The Principle We Keep Forgetting

Birthdays have a way of making me philosophical, whether I want them to or not. This one, I'm sitting in my office on a Friday, the building is quiet with almost no one here, and I can't shake the feeling that the number on my cake keeps pulling me toward a harder question about the country we're living in right now.

We're in a semiquincentennial year. In less than three months, America turns 250. There are parades being planned, a Navy fleet review scheduled for New York Harbor on the Fourth of July, baseball's All-Star Game booked for Philadelphia, the cradle of the whole thing. The bunting is going up. The speeches are being written. And underneath all of that, if you're paying attention, a harder question keeps trying to get a word in edgewise.

What, exactly, are we celebrating?

On June 4, 1958, President Dwight D. Eisenhower stood before the graduating class of the United States Naval Academy and said something that, in a different era, might have seemed too obvious to bother saying. He reminded those young officers, men who had deliberately chosen a life of service, that American democracy rested on three things: personal liberty, human rights, and the dignity of man.

Three things. Not a party platform. Not a policy agenda. Three principles that Ike believed were so foundational, so basic (to use his word), that they were the binding matter of our entire civilization.

That quote has been following me around. The third one is what stops me.

The dignity of man.

Liberty gets the speeches. Rights get the lawsuits. But dignity? Dignity just quietly sits there, the least defended of the three, and the one we seem most willing to erode without even noticing we've done it.

What gives that observation its weight is what Eisenhower had actually seen. He commanded armies against a regime that had decided, systematically and with great bureaucratic thoroughness, that certain categories of people did not possess dignity. That those people's lives did not have weight. That their suffering was acceptable, or irrelevant, or frankly useful. He had walked through what that looks like at the end: the liberated camps, the skeletal survivors, the scale of what happens when the dignity of man is removed from the list of non-negotiables. And then he went home, became president, and thirteen years later stood in front of a graduating class and said: remember, this is basic. This is the foundation. Don't lose it. He wasn't being rhetorical. He was being precise. The man had receipts.

I've visited the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas, with my daughter. Two self-avowed history nerds on something close to a pilgrimage, en route to Philadelphia, where she was starting medical school. I remember standing in front of a display about Ike's farewell address and feeling the particular weight that comes from being in a place where someone's actual life is laid out in front of you. His letters. His mother's Bible. His uniform. The library sits right there in Eisenhower's hometown, modest and serious, very much like the man it honors.

What struck me then, and what strikes me even more now as this anniversary year unfolds, is the gap between the man and the moment we're living in. Eisenhower was not a perfect president, and he would have been the first to say so. But he understood something that feels almost quaint in the current political climate: that the people on the other side of an argument are still people. That disagreement doesn't require dehumanization. That you can fight hard for what you believe and still, at the end of it, extend the basic courtesy of acknowledging another person's dignity.

I don't think that's where we are right now.

This spring, the United Nations' top human rights official issued a formal warning about what he called the "growing dehumanization" of migrants in the United States. Federal agents are conducting immigration enforcement operations in hospitals, schools, and churches. Parents are detained without information about where they're being held, leaving children at home uncertain whether they'll come back. The UN High Commissioner described his astonishment at the "routine abuse and denigration" that has become, in his words, normal. Amnesty International, preparing for the World Cup that comes to this country in June, characterized what it found here as a "human rights emergency."

I'm not going to turn this into a policy argument. That's not what this is. You can hold a dozen different views on immigration law and enforcement and the proper role of the federal government, and reasonable people do. What you can't do is look at a child wondering where their parent is and conclude that the person who was taken doesn't possess dignity. That their suffering is an acceptable variable in someone else's political equation. Eisenhower had seen that logic carried to its endpoint. That's why he stood up in front of those officers in 1958 and said: remember, this is basic. Don't lose it.

And yet that's the direction the drift seems to be going, and not just on immigration. Freedom House just recorded the nineteenth consecutive year of global decline in democratic freedom. Politicians now aim the word "enemies" at fellow citizens with increasing ease. People get sorted into categories of the worthy and the unworthy, the real Americans and the not-quite-Americans, with the line shifting depending on who's drawing it that week. We're preparing to celebrate 250 years of a republic built on the proposition that all men are created equal, and the conversation underneath the bunting has a very different character.

Years ago, I lost someone I cared deeply about to a sudden illness. Yoko had been my assistant for nearly a decade: my partner, my protector, my work mom, and my dear friend. When she died without warning, the absence she left was enormous, and one of the things I kept bumping into in the grief was how much of what she gave me was simply the daily, unremarkable gift of being treated with dignity. She saw the whole person, not just the professional. She anticipated what I needed before I knew I needed it. She made room for me to be a complete human being at work, flawed and tired and occasionally very wrong about things. I remember one afternoon, in the middle of a stretch when I was running on empty and short with everyone around me, she set a bottle of Coke Zero on my desk without a word and closed the door on her way out. No commentary. No judgment. Just the quiet signal that she saw what was happening, and it was okay. That's what dignity looks like when it's not performing.

That's a small-scale version of what Eisenhower was describing. Not grand declarations, but the practice of it. The daily decision to treat the people around you as people, not as obstacles or instruments or demographic categories or enemies, but as human beings who possess the same irreducible worth you'd like to think you possess yourself.

When I think about what made Yoko extraordinary, it wasn't that she agreed with me. She didn't, plenty of times. It's that she never let a disagreement become a diminishment. There's a whole leadership philosophy hiding in that sentence, and I've spent years trying to live up to it.

