How To Change Your Mind (Maybe)

Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know

America is arguably plagued with a crisis of overconfidence. Politicians, business professionals, and pundits can’t be shaken from their opinions. Everyone from bankers to athletic coaches keeps supporting their investments, even after they’ve proven themselves unreliable. Why are so many people unwilling to change their minds? And is there any way to reverse this apparently culture-wide aversion to basic rethinking?

I had two different opinions about Wharton organizational psychologist Adam Grant’s latest book. While reading, I felt very genial toward his message, that constantly reëvaluating our own beliefs strengthens our position, and makes it more likely that we’re ultimately correct. He uses the latest research from psychology and behavioral economics to justify his position, but he restates that research in plain English, so us ordinary readers grasp the import of his message.

However, I took few notes while reading, and when I sat to write this review, I realized I couldn’t remember very much of what he’d said. Grant made what felt, as I was reading, like several important and substantive points. However, he made them in ways that had no mental adhesion, that slid off my recollection like bugs off a windshield. If I can’t recall them, just two hours later, have his points really changed my mind?

Not that Grant says nothing memorable. Throughout his book, he emphasizes the importance of “thinking like a scientist.” This means using knowledge, not as absolute truth, but as the foundation for hypothesis and experiment. Good scientists test all knowledge against emerging evidence, and when the evidence requires it, they change their minds. To scientists, being proven wrong isn’t evidence of weakness; it’s a sign that they’re still growing.

Grant contrasts thinking like a scientist to the other roles our thinking often falls into: preacher, prosecutor, and politician. That is, we preach the truth of our own understanding, prosecute supposed flaws in others’ understanding, and politically hedge between these extremes to make our understanding useful. All these, Grant admits, are useful roles, in their place. But too often, we let them dominate us, and we pay for it.

Adam Grant

This broad outline makes sense. The extreme intellectual and political intolerance which dominates modern discourse comes from people seeing their ideas, not as tentative expressions of the best evidence, but as extensions of their own identity. Too many people respond to friendly intellectual challenges like they’d respond to a bear attack. This individualistic approach is personally harmful, and it prevents us getting any closer to resolving our differences.

In justifying this outline, however, Grant caroms wildly. In an early chapter, he draws an analogy between rigid, hidebound thinking, and the way the once-popular Blackberry Corporation collapsed because it couldn’t adapt to changing tides. It’s a valid analogy. Except he lays the premise, then leaves for so long that, when he returns to it, I’d forgotten the premise, and had to skip backward to remember what he was talking about.

He repeats this hit-and-run technique with multiple examples: Apple Computer, Pixar Animation, the anti-vax movement, his own cousin’s medical career. He dips in, makes his point, and zooms away, in a manner that arguably would work well in a TED Talk or other oral format. In a book, where audiences expect thoughtful authors to unpack weighty topics with appropriate gravity, the product just looks chaotic.

Maybe it’s the format. Like multiple scholars writing nonfiction for a general-interest market (Malcolm Gladwell and Naomi Klein come to mind), Professor Grant feels obligated to make his narrative fast-moving, concise, and peppy. However, he’s addressing a topic where his audience has precast opinions, and where he often has to overcome deep intransigence. As Grant himself notes, “There's a fine line between heroic persistence and foolish stubbornness.”

I found plenty in Grant’s writing that stuck with me. His chapter on Motivational Interviewing, a technique of persuasion through asking questions rather than making statements, gave me plenty to consider. Particularly since I formerly struggled to overcome my students’ ingrained beliefs by making statements, which they found easy to ignore, I really enjoyed Grant’s insights into this topic, and will definitely read further and utilize this technique.

On balance, I’m glad I read this book. Professor Grant gives readers important insights, encourages us to reframe our own thinking processes, and shows us how successful rethinkers have made their approach systemic. Perhaps I’ll reread the book, taking more notes the second time. But this book didn’t really change me, ironically. In today’s busy, time-crunched environment, most readers won’t give books that second chance.

