Finally Indexing All My Born to Run Posts

Christopher McDougall just wrote an excellent article for the New York Times that sums up the ideas in his excellent book Born to Run in a few pages. It even includes a short instructional video for a quick, easy drill to do daily to train your body in a healthier running form. A few quick excerpts if you're unfamiliar with the book:

The Once and Future Way to Run

We were once the greatest endurance runners on earth. We didn’t have fangs, claws, strength or speed, but the springiness of our legs and our unrivaled ability to cool our bodies by sweating rather than panting enabled humans to chase prey until it dropped from heat exhaustion. Some speculate that collaboration on such hunts led to language, then shared technology. Running arguably made us the masters of the world. . . .

Two years ago, in my book, “Born to Run,” I suggested we don’t need smarter shoes; we need smarter feet. I’d gone into Mexico’s Copper Canyon to learn from the Tarahumara Indians, who tackle 100-mile races well into their geriatric years. I was a broken-down, middle-aged, ex-runner when I arrived. Nine months later, I was transformed. After getting rid of my cushioned shoes and adopting the Tarahumaras’ whisper-soft stride, I was able to join them for a 50-mile race through the canyons. I haven’t lost a day of running to injury since. . . .

The only way to halt the running-injury epidemic, it seems, is to find a simple, foolproof method to relearn what the Tarahumara never forgot. A one best way to the one best way [to run]. . . .

Last fall, at the end of a local 10-mile trail race, I surprised myself by finishing five minutes faster than I had four years ago, when I was in much better shape. I figured the result was a fluke — until it happened again. No special prep, awful travel schedule and yet a personal best in a six-mile race.

“I don’t get it,” I told Cucuzzella this past June when we went for a run together through the Shepherd University campus in Shepherdstown. “I’m four years older. I’m pretty sure I’m heavier. I’m not doing real workouts, just whatever I feel like each day. The only difference is I’ve been 100-Upping.” . . . .

(See the video for a demonstration of the 100-Up; read the article for a description.)

Previous Posts
(In chronological order)

Was it a coincidence that the world's most enlightened people were also the world's most amazing runners? - I started listening to a book today I've been looking forward to for a long time. Not only did it not disappoint, it's so far better than expected. Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall. First a quote I like then a full introduction via The Daily Show . . .

They were so ignorant, they didn't even realize they were supposed to be burned out, overtained, and injured. Instead, they were fast. - I'm only about a third of the way done with Born to Run, but I am totally into it. My running geek is fascinated by learning more about the Leadville 100, the Adams State coach, and all kinds of other people, places, and things, I'm casually familiar with. McDougall knows how to tell a story, and he has an unending stream of them woven into this book. More than geeked, though, I'm stirred. It makes me feel everything I love about running. . . .

Trail Running Is My Favorite Form of Meditation - . . . "When I'm out on a long run," she continued, "the only thing in life that matters is finishing the run. For once, my brain isn't going blehblehbleh all the time. Everything quiets down, and the only thing going on is pure flow. It's just me and the movement and the motion. That's what I love--just being a barbarian, running through the woods." . . .

Might Have to Try Some Barefoot Running - "Everyone thinks they know how to run, but it's really as nuanced as any other activity," Eric told me. "Ask most people and they'll say, 'People just run the way they run.' That's ridiculous. Does everyone just swim the way they swim?" For every other sport, lessons are fundamental; you don't go out and start slashing away with a golf club or sliding down a mountain on skis until someone takes you through the steps and teaches you proper form. If not, inefficiency is guaranteed and injury is inevitable. . . .

Running was the superpower that made us all human--which means it's a superpower all humans possess - Lieberman began calculating temperatures, speed, and body weight. Soon, there it was before him: the solution to the Running Man mystery. To run an antelope to death, Lieberman determined, all you have to do is scare it into a gallop on a hot day. "If you keep just close enough for it to see you, it will keep sprinting away. After about ten or fifteen kilometers' worth of running, it will go into hypothermia and collapse." Translation: if you can run six miles on a summer day, then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom. We can dump heat on the run, but animals can't pant while they gallop. . . .

Born to Run Review - . . . That’s the summary, but McDougall shares his entire journey of conversion and more. He’s one heck of an entertaining storyteller, and he has woven countless tales throughout the book. In his quest to discover his own inner runner, he has been part of a convergence of U.S. ultra marathoning and the Tarahumara people of remote Mexico. Along the way he’s had more than his share of adventures into the Mexican wild lands, science, and the ultrarunning subculture, and met an amazing number of amazingly colorful people. . . .

Born to Run Visuals and Extenders - If you've been intrigued by the book, then you need to start with McDougall's site. That links to the photos of some of the people mentioned in the excerpts I've shared (like Jenn doing a handstand at the top of an 8,000 foot climb). . . .

Raramuri Diet Tips - . . . The Tarahumara diet is described in some small detail in the book, with repeated mention of two staples — pinole and chia seeds. The author relates a few stories that ascribe almost magical qualities to these simple foods, and though he is prone to hyperbole, I found myself intrigued enough to do some research and try making them on my own. . . .

I'm a Trial and Error Learner - My dad and brother are in town, and last night I took my brother hiking on some fairly rocky mountain bike trails. I wore my Vibram FiveFingers and stubbed my toes a couple of times. I knew when I hurt the middle toe and hopped around going, "Ow! Ow!" for a few seconds, but don't know when I hurt the pinky. They hurt to the touch, but seem to be OK for walking (although the soles of my feet are sore from all the rocky walking). . . .

If you don't have time to read (the rest of) Born to Run - This succinctly explains the theory that humans evolved as the world's best endurance runners and how the barefoot running style is better for you. Even has a short video demonstration. From NPR.

Natural Born Runners - A new study, it seems, would support the idea that the evolutionary advantage humans developed as predators was distance running. A Yahoo News summary:

Running was the superpower that made us all human--which means it's a superpower all humans possess

" . . . It's yet another feature of human evolution that only makes sense in terms of running."

But the big mystery continued to be food. Judging by the Godzilla-like growth of our heads, Lieberman could pinpoint the exact moment when the caveman menu changed: it had to be two million years ago . . . Only one thing could have sparked such a dramatic makeoever: a diet no primate had ever eaten before, featuring a reliable supply of meat, with its high concentrations of calories, fat, and protein.

"So where the fuck did they get it?" Lieberman asks, with all the gusto of a man who's not squeamish about hacking into goats with a rock. "The bow and arrow is twenty thousand years old. The spearhead is two hundred thousand years old. But Homo erectus is around two million years old. That means that for most of our existence--for nearly two million years!--hominids were getting meat with their bare hands." . . .

So how long would it take to actually run an animal to death? . . . A jogger in decent shape averages about three to four meters a second. A deer trots at almost the identical pace. But here's the kicker: when a deer wants to accelerate to four meters a second, it has to break into a heavy-breathing gallop, while a human can go just as fast and still be in his jogging zone. A deer is way faster at a sprint, but we're faster at a jog; so when Bambi is already edging into oxygen debt, we're barely breathing hard.

Lieberman kept looking, and found an even more telling comparison: the top galloping speed for most horses is 7.7 meters a second. They can hold that pace for about ten minutes, then have to slow to 5.8 meters a second. But an elite marathoner can jog for hours at 6 meters a second. The horse will erupt away from the starting line, as Dennis Poolheco had discovered in the Man Against Horse Race, but with enough patience and distance, you can slowly close the gap.

You don't even have to go fast, Lieberman realized. All you have to do is keep the animal in sight, and within ten minutes, you're reeling him in.

Lieberman began calculating temperatures, speed, and body weight. Soon, there it was before him: the solution to the Running Man mystery. To run an antelope to death, Lieberman determined, all you have to do is scare it into a gallop on a hot day. "If you keep just close enough for it to see you, it will keep sprinting away. After about ten or fifteen kilometers' worth of running, it will go into hypothermia and collapse." Translation: if you can run six miles on a summer day, then you, my friend, are a lethal weapon in the animal kingdom. We can dump heat on the run, but animals can't pant while they gallop. . . .

. . . One morning, four of the renegade Bushmen--!Nate, !Nam!kabe, Kayate, and Bor/xao--woke Louis up before dawn to invite him on a special hunt. Don't eat any breakfast, they warned him, and drink all the water you can hold. Louis downed a mug of coffee, grabbed his boots, and fell in behind the hunters as they marched off across the savannah in the dark. The sun rose until it was broiling over their heads, but the hunters pushed on. Finally, after walking nearly twenty miles, they spotted a clutch of kudu, an especially agile form of antelope. That's when the Bushmen started to run. . . .

Later, after !Nate had helped him back to camp, Louis marveled at the ruthless efficiency of the persistence hunt. "It's much more efficient than a bow and arrow," he observed. "It takes a lot of attempts to get a successful hunt by bow. You can hit the animal and still lose it, or scavengers can smell blood and get to it before you do, or it can take all night for the poison on the arrow tips to work. Only a small percentage of arrow shots are successful, so for the number of days hunting, the meat yield of a persistence hunt is much higher."

Louis found out only in his second, third, and fourth persistence hunts how lucky he'd gotten in the first; that debut kudu dropped after only two hours, but every one after that kept the Bushmen on the run for three to five hours (neatly corresponding, one might note, to how long it takes most people to run our latter-day version of prehistoric hunting, the marathon. Recreation has its reasons).

To succeed as a hunter, Louis had to reinvent himself as a runner. . . .