Eisenhower was speaking specifically to officers, men who would spend their careers ordering others into harm's way and, when necessary, being ordered there themselves. The military understands that the person beside you, the person under your command, is not interchangeable. Their life has weight. Their suffering is real. Mission, hierarchy, and discipline are all essential, but they function, at their best, in service of people. Not the other way around.

On this birthday, I think about what I've tried to pass on. Not the obvious lessons, which are easy to name. The quieter ones. The ones I hope stick, even though I'm never quite sure they did.

When Ted was pitching Little League one afternoon and struggling, I walked out to the mound in the wrong mood and said exactly the wrong thing. I was so focused on the performance that I momentarily forgot the person. He knew it. I knew it. We've laughed about it since, but the lesson went in deep, into me more than into him. Parenting teaches you, over and over again, that dignity isn't a reward you hand out when someone has earned it. It's the starting condition. You begin from a place of respect and work from there, through the hard conversations and the disappointments and the long silences and the sudden unexpected moments of grace.

That's what I want my kids to understand, and what I've tried to model, not always successfully. That dignity isn't something you perform for an audience. It's something you practice when no one is watching. When it's inconvenient. When you're losing the argument. When the other person hasn't, by your estimation, done anything to deserve it.

We've become quite skilled, as a culture, at winning arguments. We're much worse at keeping the person intact while we do it. The argument can be correct, and the relationship still irreparably damaged. We announce our commitments to human rights while treating the specific humans before us as props in our own narrative.

Ike's three principles are worth reading in order. Liberty is what we're free to do. Rights are what we're protected from. But dignity is what makes the other two mean anything at all. Without it, liberty becomes license and rights become weapons. Dignity is the premise, the thing you have to believe about a person before any of the rest of it holds.

In three months, we're going to stand in Philadelphia and celebrate 250 years of a country founded on the idea that certain truths are self-evident. That all men are created equal. That they are endowed with rights that can't be taken away. That's worth celebrating. It's also worth asking, on a birthday in a semiquincentennial year in a spring that feels more complicated than most, whether we still believe it. Not as a slogan. As a practice. As a daily choice about how we treat the person in front of us, regardless of where they came from or what side of the line they're on.

I drove through Abilene on a hot July afternoon with my daughter, taking photos as memories, and I lingered in the room with Eisenhower's letters longer than she probably wanted to. There's something in those letters, in the care of the language and the attention to the person being addressed, that you don't see much of anymore. A five-star general writing to a grieving mother with the same deliberate respect he'd bring to a letter to a head of state. He called it basic. He was right. It's also, apparently, the hardest thing in the world. 

But it's not nostalgia. It's a standard. One we set for ourselves once, and can set again.

—

"Basic to our democratic civilization are the principles and convictions that have bound us together as a nation. Among these are personal liberty, human rights, and the dignity of man."

— President Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. Naval Academy Commencement, June 4, 1958

The Uncomfortable Truth About Human Stupidity: Why Mom Was Right All Along

A few weeks ago, a former colleague reached out to thank me for serving as a reference for his new position. After the pleasantries, he gently mentioned that he'd noticed I haven't posted anything on my blog in a few months. "Everything okay?" he wrote. "Just busy, or have you run out of things to complain about?"

He had a point. It's been a while. But if I'm being honest, I haven't run out of material—far from it. Life has a way of continuously validating certain uncomfortable truths, and lately I've been thinking a lot about one particular truth that my mother tried to teach me years ago.

Mom used to tell my siblings and me, something to the effect of: If you remember that people are dumb, you will never be disappointed...

That Mom-proverb coupled with one of her other favorites: If common-sense were common, it wouldn't be so valuable...

These Mom-proverbs have always stuck with me. I know she told us those things because she was trying to convey that she believed we were each smart and "above average." While I realize, in some respects, these sentiments are rooted in the Lake Wobegon effect, I've never really forgotten her wisdom. Whether that was dealing with Little League parents who treated six-year-old tee ball like Game 7 of the World Series, bosses who make arbitrary "design" requests, or colleagues who believe that "office transparency" means they have to know everything about everything, Mom's observations have proven remarkably prescient.

What I didn't realize until recently is that my mother had essentially distilled the essence of what Italian economist Carlo M. Cipolla would later formalize in his book "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity." While presented with academic rigor, Cipolla's work arrives at conclusions that would make my Mom nod knowingly.

Why Experience Keeps Proving Mom Right

Cipolla identified five laws that explain why stupidity is both more prevalent and more dangerous than we assume. His insights perfectly capture what I've witnessed throughout many of my career and volunteer experiences.

Early experiments in transportation
Far Side - ©1984 Gary Larson

Cipolla's first law states that we always underestimate the number of stupid people out there. Every time I think I've seen it all, someone proves me wrong. Like the parents who sent me long emails, accusations of favoritism, and ultimatums about pulling their kids from Little League when I was president. Why? Because their 10-year-old only played three innings instead of four in a recreational game. These weren't isolated incidents; these parents were convinced their child's future athletic scholarship was on the line…in Little League. Meanwhile, their kids just wanted to have fun playing baseball, but the parents had transformed what should have been a developmental experience into high-stakes drama that served no one. Mom would have just nodded and said, "What did you expect?"