The Ordered Mind in a Disordered Society

Johann Hari, Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention—And How To Think Deeply Again

It’s not just you: people worldwide are reporting increased difficulty paying attention to deep ideas and ordinary tasks. Though it’s impossible to precisely quantify, copious circumstantial evidence reports that populations don’t stick with ideas as long as we once did, and while customers are buying more books than ever, they’re finishing far, far fewer. How did this happen to so many people simultaneously? Just as important, how can we reverse it?

Anglo-Swiss journalist Johann Hari mixes autobiography with investigative reportage to uncover answers to these questions. He noticed his beloved nephew, once an energetic child, had become entranced by his handheld technology, spending literally hours without looking up from his phone. But sure as every doctor is a patient, Hari realized he could see, in his nephew, his own sins; his own life was increasingly circumscribed by his phone.

Like many critics, Hari assumed our handheld technology caused the problem. After all, we started staring at phones, and experienced shortened attention spans, right? Not so, he quickly discovers. First, though the data isn’t ironclad, there’s reason to believe human attention spans have been getting shorter since the Victorian age, and the reasons are reasonably comparable to what’s happening around us today.

Not that mobile technology, and the companies that make it, are innocent. Using insider testimony and industry documents, he provides persuasive evidence that Silicon Valley cultivates a business model based on keeping users hooked. They know their devices produce cocaine-like dopamine jolts, and they know some modest tweaks could fix that without hurting their balance sheets. But nobody can afford to be the first to make the responsible choice.

So smartphone makers and social media enterprises are disincentivized to act responsibly. That’s hardly a shocker, though Hari feigns astonishment. Hari also finds several less obvious contributors to modern users’ abbreviated attention spans. Heightened levels of economic stress trigger a human tendency to look for threats, like paleolithic hunters on the bushveldt. Lousy processed food leaves our brains undernourished, and environmental pollutants disrupt the functions of our endocrine system.

Taken together, Hari finds a socioeconomic structure that wasn’t necessarily designed to disrupt human attention spans, but definitely has that effect. What’s more, the wealthy and well-connected already know these effects exist. To the extent that they’re able, the people who profit from this disruptive economy, don’t participate in it. The rich eat organic unprocessed foods, send their kids to Waldorf schools, and frequently don’t use the technologies they manufacture.

Johann Hari

Healthy mental states aren’t difficult to define. Robust psychology and neuroscience have demonstrated what well-rounded brains do. From children running and playing, to adults achieving what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called a “flow state,” we have extensive science showing what healthy minds do, and how such health contributes to creativity, emotional balance, and social well-being. We know what’s gone wrong, Hari writes, and we know what “right” looks like.

Hari occasionally sweeps into breathless narration where he claims to have personally discovered something really well-known. For instance, he claims he uncovered evidence that Facebook and Google make most of their money, not providing services to ordinary end-users, but by packaging end-user data for resale to advertisers. That’s not exactly a closely held secret. His wide-eyed narrative in these moments, sadly, makes him appear less than wholly serious.

Which is a shame. Though most of what Hari discovers isn’t original to his investigative research, he does make a meaningful contribution by organizing it into a unified story. I like the structure of abuse and dependency Hari has uncovered, and wish he would’ve resisted the temptation to make himself the center of the story. Because ultimately, what he finds here isn’t about him, it’s about us.

Throughout the story, Hari hints at something he spells out explicitly in the conclusion. Despite the individualistic Western myth, this widespread attention failure isn’t an individual problem; it was created systemically, and can only be fixed systemically. Hari outlines several steps individual readers can implement to regain some of their attention span, some of which I’ve already implemented. But ultimately, like racism or homophobia, this collective problem requires collective solutions.

I’m not blind to the irony that you’re reading this review online. Without social media, I never would’ve discovered this book. But Hari doesn’t advocate tossing the baby with the bathwater; networked mobile technology serves an important social role. The goal, rather, is to master our technologies, instead of letting them master us. We can achieve that goal, working together. Hari provides the first organized tools to do so.

Also by Johann Hari:
Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs

The Best of 2013, Part Two

See also Part One.

July: Twilight of the Godlings

Novelist Jason Hough certainly didn’t invent the idea that humanity is in an evolutionary bottleneck. But his debut novel, The Darwin Elevator, dramatizes this concept literally: due to incomprehensible alien influences, humanity can only survive in a narrow radius around Darwin, Australia. As resources become scarce, and humanity’s survival teeters, survival hangs on bands of scavengers, while zombies besiege humanity’s last redoubt.

