Lessons in Change from the Classroom

This is adapted from a story I shared at the Fearless Change Campfire on 22 Sep 2023

I’ve always been someone to ask questions about ideas. Questions about rules for behavior seemed different. I went to high school in New York City in the early 1980s, and there were students around me who wore “Question Authority” buttons. I was not one of them. —Though I think a part of me secretly wanted to be.

As a child I was a rule follower. If a teacher had a rule — unless it was obviously harmful to someone, I wouldn’t even consider breaking it. It’s not that I thought that teachers were infallible; I learned early that teachers sometimes make mistakes and some — not the good ones — don’t admit them (but that’s another story). I just didn’t have a framework to think about rules. Until junior year of high school.

The class was Algebra II and Trigonometry. I did well in the class, and I liked it, in part because the teacher — Ms Yearwood — was an amazing, caring person in addition to being a great teacher. But she was strict. She had Rules.

A few days a year Ms Yearwood, would have laryngitis. On those days she'd sit at her desk, do grading, and drink tea. And the rule was that students sit silently and work on exercises.

On one of these days the person sitting next to me — I think her name was Lisa— asked me for help with a problem. Since I understood the subject and I wanted to help. But there was this Rule. In the end I decided to lean over towards Lisa’s desk to discuss the problem.

Did I mention that our desks were near the front of the classroom? As we were (quietly) talking through the problem Ms Yearwood looked up, turned in our direction, and glared at us. Time seemed to stop.

Then she realized that we were working together on a problem, and not being disruptive. Her expression shifted to a smile and she gave us an encouraging nod.

At that moment I learned a perhaps obvious lesson:

Rules have a purpose and context, and aren't necessarily absolute, or even fully described by their words.

I this case “work quietly” was meant to maintain order and enable learning. There were exceptions to the the rule, in particular when what you were doing served the purpose of learning.

A second lesson was

You can learn important things in unexpected contexts, and in brief moments

This was a math class. I wasn’t expecting to learn a deep moral lesson, and certainly not from an ad-hoc interaction.

This isn’t the only case where what I learned in class transcended the subject matter and helped me in my life and career. — But this story sticks with me because I’ve been able to apply these particular lessons in many aspects of my life including as an employee, colleague, partner, change-agent, and citizen.

I sometimes still give rules the benefit of the doubt. But for all but the most obvious ones, I try to be curious and seek to understand why the rule is there. And I’m highly skeptical anytime I hear the phrase “Zero Tolerance.”

Even with this healthy skepticism of rules and willingness to, analyze, if not question, authority I wonder if we really need to always try to understand the why for every rule before we follow it? Or Are there any universal rules about behavior that don’t have a why worth understanding?

My sense is is that, beneath any rule that seems intuitive there is a purpose that supports something you value. But I try to not fall into complacency. The status quo is comfortable, and easy. And sometimes we need comfort and ease. But growth requires change and change requires curiosity and enough fearlessness to push boundaries when you see a rule that seems arbitrary and is a barrier to doing something valuable.

Branching and Integration Time

Discussions about branching often focus on the wrong thing. Unintegrated code sitting around slows teams down, whether the code is in a branch or in a developer’s workspace. Discussions about improving pace of development often veer into arguments about branching. Arguing about whether branches are good or bad will distract you from the more basic question of “Do changes get integrated and tested rapidly enough to ensure the rate of delivery we want?”

Integrating too slowly is the main challenge to agile development. Slow integration makes it harder to show incremental progress and maintain an always working code line with valuable features. Frequent integration helps the team deliver incrementally and maintain working software. Your process should help you to integrate quickly so that you can deliver value at a good pace.

The ideal integration frequency varies from team to team. Merging once a day is good, more frequently can be better, but too often can cause churn and overhead if you aren’t doing it well. Team and planning dynamics are key decision factors, but some things are universally true: small frequent commits improve reliability, changes that move the design forward are more valuable than trivial changes. These factors often lead to once a day as a good initial target, but each team needs to decide what values of “small” and “frequent” work for them. (Retrospectives are a good forum for exploring that question.) Automated testing is essential to moving quickly even though it can add a small increment of time to the commit interval in the short term.

Getting this to work well can be challenging, but it is doable. Small useful increments and effective tests are easier than many believe. Though you may need to change your mindset.

Branches and reviews can improve collaboration for both co-located and remote teams. So rather than starting with a “branch or not” conversation, start with an integration rate goal and evaluate how long it takes code to get into production. The next post will talk about why branching can have advantages for your team.

(This is adapted from an earlier Techwell article)

Perceived Safety and Branches

Branches are often used with the goal of improving stability. This going wrong is often the source complaints abut the use of branching. This post briefly examines the rationale behind branching some non Main Line branching strategies.

Workspaces and Delays

A Brief Detour from talking about branching. There are risks with branching, there are other paths that lead to deferred integration, and all the issues that arise from that.