The second law reveals that stupidity strikes randomly. Intelligence, education, or position don't provide immunity. Consider the university colleague whom I've shown six times in one month how to sum a column of numbers in Excel. Six times, using the same basic function. This isn't about learning curves or complex software; it is about someone who uses spreadsheets daily but refuses to retain the most fundamental operation. Credentials don't protect anyone from poor judgment of lack of effort.

Cipolla's third law cuts to the heart of why stupidity is so destructive: stupid people cause harm to others while gaining nothing themselves, often even hurting themselves in the process. In 2024, this played out perfectly with rural farmers. America's most farming-dependent counties overwhelmingly backed Donald Trump in last year's election; his support averaged 77.7% in America's breadbasket. American farmers were convinced that Trump's policies would protect their economic interests. (Felder, 2024), (Atkinson, 2024) Yet when the new administration began implementing mass deportation policies in early 2025, these same agricultural communities found themselves in crisis. "We are dangerously close to a breaking point," and "Farmers and other employers say they worry their workers will be deported" became common refrains as the very workforce these farmers depended on faced removal. The agricultural sector, which voted overwhelmingly for Trump, now pleads for exemptions from the policies that they helped elect him to implement. Simultaneously harming immigrant communities, damaging their own economic prospects, and undermining the agricultural system that feeds our nation—all while achieving none of their stated goals of economic prosperity. (Chishti & Bush-Joseph, 2025), (Rahman, 2025)

The fourth law warns that reasonable people consistently underestimate the damage that foolish people can cause. We assume rationality will eventually prevail, that obvious problems will self-correct, and that someone will step in before things get too bad. Instead, systems are designed by committee, and processes are implemented that prioritize appearance over function, like fixing font preferences. At the same time, actual problems go unaddressed, and organizations create processes for the 20 percent of exceptional cases rather than optimizing for the 80 percent that matter most. Looking back on my volunteer Little League experience, parents spent countless hours debating rules for edge cases, uniform policies, practice schedules, and "rules loophole" scenarios—while the 80 percent that mattered, like ensuring kids actually learned baseball and had fun, became a theater of adult insecurity, robbing their children of joy and development.

Cipolla's fifth law delivers the stark conclusion: stupid people are the most dangerous because their actions are both harmful and unpredictable. You can understand and work around people who act out of greed or malice; their motivations make sense, even if you disagree with them. However, the truly dangerous person is the one whose decisions follow no logical pattern you can anticipate or counter. They're not trying to gain an advantage; they're just creating chaos while everyone else tries to make sense of senseless behavior. Like the executive who insisted I drop everything to change fonts on thirty reports because "that's the font he prefers reading internal reports in." Not because the data was wrong, not because the formatting was unclear, just because he had a font preference. Meanwhile, I'm trying to find and fix actual data errors, but font aesthetics have become the urgent priority. There's no rational framework for predicting when someone will prioritize arbitrary preferences over actual problems — you just have to build systems robust enough to survive the inevitable disruption.

The Digital Amplification Effect

What makes these laws particularly relevant today is how our interconnected world amplifies stupidity's reach. Social media platforms reward engagement over accuracy, creating perfect conditions for Cipolla's predictions to manifest at scale. Misinformation spreads faster than corrections, conspiracy theories find fertile ground in confirmation bias, and complex problems get reduced to soundbites that satisfy our need for simple answers to complicated questions.

The rapid spread of obviously false information during major news events demonstrates how we consistently underestimate both the number of people who will believe nonsense and their ability to influence others. Mom's wisdom about disappointment becomes prophetic. If you expect rational responses to obvious facts, you'll be let down every single time.

Living with the Reality

I don't mean to be cynical or misanthropic. Acknowledging the prevalence of stupidity isn't about looking down on others, and indeed, I have fallen into this very trap on occasion. Instead, understanding the phenomena is about managing expectations and preparing for reality. When I remember Mom's advice, I'm less likely to be blindsided by poor decisions in group settings, more likely to build redundancy into my plans, and better equipped to respond constructively when things go sideways.

My goal isn't to make you jaded, but to have you become realistic. By accepting that stupidity is not just common but predictable, we can all design systems that account for it, we can communicate in ways that minimize its impact, and maintain our own sanity when confronted with its inevitable manifestations.

Mom helped prepare me, my brother, and my sisters for a world where critical thinking is rare, good intentions don't guarantee good outcomes, and the phrase "I can't believe they did that" loses its power to shock. She wanted us to be ready to be wise, not bitter, not cynical.

Turns out she was teaching us Cipolla's laws decades before I'd ever heard of them. Sometimes the most profound truths come wrapped in the simplest packages, delivered by the people who love us most and want us to be prepared for the world as it actually is, not as we wish it were.

Common sense really isn't all that common. And if you remember that people act dumb, you really will never be disappointed.

You'll just be prepared. Thanks, Mom!

