The Ezra Klein Show: Best of: Jia Tolentino on what happens when life is an endless performance https://www.vox.com/ezra-klein-show-podcast
Category: books
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I have started to notice more physical book reading on Muni.
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Wow, I had not expected this of Calgary, Canada. The new Central library is a must see for anyone who loves public libraries.
- The architecture from the outside and the curved ceilings outside draws you in.
- The large community spaces when you walk in
- Then taking a tour, I realized the incredible amount of details in the design of every aspect of the library really pushed the limits of what a public library could be.
- The library creates a space for a book lover to meet with their community, read books, hang out and look out.
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While reading NY Times physical Sunday paper, I came across an article about Bumble’s CEO Whitney Wolf Herd’s work week diary. While the article was inspiring to see a day in the life of female CEO, I thought the mention of Emma Watson’s book club “Our Shared Shelf” is even more interesting.
From a cursory look, the book club has over 250K users on Good Reads.
From her list of books recommended in the book club, I ‘ve put this book on my library hold list “Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race”
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I’m coming to the end of the book “Skin In The Game”. It’s not an easy book to read but I find the author is able to make some arguments that are not mainstream but very convincingly.
Page :217 “you will not have an idea about what people really think, what predicts people’s action, merely by asking them — they themselves don’t necessarily know. What matters, in the end, is what they pay for goods, not what they say they “think” about them, or the various possible reasons they give you or themselves for that.”
Also on page 217: “”This is why I have been against the state dictating to us what we “should” be doing: only evolution knows if the “Wrong” thing is really wrong, provided there is skin in the game to allow for selection”
Also on page 217: “Recall that skin in the game means that you do not pay attention to what people say, only to what they do, and to how much of their necks they are putting on the line. Let survival work it’s wonders.”
Page 218 “To repeat, we do not have enough grounds to discuss “irrational beliefs.” We do with irrational actions”
So much good quotes: page 219: “There is a difference between beliefs that are decorative and different sorts of beliefs, those that map to action”
Also. On Page 219 “How much you truly “believe” kin something can be manifested only through what you are willing to risk for i”
Page 221″ “Rationality does not depend on explicit verbals tic explanatory factors; it is only what AIDS survival, what avoids ruin.”
Page 221: “Not everything that happens happens for a reason, but everything that survives survives for a reason”
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While reading the book “Skin in the Game”, I saw several negative references to Barack Obama. At first I chalked it up for something for me to think about. After the latest reference on pg 156, I thought for brief moment to brush it off as a conservative author taking shots at a democratic president.
I flipped through the index and found all the references and I do agree with most of his criticism of Obama. I think his greatest achievement is getting universal health care, but his greatest fail is leaving us with a much divided nation which allows someone like Trump to be president. Making a fortune off of a memoir (his and Michelle’s) … I don’t really know what to make of that.
pg 12: “complicit Obama administration that wanted to protect the game and the rent-seeking bankers”
pg 108: “I said in the Prologue 1 that the Obama administration was complicit with the Bob Rubin trade. We have plenty of evidence that they were afraid of rocking the boat and contradicting the cronies”
pg 138: “When, on leaving office, Barack Obama accepted a sum of more than $40 million to write his memoirs, many people were outraged”
pg 156: “Actually, the best actor is the one nobody realizes is an actor: a closer look at Barack Obama shows that he was even more of an actor: a fancy Ivy League education combined with a liberal reputation is compelling as an image builder”
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Raw notes from the book : The Person You Mean To Be: How Good People Fight Bias
- Not a binary notion, bounded ethicality
- Important to us that we are a good person, we feel threaten when we don’t hit the bar.
- We have blind spots, as a good person, if there is no room from mistakes and blindspots. As an example, if you feel attacked, your desired to be a good person, may prevent you from accepting critisizm.
- Let’s break out the corner, and give ourselves room to grow.
- Being a goodish person and be able to learn from mistakes
- Don’t focus on binary boundaries
- Not evil or good, we are always improving
- Growth mindset or fixed mindset
- We can always grow
- Psychological safety
- “Because I have unconscious bias, I’m not accountable?”
- Prison — education program
- Savior trap – feel good feeling, warm glow
- Puts her above others
- Treat them as people – as normal people
- Headwind and tail wind
- A systems approach is “What are the ways we create more visible headwinds and less tail winds?”
- Even if bias is solved, the system still has bias built in
- What does cultural fit mean? That type of questions creates headwinds
- If you are on the inside, email falculty to signal your interest.
- The email experiment sending the same email to Falculty. With gender, race, fictional students and falculty from different schools. Would the falculty write back?
- Compared with white students – 87% chance of getting a reponse, 62% response to your email
- Work organizations
- Diversity
- Getting into the door, the gateway. Relatively easy to measure
- Inclusion
- Pathway process, not measurable. Who interrupts who, who sits next to who. Everyday moments
- Meetings present opportunties to be inclusive
- Salesforce : Run better meetings, your meetings mirrors your headwinds and tailwinds. Who should be in the room, are we balancing air time, did we interrupt people or not. Did we have a meeting where we disagree? Meetings is like 5th ave realestate
- Belonging
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Recently I’m experimenting with starting up bookclubs at work in order to meet new people and helping to instill the habit of book reading into my own life.
Here is what I’m doing
- Create a #bookclub channel on Slack
- Create a document with a list of books that anyone can propose
- Once there are 5 people who sign up to read a book, a pop-up bookclub is created
- Another channel on Slack #bookclub-[name of book] is created
- The group of 5 or more people who want to read that book are added to the Slack channel #bookclub-[name of book]
- Then a leader for that new bookclub schedules 5 Friday’s to read the book
- A new person is designated to lead the discussion for 1/5th of the book everyweek so that there is active participation.
- Each week the bookclub reads 1/5th of the book and discuss for an hour
Our first book is “That’s what she said” by Joanne Lipman where the author invites men and women to learn about the perspectives from each gender in order to understand each other more.
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I loved this book (Tell Me More, by Kelly Corrigan). Once started, I couldn’t put it down. It is a book about the author’s journey to learn to do and say the hardest things in life. To learn to listen to her daughter and her dying father. I will just quote from her website instead.
In “I Don’t Know,” Corrigan wrestles to make peace with uncertainty, whether it’s over invitations that never came or a friend’s agonizing infertility. In “No,” she admires her mother’s ability to set boundaries and her impressive willingness to be unpopular. In “Tell Me More,” a facialist named Tish teaches her something important about listening. And in “I Was Wrong,” she comes clean about her disastrous role in a family fight—and explains why saying sorry may not be enough. With refreshing candor, a deep well of empathy, and her signature desire to understand “the thing behind the thing,” Corrigan swings between meditations on life with a preoccupied husband and two mercurial teenage daughters to profound observations on love and loss.
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The “First Discovery Books” are the best designed children’s books I’ve ever seen.
These books are very hard to find brand new in the US. I’m not sure why. Do a search on Amazon and give all the books a try. These are very detailed illustrations of various topics like The Egg , Penguins, Weather, The Earth and Sky. The best part about these books are the attention to , the depth that it covers on each subject (I even learn from these books) and the very very best part is that the book make use of transparent pages to show you more details or show you before and after, or very creative use of a white background to show you xray and how it works. It’s hard to describe it, you need to really pick one up to know that these books are in a class by themselves
They are also translated in French, Japanese, Chinese if you could find them. Click on the image belong to check on Amazon’s reviews, or simple pick up one of the used books for dirt cheap
MyWeb > Children Book Reviews
Tony Tam 