Excited to be on the cover of HR Magazine this month as a Trendsetter for 2015. We certainly hope 2015 is the year of The Alliance!
Author Archives: Ben Casnocha
Experiencing Hawaii for the First Time
Having spent most of my life in California and loving to travel, it’s been an odd fact that I had never been to Hawaii.
Well, it’s a fact no more. I had a lovely New Year’s in Maui with good friends, food, and books. And no email or Twitter for five full days, which is always a refreshing respite.
Hawaii is indeed magical in winter time. A few theories. First, the climate: it’s warm there when it’s cold here, with no humidity. Second, the spirit of calm. It’s the natural Hawaain culture, I suppose. More important is the fact that pretty much all the tourists are there to simply chill out is infectious. Most of Hawaii is tourist central and they spread the chill out spirit in all the restaurants and beaches and hotels. Third, unlike Mexico, you don’t have to worry about passports, cell phone plans, currency and so on — further reducing possible stress in a beach front vacation.
(There’s a lot of natural beauty in Hawaii, though I must say, I didn’t come upon many nature scenes in Hawaii that we don’t have in beautiful California.)
Happy 2015.
Grammar Wars
Joseph Epstein, one of my favorite writers, has a fun review of two new books on grammar.
N.W. Gwynne argues for the old-school, strict approach to grammar, whereas Steven Pinker argues to relax the old rules and embrace the age of informality, baby. Pinker’s the kind of guy who likes to explode tradition, Epstein says: “Few things give him more pleasure than popping the buttons off what he takes to be stuffed shirts”: the word “whom,” the rules about can vs. may, split infinitives, and so on.
The closing paragraph of the review:
Rather than align myself with the Gwynnians or the Pinkertons, I say a blessing on both their houses, and I would add: Let the language battles between them rage on—except that to do so would expose me to the charge of ending this review on a preposition, which I cannot allow.
How Michael Lewis Slows Down Time
He writes, in a piece commissioned by Chipotle:
I even have tricks for slowing time—or at least my perception of it. At night I sometimes write down things that happened that day… Recording the quotidian details of my day seems to add hours a day to my life: I’m not sure why.
Another trick is to focus on some ordinary thing—the faintly geological strata of the insides of a burrito, for instance—and try to describe what I see.
Another: pick a task I’d normally do quickly and thoughtlessly–writing words for the side of a cup, say–and do it as slowly as possible. Forcing my life into slow-motion, I notice a lot that I miss at game speed. The one thing I don’t notice is the passage of time.
The last two points are what meditation and mindfulness are about. Observe the ordinary.
Here’s how Steven Johnson slows down time — he moved to a new physical place. In a new place, your status quo disrupted, and you’re forced to notice small details, which has the effect of making time pass more slowly.
Claims About Childhood
Griffiths believes that we force very young children into too much independence at a time when all they want is intimacy (she particularly deplores Ferberization, or controlled crying), and that we then exert too much control over older children who yearn only for freedom (she is dismayed by standardized testing). She questions the hierarchical nature of most adult-child relations, and demonstrates that in many cultures and across much of history, children have been given a much broader right of self-determination. She is fanatical about the importance of the great outdoors, and believes that all children need the kith of woods, sea and sky. She laments the enclosures movement of the 15th to 19th centuries that eliminated most common agricultural rights.Concerned that so many children today require treatment for psychological ills, she proposes space and freedom as the cure.She makes an eloquent, loosely Marxist argument that children’s play has been overtaken by commercial interests, so that imagination gets upstaged by sophistry. She objects to the way the nuclear family excludes the wider penumbra of people who stand to love any child, describing all the advantages of a “well villaged” child who may belong “to the street or the commons as much as to the home.” She lauds the idea of childhood as a quest that is precious regardless of its destination. And she regrets the fact that too many children are cut off from their daemon — their true calling — by a dreary pragmatism and a rigid, unresponsive education system.
— Andrew Solomon on Jay Griffiths’ book “A Country Called Childhood”