Hough distills several post-9/11 motifs into one trilogy. Science fantasy fans will recognize shades of Firefly, Battlestar Galactica, and The Walking Dead, among others. In so doing, he epitomizes much of America’s current plight. Clinton-era malaise, of the X-Files variety, no longer suffices; we’ve transitioned to active, blood-spitting desperation. Thankfully, in these critical times, emergent heroes refuse to embrace the easy numbness of despair.

---

August: Slow Death as the Son Becomes the Father

Jonathan Gillman grew under his powerful father’s disapproving gaze. An accomplished pianist and mathematician, Gillman’s father had worldwide acclaim. He also had incipient Alzheimer’s disease. My Father, Humming, Gillman’s first collection of verse describes the turmoil his family underwent as this former genius descended into ignominious senility. Refusing contemporary poetry’s often opaque flourishes, Gillman uses verse to strip his experience to its rawest, most heartfelt honesty, free from self-seeking airs.

---

September: If Life's a Stage, Then All School is Acting Class

Trained as an English teacher, Lou Volpe never anticipated a life in theatre. But when Levittown, Pennsylvania, crumpled during the 1970s, Volpe took a chance on a struggling school’s drama program. While everything else collapsed, lacking outside help or funds, Volpe turned Truman High’s theatre into his town’s hope for the future. Children of the Rust Belt believed, sometimes for the first time, that their lives could truly matter.

Volpe’s former student Michael Sokolove returns to his alma mater in Drama High: The Incredible True Story of a Brilliant Teacher, a Struggling Town, and the Magic of Theater. Sokolove pitches a powerful counter-narrative to current jeremiads of school decline, demonstrating that dedicated teachers, bolstered by supportive communities, can give youth direction even in the poorest hometowns. And he proves that, amid today’s math-and-science mania, fine arts mean something greater.

---

October: Proving Personal Writing Still Matters

Michael Sokolove, above, openly mocks the impersonal, test-driven education system that obtains in America today. He’d appreciate The Best American Essays 2013, a collection of personal writing in which twenty authors struggle with today’s widespread problems and joys. This collection challenges audiences to step outside themselves, understanding that only the intensely personal is ever truly universal. I’ve used prior Best American collections in writing classes, and will surely do so again.

---

November: Snowpacked Mystic

Former New Hampshire Poet Laureate Patricia Fargnoli didn’t publish her first book until she was 62 years old. Since then, she’s won numerous awards, been feted by poetry’s elite, and received generous recognition at home and away as one of today’s great unrecognized poets. No wonder: her verse reflects decades of experience, but lacks the hip cynicism burdening too many seasoned poets. This makes her prime reading for non-poetry audiences.

Fargnoli’s sixth collection, Winter: Poems, examines active life from isolation’s enforced leisure. (New England regularly gets snowed in.) Her panoply of love lyrics, agnostic prayers, and solemn laments melds across pages, and years, to create a landscape of joy and loss. I couldn’t put it better than to quote myself: “Fargnoli’s Winter is bleak, ghostly, and alone. Yet it brims with life, because humans inject themselves into the vacuum.”

---

December: Eternity Runs in the Blood

If American society has a new frontier, it must surely be the human genome. Our growing knowledge of biological inheritance threatens to transform medicine, childbearing, marriage, and other keys to human community. While scientists have written copious data-driven studies, the human story remains appallingly unheard. Editor Amy Boesky aims to change that with The Story Within: Personal Essays on Genetics and Identity.

Cable news and populist politicians have presented genetic research as inhumane, eugenicist, and possibly Nazi. These essays, by ordinary but eloquent genetic illness sufferers and their families, reframe the debate in ways that will hopefully move important discussions into the Twenty-First Century. Because genetic illnesses, fundamentally, aren’t about genes; they’re about how humans live in a scientific era.

---

2013 was a literary mixed bag. January sucked so bad that I actually apologized for the entire month. Yet highlights like these remind me that books and reading remain vitally important. Here’s wishing you a smart, literate, satisfying 2014.

