First Paragraph

 Throughout my years as a social psychologist, I have learned how important a sense of belonging can be. Today, many people who once took that feeling for granted seem unmoored and adrift. In the turbulent election season of 2016, my colleagues and I conducted a survey of law students at a selective university to determine who felt most alienated on campus. The two groups who felt least like they belonged were black women and politically conservative white men. These two groups seem to fall at the farthest poles of our political discourse. Yet they shared a feeling: They felt like outsiders. The defining feature of our era seems to be that few groups feel confident in their sense of belonging.

- From Belonging: The Science of Creating Connection and Bridging Divides by Geoffrey L. Cohen

Remembering James Hilton

 

You'd think that the author who wrote Lost Horizon; Goodbye, Mr. Chips; and Random Harvest, all of which were made into major films, would be better known.

The Career Manifesto is Back!

I've popped it up on Substack.

Read it. Learn it. Live it.

[And don't forget to subscribe. Free subscribers are welcome. Paid ones are honored.]

First Paragraph

 In 1937, the soul of Genghis Khan disappeared from the Buddhist monastery in central Mongolia along the River of the Moon below the black Shankh Mountains where the faithful lamas had protected and venerated it for centuries. During the 1930s, Stalin's henchmen executed some thirty thousand Mongols in a series of campaigns against their culture and religion. The troops ravaged one monastery after another, shot the monks, assaulted the nuns, broke the religious objects, looted the libraries, burned the scriptures, and demolished the temples. Reportedly, someone secretly rescued the embodiment of Genghis Khan's soul from the Shankh Monastery and whisked it away for safekeeping to the capital in Ulaanbaatar, where it ultimately disappeared.

- From Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World by Jack Weatherford

Find Something Beautiful Today

 

[Photo by Robert Murray at Unsplash]

Chaos, Anyone?

I was saved by these wise words of Nicholas Bate as I was pondering some invitations to chaos that were on my desk.

Remember, chaos doesn't come with warning labels.

Deeply Missed

 Read any of the material about Tom Wolfe at this National Endowment for the Humanities site. 

An excerpt:

Bruce Cole: I wanted to talk about literature and you as a chronicler. You just spent a lot of time on college campuses talking to kids. What is happening with how we study literature and how we interpret literature in the academy now?

Tom Wolfe: The study of literature has been so politicized at the graduate level that I urged my daughter, who has a degree in English from Duke, not to even think about it. It's a theory-ridden field now and the theories, somewhat like the theories of the international style in architecture, are essentially political.

Haidt on Phone-Free Schools

 

Memorable Encounters

Encounter A: He had long bushy hair and a beard. Was wearing a yellow Mickey Mouse t-shirt, jeans, and tennis shoes. Scruffy look but not so much that you'd give him a lot of attention.

Encounter B: They were dressed neatly and could have been grad students or professors. Every item they had on was German. They spoke German flawlessly and were circumspect in their use of German body language. I was permitted one quick glance across a room.

Encounter C: Both of them were filthy. Long unwashed hair. Large beards. Leather jackets. Greasy Levis. Motorcycle boots. One had a chain for a belt. I assumed they were armed.

Encounter D: A police supervisor. Sharp and experienced. He described the psychological problems often faced by those who were in deep undercover work. One of his concerns: an undercover officer had recently gotten a tattoo, which could be a warning sign regarding identity issues. Another topic to counter a civil rights query by a state attorney general's office: there was no way that we were going to put a female officer in an undercover assignment in a biker bar. The gangs regarded women as currency.

Encounter E: The managers explained that their employee came up clean in a local records check. [He had been convicted in California.] He was hired in a special jobs program and then transferred to the City Treasurer's Office. He was caught after an alert bank employee noticed an odd movement of over $700,000. Everyone in the office liked him. A frequent comment: "Willing to work late."

Current Late Night Re-Reading