After a while, Louis began to look at running the way other people look at walking; he learned to settle back and let his legs spin in a quick, easy trot, a sort of baseline motion that could last all day and leave him enough reserves to accelerate when necessary. . . .

The Kalahari summer cooled into winter, but the hunts continued. The Utah-Harvard docs would turn out to be wrong about one part of their Running Man theory: persistence hunting doesn't depend upon killer heat, because the ingenious Bushmen had devised ways to run down game in every weather. . . .

"Then why do so many people hate it?" I asked Dr. Bramble as he came to the end of the story of Louis and the Bushmen. "If we're all born to run, shouldn't all of us enjoy it?"

Dr. Bramble began his answer with a riddle. "This is fascinating stuff," he said. "We monitored the results of the 2004 New York City Marathon and compared finishing times by age. What we found is that starting at age nineteen, runners get faster every year until they hit their peak at twenty-seven. After twenty-seven, they start to decline. So here's the question--how old are you when you're back to running the same speed you did at nineteen?" . . .

" . . . It's sixty-four."

"Are you serious? That's a--" I scribbled out the math. "That's a forty-five-year difference. You're saying teenagers can't beat guys three times their age?"

"Isn't it amazing?" Bramble agreed. "Name any other field of athletic endeavor where sixty-four-year-olds are competing with nineteen-year-olds. Swimming? Boxing? Not even close. There's something really weird about us humans; we're not only really good at endurance running, we're really good at it for a remarkably long time. We're a machine built to run--and the machine never wears out."

You don't stop running because you get old, the Dipsea Demon always said. You get old because you stop running. . . .

"But there's a problem," Dr. Bramble said. He tapped his forehead. "And it's right up here." Our greatest talent, he explained, also created the monster that could destroy us. "Unlike any other organism in history, humans have a mind-body conflict: we have a body built for performance, but a brain that's always looking for efficiency." We live or die by our endurance, but remember: endurance is all about conserving energy, and that's the brain's department. "The reason some people use their genetic gift for running and others don't is because the brain is a bargain shopper." . . .

"We live in a culture that sees extreme exercise as crazy," Dr. Bramble says, "because that's what our brain tells us: why fire up the machine if you don't have to?" . . .

By the time the astronauts returned to earth, they'd aged decades in a matter of days. Their bones were weaker and their muscles had atrophied; they had insomnia, depression, acute fatigue, and listlessness. Even their taste buds had decayed. If you've ever spent a long weekend watching TV on the sofa, you know the feeling, because down here on earth, we've created our own zero-gravity bubble; we've taken away the jobs our bodies were meant to do, and we're paying for it. Nearly every top killer in the Western world--heart disease, stroke, diabetes, depression, hypertension, and a dozen forms of cancer--was unknow to our ancestors. They didn't have medicine, but they did have a magic bullet . . .

"You could literally halt epidemics in their tracks with this one remedy. . . . So simple. Just move your legs. Because if you don't think you were born to run, you're not only denying history. You're denying who you are."

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From Born to Run

Why I Run

I've cycled through phases as a runner throughout my life.  My dad was a distance coach, so I grew up running as a way of life and loved it.  In middle school and high school I pursued other sports and got away from it, but after graduating I started up again as a way to stay fit.  Soon I was practicing with my dad's top runners in the state and ended up walking on to my college cross country/track team.  I was never the best, but my teammates voted me co-captain my senior year.  Then competitive drive left me burned out, and I gradually lost the habit after college.  Later I rediscovered the fun of running with the trails at local parks and triathlon competitions.  Recently I've been less active.

I vividly remember the moment in college that I decided I didn't just want to run for fitness, I wanted be a runner.  We were at a college cross country meet watching a former star from our high school.  He and one other runner led the race.  As we cut across the turns of the course to see them again and again throughout the race, I became increasingly amazed at how long they could sustain such a fast pace.  It seemed they were flying through the course.  And even though part of me knew they were suffering from the effort, the runners I saw simply looked graceful and strong, joyful and peaceful.  I want to do that, I thought.  I will do that.

For the most part, I did.  I was never as fast as those particular runners, but I've experienced what I imagined them feeling many times.  There really is a runner's high, though it takes some fitness to achieve.  Aside from the endorphin high, though, there is a particular joy to running that is hard to explain.  I've tried to describe aspects of it before in some of my previous posts:

• In Trail Running Is My Favorite Form of Meditation (linked within the post linked for context), I quoted a couple of long sections from Christopher McDougal's book Born to Run.  An excerpt:  . . . "When I'm out on a long run," she continued, "the only thing in life that matters is finishing the run. For once, my brain isn't going blehblehbleh all the time. Everything quiets down, and the only thing going on is pure flow. It's just me and the movement and the motion. That's what I love--just being a barbarian, running through the woods." . . .

• I expanded on that thought with my own words in Do You Incubate Your Brain?, opening with, I'm always going on about how I do my best thinking while engaged in repetitive physical activities like hiking, swimming, biking, and running, then connecting it to the ideas in an article about daydreaming.

• And The Calm After the Storm begins with, Most of my most tranquil moments in life have come during quiet reflection after long, hard exercise, and then I explain.

None of those capture the complete experience, though.  Recently, the writer of the webcomic The Oatmeal did a series about his experience as a runner.  It is brilliant.  It could be about me and says nearly everything I'd want to say, in a quick visual format.  It's done in 6 parts.  If you want the payoff, the answer to "Why I Run," you could read part 6 because that says it.  But the whole series is worth it if you want to fully understand.  There are excellent internal links at the site and I don't expect you to come back here to navigate through the parts, but I'll link them all with a quick bit from each as an introduction; and since I know most readers are impatient, I'll start with part 6 then take you back to the beginning for the full story.

The Terrible and Wonderful Reasons Why I Run Long Distances:

Part 6. The Void - I run very fast because I desperately want to stand very still.  I run to seek a void.  The world around me is so very, very loud.  It begs me to slow down, to sit down, to lie down.  And the buzzing roar of the world is nothing compared to the noise inside my head.  I'm an introspective person, and sometimes I think too much, about my job and about my life.  I feed an army of pointless, bantering demons.  But when I run, the world grows quiet.  Demons are forgotten, Krakens are slain, and Blerches are silenced.

Part 1. The Blerch - The Blerch represents all forms of gluttony, apathy, and indifference that plague my life. . . . I run because it's the only way I know how to quiet the monster.  I run, because deep down, I am the Blerch.

Part 2. The Feeding - Running through forests and over mountains and under massive cityscapes makes me feel ALIVE.  Eating iceberg lettuce and counting calories makes me feel tired and robotic.  I run long distances for the worst possible reason: I run to eat.  I punish my body outdoors to atone for my atrocities indoors.

Part 3. Selfishness and Krakens - Running is a magical shortcut to that [euphoric sense of accomplishment].  It enables me to feel like my life is rocketing skyward, even if it's going straight to hell. . . . I run long distances because it makes me feel better.  I run because I want to slay the Kraken, I just don't want to actually lift the sword.

Part 4. Vanity - Running is not about building strength and wearing it like a fashion statement.  It's about finding strength and measuring yourself every single day.  I run long distances to feel good, not to look good.

Part 5. The Agony - I was too hot and miserable to enjoy the run physically, and I was too worried about the hornets to enjoy the run emotionally.  But that's how it goes with runners: through pain, we find serenity.  The greater the agony, the greater the eventual absolution.

Part 6. The Void - It was on this day, during this terrible and wonderful run, that a thought occurred to me, a thought which has never left me: I've always considered the question to be "Why am I alive?  Why am I here?  What's the point of me?"  And to that I say: WHO CARES!  FORGET THE WHY.  You are in a raging forest full of beauty and agony and magical grapey beverages and lightning storms and demon bees.  THIS IS BETTER THAN THE WHY.

Born to Run Review

For the first time, it hit me how cut off we were; we had no way of knowing what was going on in the outside world, or letting the outside world know what was happening to us. We were putting a hell of a lot of trust in Caballo, and once again, I had to wonder why; as knowledgeable as Caballo was, it still seemed crazy to put our lives in the hands of a guy who didn’t seem too concerned about his own.

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Christopher McDougall’s epic adventure began with a simple question: Why did his foot hurt? He was trying to run 2-3 miles 2-3 times a week, but couldn’t stay injury-free enough to do so. Doctors and experts consistently told him it just wasn’t meant to be; his body wasn’t built for running and he needed to find another activity. But if that was so, then why were so many other people so successful at running massive distances? And what was the secret of the mysterious, reclusive, so-called running people of Mexico? According to legend, they could all run 60 miles a day, day after day, until well into their late years. If doctors wouldn’t give him a satisfactory answer, he’d try to find out for himself.

The short version of the answer McDougall found is that the modern running shoe has taught us to run with incorrect mechanics. By cushioning the heel and allowing us to land on it, shoes have caused us to lengthen our stride, extending our legs in a way that creates a much harder impact and jerkier motion. We need to rediscover our natural gait, with our feet gently landing directly underneath us while our knees stay bent in a shorter, more fluid movement. Of all the creatures of the earth humans have the bodies most well designed for distance running, and we’re all more than capable of ultra distances if we can unlearn our bad habits and begin to function the way we were built to.

