All Stories Are Keys to a Truth

“All stories are keys, you know. All stories are keys to a truth. Sometimes a truth about the world. Sometimes a truth about love or fear. Sometimes, even, a truth about a like. But all keys, all truths.”

― Lora Senf, The Clackity

In Green Grass & Goblins a couple of months ago, I shared my responses to interview questions from a high schooler investigating reading motivation. My answer to "How did you become a librarian?" started with:

That was a long, gradual road for me. I spent my first few years in college just learning without a clear goal, not knowing what I wanted to do with my life. Finally, in my third year, I had an epiphany; I had a semester where most of my classes were simply for fun, and I realized, after seeing that one of them was “Shakespeare” and another was “The Oral Interpretation of Literature,” that what I really loved was reading and sharing stories in the pursuit of understanding and connecting with people. I finally understood that I needed to be an English major.

I hadn't thought of that epiphany in years, but I'm glad I remembered it. At work our new leaders are in the process of sharing their "Why do you work here?" answers in the context of aligning with the organization's vision and mission. Putting that together with my epiphany, I was able to articulate for the first time:

My life's pursuit has been seeking insight into the human experience by immersing myself into the stories we tell, and sharing that pursuit with others, encouraging them to join me.

All stories are keys to a truth, and I want to unlock as many of them as I can. I want all of us to unlock them together. Stories are meant to be shared.

Speaking of. Everyone says having kids and aging changes your perspective, that you begin to think about your life differently. Still, knowing to expect it and living it are not the same. It's been interesting to experience. Very subtle, but there. Creeping thoughts about my "legacy." Not in Ozymandias terms, but along the lines of this:

Death is an essential feature of life. Indeed, implicitly it is an essential feature of the theory of evolution. A necessary component of the evolutionary process is that individuals eventually die so that their offspring can propagate new combinations of genes that eventually lead to adaptation by natural selection of new traits and new variations leading to the diversity of species. We must all die so that the new can blossom, explore, adapt, and evolve.

My children are going to be my legacy. How can I best help them "blossom, explore, adapt, and evolve" to be better than I've been? How can I help them do more to make the world a better place than I have? What stories can I equip them with?

When I started this blog, it was for my friends. Blogs were the social media of the moment, how we interacted online. Then that changed and they went away, but I kept posting. I learned to accept that, though public, this is basically my private journal that no one ever reads. As I said in reference to my Strengths Finder Assessment results in Find the Thread of Love and Beauty in It All, this has become one the main places I collect my knowledge, stories, and resources.

Lately, though, when I create new posts, the imaginary audience I'm writing for is my children when they are adults wanting more insight into who their father was. I also hope they find keys and truth to help them evolve, but some of me in the language and ideas they're not yet ready for. I've wondered more about my parents the older I've gotten--who they were before me and without me, all the parts of them I didn't see--so maybe this can be something like that for them.

(Assuming they can get past those first few years that won't make much sense without context.)

The quote above comes from the book Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies by Geoffrey B. West. Here is what I wrote for my review, full of extensive quotes to capture the depth and complexity of its ideas:

A typical complex system is composed of myriad individual constituents or agents that once aggregated take on collective characteristics that are usually not manifested in, nor could easily be predicted from, the properties of the individual components themselves. For example, you are much more than the totality of your cells and, similarly, your cells are much more than the totality of all of the molecules from which they are composed. What you think of as you--your consciousness, your personality, and your character--is a collective manifestation of the multiple interactions among the neurons and synapses in your brain. These are themselves exchanging continuous interactions with the rest of the cells of your body, many of which are constituents of semi-autonomous organs, such as your heart or liver. In addition, all of these are, to varying degrees, continuously interacting with the external environment. Furthermore, and somewhat paradoxically, none of the 100 trillion or so cells that constitute your body have properties that you would recognize or identify as being you, nor do any of them have any consciousness or knowledge that they are a part of you. Each, so to speak, has its own specific characteristics and follows its own local rules of behavior and interaction, and in so doing, almost miraculously integrates with all the other cells of your body to be you. This, despite the huge range of scales, both spatial and temporal, that are operating within your body from the microscopic molecular level up to the macroscopic scales associated with living your daily life for up to a hundred years. You are a complex system par excellence.

