Malcolm Gladwell is a 56-year-old Canadian living in New York City, a runner who loves cars, and probably our most popular public intellectual. Except that he isn’t really a public intellectual, he’s a storyteller. That’s how he describes himself, a storyteller. I’ve been a Gladwell fan for a long time. According to my reading journal, […]
A consistent writing practice is the key to getting comfortable with words and sentences and paragraphs and, ultimately, stories. When people tell me they have an English language test and ask for advice, I tell them to read as much as they can in English to get the patterns of the language into their heads. […]
My reading was all over the map in March. Each of these books packed a punch, albeit in vastly different ways. In the order in which I finished reading them, here are my thoughts. Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson Leonardo Da Vinci by Walter Isaacson is an extremely thorough account of Leonardo’s life. The organization is both […]
Way back in March, the beginning, when we were only beginning to suspect that things might be a wee bit different in the future, we thought we had it figured out. OK, we didn’t have much figured out, but there was a sense to how the world worked or didn’t work for us. I had […]
We are living in a time of tremendous uncertainty. The Stoics would argue that we always live in times of uncertainty, but in this moment, when the familiar world has been overturned in a matter of weeks, the uncertainty seems loud and clear. We don’t know what the future holds, whether you’re talking about a […]
In the fall of 2014, I gave an orientation for new international staff at the Dutch university I worked at. In designing the program, I called on 5 years of experience teaching Intercultural Awareness and more than 15 years of experience living abroad. By then, I had lived in 6 countries on 3 continents. I […]
This post is based on an introduction to the film Women that I gave at the Focus Theater on behalf of Arnhem Together in Arnhem, The Netherlands on International Woman’s Day 2020 I went to college at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. If you aren’t from the US, you probably haven’t heard […]
February was a big, thick books month. I’m often hesitant to read thick books because it feels like a speed bump in my reading highway. But, they’re also good challenges and why be afraid of a challenge? Sapiens was a book club choice this month. In order to make sure we don’t get in a […]
During a workshop, a participant asked me if using their audacious goal was honest. As she put it, “If I tell people then I am going to cure cancer am I lying to them?” The short answer is that it depends on your phrasing and situation. If you tell them you’re going to cure cancer […]