We got our California mail-in ballots yesterday, so Kim and I decided to take the time to work through the long two-page, four-sided ballot together. We needed all the help we could get to work through it and we had the extensive voter information pamphlet (more a booklet than a pamphlet) as well as our good friend Claude to help us work through the issues. The first page was pretty easy because it was the…
Today was ride day. Gordon couldn’t make it so it was just me and Len, which always makes it easy. It’s easier to agree on a route (Len simply doesn’t care and will ride wherever I lead him even though he rides the local roads more than I do and knows them way better). It’s easier to stay tight and in formation with two riders. And it’s easier to adjust the ride as we go…
I recently saw some typical projections about what college majors were drawing the highest compensation three years out from graduation. It looked pretty math-heavy to be sure. I’ve looked into it further and found that while there’s no official dataset that tracks pay exactly three years after graduation, the closest are the New York Fed’s early-career figures (grads aged 22–27, roughly 0–5 years out) and Department of Education data covering about four years out. Both…
Toxic masculinity is not just front page news these days, its the top topic on the front page. Masculinity rests on real biological differences between the genders, but how those differences turn into norms of “being a man” is shaped heavily by history and culture. Most researchers see it as an interaction, not either/or. The biological roots of it lie in hormones. Prenatal and pubertal testosterone shape body size, muscle mass, and some behavioral tendencies.…
One day in 2015, when Kim and I had moved to Staten Island so I could pursue my crazy vision of building the world’s largest observation wheel on New York Harbor (why does that sound so idiotic today when it made total sense at the time?), I heard her conversing with someone out on our patio. The patio overlooked the parking lot for the half dozen orange ferries that plied the waters from there to…
Every day we deal with personalities. We do that mostly without noticing. We read and adjust to personality in nearly every interaction. We are forced to read people and form quick trait impressions from voice, posture, and word choice, and they’re often surprisingly accurate, especially for extraversion. We are constantly adjusting our approach to people based on our assessment of their personality. We give the anxious colleague more reassurance, we keep it brief with the…
Being in the moment means your attention is on what’s actually happening now, rather than replaying the past or rehearsing the future. You notice the conversation you’re in, the food you’re eating or the road ahead, instead of half-living it while your mind is somewhere else. It doesn’t mean having no thoughts. It means noticing when your mind has wandered off and bringing it back. Writing is my best tool for staying in the moment…
The midterms are Tuesday, November 3, a month out from today. Democrats are favored to take the House, and the Senate is close to a coin flip, with a slight edge for the Democrats. While I say a Paul Krugman podcast today that suggested that the House odds were now at 99% in favor of Democrats, the prediction markets, which are the most objective source of sentiment, give Democrats about 85% odds of winning the…
Today I read an article on listening and how to do it better. They called it “reflective listening”. What is reflective listening? Reflective listening is most often used by therapists (remember the “how does that make you feel” questions?). But psychologists who have studied the technique say it’s a tool everyone should have in their back pocket in order to get the most out of our communication with others and therefore in our relationship with…
You’ve heard of the “last mile”. It’s a phrase that ostensibly comes from telecommunications, where it described the final stretch of a network: the copper line, cable, or fiber running from the local exchange or hub to an individual home or business. Telephone engineers had long called this segment the “local loop.” “Last mile” became the popular term, likely in the 1980s–90s as cable, broadband, and telecom deregulation made that final connection the costliest and…