In a similar fashion, a city is much more than the sum of its buildings, roads, and people, a company much more than the sum of its employees and products, and an ecosystem much more than the plants and animals that inhabit it. The economic output, the buzz, the creativity and culture of a city or a company all result from the nonlinear nature of the multiple feedback mechanisms embodied in the interactions between its inhabitants, their infrastructure, and the environment.

When I was born people were concerned about population growth, that the number of humans on earth would grow too large for our planet's resources to sustain. I've heard worries my whole life, over 50 years. Yet, in that time, world population has more than doubled, from 3.768 billion in 1971 to an estimated 7.888 billion today.

Not only has the population grown drastically, the pace of growth has accelerated consistently. It took two million years for humans to reach a global population of 1 billion. It took 120 years for us to double that to 2 billion. Then it took 60 years to double that to 4 billion, in 1974. We're expected to double that to 8 billion this year, 2023, in 49 years. We're not just growing, we're growing at a faster rate all the time.

We've managed this through constant innovation, finding new and ever better ways to sustain ourselves. Both the innovation and population growth have been tremendously aided by one big factor: urbanization. Cities.

Cities, it turns out, follow consistent scaling laws regardless of location, country, design, or culture. A 15% rule. As a city's population size increases, only 85% more infrastructure (roads, electrical cables, water and sewage pipes, gas stations, etc.) is needed to support them, while they gain 115% in socioeconomic quantities (wages, wealth, patents, disease, crime, educational institutions, etc.).

Thus a city of 10 million people typically needs 15% less of the same infrastructure compared with two cities of 5 million each, leading to significant savings in materials and energy use.

This savings leads to a significant decrease in the production of emissions and pollution. Consequently, the greater efficiency that comes with size has the nonintuitive but very important consequence that on average the bigger the city, the greener it is and the smaller its per capita carbon footprint. . . .

The larger the city, the higher the wages, the greater the GDP, the more crime, the more cases of AIDS and flu, the more restaurants, the more patents produced, and so on.

Thus the larger the city the more innovative "social capital" is created, and consequently, the more the average citizen owns, produces, and consumes, whether it's goods, resources, or ideas. . . .

Cities are effectively machines for stimulating and integrating the continuous positive feedback dynamics between the physical and the social, each multiplicatively enhancing the other. . . .

To the same 15 percent degree, the bigger the city the more each person earns, creates, innovates, and interacts--and the more each person experiences crime, disease, entertainment, and opportunity--and all of this at a cost that requires less infrastructure and energy for each of them. This is the genius of the city.

Those quotes come from chapter seven of West's book. He takes a long time building the groundwork for his claims, the somewhat meandering path that West himself took in his life. He started his career as a physicist, only eventually delving into biology to look at growth, aging, and death. Finally, that connected him to cities. The common theme he found to connect them all is laws of scale that transfer from one realm to another. He has become an expert on "complex adaptive systems" and how they scale in a number of disciplines. He has most recently been part of the Santa Fe Institute, where he even served as president.

The Santa Fe Institute has been internationally recognized as "the formal birthplace of the interdisciplinary study of complex systems" and has played a central role in recognizing that many of the most challenging, exciting, and profound questions facing science and society lie at the boundaries between traditional disciplines.

Even as he has moved between fields, he has "approached all of the problems addressed in the book primarily from the viewpoint of a theoretical physicist whose language is mathematics." He has always sought numbers and measurement to validate his theories.

So the book doesn't start with cities, but with how things are measured and how measures are consistent at different scales. For example, the capillaries in all mammals are the same size, from the mouse to the blue whale. They are "terminal units" in the circulatory system where energy and resources are delivered to cells. The cells in mammals are the same size, so the capillaries must be as well. What changes with size is the size of the aorta where blood flow starts and the number of branches made as the network splits and divides on its way to the capillaries. Bigger animals have bigger aortas and more branches, all leading to the same capillaries. Also, on average, all mammals have the same number of heartbeats over the course of their lives; what changes is not the number of heartbeats, but how rapidly they occur. The smaller the mammal, the more quickly it burns through it's designated number of beats, and this scales consistently.

