretically inhabit).
I wonder if no mention of churches is an indicator of the increasing secularization of North American life.
And I gotta believe there’s one more explanation that Kitchener and her sources slight, that some are opting for barns because others are. How do I want to see myself? Like others.
Juliet Macur, the author of this recent NYT article, in an unrelated interview was asked, “What is your favorite virtue?” “Kindness,” she answered, and then added:
“My earliest memory of it is my mother taking the train to Manhattan from our house in New Jersey, toting three freshly baked loaves of bread. She would leave each loaf next to a homeless person sleeping on the floor of Penn Station.”
I sent an email to a student of mine this week to see if there was anything I could do to support her in the last stages of her teaching certificate work. From Central America, a wife and mother, Rosa is struggling to complete the high-stakes performance assessment she has to pass.
She wrote back:
“I think the only reason I will end the program is thanks to you all. Every time I was about to break there was one of you to hug me, encourage me, smile at me. Remember when you stopped to talked with Rebeca, Drew and I one day? You called us “three of my favorite teachers.” You have no idea how much that meant to me. Now every time I feel like dropping out, I get my journal and read. Stop Rosa you are already a teacher and not only that, you are one of Ron’s favorites so get it together and finish! You haven’t come so far to come just this far!”
I barely remember that interaction. My words that afternoon were a spontaneous, simple, seemingly forgetful greeting that I never would have guessed any of them would’ve remembered very long at all.
As teachers, parents, and coaches, we forget that our words, whether we think before speaking or not, whether kind or not, have lasting impacts.
In the New Testament, James (Chapter 3, verse 5), encourages his readers to “Consider what a great forest is set on fire by a small spark.”
Think first, convey kindness, and most everything else will fall into place.
1. Research Puts Spotlight on the Impact of Loneliness in the U.S. and Potential Root Causes
The findings:
2. Nearly half of jobs are vulnerable to automation.
“In 2013 Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne of Oxford University used—what else?—a machine-learning algorithm to assess how easily 702 different kinds of job in America could be automated. They concluded that fully 47% could be done by machines ‘over the next decade or two.'”
4. The Secret to Magic Mornings? Put The Kids to Work.
“Our kids — all daughters (and no, we aren’t and weren’t trying for a boy) — are ages 4 through 18. And over the years we’ve tried all kinds of systems and routines as we’ve tried to make mornings more manageable. Yelling didn’t work. Bribes and reward charts were more trouble than they were worth. Doing everything for them was unsustainable — we all were cranky.
So we kept tinkering with different ideas.
A while back we hit the jackpot with a plan that is finally working well.”
5. How Refugees Are Finding Home on an American Campus.
Proud of my former employer for resisting Trump’s xenophobia so concretely.
You don’t know because Jack was right.
I hope it’s a lot less than mine. All numbers are approximations.
• 40 weeks x 4 days commuting per week = 160 round trips of about 65 miles = 10,400 miles/year. Divided by 36 miles per gallon = 289 gallons x $3.25/gallon = $939. Because I like round numbers, let’s say the cost of gas continues creeping upwards, so let’s round up to $1,000 year in gas.
• $846 in insurance, but since 20% of my mileage is non-work, let’s pencil that in as $677 (I will resist rounding).
• Approximately $500 in routine services, tires, general wear and tear, so a work adjusted total of $400.
• 80% of my $65 annual registration is $52.
• I paid $38.5K for my car in 2015. Let’s assume it will be worth $5.5k in 2024 when it will have 150k on it. That’s $33k in depreciation over ten years or $3.3k per year.
So $1,000 gas + $677 insurance + $400 in maintenance + $52 in registration + $3,300 in depreciation = $5,429. Are we done? Unfortunately, no, we’re not even close.
Why? Because I haven’t added in the cost of my time spent behind the wheel. Without traffic, my 65 mile roundtrip commute takes 1:25-ish, adjusting for traffic, let’s call it 1:40, or 6 hours and 40 minutes per week for a grand total of 267 hours per year or nearly 7 weeks of full time work sitting behind the wheel.
Hmm, how to value that time? If you or your workplace want to hire me to edit or write something or consult on a work or life problem, I’ll charge something north of $100/hour, but that doesn’t mean all my time is that valuable. How much should we discount my commute time? By half? If my commute time is worth $50/hour, that adds $13,350 to the above total. What if we discount it by half again, using $25/hour as our estimation, then we add $6,675 to our previous total.
At $25/hour, it costs me $12,104 to work each year. At $50/hour, $18,779.
Drumroll. This is as painful a sentence as I’ve written in a long time. It costs me somewhere between $12,000 and $19,000 getting to and from work each year.