Eternity Runs in the Blood

Amy Boesky, editor, The Story Within: Personal Essays on Genetics and Identity

Female cancers run in Amy Boesky’s family. After her mother and aunt died young, Boesky and her sister chose elective surgery to forestall their own early deaths, a decision with ramifications not only for themselves and their childbearing potential, but for daughters who face the same grim choices. This painful personal history led Boesky to organize this collection, wherein people facing genetic diseases discuss what their genes say about them.

Many authors have spilled much ink over genetic science, and its medical and ethical implications for modern society. Less has been written about genetic patients’ lived personal experience, and little has received widespread attention. Thus, many patients suffering inherited illnesses, and parents passing such illnesses to their children, feel needlessly isolated. This collection should alleviate that loneliness, laying foundations for a community of dialog surrounding genetics’ costs and opportunities.

We’ve long known genetics exists. People comment on which parent a child more resembles, and warn kids about illnesses running in families. But developing science makes absolute knowledge possible where once we had only probabilities. Alarmists bleat of genetic discrimination and eugenics, while optimists praise the dawning era of treatment and prevention. But Boesky’s authors demonstrate the lived truth, for ordinary people, is more complex and subtle than that.

Boesky divides her collection three ways. Her first section focuses on discovering genetic inheritance and science’s broadening diagnostic capabilities. We’ve become increasingly able to identify Alzheimer’s, cancer, Huntington’s, and other illnesses long before symptoms manifest. Does knowing equal a death sentence? When must we test ourselves for difficult, debilitating genetic illnesses? Alice Wexler, whose sister discovered the Huntington’s gene, makes a persuasive case that knowledge isn’t necessarily “the truth.”

Her second section analyzes treatment. Genetic diseases that once spelled inevitable mortality, like cystic fibrosis or hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, are now survivable, if recognized early. But treatments require not only solid science, but a welcoming community. Illnesses like schizophrenia, with its significant genetic component, never get treated, or even diagnosed, when surrounding cultures refuse to discuss them openly. We cannot treat what we cannot acknowledge.

Finally, Boesky turns to inheritance. What does it mean to have children, knowing they’ll inherit illnesses that have no cure, and may suffer physical pain or social stigma? Authors write about the difficulty of having children, knowing they’ll inherit disabilities and terminal conditions. And in one of this collection’s most heartrending essays, Laurie Strongin describes the painful decision to bear another child for the purpose of treating her dying firstborn.

Essays span the ideological map. Many authors come from Jewish backgrounds, unsurprisingly, since Jewish heritage has many diagnosed genetic anomalies. But one of this collection’s most hopeful essays comes from Mara Faulkner, who has learned much about survival and perseverance from her life in a Benedictine order. Authors are rich and poor, theist and skeptic, liberal and conservative, educated and self-taught. Their experience with genetic illness, not ideology, binds them.

Despite this collection’s scientific underpinnings, not every essay approaches its subject equally. Misha Angrist, a working genetic scientist, and journalists like Charlie Pierce and Patrick Tracey, approach their subjects with appropriate precision, and though they don’t do “dispassion,” they certainly emphasize the facts. But Emily Rapp, Michael Downing, and others have little patience for unbiased detachment, spotlighting individual experience. Kelly Cupo most embodies this latter trend, eschewing science altogether.

This collection’s one misfire comes in Joanna Rudnick’s essay about her struggles with BRCA, a female cancer gene. Basically, it isn’t an essay; Amy Boesky interviews Rudnick about her efforts making a PBS documentary about BRCA. That documentary sounds interesting, but the interview feels very Entertainment Weekly-ish. Editor Boesky, who has BRCA herself, returns to this gene as the foundation of her interest, but this article feels misplaced and intrusive.

Boesky’s best essays strike a balance between objective science and workaday participation. Much as we like the idea of knowable reality, reality exists in the tension where we lack knowledge, but must act. And that’s what Boesky’s authors do: they act. They get tested and seek treatment, or embrace unknowing for solid, defensible reasons. Nobody here is a mere passenger on life’s currents; they take command.