Whales live in the ocean, elephants have trunks, giraffes have long necks, we walk on two legs, and dormice scurry around, yet despite the obvious differences, we are all, to a large degree, nonlinearly scaled versions of one another. If you tell me the size of the mammal, I can use the scaling laws to tell you almost everything about the average values of its measurable characteristics: how much food it needs to eat each day, what its heart rate is, how long it will take to mature, the length and radius of its aorta, its life span, how many offspring it will have, and so on. Given the extraordinary complexity and diversity of life, this is pretty amazing.

The same types of scaling principles apply to insects and other types of animals, though the details of their anatomies differ. And to plants. And cities. Electrical outlets, for instance, are "terminal units" in the same way that capillaries are. They are where energy is delivered, and they are the same size regardless of the size or style of building they are in. What changes with size is the size of the power plant where the electricity begins and the number of substations and transformers and branches as the network splits and divides on its way to the outlets. The scaling from small building to large, small town to large city also follows consistent, mathematically measurable laws in the same way that biology does.

It's a lovely thought that the optimum design of our circulatory system obeys the same simple area-preserving branching rules that trees and plants do. It's equally satisfying that the condition of nonreflectivity of waves at branch points in pulsatile networks is essentially identical to how national power grids are designed for the efficient transmission of electricity over long distances.

So:

Almost any measurable characteristic of animals, plants, ecosystems, cities and companies scales with size. The existence of these remarkable regularities strongly suggests that there is a common conceptual framework underlying all of these very different highly complex phenomena and that the dynamics, growth, and organization of animals, plants, human social behavior, cities, and companies are, in fact, subject to similar generic "laws." . . .

This book is about a way of thinking, about asking big questions, and about suggesting big answers to some of those big questions. It's a book about how some of the major challenges and issues we are grappling with today, ranging from rapid urbanization, growth, and global sustainability to understanding cancer, metabolism, and the origins of aging and death, can be addressed in an integrated unifying conceptual framework. It is a book about the remarkably similar ways in which cities, companies, tumors, and our bodies work, and how each of them represents a variation on a general theme manifesting surprisingly systematic regularities and similarities in their organization, structure, and dynamics. A common property shared by all of them is that they are highly complex and composed of enormous numbers of individual constituents, whether molecules, cells, or people, connected, interacting, and evolving via networked structures over multiple spatial and temporal scales. Some of these networks are obvious and very physical, like our circulatory system or the roads in a city, but some are more conceptual or virtual, like social networks, ecosystems, and the Internet.

West goes into great detail developing these ideas. Graphs and numbers and technical language. He avoids technical math, though, and manages to clearly define and explain the technical terms, translating them into more everyday language along the way. An effective level of repetition helps, too; not so much as to grate, just enough to help things sink in. He is able to connect and integrate an amazing depth and breadth of knowledge, showing how the "universal laws" of the subtitle apply consistently to many different types of systems.

However. There is one difference about cities in comparison to the other complex adaptive systems West has studied. Everything else, including biology and human companies, has aging and death built into its nature. Eventually, there will be decline and an ending.

Just as growth is an integral part of life, equally so are aging and death. The fact that almost everything dies plays a central role in the evolutionary process because it allows new adaptations, designs, and innovations to emerge and flourish. From this viewpoint, it's not only "good" but also crucial that individuals, whether organisms or companies, die--even if they themselves may not be quite so joyous about it.

Not so for cities. Even though cities clearly have an organic nature and share much in common with traditional organisms. They metabolize, they grow, they evolve, they sleep, they age, they contract disease, suffer damage and repair themselves, and so on--they do not stop growing or age into death. Cities can keep growing in size, scale, pace, and efficiency without apparent end. Just as human population keeps doubling in shorter and shorter time increments, cities will keep getting bigger and bigger, faster and faster.

That is good because of all the benefits we gain from cities. That is bad because, mathematically, it is impossible. At some point, something must change. Will change, whether we want it to or not.

In biology, the network principles underlying economies of scale and sublinear scaling have two profound consequences. They constrain the pace of life--big animals live longer, evolve more slowly, and have slower heart rates, all to the same degree--and limit growth. In contrast, cities and economies are driven by social interactions whose feedback mechanisms lead to the opposite behavior. The pace of life systematically increases with population size: diseases spread faster, businesses are born and die more often, and people even walk faster in larger cities, all by approximately the same 15 percent rule. Moreover, the social network dynamic underlying superlinear scaling leads to open-ended growth, which is the primary assumption upon which modern cities and economies are based. Continuous adaptation, not equilibrium, is the rule.