---

References:

• Atkinson, M. (2024, November 7). "Rural America sent Trump back to the White House. Flip in Clarendon County helps explain why." Post and Courier. Link
• Chishti, M. & Bush-Joseph, K. (2025, April 25). "In First 100 Days, Trump 2.0 Has Dramatically Reshaped the U.S. Immigration System, but Is Not Meeting Mass Deportation Aims." Migration Information Source. Link
• Felder, B. (2024, November 13). GRAPHIC: "Trump support grew in America’s top farming counties despite first-term trade war." Investigate Midwest. Link
• Rahman, B. (2025, April 29). "Trump’s mass deportations are pushing US farms to breaking point." Newsweek. Link

The Light for Which Many Have Died

Memorial Day 2025

I always return to Memorial Day not only as a moment of remembrance, but as a reminder of responsibility. If you've read my earlier reflections on the quiet lessons of cemeteries, the fraying threads of our civic fabric, or the unfinished work we inherit as citizens, you know I believe history isn't just something we study; it's something we carry. Memorial Day forces me to stop scrolling and actually think. Not just about the dead, but about what I'm doing with what they left me. Am I building something worth their sacrifice? When I vote, when I speak up, when I choose how to spend an ordinary Tuesday - am I honoring what they died for, or am I just coasting?

There is a quiet place in the heart of Philadelphia, bracketed by trees and hemmed in by the rhythm of the city. Washington Square was once a burial ground, then a grazing field, later a parade ground, ultimately holding, beneath its grass, the remains of thousands of unnamed soldiers who fought for the fragile, radical idea of American independence.

No headstones. No names. Just grass and the weight of knowing they're down there.

The flame flickers above them, and carved into stone are words that won't leave me alone: 

"Freedom is a light for which many men have died in darkness."

That line has settled in my head this year. It feels like a whisper from the past, growing louder as the headlines grow noisier.

These men died in obscurity, in suffering, in the confusion and chaos of a war that had not yet produced a nation. They died not for a flag or a president or a party, but for an idea, half-born, fragile, and still unproven: that people could govern themselves.

They did not live to see if it would work. They gave their lives for a future they could not claim, only imagine.

We are that future.

And the question we must ask this Memorial Day is not merely, "Do we remember them?" but rather, "Are we worthy of them?"

Because freedom's light still burns, but it flickers.

In recent months, I've felt it dim in the distance, dulled by cynicism, selfishness, and a national attention span grown brittle. We argue more than we understand. We scroll more than we serve. We mock before we mourn. I'm as guilty as anyone. I check my phone for election updates the way I used to check baseball scores. We treat politics like some kind of reality show, who's winning, who's losing, who said what stupid thing today. My dad does it, my neighbors do it, I do it. But when I stood in that square, looking at that flame, it hit me: those guys didn't bleed out in some field so we could turn their gift into cable news drama. They died for something more challenging and less exciting: the daily grind of citizens actually governing themselves.

History doesn't just happen; we write it, one vote, one conversation, one choice at a time. It is written by hands like ours, in ballot booths and classrooms, in boardrooms and around kitchen tables. The soldiers in Washington Square died without knowing who would take up the work. That task was left to us.

George Washington, in his 1796 Farewell Address, reminded the country:

“The independence and liberty you possess are the work of joint councils and joint efforts of common dangers, sufferings, and success.”

It was true then. It remains true now.

This Memorial Day, we are called not only to decorate graves, but to defend ideals. To honor the dead not just with flags and flowers, but with action, with civic learning, civil dialogue, and a renewed belief that our shared work is still unfinished and still worth doing.

Because if freedom is a light, then we must be its keepers.

And if others have died in darkness to bring us this light, let us not extinguish it with our indifference. Let us carry it forward, however imperfectly, however urgently, so that future generations might look back and say:

They remembered.

They were worthy.

Washing Clothes, Reading History, and Rethinking the Constitution (REVIEW)

The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution, 1783–1789
by Joseph J. Ellis

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When I moved from Boise to Syracuse, I figured I'd run into a few bumps, unpacking chaos, hunting down new grocery stores, and learning to live with colder, wetter weather. What I didn't see coming was life without a washer and dryer. My trusty electric dryer, after years of faithfully tumbling load after load, turned out to be useless in a place that runs almost entirely on natural gas. Now it's stuck in a storage unit across town, probably wondering what it did to deserve exile, which is how, one Saturday, I ended up at the local laundromat—basket of dirty clothes in hand and a faint whiff of nostalgia in the air.

After jockeying for a dryer and realizing I'd forgotten both my Bounce sheets and my earbuds (rookie mistake), I did what any self-respecting person without a podcast would do: I wandered around the laundromat. That's when I stumbled upon a weathered Little Free Library tucked beside the soda machine. Most of the offerings were exactly what you'd expect: Go Dog Go!, a few romance novels missing their covers, and Chicken Soup for the Cat Lover's Soul. But sandwiched between them was something unexpected: The Quartet: Orchestrating the Second American Revolution by Joseph J. Ellis. I have no idea if someone meant to leave it there or if a cat lover just happened to be into the Founding Fathers, but I grabbed it. As my clothes tumbled around me, I found myself drawn into a story about revolution and the struggle to keep a country together when everything's falling apart.

In The Quartet, Ellis turns his considerable talents to the underexplored period between the end of the Revolutionary War and the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, a stretch of time often glossed over in high school textbooks. His thesis is simple but profound: that the actual founding of the United States as a unified nation happened not in 1776, but between 1783 and 1789. And it wasn't the result of some grand inevitability, but of the determined efforts of four key figures, George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, who understood that liberty without structure was a recipe for collapse.

I studied The Federalist Papers and read Ketcham's The Anti-Federalist Papers and the Constitutional Convention Debates in college and have always considered myself fairly well-versed in the mechanics of the Constitutional Convention. I'll admit, I've tried dropping "Publius" into regular conversation a few times. Most people have no clue what I'm talking about. My friends just look at me like I dropped some random professor name at a cookout.

