Highly Recommended

Quote of the Day

I haven't the slightest idea how to change people, but still I keep a long list of prospective candidates just in case I should ever figure it out.  

- David Sedaris

First Paragraph

Norman Hall shouldn't exist. But here he is - flesh, blood, and bow tie - on a Tuesday afternoon, sitting in a downtown San Francisco law office explaining to two attorneys why they could really use a few things to spruce up their place. 

- From To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others by Daniel H. Pink

The Post-Election News Reporting Seems to Be Getting Back to Normal

Be Sure to Schedule Time for Two Things

Thinking and reading.*

* And don't just say you'll do it. Block out time in your appointment book.

Patience

A person with insight and skill in any large organization must learn how to be patient. It takes time to persuade, even if the virtues of a proposal seem self-evident. Furthermore, hostile political factions may be lurking and it is much easier to strangle a new idea than to boost one.

Rushing may feel good but, unless there is savvy guidance, it may merely ensure a faster trip to a quagmire. A guide who knows the terrain and the likely avenues of attack should be found and awarded close attention.

Patience is not indecision. It can be a form of boldness.

Highly Recommended

Quote of the Day

The sweaty players in the game of life always have more fun than the supercilious spectators. 

- William Feather

First Paragraph

I like to think of history as an untidy sprawling house. Over the past decades, historians have broadened their scope from political, economic, or intellectual history to include the study of emotions, attitudes, tastes, or prejudices. (And in what I find a rather tiresome trend, historians have also been looking increasingly at themselves; how they "created" the past.) And in the house of history are those who think in centuries and those who focus on a single moment. Some historians prefer to deal with the great changes, sometimes over millennia, that have taken place in human society. They look at the shift from hunting to agriculture, for example, or the growth of cities; or they count such things as population growth and migrations or economic output. The great French historian Fernand Braudel argued that the true object of historical research was to look beneath the surface of events and discover the longer-term patterns - what he called the longue duree. He saw human history as a great slow-moving river, affected in its course more by geography, the environment, or social and economic factors than by such transient or short-lived events - he called them "froth" - as politics or wars. While biography cannot explain all, it is perhaps no coincidence that Braudel spent the Second World War in a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany. From that perspective the longue duree must have offered hope that Nazism would disappear like a bad dream as history moved slowly on. 

- From History's People: Personalities and the Past by Margaret MacMillan

Cook Up a Storm

The Pioneer Woman has released her complete Thanksgiving Recipes Archive.