This is a wonderfully consistent picture: the same conceptual framework based on underlying network dynamics and geometry with the same mathematical structure leads to quite different outcomes in these two very different cases, and both are strongly supported by a plethora of diverse data and observations. However, there is a big catch with potentially huge consequences. Even though the growth of organisms, cities, and economies follows essentially identical mathematical equations, their resulting solutions have subtle but crucial differences arising from one being driven by sublinear scaling (the economies of scale of organisms) and the other by superlinear scaling (the in-creasing returns to scale of cities and economies): in the superlinear case, the general solution exhibits an unexpectedly curious property technically known as a finite time singularity, which is a signal of inevitable change, and possibly of potential trouble ahead.

A finite time singularity simply means that the mathematical solution to the growth equation governing whatever is being considered--the population, the GDP, the number of patents, et cetera--becomes infinitely large at some finite time. This is obviously impossible, and that's why something has to change. . . .

Astronomical time is linear and regular. But the actual clock by which we live our socioeconomic lives is an emergent phenomenon determined by the collective forces of social interaction: it is continually and systematically speeding up relative to objective astronomical time. We live our lives on the metaphorical accelerating socioeconomic treadmill. A major innovation that might have taken hundreds of years to evolve a thousand or more years ago may not take only thirty years. Soon it will have to take twenty-five, then twenty, then seventeen, and so on, and like Sisyphus we are destined to go on doing it, if we insist on continually growing and expanding. The resulting sequence of singularities, each of which threatens stagnation and collapse, will continue to pile up, leading to what mathematicians call and essential singularity--a sort of mother of all singularities. . . .

Perhaps more likely is that we can't make the shift, and that we will need to come to terms with the whole concept of open-ended growth and find some new way of defining "progress" or be content with what we've got and spend our energies raising the entire planet's standard of living to reflect a comparably high quality of life. Now that would be a truly major paradigm shift!

Unfortunately, West doesn't offer clear solutions to this conundrum. It has taken his whole career to reach this point of understanding, a clear, explicated description of Scale and Complex Adaptive Systems. This book is the story of what we have learned so far. We still have to figure out what comes next. Nevertheless, it's a marvelous book.

I found everything about it fascinating. All of the biology and scaling, the similarity of networks, and the idea of cities and urbanization as an explanation for explosive population growth.

My favorite part, though not his main point, is what I opened with: You are a complex system par excellence.

What you think of as you--your consciousness, your personality, and your character--is a collective manifestation of the multiple interactions among the neurons and synapses in your brain. These are themselves exchanging continuous interactions with the rest of the cells of your body, many of which are constituents of semi-autonomous organs, such as your heart or liver. In addition, all of these are, to varying degrees, continuously interacting with the external environment.

Everything is made of smaller things and is part of bigger things. We are all connected. There is no true "I"; only "us."

And we evolve together.

And we pass on our truths in the guise of stories.

So, speaking of stories, here's a new favorite: The Blacktongue Thief by Christopher Buehlman. It's for adults.

Aye, and never was a fantasy tale told with as much personality, flavor, grit, character, fleshiness, reality, and oomph. Every single page is full of lyrical, profane, vulgar, insightful, sensual, grungy, beautiful fucking poetry. But it doesn't stop with a few pretty words and deft narration, because all those words I used just now, they describe the characters and plot as well. It's all as vivid and deep and complex and, well, real as a story can get. All those mundane, dirty little details of life are included, the embarrassing bits we usually try to hide and don't mention in epic tales of gallant deeds, and somehow they become, in the smallest way, a part of the adventure, almost romantic and magical.

And make no mistake this is a tale of adventure and magic. A young, irreverent, mischievous thief with talent and good training but generally untested by the world gets in over his head. His debt to the thieves guild is called in and he finds himself embroiled in international politics, traveling with the most powerful of magickers, hounded by the best of assassins. This in a world scarred by goblin wars and facing a new invasion by giants--their adventure through it marked by lethal-to-some encounters with both types. And kraken. And all sorts of other nasties besides. I'm not going to let myself keep tripping over my words trying to find more ways to sing this book's praises, because nothing I can say will do it justice. It's fucking magnificent. I am in love and in awe.