Ellis's book hit me differently, though. It felt messy and urgent in a way history books usually don't. No sanitized founding fathers nonsense. Just these guys scrambling around, making deals, staying up too late arguing about whether any of this would actually work. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, Jay: they weren't just standing around making grand speeches in some stuffy Philadelphia room. They were making deals, twisting arms, probably losing sleep, and doing whatever it took to convince a bunch of stubborn states to actually stick together instead of going their separate ways.

Ellis doesn't present these men as statues in a park. They're human: brilliant, flawed, and sometimes just plain stubborn, wrestling with the chaos of post-war America. Washington's steady presence and self-control become political weapons in their own right. Hamilton brings sharp financial thinking and a gift for verbal fireworks to the push for federal authority. Madison, the grinder of the group, is everywhere: crafting the Virginia Plan, pounding out the Federalist Papers, and shaping the Constitution's bones. And Jay, who usually gets the least fanfare, turns out to be the glue guy, quietly brokering peace, building trust, and lending the whole project legitimacy.

The unnerving part? It all feels too familiar. The stuff Ellis writes about sounds way too familiar. Political gridlock, sketchy alliances, everyone freaking out about big government taking over. You could swap out a few names and publish these stories in today's news. Yeah, people yell louder now (thanks, internet), but we're still having the exact same arguments: Should states call their own shots or should Washington be in charge? Do we go with what sounds good or what actually works? It's the same old fight between big ideas and the ugly reality of trying to run anything. Ellis doesn't sugarcoat it: our system wasn't built for speed or comfort. It was built for haggling, horse-trading, and keeping the whole messy thing from collapsing.

In the long run (and this was probably Madison's most creative insight), the multiple ambiguities embedded in the Constitution made it an inherently "living" document. For it was designed not to offer clear answers…but instead to provide a political arena in which arguments about those contested issues could continue in a deliberate fashion. (Ellis, p.174)

The whole idea that the Constitution wasn't supposed to be some set-in-stone rule book really hits different these days. Madison and the others knew people would keep arguing about what it all means, and that was the point. They built the argument on purpose. Which feels relevant when every big issue we face comes down to how you read the thing and whether anyone's willing to actually talk to people they disagree with.

What I loved about Ellis's book is how straightforward it is. Ellis cuts through the heroic glow that usually surrounds the Constitution's origin story and shows us the mess underneath. This wasn't the nation locking arms in perfect agreement. It was a bruising campaign waged by a stubborn minority convinced the American experiment needed sturdier bones if it was going to make it. On paper, the Articles of Confederation had a certain nobility. In practice, they left the country broke, politically unsteady, ignored on the world stage, and hanging together by a thread. Washington, Hamilton, Madison, and Jay saw what plenty of others didn't want to admit: the revolution hadn't tied up the story with a neat bow. It had kicked off a brand-new chapter, one that promised to be just as messy as the last.

Ellis walks us through the Philadelphia Convention, the state ratification battles, and the artful persuasion that made unity possible. He brings a historian's rigor to the narrative but writes with the accessibility of someone who wants his work to be read on park benches, in coffee shops, and yes, even in laundromats. His focus on character-driven storytelling makes the political feel personal, which is a good reminder that it always has been.

Reading this book while I was dealing with my own move and starting over made me think about how much work it takes to build anything that's going to last. Whether you're trying to make a new place feel like home, fit into a community, or keep a whole country from falling apart. Moving to a new city and starting over in a dozen different ways, I felt an unexpected connection to the story of four men trying to stitch together a brand-new country from a jumble of states that didn't always trust (or even like) each other. The whole thing reminded me that reinventing anything, whether it's a country or just yourself, takes more than big ideas. You need patience. You need to stick with it when things get messy. And you have to be willing to face some truths that make you squirm a little.

What Ellis really gets at in The Quartet is the idea of second chances. Not just for America back then, but for what America could be, or can be again. He shows how those founding principles we all learned about in school are only as strong as the people willing to fight for them. And honestly, given how chaotic our politics feel right now, there is something reassuring about reading how messy things were back then, too. The United States made it through that chaos, so perhaps we can figure out the current moment as well. Ultimately, it simply takes people willing to do the actual work instead of just yelling at each other.

If you come across The Quartet somewhere, maybe at one of those Little Free Libraries or on a shelf at your bookstore, pick it up. You'll walk away with more than just some historical facts. You might even remember why any of this stuff matters in the first place.

Read more of my reviews

The Art of Being Lovably Flawed

What Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster Taught Me About Building a Life

I am part of the Sesame Street generation, not the nostalgic, "remember when" generation, but the actual first one. I was there for the beginning, sitting cross-legged in front of our wood-grain Zenith television in 1969, watching something that had never existed before: a show that talked to kids like we had brains, that mixed education with pure silliness, and that populated a neighborhood with characters who were unapologetically, authentically themselves.

Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster. Those were my guys. Don't get me wrong - Big Bird was sweet and Kermit has great moments. But Oscar? Oscar got it. Some days you just feel grouchy and that's that. And Cookie Monster, the way he'd completely lose his mind over cookies, cracked me up. Still does.

Decades later, as I reflect on the life I've built, the career choices I've made, the way I've tried to parent, the relationships I've formed, I realize how profoundly those fuzzy philosophers shaped my understanding of what it means to show up authentically in the world. More importantly, they taught me lessons I hope I have passed on to my own children.

