That is not a modern literary pose. That is the oldest layer of the culture speaking. And Norwegians, for all their reputation for understatement, rather revel in it. The darkness is not something they have grown out of. It is something they claim. Continue reading The Crack in the Ice- On Nordic Noir
I find myself thinking about what it means to truly respect our children as adults. It means trusting that they know their own hearts. It means not imposing our expectations onto their choices. It means celebrating their flourishing, whatever form it takes. Continue reading In Defense of My Children’s Choice
This is how resentment reproduces itself. Keep people scrambling and they stay dependent on whoever promises to name their enemy and fight on their behalf. The resentment architects need your scarcity to keep you as a host. The moment you experience enough abundance, enough space, enough breathing room, you start to see through it. Continue reading THE CROSSING – Part Two of Two
The architects of resentment, of any age, share certain characteristics. They deal in enemies. They trade in scarcity, the sense that there is not enough, that someone else is taking what is yours, that the only answer is to fight. Their nationalism and their religion are transactional and tribal rather than transcendent. They don’t lift people toward higher ground. They plant people more firmly in the mud and tell them to be proud of it. Continue reading Part One of Two: On self-determination, equality, and the feudal logic we keep having to fight
This is the language of dehumanization. Not subtle, not coded, not requiring any interpretation. Just the plain assertion that some category of people belongs in rubble and ruin, that their reduction to ash is their proper place in the order of things. Continue reading A Season of Reflection — An Easter Message
But this post isn’t really about Iran. It’s about a pattern I see everywhere. A pattern of hubris and dehumanization that plays out on battlefields overseas and in our own communities and across dinner tables where families have stopped speaking to each other. The same inability to see others clearly. The same assumption that we have nothing to learn from people who disagree with us. The same surprise when those we’ve dismissed turn out to be more capable and more human than we wanted to believe. Continue reading The Cost of Hubris: Learning from Military and Social Patterns
This took some getting used to. In my experience growing up in America, changing your mind in public felt dangerous. It meant you were weak, or uninformed, or that you had somehow lost the argument. We treat conversations like competitions here, I think. Someone has to win. Someone has to be right. Continue reading Unpolished
The cheese has moved. It is always moving. The kindest thing we can do for ourselves and each other is to start building in the new location, with better tools than we have ever had before. Continue reading The Cheese Has Moved Again
The books that have actually transformed me were not always the ones with the best arguments. Sometimes they were novels that let me inhabit a consciousness so different from my own that I could never quite return to my previous assumptions. And sometimes they were people who stopped telling stories and simply said: This is what I experienced. This is what I now believe. This is what I am asking you to consider. Continue reading When Story Is Not Enough: On Crossing the Line Between Fiction and Truth
Leadership requires the capacity to understand people. Not to manage them. Not to optimize them. To understand them. And you cannot understand people you have never been curious about. You cannot lead humans if you have not done the work of recognizing that other humans are, in fact, as real and complex and worthy as you are.
Continue reading Leadership Malpractice and the Duty to Travel