Or, as author Nicholas Eames is quoted on the cover as saying: "Holy hell, this book is awesome." I enthusiastically agree. And I can't recommend the audiobook reading by Buehlman himself strongly enough. It is amazing.

If you want a quick hint of the book's narration by protagonist Kinch Na Shannack, I'd offer you this bit:

Monarchy is a bad system because, no matter how smart you are, you can still squirt a moron out of your plumbing. Maybe you get lucky and your son or daughter is at least half as smart as you--what about your grandchild? Probably a knob, and when they inherit the throne, everything you built falls to shyte.

For a proper taste of the book's flavor, though, I'd give you these two sections from maybe a third of the way through. First, Kinch's thoughts as his party approaches the city Pigdenay:

Pigdenay, city of warships, city of armorers, city where the first sick horses clomped ashore, let me weave a garland of wishes for you.

O city of gray-brown bricks and mud-brown swans, city of small green windows and mean gray eyes looking out, may your salt-rubbed rotting timbers stand another year, may the anvils of your hundred smithies bang forever in the hungover skulls of King Conmarr's wodka-drunk, lad-mad sailors. May the greasy fishpies you are famed for never cool so much one can taste the earthworms ground for filler, nor may your dungeons ever want for Galtish bards who mocked your huge, fat duke.

Pigdenay, city of rain and ashes, Pigdenay, city of whores and rashes, capital of kidnaps and ambergris, cradle of half the world's soot, I praise your cobbled promenade, where the whale's blubber and the kraken's tentacle are grilled and sold across from the hall of lost sailors, mostly killed by whales and krakens.

I sing of the heart you were born without, and of the twice-sized belly you got instead. You're a cold city, Pigdenay, but I'll forgive you your faults as you forgive mine, for your beer is never warm, and I'm never short a stolen copper shave to buy it.

"Give us a ship stout enough to carry us, and a captain fool enough to take us west, for my feet are tired of walking and I'm keen to clear my debts."

This last I said aloud in a sort of Allgod prayer as the city came to view.

"Let it be so," said Norrigal, and rao said Bully Boy from his pack, for the little bastard felt quite at home there again. Now we three, or four if you count the cat, or five if you count the murder-bird sleeping flat on the Spanth's scarred chest, looked west down the Cumber Road that led to the city's east gate.

"First, to the harbor to find an inn," Galva said, "I need a bath." And in we went through the main gate, no bother given to us, nor to any who paid the entry toll.

And from a day or two later, inside the city:

What a fabulous kingdom the mind is, and you the emperor of all of it. You can bed the duke's wife and have the duke strangled in your mind. A crippled man can think himself a dancer, and an idiot can fool himself wise. The day a magicker peeks into the thoughts of commoners for some thin-skinned duke or king will be a bad day. Those with callused hands will rise on that day, for a man will only toil in a mine so long as he can dream of sunny fields, and he'll only kneel for a tyrant if he can secretly cut that tyrant's throat in the close theater of his bowed head.

Even as the tool-impugner apologized to save her family, and gods bless her, she made it sound just as insincere as it was, I got a shabby leather purse off a chainsdam.

Truth be told, it was too easy stealing here--people were so cowstruck watching souls quit their bodies, they were like simpletons. So I challenged myself to do something harder. I started stalking a merchant's fancy boy for his gold boot-anklet, trying to work out how to kneel down without being noticed, but then they led the killer onto the gibbet, and my breath caught in my throat.

It was Deerpants from the fight in the woods, the straw-haired bitch who'd nearly done for me with an axe. I was close to the platform at that point, close enough to see the carved bone fox pendant around her neck, just below the noose--were it ivory, a chainsman would have had it. When asked if she wanted to speak, she shook her head. I doubted she could have spoken out of that mouth, swollen up and missing teeth as it was from the beating Norrigal's staff had given it.