The Grouch's Gift: Permission to Be Real

I didn't know why I loved Oscar so much back then, but looking back, it makes perfect sense. Every other character on TV was happy all the time - big smiles, cheerful voices, everything's wonderful! Oscar was the only one who said, 'You know what? Today sucks and I'm not pretending otherwise.'

He wasn't a jerk about it. He wasn't trying to ruin anyone else's day. He just sat in his trash can, owned his bad mood, and didn't apologize for it. That was huge for a little kid to see - that you didn't have to be sunshine and rainbows every single day to be okay.

When I found myself translating between temperamental programmers and impatient fundraisers, Oscar's influence was there. When I chose to sit in the political middle seat while others retreated to comfortable extremes, that was Oscar's gift at work, when I admitted to my team that I was struggling after losing my dear friend and colleague Yoko, rather than putting on a professional mask, I was practicing what the grouch had taught me: that authenticity creates deeper connections than any performance ever could.

To my children, I hope you've learned this lesson through watching me navigate both my good days and my difficult ones. When I write about feeling like Charlie Brown most days instead of pretending to be someone more optimistic, that's not pessimism, that's honesty. And honesty, even when it's not pretty, builds trust in ways that false cheer never can.

Cookie Monster's Chaos: The Power of Unfiltered Enthusiasm

Cookie Monster was totally different from Oscar. Oscar sat there being grouchy, and Cookie Monster went gaga over cookies (well, mostly cookies). He'd shove them in his mouth, crumbs flying everywhere, half of the cookies ending up on the floor... 'om nom nom nom.' It was always complete chaos, of course, that's what made it funny. Most characters would eat cookies politely. Cookie Monster attacked them like his life depended on it, and somehow that made him impossible not to love.

Cookie Monster taught me that passion doesn't have to be polite, a lesson that became the foundation for some of my most meaningful choices. When I decided to bring donuts to a struggling database conversion team on Fridays, that wasn't strategic planning. That was Cookie Monster-level enthusiasm for simply showing up and caring about people.

I see his influence in my obsessive Cubs fandom that defies all mathematical logic. I see it in my willingness to drive cross-country with the dogs in a U-Haul, turning a practical move into an adventure. Or volunteering in Faith's computer lab, even though I probably wasn't the best choice, I just really wanted to be there. Cookie Monster taught me that caring too much about something beats not caring at all, even if you make a mess doing it.

Kids, you've seen this in action, whether it was our elaborate Christmas traditions born from last-minute improvisation, or my insistence on keeping score at your baseball games when everyone else was just watching casually. What I hope you learned is that it's better to care too much about the things that matter to you than to care too little about anything at all.

Building a Career on Beautiful Disasters

I built my career primarily as a translator. Not like French to English - more like translating between programmers who think in code and database schemas, and regular people who just wanted the computer to spit out useful information. I got good at taking what the tech guys were saying and explaining it in a way that made sense to everyone else, and vice versa. Turns out there aren't that many people who can do both sides of that conversation.

When I started PRSPCT-L, it wasn't because I was some expert. I just figured that if I was confused about something, other people probably were too. That simple acknowledgment of shared uncertainty became one of the field's most valuable resources.

My weekly donut tradition at Caltech exemplifies this approach. My team was getting killed by deadlines and technical problems that seemed impossible to solve. I should have taken a more official approach, brought in consultants, reorganized workflows, or whatever managers are supposed to do. Instead, I started bringing donuts from Foster's every Friday. For years. This wasn't a grand strategy; I thought people needed something good in their week, and donuts seemed the easiest way to do that.

That tradition worked not despite its simplicity, but because of it. Like Cookie Monster's single-minded pursuit of cookies, the gesture was so genuine, so unfiltered, that it cut through workplace cynicism and created real connections.

Parenting Through Imperfection

These same principles shaped how I tried to raise you. When Faith worried about how Santa would find us in California without a chimney, I didn't have a perfect answer ready. So, we invented the Magic Reindeer Feed and Santa's Magic Key traditions, born of improvisation and sustained by enthusiasm rather than expertise.

When my attempts to get Kailey to eat everything on her plate led to the notorious episode of hiding sweet potatoes in milk, I learned that being lovably flawed meant acknowledging my mistakes, laughing at them (eventually), and adjusting course. Some of my best parenting moments came not from having all the answers, but from being willing to figure things out together with you.

The St. Nicholas tradition we maintained wasn't about creating perfect memories; it was about showing up consistently, year after year, with both celebration and honest reflection. The "however" paragraph in St. Nick's letter, acknowledging that we all have room to grow, became a family touchstone because it made space for the full spectrum of human experience.

Through watching me coach Ted's Little League teams, volunteering in your schools, and navigating the various crises and celebrations of family life, you've come to realize that parents don't have to be perfect to be good. In fact, the opposite might be true: perfection creates distance, while lovable flaws create connection.

The Wisdom of Messes

What Oscar and Cookie Monster understood and what I've tried to practice throughout my life is that our flaws aren't bugs in the human operating system. They are features. The grouchiness that makes Oscar lovable is the same quality that allows him to cut through false cheer and speak uncomfortable truths. Cookie Monster's chaos creates joy precisely because it's so genuinely enthusiastic.

When I lost my temper on the baseball field, made mistakes as a parent, or had relationships that didn't work out, I wasn't proud of those moments. But they were real. And in that authenticity, followed by genuine apology and growth, I hope you learned something more valuable than you would have from a father who never made mistakes.