That’s the summary, but McDougall shares his entire journey of conversion and more. He’s one heck of an entertaining storyteller, and he has woven countless tales throughout the book. In his quest to discover his own inner runner, he has been part of a convergence of U.S. ultra marathoning and the Tarahumara people of remote Mexico. Along the way he’s had more than his share of adventures into the Mexican wild lands, science, and the ultrarunning subculture, and met an amazing number of amazingly colorful people. Reading about them is endlessly fascinating. His inquiry started well before his training, but less than a year after McDougall started relearning how to run in the barefoot manner of the Tarahumara, he successfully joined their best runners and a group of the top ultra runners from the U.S. in a fifty mile race up and down (not through) some of the wildest, most severe canyons in the world. He develops the story so well that I wanted all of the (real) characters to win that climactic race and couldn’t decide who to root for. Even if you’re not interested in learning to run like him, it’s an absorbing and stirring story.

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We followed the stony riverbank for a mile, then turned into a dry gully. Without a word, we all spontaneously broke into a trot. The gully was wide and sandy, leaving plenty of room for Scott and Barefoot Ted to flank Caballo and run three abreast.

"Check out their feet," said Eric. Even though Scott was in the Brooks trail shoe he’d helped design and Caballo was in sandals, they both skimmed their feet over the ground just the way Ted did in his bare feet, their foot strikes in perfect sync. It was like watching a team of Lipizzaner stallions circle the show ring.

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By the eve of Race Day, our numbers had tripled from eight to twenty-five. Up and down Urique’s main street, debate over who was now the true top seed was running hot: Was it Caballo Blanco, the wily old veteran who’d poached the secrets of both American and Tarahumara runners? Or the Urique Tarahumara, experts on the local trails who had hometown pride and support on their side? Some money was riding on Billy Bonehead, the Young Wolf, whose surf-god physique drew admiring stares whenever he went for a swim in the Urique River. But the heaviest street action was divided between the two stars: Arnulfo, king of the Copper Canyons, and El Venado, his mysterious foreign challenger.

"Si, senor," I replied to the shopkeeper. "Arnulfo won a one-hundred-kilometer race in the canyons three times. But the Deer has won a one-hundred-mile race in the mountains seven times."

"But it’s very hot down here," the shopkeeper retorted. "The Tarahumara, they eat heat."

"True. But the Deer won a one-hundred-thirty-five-mile race across a desert called Death Valley in the middle of summer. No one has ever run it faster."

"No one beats the Tarahumara," the shopkeeper insisted.

"So I’ve heard. So who are you betting on?"

He shrugged. "The Deer."

The Urique villagers had grown up in awe of the Tarahumara, but this tall gringo with the flashy orange shoes was unlike anyone they’d ever seen. It was eerie watching Scott run side by side with Arnulfo; even though Scott had never seen the Tarahumara before and Arnulfo had never seen the outside world, somehow these two men separated by two thousand years of culture had developed the same running style. They’d approached from opposite ends of history, and met precisely in the middle.

I first saw it up on Batopilas mountain, after we’d finally gotten to the top and the trail flattened as it circled the peak. Arnulfo took advantage of the plateau to open it up. Scott locked in beside him. As the trail curled into the setting sun, the two of them vanished into the glare. For a few moments, I couldn’t tell them apart--they were two fiery silhouettes moving with identical rhythm and grace.

"Got it!" Luis said, dropping back to show me the image in his digital camera. He’d sprinted ahead and wheeled around just in time to capture everything I’d come to understand about running over the past two years. It wasn’t Arnulfo’s and Scott’s matching form so much as their matching smiles; they were both grinning with sheer muscular pleasure, like dolphins rocketing through the waves.

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Comment I added to the review:

Browsing through the reviews, I see some readers were put off by the times McDougall seems to be making a sales pitch. He’s definitely making a persuasive case about something he feels passionately. But if you’ve ever been a runner, you know what he’s talking about and it’s not snake oil. At times in my life I’ve made a habit of running 10 miles at 10 at night, almost always feeling better after I finished rather than tired or sore. I’ve gotten up at 2 a.m. in the dead of winter to run a hill workout because I was too agitated to sleep. I’ve gone out at noon in 100 degree weather because that’s what my schedule allowed and it was too good to miss. In college I wrote a research paper about runner’s addiction because I could relate. Runner’s high really is as awesome as advertised. One of McDougall’s main contentions is that running and compassion go together. I feel I was a kinder, gentler, better (though more reclusive and with less initiative) person when I ran more. I’m 90 pounds heavier now than at my peak and struggle to get through 4 miles without walking these days, so it wasn’t good enough to keep me totally hooked and disciplined, but I’ve felt it and always want it back. I can see how you might not be convinced by him if you haven’t experienced what he’s talking about, but what he’s selling is real and if you have experienced it I don’t see how you won’t love this book.

They were so ignorant, they didn't even realize they were supposed to be burned out, overtained, and injured. Instead, they were fast.

I'm only about a third of the way done with Born to Run, but I am totally into it. My running geek is fascinated by learning more about the Leadville 100, the Adams State coach, and all kinds of other people, places, and things, I'm casually familiar with. McDougall knows how to tell a story, and he has an unending stream of them woven into this book.

More than geeked, though, I'm stirred. It makes me feel everything I love about running. Most serious runners time themselves with a watch, keep track of every mile in a log book, and turn it into a science. I stopped carrying a watch long ago, hate using a log book, and usually only have a vague route in mind when I take off--I just like to listen to my body and feel the moment and run what sounds fun. I've never been into massive distances and I hike much more often than I run anymore, but I've experienced a bit of what's described below.

After seeing how free and vigorous the nation's top collegiate runners looked at a meet, I decided I wanted that experience. I started running with my dad's high school cross country team for fun and a couple years later walked onto the team at Emporia when I transferred there. I was never our top runner, but I did end up as co-captain. The competitive drive eventually burned me out because it sapped the experience of fun, but I've had awesome runner's highs where I could just float all day along the road. It really is a great, joyful experience. I can't get there anymore with my current body, but hiking and other physical activities are still a joy that head in that direction.

I've selected some quotes from the section of the book I just finished in an attempt to capture it:

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What the Leadville Trail 100 boils down to: nearly four full marathons, half of them in the dark, with twin twenty-six-hundred-foot climbs smack in the middle. Leadville's starting line is twice as high as the altitude where planes pressurize their cabins, and from there you only go up. . . .

Leadville racers routinely fall off bluffs, break ankles, suffer over-exposure, get weird heart arrhythmias and altitude sickness. . . .

One Leadville legend is Marshall Ulrich, an affable dog-food tycoon who perked up his times by having his toenails surgically removed. "They kept falling off anyway," Marshal said. . . .

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One Saturday, Ann got up early and ran twenty miles. She relaxed over breakfast, then headed back out for twenty more. She had some plumbing chores around the house, so after finishing run No. 2, she hauled out her toolbox and got to work. By the end of the day, she was pretty pleased with herself; she'd run forty miles and taken care of a messy job on her own. So as a reward, she treated herself to another fifteen miles.

Fifty-five miles in one day. Her friends had to wonder, and worry. . . . she liked to tell them that running huge miles in the mountains was "very romantic."

Gotcha. Grueling, grimy, muddy, bloody, lonely trail-running equals moonlight and champagne.

But yeah, Ann insisted, running was romantic; and no, of course her friends didn't get it because they'd never broken through. For them, running was a miserable two miles motivated solely by size 6 jeans: get on the scale, get depressed, get your headphones on, and get it over with. But you can't muscle your way through a five-hour run that way; you have to relax into it, like easing your body into a hot bath, until it no longer resists the shock and begins to enjoy it.

Relax enough, and your body becomes so familiar with the cradle-rocking rhythm that you almost forget that you're moving. And once you break through to that soft, half-levitating flow, that's when the moonlight and champagne show up: "You have to be in tune with your body, and know when you can push it and when to back off," Ann would explain. You have to listen closely to the sound of your own breathing; be aware of how much sweat is beading on your back; make sure to treat yourself to cool water and a salty snack and ask yourself, honestly and often, exactly how you feel. What could be more sensual than paying exquisite attention to your own body? Sensual counted as romantic, right?

-----

Besides his Ph.D. and two master's degrees, Vigil's pursuit of the lost art of distance running had taken him deep into the Russian outback, high into the mountains of Peru, and far across Kenya's Rift Valley highlands. He'd wanted to learn why Russian sprinters are forbidden to run a single step in training until they can jump off a twenty-foot ladder in their bare feet, and how sixty-year-old goatherds at Machu Picchu can possibly scale the Andes on a starvation diet of yogurt and herbs, and how Japanese runners trained by Suzuki-san and Koide-san could mysteriously alchemize slow walking into fast marathons. He'd tracked down the old masters and picked their brains, vacuuming up their secrets before they disappeared into the grave. His head was a Library of Congress of running lore, much of it vanished from every place on the planet except his memory.

His research paid off sensationally. At his alma mater, Adams State College in Alamosa, Colorado, Vigil took over the dying cross-country program and engineered it into an absolute terror. Adams state harriers won twenty-six national titles in thirty-three years, including . . . the only shutout ever achieved at a national championship. . . . [He] was named College National Coach of the Year a record fourteen times. . . .

-----

How come nearly all the women finish Leadville and fewer than half the men do? Every year, more than 90 percent of the female runners come home with a buckle, while 50 percent of the men come up with an excuse. . . .

No woman ranked among the top fifty in the world in the mile . . . A woman might sneak into the top twenty in a marathon . . . But in ultras, women were taking home the hardware. Why, Vigil wondered, did the gap between male and female champions get smaller as the race got longer--shouldn't it be the other way around?