They asked if she wanted a hood, and she was about to nod, I think, when she saw me. She actually laughed. She shook off the hood. The hangman tightened the noose, went to yank her standing-block, and she fixed me with her eyes. I should have looked away but didn't. Her gaze wasn't hateful. I know I'm reading into it, but it seemed her eyes were telling me lots of things at once--she forgave me for stabbing her; she forgave me for killing her man-bull; she couldn't believe her not-so-long life was ending in this rainy place; she'd like one more mug of beer; she'd have that beer with me if she could; she hoped the life after was better than this one, and if not, she'd rather it was nothing at all. Just nothing. She looked at me and seemed to be asking me not to look away because I would help her more than some mumbling Allgod priest wagging a bronze sun on a stick, or even more than her own folk, who'd be ashamed of what she was. So I stayed there with her, another fool in thrall to the fox god and like to find his own noose.

I held my hand up in kinship, and her elbow moved, so I think she would have held her palm to me as well were she not manacled. When the hangdam yanked the block, she said ah as she fell, and that ah before her neck broke seemed the realest thing I'd ever heard said. Her voice as expressed in just that one syllable was perfect, not the deceiver's purr she'd used before the fight or the harpy's cry in the fray, but it was her essence; killer, lover, thief, daughter, all of it together with something of the divine as well. I loved her for that ah. I wanted to leave then, but I felt I needed to do something for her, so I removed my pattens and toed off that fucking fancy boy's anklet as if she were still watching me, and I can't swear that she wasn't.

But I wasn't done in Marspur yet--I had one last holy duty to see to. I waited until the duke's young wife had a good snootful of mead, then cantripped a right, juicy, snotty sneeze out of her, all over Drannigat. Oh, the big man raged, near fit to split his two-cow belt, and seethed while a steward wiped him down. By the time he thought to have a magicker dowse for whomever tossed that spell, I was down an alley and bound for the sea.

Oh, to be a storyteller of that caliber.

Really, in many ways, that's the post. Sharing my reviews of two marvelous books I've recently read and loved. But I have a bit more material to include in the interests of chronicling me, my interests, and sources I may want to access again.

First, a poem randomly generated for me by an AI website. I spent as little time and put in as little effort as possible just to see what I would get.

Postage

How happy is the german expedition!

Never forget the germanic and teutonic expedition.

Pay attention to the post,

the post is the most pre move of all.

Does the post make you shiver?

does it?

A wearing, however hard it tries,

Will always be yellow.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the wearing,

Gently it goes - the jaundiced, the sensationalistic, the old.

Ah, yes, I'm sure that will be me soon enough; jaundiced, sensationalistic, and old.

I think a much better effort is this cento I created during a slow night at the library, a poem composed of headlines and other random sentences I found browsing the news and such:

Finding God's rest in a season of 'blah'

We need that everyday awe:

a leafy tree’s play of light and shadow on a sidewalk;

strange carnivorous plants discovered using slime attack;

an emerald-green goo oozed out that smelled like a cross between gasoline and old perfume;

severed hands unearthed at ancient Egyptian site may have been battle trophies;

snot otters and other wildlife are not rock stars.

You had me at 'musky or vanillic tonalities.'

Quit lying to yourself.

You can get a good tree for killing a bad one,

There are plenty of doomsday climate stories,

Aliens could be hiding in 'terminator zones' on planets with eternal night,

Cold is beneficial for healthy aging,

America doesn't know tofu.

Five questions you should ask your partner before getting married:

How to handle paranoid thoughts?

How science got into bed with sexism?

Where the Amish go on vacation?

Why the animal kingdom is full of con artists?

What is Generation Alpha?

Pilot praised for safe landing after cobra scare mid-air:

The man who demystified the human heart.

Marriage isn't hard work; it's serious play;

To supercharge learning, look to play;

Building a better brain through music, dance and poetry;

Most of us are familiar with the outward signs of domestication:

a tamer personality and babylike features.

This is actually quite bad

If you're reading this I still love you

Be the reason someone feels welcomed, seen, heard, valued, loved.

Serious play.

To Supercharge Learning, Look to Play

Play is a key component of the arts and aesthetics in myriad ways. Art and play are like two sides of the same coin, with play being a part of artistic expression, imagination, creativity, and curiosity. Though it often gets buried in adulthood, the urge to play exists in all of us. It has been a major part of how we’ve evolved as a species. As Plato famously said, “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation.” . . . 

“If you’re not having a good time, you’re really not learning,” Roberta told us. “And there are so many ways in which we can infuse play into classrooms and informal learning environments.” This is supported in the research on the neuroscience of play and learning. Play, the research notes, is universal to our species, and when humans play it positively influences both their cognitive development and their emotional well-being. . . . 