Look, I hope you guys figure out what took me way too long to learn: nobody's got it all figured out, and that's actually okay. Your weird quirks and the stuff you're not great at - that's not something to hide. People connect with real, not perfect. Show up as whoever you actually are, even if you're having a bad day or you're obsessing over something stupid. That's way better than pretending to be someone you're not.

Looking back now, I think Oscar and Cookie Monster taught me how to be a decent person. Sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud - two puppet characters on a kids' show. But they showed me it was okay to be grumpy sometimes and to get way too excited about the things you care about. That's pretty much how I've tried to live ever since.

They taught me that authenticity isn't just more honest, it's more effective. More connecting. More human. And maybe, if we're lucky, more fun.

A Letter to My Children

Kailey, Ted, and Faith: you've watched me practice this art your entire lives. You've seen me succeed and fail, show up and stumble, get enthusiastic about things that probably didn't deserve so much enthusiasm. What I hope you've learned is that this is what love looks like in practice, not perfection, but presence. Not having all the answers, but being willing to ask the questions. Not avoiding mistakes, but owning them, learning from them, and moving forward together.

The art of being lovably flawed isn't really about being flawed at all. It's about having the courage to be seen as you are, the wisdom to know that everyone else is just as beautifully imperfect as you are, and the grace to build relationships and a life around that fundamental truth.

My hope is that I pass on to you not a roadmap to perfection but permission to be gloriously, beautifully, lovably yourselves. To care deeply about the things that matter to you, even when others don't understand. To be grouchy when you need to be and enthusiastic when something deserves your enthusiasm. To make messes in pursuit of what you love and clean them up with humor and grace.

In a world that increasingly rewards performance over presence, I hope you'll remember what those fuzzy philosophers taught us: that the strongest relationships aren't built on mutual admiration of each other's perfection, but on shared acknowledgment of each other's beautiful imperfections.

Because in the end, the best version of yourself isn't the most polished version, it's the most honest one. And honesty, even when it's messy, even when it makes mistakes, even when it sprays metaphorical cookie crumbs everywhere, is always worth more than the most perfect performance.

Even if it makes a mess.

Especially if it makes a mess.

Why rules matter...

(And Why Arguing About Them Usually Doesn't)

Sometimes the best way to change someone's mind isn't to change it at all.

I've been thinking a lot over the last few months about rules, not the bureaucratic, soul-crushing, DMV-ish kind that make you want to set your employee handbook on fire, but the deeper question of why we need them in the first place. And more importantly, what happens when we try to convince people to follow them by doing exactly the wrong thing?

It started with a conversation I had with a former colleague at Boise State who was frustrated about vaccine hesitancy in our community. Sound familiar? She'd been getting into fights with her family and friends about politics. Big fights. Showing up with printouts from news sites and research studies, she believed that if she could just walk them through the facts, they'd finally get it. Her efforts never worked and actually made everything worse. The harder she tried to convince them, the more they shut down.

"I don't understand it," she confided in me. "The science is clear. Why won't they just listen to reason?"

I thought about the experience Adam Grant wrote about in his 2021 New York Times opinion piece The Science of Reasoning With Unreasonable People, where his stubborn friend, the one who refused to vaccinate his children, no matter how many myths Grant debunked. Grant, an organizational psychologist, eventually realized something profound. When we try to change someone's mind by preaching about why we're right and prosecuting them for being wrong, we often end up strengthening the very beliefs we're trying to change.

The Logic Bully Problem

Here's the thing about being right: it can make you insufferable.

I've been guilty of this myself more times than I care to admit. I do this all the time. Someone says something I think is completely wrong - about COVID, or politics, or even just which way to drive somewhere - and I jump in with all my evidence. I start pulling up articles on my phone, explaining why they're mistaken, basically trying to beat them over the head with facts until they give up.

Turns out that doesn't work. At all. At least not the way we think they do.

When we attack someone's position head-on, we trigger what psychologists call the "psychological immune system." Just like a vaccine inoculates the body against a virus, the act of resistance fortifies the mind against future attempts at influence. We make people more certain of their opinions, not less.

The Motivational Interviewing Alternative

There's a better way, and it comes from an unlikely source: addiction counseling.

Decades ago, psychologists working with substance abuse developed a technique called motivational interviewing. Instead of trying to force people to change, they learned to help people find their own intrinsic motivation to change. The approach is deceptively simple: ask open-ended questions, listen carefully, and hold up a mirror so people can see their own thoughts more clearly.

It's not manipulation, it's genuine curiosity about how someone thinks and what matters to them.

Grant eventually tried this approach with his vaccine-hesitant friend. Instead of asking why he opposed COVID vaccines, Grant asked how he would stop the pandemic. Instead of debating the merits of immunization, he listened for moments when his friend expressed any ambivalence, any "change talk," and gently explored it.

The breakthrough wasn't that his friend suddenly signed up for a shot. It was that he admitted his views could change, that this wasn't a "black-and-white issue." That's not nothing. That's everything.

Why Rules Actually Matter

This connects to something more profound about why we have rules in the first place. Rules aren't just arbitrary constraints imposed by killjoys who hate fun. At their best, they're collective agreements that make cooperation possible.

Think about it: every time you drive through a green light without slowing down, you're trusting that everyone else has agreed to follow the same set of rules. Every time you put money in a bank, use a credit card, or sign a contract, you're relying on systems of regulations that make complex societies function.