The Trouble with Branching

Code Lines defined terms, Why Code Lines Matter motivated why SCM Process matters, and the post addresses a major risk people see in using branching.

Why Code Lines Matter

Code Lines defined some terms. Here I’ll start getting into how SCM and Version Management concepts affect your day to day work

Code Lines

My last post introduced the series. This post defines some terms and sets the stage for discussing the value of simple branching for agile teams

It's About Time: Branching and Integration

This post kicks off a series of articles about the role of branching on an agile software development team. Since Software Configuration Management Patterns came out quite a while ago, it seems like time to revisit some of the concepts in it. They are still relevant, though a different approach to explaining how to apply them might be useful.

Review: Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow

Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow by Yuval Noah Harari
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Homo Deus is an insightful, irreverent, and thought provoking book that explores what motivates and connects humanity. Hararri discusses the evolution organizing ideas, including Theism, Humanism, and what he calls Dataism (for example, the idea of the “Quantified self” ) and how they reflect our ways of interaction.  

Hararri draws some interesting parallels between religion, science and economic systems, in particular in terms of how they each have their own organizing principles and stories. In particular, I found the discussion of morality through various lenses particularly insightful; it got me thinking about how we can balance a principle of a right to a “pursuit of happiness” while also having a shared moral code. The general answer could be by measuring whether it impacts another life, but that question too depends on the code you believe in.

The idea that our ability to create and share stories  helped humans for large networks,and thus become dominant, is central to the book. Stories and myth are powerful in creating unified organizing principles, and this power can be used for good and bad ends. An intersting insight, which resonates with current political discourse, is that myths can be more powerful than facts. Good facts are not always enough to gather people around a cause: sometime you need a good story to comment people even with fact. 

Whether you are inclined to agree or not with Hararri’s ideas or approach, Homo Deus is a book that will challenge you to think about what drives you in your personal life and in interactions with the larger society. And that sort of thinking and the understanding it leads to can make for a stronger self and society.

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Review: You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake: How Biases Distort Decision-Making and What You Can Do to Fight Them

You're About to Make a Terrible Mistake: How Biases Distort Decision-Making and What You Can Do to Fight Them by Olivier Sibony
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You’re About to Make a Terrible Mistake is a book about why organizations make bad decisions, and how to create processes and environments where we can make better ones, understanding the value of process and collaboration over any specific individual’s leadership.

Much of the advice here will seem familiar if you have studied ideas about how we make decisions but the context of strategic decision making is new.  The audience and examples are geared towards strategic business decisions, but this will give you insight into how you and others make decisions that might not be optimal in all aspects of your life.

The advice is obvious and common sense in retrospect, but obvious and common sense doesn’t always mean visible and common. I’ve come across few groups that follow even the general principles here, much less the entire framework. 

Sibony references agile organizations, and while his meaning isn’t the same as “Agile” in the context of software development, If you are familiar with Agile Software Development practices, many of the concepts, and some of the practices may seem familiar. Agile Retrospective frameworks, for example, follow a process framework that helps teams avoid many of the problematic decision making biases. 

A recurring theme in the book is the importance of process and collaboration over any specific individual’s leadership. In my experience process can make the difference between success and failure for a team, and this book drives the value of process and collaboration home. And Sibony notes that circumstance plays a role: The same good plan can succeed or fail depending upon factors beyond your control, and the same bad plan might work surprisingly well if one is lucky. Sibony tells us how to set up processes so that our big strategic decisions factor in these factors so that we have a reasonable sense of risks involved.

A key part of a good decision process is the definition and role of a leader.  Sibony points out that much of the advice he presents goes counter to the model of the certain, definitive, action-oriented leader. For better decisions we need to to step away from that idea. While final decisions may rest with an individual leader,  the process to get there must be collaborative. 

The book ends with a summary of the key concepts, and good bibliography, and notes. You may well find your self finishing this book with a much longer reading list than when you started.

Whether you are a senior manager, a team lead,  or active in a volunteer organization, the principles in this book will help you create frameworks to enable better decisions. And as an individual you will gain insight how to understand how others make decisions, as well as how you might think about how you make important decisions.

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Review: The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win

The Biggest Bluff: How I Learned to Pay Attention, Master Myself, and Win by Maria Konnikova
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

On the surface, The Biggest Bluff seems to be simply about the author’s adventure learning about poker in an attempt to compete in the World Series of Poker: A Personal Quest story. But the book isn’t about Poker. And while it is a personal story, it’s more than just that. It’s about how we make decisions, and Poker turns out to be a remarkably good lens to understand how people make choices in situations which combine uncertainty and experience.

I was surprised to learn useful things that relate to my daily life like the impact of implicit bias and emotion on decision making, and the relationship between luck and skill in being successful.