If you’ve ever read one of my 1,348 posts and thought there was some semblance of intelligence evident within it, this 1,349th one should disabuse you of that idea forever and ever amen.
1. How we talk to our kids about race, racism and identity. After the discussion, one of the participants communicated an important insight that is often lost on people who do not have much experience with people different than them.
“This experience concretized a familiar truth: black identity is not a monolith. Our experiences and stories are as vivid, varied, and complex as our culture and hues.”
2. Does implicit bias training work?
Researchers suggest:
“When companies get in hot water over bias, their initial reaction is often to do some kind of training because it’s something you can outsource and it’s relatively easy to do and has good optics. The studies that look out six months to a year tend to be equally likely to show increased bias after the training as they are to show decreased bias.”
All is not lost though:
“. . . companies can have better success decreasing bias by making sure their workforces are integrated so that people of different racial groups are regularly in contact with one another. “We know that what works best is for workers to be put side by side with people from other groups and have them work together collaboratively as equals. That seems to be the best way to change stereotypes in people’s heads because it causes people not to lump all members of a group together, but to start to individuate.”
3. Fixing Ethiopia Requires More Than a New Prime Minister.
Hilary Matfess describes the The Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front’s (EPRDF) political hegemony. It’s a blueprint of sorts for wannabe authoritarians the world over.
Her logical conclusion is disheartening:
“The current unrest in Ethiopia is not a phase that will fade with the pronouncement of a new prime minister, but rather a reflection of a system in which modest reform and dissent have been made nearly impossible. Until the government remedies the marginalization of ethnic groups and ceases to perpetrate gross human rights abuses, it will experience protests, potentially escalating beyond the low levels of violence that have characterized the clashes between Oromo protesters and the government thus far. Putting a new face to the leadership of this system will not be enough to stabilize the country—radical democratizing reforms are necessary. Failing this, the country (and its hand-wringing security partners) can expect continued resistance and instability.”
• I mysteriously lost 3 seconds/100 yds recently. Depressing. Couldn’t find them anywhere. Finally, this morning, I found them. Today, sports scientists the world over are dropping their planned research to debate whether it was because I rested yesterday or had leftover quiche for breakfast. The peer-reviewed articles should make for riveting reading.
• Today’s swim workout. 200 free. 2×100 free. 4×50 fly/free, back/free, breast/free, free/free. Kick 100. 5x. 1-2 naked, 3-5 with toys. 3,500 yards. Perfect start to the day.
• There was an Olympic gold medalist (1984, Women’s 8 rowing) in the lane next to me who is also a loyal reader of the Humble Blog.
• Sadly, Free Styler has been missing in action this week.
• There’s another dude who has been completely overlapping with me on the pool deck and in the locker room every Tu/Th morning for YEARS, by which I mean DECADES. Note that I do not know his name. We are engaged in an epic standoff of introversion, each refusing to introduce them self to the other. He has no idea what he’s up against. Sometime, probably 10-20 years from now, he will break. Trust me on this, victory is assured.
Dig this beautiful essay on selfishness, selflessness, and love titled “Nobody Tells You How Long a Marriage Is” by Lauren Doyle Owens.
At the end, she writes:
“Nobody tells you how long marriage is. When you fall in love, when you have fun with somebody, when you enjoy the way they see the world, nobody ever says, “This person will change. And so you will be married to two, three, four, five or 10 people throughout the course of your life, as you live out your vows.” Nobody warns you.”
Tru ‘dat.
Same as when I married three decades ago, I have no interest in military history, plant nomenclature, or jazz; now though, I am interested in lots of new things like cooking, food, endurance athletics, North Korea, and Stoicism. When I married I was a pauper public school teacher who was oblivious to the stock market. Now I identify in part as an investor. When I married, I was a conventional Christian, today I am more open to and interested in other religious traditions and forms of spirituality. When I married, I used a lot of product in my (amazing) hair; now, not so much.
When I married I was agnostic about the natural world; today, my well-being depends upon it. When I married I was a son; now, I am not. When I married, I was Lauren’s husband, preferring the suburbs; now I’m Lauren, preferring anywhere else.
Life is fragile and mysterious, meaning best case scenario, the Good Wife and I are in the middle of our life together, meaning she’s been married to four or five Rons* with maybe another four or five to go. Here’s hoping she continues adjusting to my continuing evolution.
*As a result of this recent Janos tweet, I’ve decided my Witness Protection name is going to be Rondo not LeRon. What, you don’t get to pick your WP name?!
Written while the Celts were losing their last game, “we are need rondos. I am say all day all night for lots time but is no rondos. i am frustrate.”
Pressing Pause 