Last month Columbia invited me to walk in its big commencement for the twentieth anniversary of graduating college there. I don’t often get to dress in my medieval-looking PhD cap and gown, so I accepted. If you’ve never seen a Columbia commencement, it’s a great, stately affair with tens of thousands of graduating students and their families, all the more so when you realize how few spaces like its campus[…] Keep reading →

I was watching the beginning of the movie Patton. If you haven’t seen it, it begins with George C. Scott as General Patton giving an incredible speech. YouTube has only the audio, but here it is. Many see giving a speech like that as the pinnacle of leadership — “I have a dream,” the Gettysburg Address, Churchill’s great speeches, and so on. If they are the pinnacle of leadership, I[…] Keep reading →

A reader raised the question for me of how to respond to others’ suffering. She wrote about my recent posts about the aftermath of the storm: You may want to show some empathy at your blog for those hardest hit who have been displaced from their homes with children, not knowing whether to stay or go, not having many options at their disposal, worried for the safety of their children,[…] Keep reading →

I ask people about their passions a lot. Many tell me they have no passions, which makes me sad for them. I don’t think passions are something you find lying around but something you create and build from small interests through self-awareness, effort, and dedication. It means they haven’t created something they could have. They either never invested enough to find out what it took to create a passion or,[…] Keep reading →

Greenwich Village, my home, is the best place on Earth. You may love a place more. I love the beauty of raw nature, untouched by human hands, that New York City no longer offers. But I love people and the art, music, culture, and community we create too and I’ve never seen the equal of the West Village. After living abroad and visiting amazing growth, ancient cultures, new cultures, and[…] Keep reading →

As I consider the U.S. Declaration of Independence perhaps the founding concepts of the country I was born in and lived most of my life, I celebrate our Independence Day by reading at least one relevant historical work. Having visited Vietnam and North Korea since last July 4th, I’ve had pause to think about what freedom means to America and some things of what America is doing to freedom. Vietnam’s[…] Keep reading →

I came across some quotes from astronauts who had seen the Earth from space that increased my sense of the beauty and fragility of life here — as far as we know, the only life at all. The quotes surprised me partly because I think of astronauts as cowboy- and engineer-types. That surprise strengthened the feeling of the quotes, because you don’t expect cowboy engineers to promote protecting the environment,[…] Keep reading →