Where science treats in testable knowledge, Boesky’s authors offer lived experience, with its sloppy, chaotic tendencies in domains where nobody’s ordeal exactly repeats anybody else’s. Everybody facing genetic illness must reinvent the wheel. While this reality seems imposing, and we water our garden with tears, this collection reassures us that real humans have the ability to face that new reality with dignity and triumph.

Proving Personal Writing Still Matters

Cheryl Strayed, editor, The Best American Essays 2013

In reading this year’s edition of the Best American Essays, the format struck me before the content. Most years’ editions sequence the essays alphabetically by authors’ last names. Not so this year, where editor Cheryl Strayed organizes twenty-six essays in a manner somehow differently. The thematic structure doesn’t present itself obviously until readers penetrate well into her sequence. Even afterward, her subtleties aren’t necessarily obvious.

The word “essay” has been cheapened by generations of schoolteachers who, lacking any other term for the five-paragraph monotonies students write to prove they’ve done the reading, yclept them “essays.” But this does the idea no justice. This series returns essays to the meaning they had when Montaigne pioneered the form, calling them the French for “attempts.” As in, let’s try this shit and see what happens.

And boy, oh boy, does something happen. Strayed compiles some well-known authors, including Charles Baxter, Zadie Smith, and Nobel Prize-winner Alice Munro, but she mostly shares less famous writers who, by turning hard, unblinking eyes on their own lives, manage to recount stories that exceed their authors. These writers prove George Bernard Shaw’s adage that only the intimately personal ever becomes truly universal.

Some essays address larger topics. Walter Kirn’s “Confessions of an Ex-Mormon” answers media stereotypes about Mitt Romney’s religion by recounting Kirn’s brief flirtation with Mormonism, and how it continues to save his life. Angela Morales’ “The Girls in My Town” gently laments how economic realities create two classes in America’s wealthiest state. Jon Kerstetter’s “Triage” reveals what happens in the moment combat surgeons choose to let a GI die.

Others remain more insular, unpacking something specific to the author. Tod Goldberg’s “When They Let Them Bleed” correlates “Boom Boom” Mancini’s most famous fight with his own obese, self-mortifying youth. Richard Schmitt’s “Sometimes a Romantic Notion” debunks the melodrama behind joining the circus. Steven Harvey’s “The Book of Knowledge” reveals what he discovered when he reread his late mother’s letters, discovering a disquieting stranger in his house.

Cheryl Strayed

Strayed also includes the most chilling essays I’ve ever seen in this series, Vanessa Veselka’s “Highway of Lost Girls” and Matthew Vollmer’s “Keeper of the Flame.” These two invade readers’ consciousness with such incisive power that I dare say nothing more about them. However, Strayed places them very early in the collection, leaving readers’ nerves frayed and jangling, prepared for the profound nuances of everything that comes after.

Early essays start big, addressing the authors’ personal weight in major issues. There’s a great deal of objective fact: the 1987 Black Monday stock collapse, Mitt Romney, a schoolboy’s death in a Dallas trash dumpster. These stories have a place not only in the authors’ worlds, but in ours, and their stories impinge upon us readers as concretely as the nightly news. We respond because we recognize ourselves.

As the collection progresses, however, essays become increasingly personal. Authors start omitting details like dates, geographical addresses, and sometimes even names. The language becomes transient, narratives grow non-linear, and the essays come to resemble poetry for our aggressively non-poetic age. By inviting us into their lives, rather than visiting ours, the authors make themselves vulnerable, and we find ourselves wanting to trust them.

I’ve used prior editions of this series as Freshman Comp texts, and would cheerfully use this edition too. Strayed’s selections don’t merely showcase diverse, challenging topics—from cancer and postpartum depression and grief, to love and family and music. She also chooses authors who convey their topics well, with professional attention to well-chosen words and phrases that convey beyond their literal meaning. I can pay no higher compliment than to say this collection makes me want to try something new as a writer.

Unfortunately, as more states move to adopt Common Core educational standards, many parents don’t realize the standards explicitly discourage personal writing. Though Common Core explicitly encourages nonfiction reading, that doesn’t include essays like those in this collection. David Coleman, who co-wrote Common Core, has said: “As you grow up in this world, you realize people really don’t give a shit about what you feel or what you think.”