Ultrarunning seemed to be an alternate universe where none of planet Earth's rules applied: women were stronger than men; old men were stronger than youngsters; Stone Age guys in sandals were stronger than everybody. And the mileage! The sheer stress on their legs were off the charts. Running one hundred miles a week was supposed to be a straight shot to a stress injury, yet the ultrafreaks were doing one hundred miles in a day. Some of them were doing double that every week in training and still not getting hurt. Was ultrarunning self-selective, Vigil wondered--did it attract only runners with unbreakable bodies? Or had ultrarunners discovered the secret to megamileage? . . .

-----

[Emil] Zatopek was a bald, self-coached thirty-year-old apartment-dweller from a decrepit Eastern European backwater when he arrived for the 1952 Olympics in Helsinki. Since the Czech team was so thin, Zatopek had his choice of distance events, so he chose them all. He lined up for the 5,000 meters, and won with a new Olympic record. He then lined up for the 10,000 meters, and won his second gold with another new record. He'd never run a marathon before, but what the hell; with two golds already around his neck, he had nothing to lose, so why not finish the job and give it a bash?

Zatopek's inexperience quickly became obvious. It was a hot day, so England's Jim Peters, then the world-record holder, decided to use the heat to make Zatopek suffer. By the ten-mile mark, Peters was already ten minutes under his own world-record pace and pulling away from the field. Zatopek wasn't sure if anyone could really sustain such a blistering pace. "Excuse me," he said, pulling alongside Peters. "This is my first marathon. Are we going too fast?"

"No," Peters replied. "Too slow." If Zatopek was dumb enough to ask, he was dumb enough to deserve any answer he got.

Zatopek was surprised. "You say too slow," he asked again. "Are you sure the pace is too slow?"

"Yes," Peters said. Then he got a surprise of his own.

"Okay. Thanks." Zatopek took Peters at his word, and took off.

When he burst out of the tunnel and into the stadium, he was met with a roar: not only from the fans, but from athletes of every nation who thronged the track to cheer him in. Zatopek snapped the tape with his third Olympic record, but when his teammates charged over to congratulate him, they were too late: the Jamaican sprinters had already hoisted him on their shoulders and were parading him around the infield. . . . Zatopek found a way to run so that when he won, even other teams were delighted. . . .

"His enthusiasm, his friendliness, his love of life, shone through every movement," an overcome Ron Clarke said later. "There is not, and never was, a greater man than Emil Zatopek."

So here's what Coach Vigil was trying to figure out: was Zatopek a great man who happened to run, or a great man because he ran? Vigil couldn't quite put his finger on it, but his gut kept telling him that there was some kind of connection between the capacity to love and the capacity to love running. . . .

He'd made his bones by finding connections where everyone else saw coincidence, and the more he examined the compassion link, the more intriguing it became. Was it just by chance that the pantheon of dedicated runners also included Abraham Lincoln ("He could beat all the other boys in a footrace") and Nelson Mandela (a college cross-country standout who, even in prison, continued to run seven miles a day in place in his cell)? Maybe Ron Clarke wasn't being poetic in his description of Zatopek--maybe his expert eye was clinically precise: His love of life shone through every movement.

Yes! Love of life! Exactly! That's what got Vigil's heart thumping when he saw Juan and Martimano scramble happy-go-luckily up that dirt hill. He'd found his Natural Born Runner. he'd found an entire tribe of Natural Born Runners, and from what he'd seen so far, they were just as joyful and magnificent as he'd hoped.

-----

Because that was the cool part--Ann had been right there with them, which meant whatever the Tarahumara were doing, the rest of us could learn!

Might Have to Try Some Barefoot Running

"Everyone thinks they know how to run, but it's really as nuanced as any other activity," Eric told me. "Ask most people and they'll say, 'People just run the way they run.' That's ridiculous. Does everyone just swim the way they swim?" For every other sport, lessons are fundamental; you don't go out and start slashing away with a golf club or sliding down a mountain on skis until someone takes you through the steps and teaches you proper form. If not, inefficiency is guaranteed and injury is inevitable.

"Running is the same way," Eric explained. "Learn it wrong, and you'll never know how good it can feel." He grilled me for details about the race I'd seen at the Tarahumara school. ("The little wooden ball," he mused. "The way they learn to run by kicking it; that can't be an accident.") Then he offered me a deal; he'd get me ready for Caballo's race, and in return, I'd vouch for him with Caballo.

"If this race comes off, we have to be there," Eric urged. "It'll be the greatest ultra of all time."

"I just don't think I'm built for running fifty miles," I said.

"Everyone is built for running," he said.

"Every time I up my miles, I break down."

"You won't this time."

"Should I get the orthotics?"

"Forget the orthotics."

I was dubious, but Eric's absolute confidence was winning me over. "I should probably cut weight first to make it easier on my legs."

"Your diet will change all by itself. Wait and see."

"How about yoga? That'll help, yeah?"

"Forget yoga. Every runner I know who does yoga gets hurt."

This was sounding better all the time. "You really think I can do it?"

"Here's the truth," Eric said. "You've got zero percent margin of error. But you can do it." I'd have to forget everything I knew about running and start over from the beginning.

"Get ready to go back in time," Eric said. "You're going tribal."

-----

"The Tarahumara aren't great runners," Eric messaged me as we began my second month of those workouts. "They're great athletes, and those two things are very different." Runners are assembly-line workers; they become good at one thing--moving straight ahead at a steady speed--and repeat that motion until overuse fritzes out the machinery. Athletes are Tarzans. Tarzan swims and wrestles and jumps and swings on vines. He's strong and explosive. You never know what Tarzan will do next, which is why he never gets hurt.

"Your body needs to be shocked to become resilient," Eric explained. Follow the same daily routine, and your musculosketetal system quickly figures out how to adapt and go on autopilot. But surprise it with new challenges--leap over a creek, commando-crawl under a log, sprint till your lungs are bursting--and scores of nerves and ancillary muscles are suddenly electrified into action.

For the Tarahumara, that's just daily life. The Tarahumara step into the unknown every time the leave the cave, because they never know how fast they'll have to sprint after a rabbit, how much firewood they'll have to haul home, how tricky the climbing will be during a winter storm. The first challenge they face as kids is surviving on the edge of a cliff; their first and lifelong way to play is the ball game, which is nothing if not an exercise in uncertainty. You can't drive a wooden ball over a jumble of rocks unless you're ready to lunge, lope, backpedal, sprint, and leap in and out of ditches.

Before the Tarahumara run long, they get strong. And if I wanted to stay healthy, Eric warned me, I'd better do likewise. So instead of stretching before a run, I got right to work. Lunges, pushups, jump squats, crunches; Eric had me powering through a half hour of raw strength drills every other day, with nearly all of them on a fitness ball to sharpen my balance and fire those supportive ancillary muscles. As soon as I finished, it was off to the hills. "There's no sleepwalking your way up a hill," Eric pointed out. Long climbs were an exercise in shock and awe, forcing me to focus on form and shift gears like a Tour de France cyclist. "Hills are speedwork in disguise," Frank shorter used to say.

-----

From Born to Run

Was it a coincidence that the world's most enlightened people were also the world's most amazing runners?

"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn't matter whether you're a lion or a gazelle--when the sun comes up, you'd better be running."

--Roger Bannister, the first person to run a mile in under four minutes.

I started listening to a book today I've been looking forward to for a long time. Not only did it not disappoint, it's so far better than expected. Born to Run: A Hidden Tribe, Superathletes, and the Greatest Race the World Has Never Seen by Christopher McDougall. First a quote I like then a full introduction via The Daily Show

There's something so universal about that sensation, the way running unites our two most primal impulses: fear and pleasure. We run when we're scared, we run when we're ecstatic, we run away from our problems and run around for a good time.

And when things look worst, we run the most. Three times, America has seen distance-running skyrocket, and it's always in the midst of a national crisis. The first boom came during the Great Depression, when more than two hundred runners set the trend by racing forty miles a day across the country in the Great American Footrace. Running then went dormant, only to catch fire again in the early '70s, when we were struggling to recover from Vietnam, the Cold War, race riots, a criminal president, and the murders of three beloved leaders. And the third distance boom? One year after the September 11 attacks, trail-running suddenly became the fastest-growing outdoor sport in the country. Maybe it was a coincidence. Or maybe there's a trigger in the human psyche, a coded response that activates our first and greatest survival skill when we sense the raptors approaching. In terms of stress relief and sensual pleasure, running is what you have in your life before you have sex. The equipment and desire come factory installed; all you have to do is let 'er rip and hang on for the ride.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Christopher McDougall
www.thedailyshow.com
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And for a taste of things to come, we'll be discovering a group of people who exemplify this from another favorite book:

In skeletal form, it appears horribly uncomfortable, as though the knee would be pounded to paste in a couple of miles. But the entire human body has been remodeled to make the most of this joint. From head to toe, I’m built to run, with the knee forming a hinge that allows my leg to swing forward for the next stride. . . .

Only a few animals enjoy membership in the distance-runners’ club. They are the horse, wolves (and domestic dogs), African hunting dogs, the hyena, the migrating wildebeest, and we Homo sapiens. . . . And when biologists compare humans to other distance runners, we travel at the front of the pack. . . .

The Bushmen of the Kalahari still hunt antelope that way. For hours they’ll chase the animal, preventing it from resting or cooling off. Antelope, and most other animals, will tire before we will.