When children have an opportunity to learn in a playful way where they have some agency, where they’re active, where they get to be involved and collaborate, it leads to the gold standard of learning: transfer. “You can take something you learned in one context and apply it to another, and when you can create environments in which these things are exemplified, that’s when you get real learning,” Roberta says. . . . 

Once you open up to the idea of playful landscapes being everywhere and anywhere, suddenly your surroundings become a world of possibility. . . . 

In 2020, the game, now called EndeavorRx, was approved by the FDA as a Class 2 medical device to treat children with ADHD. “This is the first non-drug treatment for ADHD and the first digital treatment for children in any category, so it was really pretty exciting when it happened,” Adam says. His video game is now being prescribed by doctors. What’s extraordinary about Adam’s work is his capacity to understand how learning differences—like attention deficits—actually work in the brain, and how arts-infused experiences can address them.

Elephants May Be Domesticating Themselves

Elephants are the gentle giants of the animal kingdom. They will often empathetically reach out their trunks to console a distressed sister or attempt to lift up those that are ill and suffering. They recognize the bones of deceased elephants and appear to mourn their dead. They also recognize themselves in mirrors—a sign they’re self-aware. These traits may have evolved because elephants have domesticated themselves, according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. If so, that would make them the only known animal besides humans and bonobos to have done so. . . . 

Self-domestication [is] a phenomenon where wild animals develop traits that are similar to domesticated animals. . . . 

Most of us are familiar with the outward signs of domestication: a tamer personality and babylike features. Domesticated animals also tend to have smaller brains than their wild counterparts. By all of these metrics, dogs, cats, and pigs easily qualify.

But in each of these cases, humans played a direct role. . . . 

Studies have shown that over the past 80,000 years, our faces have shortened and our brow ridges and brains have shrunk. These changes accelerated about 10,000 years ago after the invention of agriculture. Perhaps because of a greater need for cooperative males, highly aggressive males were eliminated, researchers like Wrangham have suggested. Via self-domestication, we lengthened our childhoods, came to prefer more gregarious men (and to dislike bullies), and increased our ability to communicate and share complex ideas with language. . . . 

In all, the researchers documented 19 cognitive, behavioral, and physiological traits common to humans, bonobos, and elephants, but not other species.

Understanding the Power of Intrinsic Motivation

At some point, we all are assigned to work that we find tedious and unchallenging. If we don’t figure out how to turn these tasks into interesting and challenging problems to solve, we’ll struggle to complete tasks in a timely and reliable manner, sabotaging our own success and growth at work. One skill that can help you do this is intrinsic motivation, or the incentive you feel to complete a task simply because you find it interesting or enjoyable. Learning how to harness this skill early in your career will help you build the resilience you need to reach your goals in any field. Here’s how to get started.

Look to understand how your job fits into the bigger picture. If you don’t feel like you’re contributing value, you’re more likely to become demotivated. The next time you’re assigned a vague task ask: What problem are we trying to solve by doing this work? How am I helping contribute to the solution? When you know that your contributions have a purpose, your tasks will immediately feel more interesting.

Perform easy tasks right away. When we check items off our to-do lists, feel-good hormones are released in our brains. This makes us feel accomplished, which makes the task more interesting and rewarding, which in turn, makes us more motivated to do it.

Avoid too much “mindless” repetition. When a task starts to feel boring, it’s often because the outcome of completing the task is no longer interesting to you. What can you do to change that, and make the outcome feel exciting? For example, can you challenge yourself to execute the task in less time while still achieving the same result or better?

Look for opportunities to help others. One of the easiest ways to tap into intrinsic motivation is to participate in activities you find inherently rewarding. Helping others is an easy way to do this.

The Quiet Profundity of Everyday Awe

Awe--the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding of the world--is often associated with the extraordinary. . . . 

But you don’t need remarkable circumstances to encounter awe. . . . they found it in the ordinary: a friend’s generosity, a leafy tree’s play of light and shadow on a sidewalk, a song that transported them back to a first love.

We need that everyday awe, even when it’s discovered in the humblest places. A survey of relevant studies suggests that a brief dose of awe can reduce stress, decrease inflammation, and benefit the cardiovascular system. Luckily, we don’t need to wait until we stumble upon it; we can seek it out. Awe is all around us. We just need to know where to look for it.