Yet this series’ continued success, and the caliber of writing in this collection, prove the lie in that statement. Personal writing matters because humans are empathetic beings; by sharing others’ thoughts and feelings, we think and feel more deeply ourselves. As the dwindling magazine industry dries up venues for innovative, risk-taking essays, philistines like David Coleman threaten to overtake our discourse. Editors like Cheryl Strayed stand fast against them.

From the Coldest Reaches of the Heart

Howard Norman, I Hate to Leave This Beautiful Place

Howard Norman knew he wanted to write early, but didn’t actually enter the business until fairly late. On the road to becoming his mature self, he suffered several important setbacks that laid the foundation of his later work. Now he recounts these stories in five short essays, ranging from Michigan to Vermont to northern Manitoba. But he does so in a way that frustratingly keeps readers at arm’s length.

Five times, Norman sets a good stage. In his first essay, he begins the transition to manhood, linking a strange sexual initiation with the first time he confronted his deadbeat dad. Later, he writes about the struggle a white Jewish folklorist encountered trying to transcribe the Inuit myths that would populate his earliest novels. His final essays address his attempts to create an artistic life in today’s fragmented world.

Yes, five times Norman sets a good stage. Then five times, he stumbles around it, desperately trying to find a through-line. With each essay, Norman starts off strong, and I feel a swelling heart, like I have something profound to look forward to. Most readers will agree that Norman is a good writer, with an eye for apropos detail. But he inevitably loses that initial momentum, vanishing in the haze of his own highly constructed memoir.

This isn’t helped by Norman’s overwhelming awareness of himself as an artist. In the first three essays, he repeatedly correlates, say, young Paris Keller’s lack of sexual compunctions, or an Inuit shaman’s increasingly aggressive curses, with his fumbling writing apprenticeship. His final two essays, set after his writing career began, name-drop confidences shared with David Mamet and Rita Dove, interviews with NPR, and his wife, poet Jane Shore.

Norman intersperses what could have been tight, muscular essays with sudden philosophic diversions, allusions to psychoanalysis and literary theory, and non sequitur quotes from Auden or Keats. He saps the energy from his prose, leaving us narratives that unfold with a complete lack of haste. I can’t discount the possibility that somebody prefers this languid pace, but I wonder: who?

I see similar artistic fingerprints when Norman tells his story nonsequentially. Events that happen successively get told pages apart; effect precedes cause. Sometimes he declares the payoff before telling the actual story, as when he announces that the woman he loves will die before recounting the affair. This gives Norman leeway to intrude his ruminations, but I kept thinking: Joseph Conrad did it better a century ago in Nostromo.

Throughout, Norman keeps using distancing language to hold the story at arm’s length, as though he doesn’t want to invest too deeply. His first essay culminates in a confrontation with his father—and then stops. No context, no fallout, nothing. Surely publically challenging his father created ripples beyond one conversation. I’m left to wonder whether this really happened, or if this confrontation represents the way Norman wished the story played out.

Likewise, in the final essay, about when a poet housesitting his DC address killed her son, then herself, Norman keeps referring to the poet as Reetika Vazirani, always like that, full name. Never by her first name or her surname, always the full name, like he’s talking about a figure in the news. He shows greater intimacy with a nature photographer whose friendship lasted a week, over a decade ago.

These and other examples show Norman not permitting himself to feel deeply about his narratives. While I don’t doubt these events actually happened (at least in their core), he describes them in a tone only slightly less dispassionate than a police report. This feels especially disappointing in light of his solid, engaging premises. He seemingly wants to explore the underbelly of his experience, but doesn’t want to join us there.

Such willful dissociation and conscious artistry remind me, time and again, that Norman stands between his audience and his narrative. Unlike, say, Anaïs Nin or Frank McCourt, Norman does not invite me to participate in his experiences. Rather, he invites me to marvel at him, the author; he, not his story, matters. Maintaining that gulf makes sense if Norman is writing primarily for the tenure committee.

The end product isn’t bad, as such. It’s just cold. Norman purports to revisit the crucibles that forged the most formative moments in his life, then once we’re in, he turns down the fire. It’s frustrating, because I keep feeling like we’re getting close to something important, something true and unique to him, then with the reckoning upon us, Norman inevitably flinches.