Trail Running Is My Favorite Form of Meditation

I was wasting my time, but there was a chance I'd be picking up Jenn "Mookie" Shelton and Billy "Bonehead" Barnett, a pair of twenty-one-year-old hotshots who'd been electifying the East Coast ultra circuit, at least whenever they weren't otherwise occupied surfing, partying, or posting bail for simple assault (Jenn), disorderly conduct (Billy), or public indecency (both, for a burst of trailside passion that resulted in an arrest and community service). . . .

Jenn was wearing flip-flops, surf shorts, and a tie-dyed T-shirt. Her summer-wheat hair was in braids, giving her the look of a blonder, lesser-known Longstocking. She was pretty and petite enough to pass for a figure skater, an image she'd tried in the past to scruff up by shaving her head down to stubble and getting a big, black vampire bat tattoed on her right forearm, only discovering later that it was a dead ringer for the Bacardi rum logo. "Whatever," Jenn said with a shrug. "Truth in advertising." . . .

At the Old Dominion 100 a few months later, aid-station volunteers at the halfway mark heard screams echoing through the woods. Moments later, a girl in pigtails burst from the trees. She flipped up in a handstand, jumped back to her feet, and began shadowboxing. . . .

"You've got to get her to slow down," one of the aid-station volunteers told Billy. "She's going three hours faster than the course record." . . .

Billy shrugged. After a year of romance with Jenn, he'd learned she was capable of absolutely anything except moderation. Even when she wanted to rein herself in, whatever was building inside her--passion, inspiration, aggravation, hilarity--inevitably came fire-hosing out. After all, this was a woman who joined the UNC rugby team and set a standard considered previously unachievable throughout the sport's one-hundred-seventy-year history: Too Wild for Rugby Parties. . . .

"I never really discussed this with anyone because it sounds pretentious, but I started running ultras to become a better person," Jenn told me. "I thought if you could run one hundred miles, you'd be in this Zen state. You'd be the fucking Buddha, bringing peace and a smile to the world. It didn't work in my case--I'm the same old punk-ass as before--but there's always that hope that it will turn you into the person you want to be, a better, more peaceful person.

"When I'm out on a long run," she continued, "the only thing in life that matters is finishing the run. For once, my brain isn't going blehblehbleh all the time. Everything quiets down, and the only thing going on is pure flow. It's just me and the movement and the motion. That's what I love--just being a barbarian, running through the woods."

-----

As the rest of us had discovered during the long bus ride, Barefoot Ted talked the way Charlie Parker played the sax: he'd pick up on any cue and cut loose with a truly astonishing torrent of improvisation, seeming to breathe in through his nose while maintaining an endless flow of sound out of his mouth. . . .

"My life is a controlled explosion," Barefoot Ted likes to say. . . .

Because Lisa was a bouncer at a heavy-metal bar and only got home at 3 a.m., her exposure to Ted was limited to the dry-land version of the bottom of the pool: after work, she'd come home to find Ted sitting quietly at the kitchen table, eating rice and beans with his nose buried in French philosophy. His stamina and intelligence were already legendary among his roommates; Ted could paint all morning, skateboard all afternoon, and memorize Japanese verbs all night. He'd fix Lisa a hot plate of beans, and then, with his manic motor finally running down, he'd stop performing and let her talk. Every once in a while, he'd chip in a sensitive insight, then encourage her to go on. Few ever saw this Ted. That was their great loss--and his. . . .

On his first barefoot run, Ted went five miles and felt . . . nothing. Not a twinge. He bumped it up to an hour, then two. Within months, Ted had transformed himself from an aching, fearful non-runner into a barefoot marathoner with such speed that he was able to accomplish something that 99.9 percent of all runners never will: he qualified for the Boston Marathon.

Intoxicated with his startling new talent, Ted kept pushing further. He went on to run the Mother Road 100--one hundred miles of asphalt on the original Route 66--and the Leona Divide fifty-miler, and Angeles Crest 100-Mile Endurance Run through the rugged San Gabriel Mountains. . . .

"All right!" Ted said, clapping his hands. "Who gets me?"

Silence.

"Okay," Scott said. "But you've got to let me sleep."

We shut our doors and sank into deep piles of wool blankets. Silence fell of Creel, until the last thing Scott heard was Barefoot Ted's voice in the dark.

"Okay, brain," Ted muttered. "Relax. Time to quiet down."

-----

From Born to Run

Reflecting and Expecting

On 2011 and of 2012, respectively.

2011 was an eventful year for me, to say the least, although in some ways it's been a lead-in to a potentially even more eventful 2012. My blogging has decreased accordingly, as I even addressed in a September post titled Still Hanging Around: . . . it seems for a few months now I've been bouncing back and forth between really busy and tired to rather mellow, tranquil, and content. Neither state leads to very good rants or musings.

I won't go into all of it here because much of it I consider too private for this forum, but the past year has included many trips to hospitals with loved ones, moving, dealing with tight economic times at work, stresses with exes, chronic exercise injury, travel, excellent times with friends and family, new love, my 40th birthday, and an engagement announcement.

To touch on that last one a bit, a year ago I wrote a rambling, roundabout meditation on my dislike for New Year's resolutions even though I eventually arrived at a vague intent for 2011. I rather like the post: Dawn of a Brand New . . . ish . . . well . . . just another day, really. (And I'm quite fond of the two posts linked within it, although I do understand you don't have eternity to spend reading through the history of this blog.) I more implied my intent than stated it explicitly, but I indicated I wanted to create more opportunities for romance. Soon after writing the post, I created profiles for myself on two dating sites and pursued that for a good part of the year.

But a funny thing happened along the way. In the post, I wrote: Meeting someone for a date seems like such a constructed, performance-based event. Each person is on his or her best behavior, presenting a persona to make an impression. Or even when they're not, there's doubt about it since that's the expectation. I'd much rather see someone in her natural habitat being her everyday self and have her get to know me in the same way, and if a relationship organically develops then it does. But only so many people just organically enter our lives in an everyday way, and waiting can be an exercise in futility. Once I decided to stop waiting around and pursue something more intentional, an organic situation emerged. It was surprising and unexpected, has been much more of a rapidly evolving whirlwind than might seem prudent, and has been more wondrous and precious and happy than I ever thought possible.

So 2011 started with a more formal, radical resolution than is my habit. Though nothing came directly from the actions I took in pursuing what I resolved, something came about in that same realm that delightfully overshot the mark, and now 2012 looks to include a wedding, a honeymoon, a new house, and more.

I don't think any of that particularly relates to resolutions for the new year, though (although we are a week into our "wedding dress" workout regimen). No, I think 2012 looks to be eventful enough without adding the pressure of a "to do" list of things to add to my routine or feel I need to accomplish. Nevertheless, it's my nature to seek life-long learning and constant self-improvement. In keeping with that, I want to share another vague intent, this time one with much more continuity with my general operating procedure. (And for those of you who do have eternity to spend reading through the history of this blog, prepare for more links to past posts demonstrating the continuity and elaborating on my foundation for pursuing this intent.)

I don't generally use the term "Renaissance person" because I'm not sure what associations and connotations others might have for it, but I've always been drawn to the idea since it seems to fit me instinctively. In I Want to Be a Generalist (and in the intro here) I wrote about my predisposition for variety and being well-rounded, how I am interested in many different things and don't want to specialize in any. Despite the expert advice I've seen many times, I refuse to focus this blog because I want it to reflect my many, random interests, from the Tour de France to politics, religion, and social justice to nature walks and photography to children's literature to books I read to Dungeons & Dragons and much more. This blog is about me and any topic that catches my eye, which means it will be far-ranging and diverse.

We were Christmas shopping at Half-price Books and I came across one that intrigued me. It wasn't a category I normally go for and I was blindly hoping I'd run into something that would work for the person I had in mind, and I did. I not only bought him a copy of the book as a gift, I bought the second copy they had for myself. I don't have any great expectations that it will be particularly deep or well-written or will provide that perfect formula to a magically happy life that it offers, but I hope to get some good things out of it and apply them to my life. Add to my wisdom, if you will.

So that's my resolution for the New Year: read How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci and see if I can put its "Seven Da Vincian Principles" into practice in new and deeper ways. Because it was reading the descriptions of those seven principles that won me over to the book. I'm sure I'll be blogging more about them as I get to the book, but here they are, in brief:

Curiosita - An insatiably curious approach to life and an unrelenting quest for continuous learning.

Which I've already made some reference to above and hope this blog (and my daily life, for those of you who know me) already demonstrates regularly.

Dimostrazione - A commitment to test knowledge through experience, persistence, and a willingness to learn from mistakes.

I've always called myself a trial-and-error learner (including here).

Sensazione - The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to enliven experience.

This brings to mind my recent post Keep Your Head Up, among other thoughts.

Sfumato (literally "Going up in Smoke") - A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty.

I've said many times to many people, including in this blog post, we need to Embrace Contradiction and Paradox.

Arte/Scienza - The development of the balance between science and art, logic and imagination. "Whole-brain" thinking.

I remember in high school saying that my favorite subject was science, math, art, and music, and most recently blogged along these lines in: Are Knowledge and Imagination Dichotomous?

Corporalita - The cultivation of grace, ambidexterity, fitness, and poise.

I would guess I tend to be a bit brutish for this particular definition, but I can't live happily without exercise and physical activity (see, for instance: Finally Indexing All My Born to Run Posts).

Connessione - A recognition of and appreciation for the interconnectedness of all things and phenomena. Systems thinking.

I'm not remembering at the moment if I've specifically delved into this idea in a post, but I think it's an underlying assumption to the basic philosophy that informs much of what I say.