In our daily-diary studies, one source of awe was by far the most common: other people. . . . We often find inspiring stories in literature, poetry, film, art, and the news.

Another common source of awe is just … taking a walk. . . . walks can produce an awe-like form of consciousness in which we extend the self into the environment. . . . 

One group of subjects took a weekly walk for eight weeks; the other group did the same but with some instructions: Tap into your childlike sense of wonder, imagining you’re seeing everything for the first time. Take a moment during each walk to notice the vastness of things—when looking at a panoramic view, for example, or at the detail of a flower. And go somewhere new, or try to recognize new features of the same old place. All of the participants reported on their happiness, anxiety, and depression and took selfies during their walks.

We found that the awe-walkers felt more awe with each passing week. . . . 

Over the course of our study, awe-walkers reported feeling less daily distress and more prosocial emotions such as compassion and amusement. . . . 

The arts, too, can make us feel connected to something boundless and beyond words. . . . 

Nearly three years into a pandemic that’s made many of us feel powerless and small, seeking out the immense and mysterious might not seem appealing. But often, engaging with what’s overwhelming can put things in perspective. Staring up at a starry sky; looking at a sculpture that makes you shudder; listening to a medley of instruments joining into one complex, spine-tingling melody—those experiences remind us that we’re part of something that will exist long after us. We are well served by opening ourselves to awe wherever we can find it, even if only for a moment or two.

Childhood's Greatest Danger: The Data on Kids and Gun Violence

Gun violence recently surpassed car accidents as the leading cause of death for American children.

For much of the nation’s history, disease was the No. 1 killer of children. Then America became the land of the automobile, and by the 1960s, motor-vehicle crashes were the most common way for children to die. Twenty years ago, well after the advent of the seatbelt, an American child was still three times as likely to die in a car accident as to be killed by a firearm. We’re now living in the era of the gun. . . . 

When researchers at the Kaiser Family Foundation recently compared a set of similarly large and wealthy nations, they found that among this group, the United States accounted for 46 percent of the child population but 97 percent of all child gun deaths. . . . 

Precise reasons for the spike in gun deaths among the youngest children are not known, but the increase coincides with an unprecedented rise in gun sales since 2019.

Attempts to Ban Books Doubled in 2022

The movement has been supercharged by a network of conservative groups — including organizations like Moms for Liberty and Utah Parents United — that have pushed for book removals and have lobbied for new policies that change the way library collections are formed and book complaints are handled.

Increasingly, challenges are being filed against multiple books, whereas in the past, libraries more frequently received complaints about a single title, the group said.

“What the numbers are reflecting to us is that this is a campaign,” Deborah Caldwell-Stone, director of the association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom, said in an interview Thursday morning. “What we’re seeing is not the result of an individual parent speaking to a librarian or a teacher about a particular book their child is reading. We’re seeing a campaign by politically partisan groups to remove vast swaths of books that don’t meet their agenda, whether that’s a political or religious or moral agenda.”

Some librarians and free speech advocates are also alarmed by new legislation that aims to regulate the content of libraries, or the way librarians do their jobs. Last year, laws that impose restrictions on libraries were passed in seven states, including Tennessee, Oklahoma, Florida and Utah. . . . 

Some librarians and teachers who are concerned by the spike in book bans argue that the notion of parental rights should not enable a small group of parents to decide what books all other students and families can access.

“We don’t quarrel with parents who want to guide their children’s reading,” Caldwell-Stone said. “What we have a problem with is advocacy groups who rise up and demand that everybody read the books that they approve of and not read any other books, and deny that choice to other families.”

Everyday awe is my favorite.

those experiences remind us that we’re part of something that will exist long after us

the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your understanding

an awe-like form of consciousness in which we extend the self into the environment

Everything is made of smaller things and is part of bigger things. We are all connected. There is no true "I"; only "us."

We are part of that something vast that transcends our understanding.

We are cells in a complex system par excellence.

We each, so to speak, have our own specific characteristics and follow our own local rules of behavior and interaction, and in so doing, almost miraculously integrate with all the other lives to be us.

That ah before her neck broke seemed the realest thing I'd ever heard said. I loved her for that ah.