But here's the paradox: the more we need people to follow rules, the less effective it becomes to simply tell them to follow rules.

I recently re-learned this the hard way when I tried to convince colleagues at my new employer that a workplace policy they had implemented was overly complicated, burdensome, and failed to follow Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) standards. There was one colleague in particular, let's call him Dave, who seemed to take personal offense every time I brought up FASB. At first, I approached it like a prosecutor: "Dave, this is the standard. Here's the logic behind it. We did it this way at my previous employer. End of discussion."

The more I cited FASB and invoked my previous employer's institutional processes, the more creative Dave became in his resistance and explanations. "Well, our auditors approved this approach." "The previous CFO set this up for a reason." "We've been doing it this way for years without problems." "Your old company might have different circumstances." Each response felt like he was building a fortress around the status quo, brick by defensive brick.

I was ready to write Dave off as just another change management "anchor," a DMV-ish cog in the University bureaucracy threatened by the "new guy's" ideas, when a colleague suggested I actually talk with him instead of at him. So I asked Dave for a meeting (in his office, naturally) and instead of lecturing him about past history and compliance, I asked him how the university developed this procedure.

It turned out Dave wasn't anti-FASB or resistant to proper accounting standards at all. The procedure I was critiquing had been his brainchild during a particularly chaotic period when the previous CFO had left suddenly and the auditors were breathing down their necks. He'd cobbled together a solution that worked in the crisis. While he knew it wasn't perfect, it had kept the university compliant during a vulnerable time. When I kept invoking "best practices" from my previous employer, he felt like I was dismissing not just the procedure, but the context that created it and the effort he'd put into keeping things afloat.

Once I understood the history and his actual concerns about changing mid-stream, we could work together on a transition plan. Dave became one of my strongest allies in implementing the new procedures, not because I'd convinced him with FASB citations, but because he felt like his institutional knowledge and past efforts were valued in creating the solution.

The Stag Hunt Principle

Game theorists have a concept called the "Stag Hunt" that explains this beautifully. Imagine a group of hunters who can work together to catch a stag (which feeds everyone) or split off individually to catch rabbits (which will only feed themselves). If everyone cooperates, everyone benefits. But if too many people defect to chase rabbits, the whole system breaks down.

The tragedy isn't that some people are selfish; it's that when trust erodes, even well-meaning people start making choices that undermine the collective good.

Rules work when people buy into them. And people buy into them when they feel heard, understood, and respected, not lectured, shamed, or bulldozed.

This reminds me of something I know intimately as a lifelong Cubs fan: the difference between loyalty born from argument and loyalty born from love.

For decades, people have tried to convince Cubs fans to abandon their team using perfectly logical arguments. "Look at their record!" "They haven't won anything!" "You're wasting your time and money!" The more people told us the Cubs sucked, the more we'd defend them. 'This is our year!' we'd say, every single year, despite all evidence to the contrary.

But nobody becomes a Cubs fan because someone showed them a spreadsheet. You stick with the Cubs because your dad did, or because you love Wrigley, or because misery loves company. It's not a logical decision. It's about tradition, hope, community, and something ineffable that connects us to Wrigley Field, to our fathers and grandfathers, to the beautiful futility of believing that this might be the year.

You can't logic someone into, or out of, being a Cubs fan, and you can't logic someone into following a rule they don't believe in. Both require something deeper than facts; they need trust, connection, and the sense that your perspective matters.

Most diehard Cubs fans don't come from sabermetricians proving (or disproving) the talent of the team. They come from tradition, and more recently, they come from the team finally honoring what we've always believed was possible. Sometimes the best way to change someone's mind is to show them you understand why they think the way they do.

What This Looks Like in Practice

So what does this mean for those of us who care about rules, standards, and collective responsibility?

First, get curious instead of certain. Instead of asking "How can I convince them they're wrong?" try asking "What would have to be true for their position to make sense to them?"

Second, listen for ambivalence. Most people who seem completely rigid actually have some uncertainty lurking beneath the surface. Your job isn't to create that uncertainty; it's to notice it when it emerges and make space for them to explore it.

Third, focus on shared values. Most people want the same stuff you do; they just disagree on how to get there. That parent who won't vaccinate their kid? They're not trying to hurt anyone. They're scared and trying to protect their child, same as you would. The guy who won't wear a mask at work isn't necessarily being selfish - maybe he's worried about looking weak, or maybe he thinks the whole thing is overblown. Start with what you both care about, not where you disagree.

Fourth, resist the prosecutor's impulse. When someone says something you disagree with, your first instinct might be to pounce. Don't. Get curious. Ask them to say more. You might be surprised by what you learn.

The Bigger Picture

None of this means we should abandon our convictions or stop advocating for what we believe is right. It means we should get better at it.

Rules matter; they make civilization possible. But rules without buy-in become DMV-ish bureaucracy at best and authoritarianism at worst. If we want to live in a society where people choose to cooperate rather than being forced to comply, we need to get better at the delicate art of persuasion.

That starts with remembering that the person across from us is a human being with their own fears, hopes, and reasons for believing what they believe. Even when those reasons seem entirely wrong for us.

Especially then.

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The next time you find yourself wanting to logic-bully someone into agreement, try this instead: take a breath, get curious, and ask them a question you genuinely want to hear the answer to. You might not change their mind. But you might change the conversation. And sometimes, that's precisely where change begins.