So maybe reading this book won't be much of a revelatory or transformative experience for me, but I'm hoping it will help me continue to grow during a year that looks to have more than its fair share of eventfulness and challenge already. Who knows, maybe I'll even like it so much I get the workbook.

A Few Thoughts on Memory

Recently I was showing a friend a walking trail at a park I hadn't visited for at least 4-5 years, and in the middle of our walk I blurted out, "I listened to football here." I couldn't remember the exact details--probably, I believe, because it had happened multiple times and I was remembering more than one thing--but I knew without a doubt I'd had sports radio playing on my headphones while doing the same thing in the past. It was such a vivid sensation, I had to share. That wasn't the first time it's happened. I make a habit of listening to audiobooks on long walks, hikes, and runs. Later, whether it's the very next time I use that same section of trail or road or months or even years later, I'll suddenly have a vivid memory of a scene or section from a book I was listening to when at that spot previously. The physical location is somehow linked to the listening experience and the activity.

Those events seem to be spontaneous triggers for specific memories. The same can happen with particular smells, songs, and other sensory associations. More often, I'll be trying to remember something and coming up blank at first, yet I'll know the memory or information is rattling around in my brain somewhere. If another person is involved, I'll ask them to keep describing the situation in different ways, until they say the one thing that clicks and suddenly I'll have access to the memory. It indeed was in there, I just had to figure out how to find it. As a librarian, I think of it as needing to find the right keyword for my search to bring up the results I want. I know the the information exists, I just have to figure out how it was classified, labeled, and stored so I can find it, and sometimes I have to try multiple searches before I can figure it out.

I'm not crazy, because that's the way memory works. And once you know that's how memory works, there are tricks you can teach yourself to make it work better. The sensory associations are key, particularly images. When I remember the football and audiobooks on my walks, I'm not remembering the words I was hearing, but the images I created in my head when I heard them. Those images are linked to the images of my physical surroundings when they played through my head, so when I revisit the places the other images come with them. The human brain's ability to recall images is much more vast than most people realize, so if you want to remember something they key is to associate it to an image.

Joshua Foer describes his experience of learning just that in Moonwalking with Einstein. While observing the event for a journalistic article, he became so intrigued by the U.S.A. Memory Championships that he decided to enter the competitive memory world and a year later won the title. He found that memory masters don't necessarily have superior intelligence or innate talent, they just practice hard using the classic mnemonic device of memory palaces--remembered or imagined physical spaces in which you mentally place images of what you want to remember, so that by "walking" through the palaces later you encounter the images and remember what they represent. As I read, I couldn't help but be reminded of Christopher McDougall's Born to Run, because the two books are written with similar structures. Like McDougall, Foer describes how went from becoming aware of an elite group who compete in an unusual task to becoming one of them. Along the way he sought out experts and learned everything he could about the topic. Interwoven with his personal experience is stories about the unusual personalities and characters he met who compete in the field, an exploration into the history of the field, and an investigation into the science of the field, the human potential and limitations. I'm pretty sure I won't be building any memory palaces of my own, but I learned a lot of interesting things and had fun doing so.

After having learned how to memorize poetry and numbers, cards and biographies, I'm convinced that remembering more is only the most obvious benefit of the many months I spent training my memory. What I had really trained my brain to do, as much as to memorize, was to be more mindful, and to pay attention to the world around me. Remembering can only happen if you decide to take notice. . . .

How we perceive the world and how we act in it are products of how and what we remember. We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say networks of our memory. No lasting joke, invention, insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least. Our ability to find humor in the world, to make connections between previously unconnected notions, to create new ideas, to share in a common culture: All these essentially human acts depend on memory. Now more than ever, as the role of memory in our culture erodes at a faster pace than ever before, we need to cultivate our ability to remember. Our memories make us who we are. They are the seat of our values and source of our character. Competing to see who can memorize more pages of poetry might seem beside the point, but it's about taking a stand against forgetfulness, and embracing primal capacities from which too many of us have become estranged. That's what Ed had been trying to impart to me from the beginning: that memory training is not just for the sake of performing party tricks; it's about nurturing something profoundly and essentially human.

It’s All of Us: or, Believing Can End Suffering; It's a Kind of Love

One of my favorite things I've written on this blog, over ten years ago in Imagination: Not Just for Kids, summing up thoughts about the imaginative play of groups of children, along with role-playing games like D&D and other adult equivalents, is:

And, really, in a very broad sense, isn't this what we're doing when we discuss politics and religion, when we gossip and spread rumors, when we create mission and vision statements for our workplaces, when we try to figure out how to live with one another as neighbors and define ourselves as communities--aren't we really just negotiating the rules of our shared games and trying to find groups to be part of whose styles match our own?  How we define reality is up to all of us to figure out together, and it happens in the interplay between us.

I've regularly revisited that thought and referenced it in other posts, such as here, here, and here. It makes a good introduction for some related thoughts today, all leading up to two long sections about a couple of excellent books I've read recently about refugees and immigrants.

The last time I cracked open The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows to take in a few more new words, I was struck by part of its description of Amicy, which is the mystery of what goes on behind the scenes of your social life:

It’s comforting to imagine that conspiracies run our world. To think there is some hidden order to things, a superstructure held high over our heads by a shadowy cabal of insiders. Of course, there’s no hidden order—but then again, of course there is. It’s all of us. We’re all insiders, managing an intricate web of relationships, deploying hundreds of unseen gestures and soft power plays, soaking up gossip with all the urgency of counterintelligence. It’s at once mundane, and yet no less chilling than any other conspiracy, because it leaves you questioning the very fabric of reality, wondering what you don’t know. . . . 

None of us knows the full picture of what’s really going on. All we know for sure is that some mysterious force is working behind the scenes to keep our communities intact and our relationships running—sometimes smoothly, sometimes not. But we all sleep a little better, knowing some sort of conspiracy is afoot. Otherwise we’d be tossing and turning all night, haunted by the notion that we’re all just acting alone.

We are each a small fraction of that powerful, amorphous force known as "us," slightly shaping it even as it shapes us.

This essay is basically one person's report on another, older thinker; it, nevertheless, is fascinating and eloquent. I love it.

The Magic of the Mundane

There is nothing simple about passing through a public space. Instead, we are always expected to reassure strangers around us that we are rational, trustworthy and pose no threat to the social order. We do this by conforming to all manner of invisible rules, governing, for example, the distance we maintain from one another, where we direct our eyes and how we carry ourselves. These complex rules help us understand ourselves and one another. Break such a rule, and you threaten a ‘jointly maintained base of ready mutual intelligibility’. . . . 

Goffman’s ‘microsociology’ reveals that even the most incidental of social interactions is of profound theoretical interest. Every encounter is shaped by social rules and social statuses; ‘whether we interact with strangers or intimates, we will find that the fingertips of society have reached bluntly into the contact’. Such interactions contribute to our sense of self, to our relationships with others, and to social structures, which can often be deeply oppressive. Never mind the dealings of the courtroom, the senate, or the trading floor, it is in the mundane interactions of everyday life, Goffman thought, that ‘most of the world’s work gets done’. . . . 

Goffman eschewed this macrosociology in favour of analysing minute face-to-face interactions. He examined, for example, how Baltasound locals greeted one another as they passed on the roads, how they changed their behaviour depending on whether they were among customers or colleagues, and how they dealt with social gaffes, such as getting someone’s name wrong.

In this PhD research, we find the kernel of Goffman’s most famous idea: that social interactions are governed by a complicated set of norms and expectations he called ‘the interaction order’. Understanding this interaction order was key, he thought, to understanding how humans develop individual and group identities, how relationships are formed and navigated, and how systems of exclusion and oppression form. . . . 

Just as an actor behaves differently on stage from in the wings, so too does each of us alter our behaviour depending on the context. When we are in the presence of others, we strive to present ourselves as occupying a particular social role, be that an employee, an employer, a teacher, a student, a neighbour. We use our bodies and our words to give off certain strategic information. . . . 

His point was that being a member of society required constant work – a constant process of impression management, of making oneself intelligible to others through subtle cues and gestures. Just as a character in a play is the result of an actor’s hard graft, so too is a person’s identity the product of an ongoing creative project, performed to and with an audience. . . . 

It is tempting to think that the primary goal of conversation is the exchange of information. Indeed, this remains an assumption in much contemporary philosophy of language. Goffman shows us that conversation is far more than this and can be just as much about preserving each other’s sense of self as about communicating facts or opinions.

The interaction order governs far more than just our conversations. Goffman thought that we were subject to invisible rules even when merely existing in the presence of strangers. Consider how you act when you sit next to a stranger on the train or pass someone you have never seen before in the street. It’s likely that you will momentarily glance over them – a mere flicker – then conspicuously look away, like a car dipping its lights. Through this procedure, ‘the slightest of interpersonal rituals’, you abide by what Goffman calls the ‘norm’ of ‘civil inattention’; you subtly acknowledge the other’s presence, while signalling that you have ‘no untoward intent nor [expect] to be an object of it’. . . . 

While Goffman loved to shine his sociological torch on the intricate web of social norms, he saw no intrinsic value in the norms themselves. In fact, he was often highly critical of their exclusionary potential. . . . he showed great sympathy for the plight of ‘deviants’, people who did not or could not comply with the interaction order, for psychological or physical reasons, and who were therefore excluded from social participation. . . . 

A stigmatised person, Goffman argued, will forever remain a ‘resident alien’. Her ostensible inclusion in any community will always be provisional and precarious, and she will live in fear of discomfiting those who deign to include her. Such a person will be expected to extend to her new community an acceptance that they will never quite extend to her in return. She can hope for, at best, a ‘phantom acceptance’, which in turn allows for a sense of ‘phantom normalcy’. . . . 

What we might write off as personal awkwardness is in fact evidence of acute attunement to social norms. Features of our bodies, our behaviours and our minds that others have told us are inherent flaws are in fact of no moral significance – their alleged defectiveness stems from arbitrary social standards of ‘normality’. And ultimately, it is only once we grasp the contingency and artificiality of such social norms, especially those that oppress, that we can begin to transform them.

We are always expected to reassure strangers around us that we are rational, trustworthy and pose no threat to the social order.

Being a member of society requires constant work – a constant process of impression management, of making oneself intelligible to others through subtle cues and gestures.

A person’s identity is the product of an ongoing creative project, performed to and with an audience.

How systems of exclusion and oppression form. . . . A stigmatised person will forever remain a ‘resident alien’.

As a foreign kid, I knew that American was a performance. So is refugee, good mother, top manager. Scientist is harder, but still a performance, inherited and learned.

That's from the book Who Gets Believed?: When the Truth Isn't Enough by Dina Nayeri.

This is a fascinating, passionate, personal, and complex book about a complicated, abstract, slippery concept, that of interpersonal belief.

The Library Journal review calls the book "genre-defying" and Publishers Weekly says it's "wide-ranging." My library assigned it Dewey Decimal number 177.3. I was curious just what category that puts it into, and the breakdown according to LibraryThing is: Philosophy and Psychology > Ethics > Social Ethics > Truth - Slander - Flattery. After reading the book, I think that fits pretty well. This is Nayeri's exploration, from her very personal perspective, of the subjective, social, cultural nature of truth. Some have power to define what is "true" while others don't. There are myriad dimensions to this idea, and Nayeri considers many of them.

Some authors try to hide their backgrounds and biases behind a veneer of attempted neutrality; Nayeri does the opposite. Her life experiences are central to her thoughts about her topic, so she openly--and vulnerably--brings them forward in her considerations. The book almost reads like a memoir at times, which is part of what makes it so hard to classify, as she weaves stories from her personal life into every topic that emerges in this wide-ranging journey.

The central theme that runs through the book is the plight of international refugees seeking asylum, and the bureaucratic processes they must navigate in the hopes of being believed as truly in need of sanctuary. It's a difficult process, made more so by the desperate, powerless state of being a refugee.

Nayeri herself experienced the process with her family as a child, fleeing from Iran due to religious persecution after her mother converted to Evangelical Christianity. Both of her parents were doctors, and their education and status surely helped. Before becoming a writer, she went to Harvard Business School and was trained by a top management consulting firm. Her perspectives from both her non-Western refugee background and her upper-class education inform her thoughts and emerge as themes. Another major one is her life-long struggle with her mother's faith, particularly her inability to find anything authentic in their church's practice of speaking in tongues. Most personally, she tells the story of her refusal to believe the mental illness diagnosis of her significant other's brother.

The book moves constantly from stories of those refusing to believe the genuine need of asylum-seekers, which outrages Nayeri, to stories from her life where she has refused to believe others, often causing them pain and hardship.

It is searing, insightful, and layered, and compels readers to think deeply.

Highly recommended.

As a foreign kid, I knew that American was a performance. So is refugee, good mother, top manager. Scientist is harder, but still a performance, inherited and learned. Sometimes the drama boils over; sometimes it's a pot on low simmer. In fields where expertise is harder won, more grueling and high stakes, archetypal expectations fall away--one performs brain surgeon as much as CEO, but only by completing brain surgeries. Do that well and you're free to smell like bubblegum and wear boat shoes to work. A CEO is all theater, aped and perfected in private, then trotted out publicly to varying degrees of success. There are some excellent fakers out there.

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McKinsey [management consulting firm] had taught me how to be a twenty-two-year-old who knows nothing but is treated like a savior with all the answers. . . .

Arguing against yourself is also a business school trick. Within the Western dogma of personal power (a belief that other people's potential is enriching, and their need toxic), arguing against yourself is a signal that, to survive, you need nothing from the other person, even if they hold your life in their hands. . . .

[A refugee wrote], "If you are a good storyteller you will be trusted, get a life, and escape from hell. But what do you need to do to be trusted, if telling the truth is not enough?"

The truth isn't enough. Most people aren't even listening for it. They're listening for something else. . . .

Despite all the talk of leadership and change-making, what you actually learn at Harvard Business School is how to be believed--how to be the ones people want to believe, feel safe believing, given their heuristic shortcuts. Some of that, we were taught, is achieved by developing a reputation for honesty, for precision. Some is communicated through signals and codes, the kind that exist in every profession. My classmates and I had privileged upbringings: not all wealthy, but from educated families (like mine, who were doctors), or trained at prestigious firms and universities. We knew how to dress and had internalized the language of the trusted classes. Over hundreds of case-method discussions, we taught it to each other.

Before we decide how to listen to a story, we put people on a spectrum. Do they come to us with need or with potential? Should we listen with our guard up or our imagination on? Will aligning with this person benefit or drain us? How does the storyteller signal, even before that first interaction, that they are worthy of an unguarded, imaginative listen?

Anyone with a boss knows the basics: lock eyes, shake hands firmly, under-promise, over-deliver, repeat. At Harvard Business School, we picked up other ways to affect the need/potential calculus. . . .

Later I went through the list and tried to figure out what it would be like if a refugee in an asylum interview had this same education. . . .

Refugees come with need, so we tell them that there is no room for human error or flaws. Their stories are shorn of trivial oddities, stripped of color, subjected to absurd burdens of proof.

It didn't take long for me to decide that Josh wasn't sick, but grifting. . . . The cure wasn't therapy; it was work. Just hard, exhausting, meaningful work. "Josh isn't sick," I said to Sam, "and it's not about genetics or my fears for our baby. He's a privileged white boy. Safety nets beneath safety nets."

I thought: these beloved children of successful parents, they can never do wrong, are never allowed to suffer. Not just consequences, but everyday discipline, too.

-----

Just as grief performance is shaped by culture, so is all storytelling. But it is also singular. Stories worth telling are created by our relationship with culture--they are strange, unrepeatable. That's what makes them worth telling.

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Who is hardest to believe, I ask [doctor] Adam, and who does most of the disbelieving?

Of countless medical biases he's seen, Adam describes three notable ones: the Google bias (used to dismiss teens and the elderly), the poverty bias (used disproportionately against poor people of color), and the you-should-be-healthy bias (a quick way to disbelieve women).

In training, the young [asylum caseworker] graduate is told that her job is to root out inconsistency. Then a ritual begins, a drumbeat of danger and despair that over weeks and months wears her down. The ritual changes her. How can so many people come out of the same country with the exact same injuries? How can so many people have crossed the same bridge, met the same smuggler, worn out their shoes on the same treacherous mountain? It seems impossible that she should meet twenty men a day, all dark, with the same face, the same stature, branded with the same scar patterns, running from the same villain.

"They look exactly the same," she tells her supervisor. "They're taking the same meds. Telling the same story. Why are the scars so alike?"

If she had spoken to a survivor thirty years past her pain, or a lawyer, or a charity worker, these men and women might have told her: Because something big is happening inside their small country--a tiny patch of the earth is spewing out refugees now. Yes, they are all young, brown men with many shared traits, and they look the same to you because you are white. They are fleeing a common villain, and that villain does have a single brand, a torture device, that he favors. As for for why they tell their story the same way, it is language, culture, the fact that they all learned English storytelling from the same five helpers along the way.

Instead, the senior caseworker shrugs, "They all buy their tall tales and fake papers from the same lot. God knows, probably they get themselves branded by the same thug."

-----

Believing against all reason is something to be proud of, because it shows the depths of her trust. This is the logic that evangelical churches use when they gather children in a circle and bid them to speak in tongues. "If you believe enough, you can do it! If you can't, it's only because you doubted." It is eerily like the "I believe" chants that bring Tinkerbell back to life. . . .

I didn't read Western storybooks until I was ten, and when I did, I found them bizarre. Why are American children told, in dire times, to close their eyes and wish harder? That chanting "I believe" will stay a fairy's death? . . .

Soon I learned that the fairy tales were only the beginning of a long and alarming education for these lucky kids. This collective fairy tale conditioning--the doctrine of exceptionalism of the elect, a chosen few who get to speak their desires and expect fulfillment--prepares for an unexamined adulthood in which the believer never questions why so many of her wishes have been fulfilled till now (never considering the accident of birth, the privilege of race, class, and nationality, even the kindness of neighbors, or the strength of a community). It also means she never has to face such questions in the future, since she is trained to proudly and boldly believe against data, history, science, and reason. After all, faith, according to every storybook tale, is worth so much more. And those who truly believe are so few, and ever rewarded.

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When a president calls migrants "thugs" or "criminals," he enters those words into history, an accusation that their children and grandchildren will have to answer for decades, privately, in the subconscious of their neighbors and classmates and coworkers. Simple visual metaphors become red herrings in the public memory. Once refugees are a swarm, Mexicans are rapists, women are banshees, it is trying, Sisyphean work to untangle the image from the reality--the red herring remains lodged at the story's center. For a red herring to be forgotten, a single compelling and inevitable truth has to emerge and overpower the trick. . . .

The fossilized lie is public memory. . . . For an opportunist and a grifter, truth is a feeble match for a good performative.

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Believing can end suffering; it's a kind of love.

The fossilized lie is public memory. Truth is a feeble match for a good performative.

Believing can end suffering; it's a kind of love.

I have to admit, I was compelled for this context more by the introduction and conclusion of this essay than the personal story in between--though the entire thing is worth reading.

I Rebuilt My Self-Esteem by Changing the Story of Who I Am

Your sense of who you are is deeply entwined in the stories you tell about yourself and your experiences. Storytelling is a big part of how we develop a view of our lives . . .

I found a different story to tell about my family and about my life. This rewriting of my story has parallels with the process of ‘narrative therapy’ – which has to do with finding more positive ways to interpret and tell our life experiences. . . .

We’re born without words, let alone stories, Adler explains, ‘and storytelling is a skill we learn from other people. So it always comes from outside at the beginning. Indeed, even when we tell a story to ourselves, we then put that story out into the world and get feedback on it. In a way, then, our stories are always these negotiations with other people.’ Sometimes they unfold directly through dialogue with the people in our immediate lives, such as our family or friends – but, other times, they’re broader cultural stories.

Our stories are always these negotiations with other people.

In my introduction to the book American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America by Colin Woodward, presenting some of its main ideas, I wrote:

Once a culture is geographically established, it is very hard to change and only does so gradually and incrementally. Those who move into an established nation find themselves adapting to and adopting its ideals, cultures, and values instead of changing it.

Woodward was describing regional differences in the U.S., but the idea came to mind while I was reading Streets of Gold: America's Untold Story of Immigrant Success by Ran Abramitzky and Leah Boustan.

Abramitzky and Boustan make a compelling case that many of the common narratives about immigration are not supported by facts and that new stories need to be told. Technology has allowed them to gather long-term, wide-ranging data in massive amounts never available before and see what picture that data paints. Their main conclusions, in their own words:

We will provide evidence that will revise myths about immigration in three major ways. First, the nostalgic view of immigrants in the past moving quickly from rags to riches does not fit the facts. Second, newcomers today are just as quick to move up the economic ladder as in the past, and immigrants now are integrating into American culture just as surely as immigrants did back then. And finally, immigrant success does not come at the expense of US-born workers.

Their writing is clear, readable, and engaging, sharing their data point-by-point in compelling narratives, making strong and convincing arguments. Immigration is good for the U.S., and they make policy suggestions based on their conclusions. Perhaps most important is sharing new narratives about the topic of immigration, ones based not on assumptions and "common sense," but the large pools of data these authors have collected.

More from the introduction:

The very power of such large datasets is that we do not need to rely on the recollections of a small number of immigrants who left diaries or memoirs, and we do not need to wonder whether a particular story is typical or an exception.

Indeed, when we turn to the big data, we find that many of Americans' widely held beliefs about immigrant success do not stand up to scrutiny. . . .

We will provide evidence that will revise myths about immigration in three major ways. First, the nostalgic view of immigrants in the past moving quickly from rags to riches does not fit the facts. Second, newcomers today are just as quick to move up the economic ladder as in the past, and immigrants now are integrating into American culture just as surely as immigrants did back then. And finally, immigrant success does not come at the expense of US-born workers. . . .

The true ascent for immigrant families happens in the next generation. We find in the data that the children of immigrants from nearly every country, especially children of poor immigrants, are more upwardly mobile than the children of US-born residents. The children of immigrants from El Salvador are as likely to be economically successful nowadays as were the children of immigrants from Great Britain 150 years ago. . . .

All in all, we find a common immigrant story of strong economic mobility in both the past and the present. This shared immigrant experience is all the more remarkable given the dramatic changes in immigration policy over time. . . . The American Dream is just as real for immigrants from Asia and Latin America now as it was for immigrants from Italy and Russia one hundred years ago. . . .

The data shows that current immigrants do not assimilate into US society any more slowly than past immigrants. Both in the past and today, immigrants make tremendous efforts to join American society. . . .

When we look to the evidence--either for past or the present--we do not find that immigrants steal the last slice from a fixed pie. Rather, immigrants help the economy grow, contributing to science, innovation, and culture. . . .

The data conveys a clear message: immigration is good for America, and immigrants and their children ultimately become Americans, both then and now.

That's the essence of a really clear and straightforward introduction that deftly summarizes everything that follows. Here are a few other excerpts that jumped out as I was reading:

The children of first-generation immigrants growing up close to the bottom of the income distribution (at the 25th percentile) are more likely to reach the middle of the income distribution than are children of similarly poor US-born parents.

What's more, no matter which country their parents came from, children of immigrants are more likely than the children of the US born to surpass their parents' incomes when they are adults. . . .

Not only does upward mobility define the horizons of people's lives, but it also has implications for the economy as a whole. Some voters worry that poor immigrants will drain public resources, but this concern doesn't take into account the very real possibility of upward mobility. A 2016 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine report found that first-generation immigrants use more public services than they pay into the system in terms of taxes, in large part because of the cost of educating their children in public schools. "However," the report concludes, "as adults, the children of immigrants (the second generation) are among the strongest economic and fiscal contributors in the U.S. population, contributing more in taxes than either their parents or the rest of the native-born population." Even immigrants who come to the United States with few resources or skills bring an asset that is hugely beneficial to the US economy: their children. The rapid success of immigrants' children more than pays for the debts of their parents.

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We think that immigration policy should take the long view, acknowledging that upward mobility takes time, and is sometimes measured at the pace of generations, rather than years. children of poor immigrants from nearly every country in the world make it to the middle of the income distribution by adulthood and so the fears of creating a permanent immigrant underclass are entirely misplaced.

-----

These findings carry a lesson for today's highly fraught immigration debate: far from consigning themselves to permanent outsider status, as many fear, immigrants and their descendants participate in a broadly shared American culture and adopt deeply felt identities as Americans.

The common pace of cultural assimilation then and now is even more remarkable when we consider that, in the past, policymakers imposed explicit attempts to "Americanize" immigrants and their children, whereas today there is a growing acceptance of immigrant cultures. Indiana and Ohio went so far as to ban the German language in the aftermath of World War I. Public schools in the past were conducted entirely in English, and some politicians worry that the bilingual educations programs offered today will hold immigrants back. Yet, despite these different approaches toward assimilation policy, immigrants pick up English at a similar pace and find ways of joining American society on their own.

These days, the United States has very few policies designed to address immigrant assimilation. But this hands-off approach seems to be working. So we encourage policymakers to stay the course here, allowing immigrants the time to join US society at their own pace.

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Immigrants are nearly twice as likely as the US-born population to be scientists or inventors. In recent years, around 14 percent of the US population was born abroad. But these foreign-born residents contribute significantly to innovation, making up more than 20 percent of resident patent holders, nearly double the share that we would expect from their percentage in the population.

Immigrants and their descendants participate in a broadly shared American culture and adopt deeply felt identities as Americans.

And this, near the end, makes me especially hopeful that the culture and those identities will be especially open to difference, to being inherently broadly shared.

Immigrants have made so many contributions to culture that it seems obvious--like second nature--that new arrivals will contribute to local cuisine, fashion, music, and the arts, creating a form of cultural fusion. Yet this outcome is not a foregone conclusion. If you travel today to a European country with the same share of foreign-born residents as the United States--say, Italy or Spain--you will primarily find Italian or Spanish restaurants. Maybe you'll find a few Colombian or Moroccan spots interspersed in the city center, and certainly some ethnic options in immigrant neighborhoods--but nothing like the range of choices you can find in all US cities, and even many of our small towns. So the special recipe to cultural fusion is not only immigration but also a society open to immigrants and willing to learn from the diverse experiences they bring.

Take the long view.

A slight twist of nuance to conclude. The power of trust.

I Trust You to Do This

It seems that even at a young age, children understand the value of trust and are willing to behave more honestly in response to feeling trusted by others. . . . 

"As a social species, establishing mutual trust would have conferred survival advantages for our distant ancestors,” he says. “We could speculate and say that human beings have learned that it’s good for you to respond in a trustworthy fashion if somebody has trusted you just in the same way as you trust somebody who has been trustworthy.”

Zhao says that for parents and educators, realizing the power that trust, rather than threats or punishment, can have in nurturing integrity in children is valuable.

“Our results demonstrate that clearly articulating trust can reduce dishonesty,” she says, “and this highlights the need for parents and teachers to consciously show and express trust to children through everyday asks. Rather than assuming children infer trust through actions alone, directly conveying it may be key. We recommend teachers intentionally entrust students with tasks and responsibilities, no matter how small, while explicitly telling them. ‘I trust you to do this.’”

Harris says there’s also a broader general lesson that can be learned. 

"If you treat a child in ways that they understand to be positive, you might well be helping them to put their best foot forward,” he says. “Not just with respect to cheating, but perhaps in other domains.” He says that thinking about the results of this study reminded him of an experience back at Oxford University, where he studied and taught before coming to Harvard.

“I used to teach in Oxford, which is divided into colleges. And each college is, up to a point, fairly autonomous in its mini democracy,” he says. “I noticed that from time to time, there would be murmurs of colleagues who were a complete pain in the neck, and sometimes, the president would adopt the strategy of giving this person some responsible job. Oftentimes it worked. This person, being endowed with responsibility, stopped being such a pain in the neck and stepped up to the plate.”

Clearly articulating trust can reduce dishonesty

Believing is a kind of love.

Belief in all of us.