The lessons here will give you insight into many facets of your life. While, poker may not be a good model for life, it is, according to Konnikiva, a way to develop skills important to ones life.

My one complaint is that I wish that there was an appendix with pointers to some of the research and the. references she cited. This is minor as a web search is easy enough to do, but was something I missed.

The Biggest Bluff tells an engaging story, and by understanding the path Konnikova follows you will learn about how you make decisions and interact with others. And you may learn a bit about poker along the way

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Review: Humankind: A Hopeful History

Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Humankind is an optimistic take on human nature  grounded in Science , Philosophy, and History. The author explains why humans are intrinsically good. He isn’t naive, and acknowledges that bad things happen but he explains that we tend to focus on and remember the bad things. Bad news tends to get more attention and play and thus reenforces this dynamic leaning to a downward spiral -- Good news stories don’t go as viral as bad news ones, and the banal, everyday good things people do don’t get reported. 

All bad news isn’t just a case of it getting our attention, and Bregman gives us some insight into why hate, for example, can spread in some cultures. In some cases, it is our desire  to be good, to belong, and to be collaborative can lead to us to follow  people acting in ways that are contrary to that. Even empathy -- which seems like a good thing -- can cause us to focus on the wrong things at times.

We also learn why widely spread research results, such as  “The Stanford Prison Experiment,” “No Broken Windows,” and  “The Tragedy of the Commons” are at best highly incomplete and at worst, just wrong.  Many of these ideas that assume that people  are motivated by self interest, and seek power are often based on, well, assumptions about other people (because we often believe that we are different). We also learn about why less restrictive prisons can be more safe, and have less long term costs (and how the US almost adopted a model common in Norway). You also learn that the fabled 1914 Christmas Truce, after which English and German forces refused to fight each other, was not unique in history. 

One thing I really enjoyed about the book -- once I got used to it as it is very different from many similar books -- is that walks through the evolution of ideas.  You might be tempted to highlight and share some insight, only to read a paragraph later a “wait, there’s more!”  style discussion. Which makes sense, as human nature and interactions are complex.

The book resonate with things I’ve long thought, in particular that  forming connections is essential to reducing intolerance, and that organizational dynamics affect well being and productivity, and that it’s often worth giving people the benefit of the doubt before assuming bad intentions. This book gave me a good sense of the historical and scientific basis for thinking that these are not crazy ideas (or at least ideas that only make sense in the contexts I have experience in). Similarly it gave me some sense of awareness to detect when my optimistic nature could possibly lead me astray.

In terms of structure, the first half of the book makes the case for goodness with a walk through history.  The second half of the book interweaves stories and examples that provide guidance on how you can apply the information in the book in your personal, work, and community life.

Part history, part scientific survey, and part philosophical argument for the goodness of humans, Humankind will generate ideas for you to think about, and ideas for things you can try to do to change your approach to interacting with others.

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Review: Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World

Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World by Olga Khazan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

When this book showed up in the Next Big Idea Club box I thought that I’d relate to this book, and I did. While I may not be “weird” in any obvious sense, but I’ve definitely experienced the not fitting in feeling for a variety of reasons. And as a book, Weird is a bit meta. It’s a weird book about the challenges and benefits of not fitting in. But it’s weird in all the wonderful, positive ways that the Khazan describes. It might not have imagined a book about the challenges of being different having laugh out loud passages, but this one does, and they pull you into the story. It’s not an autobiography, but it weaves autobiographical moments to help set the frame for the facts, history, and other people’s stories that are the core of the book. 

Khazan explains Weirdness isn’t a bad thing, in some ways it can be a superpower, as diversity of thought and approach can lead to better ideas in groups (the challenge is figuring out how to communicate them and being in a group that accepts a degree of “different” thinking. But not everyone assumes that, and as a rule, we like to fit in, and be around people who fit in -- though she also points out that humans gravitate to groups that are somewhat unique; it’s being the singleton that can make one lonely, awkward, and on edge. 

While race isn’t the main theme of the book, it runs throughout, in that the biases that people express towards people of different races and ethnic groups are in some ways just magnified versions of other forms of outsiderness. And this connection can be a way to find a deeper understanding of the challenges of racism. As Khazan states at the start of the book, the challenges of, say, a White immigrant are not equivalent to those faced as a BIPOC person or someone with a rare medical condition, but being aware of the extent to which social exclusion affects such a “broad swath of humanity” is useful for building empathy. 

In learning about weirdness, you have a chance to reflect on your differences and your biases, and perhaps considering these can help you find an empathy anchor when you see someone who is isn’t part of the group being challenged or feeling frustrated. And you may even learn to embrace the differences you and others bring to groups., and understand your reactions to being someone who brings a difference to a group. 

With a writing style that is engaging, and at times laugh at loud humorous, Weird will help you understand how you react to differences, how you are different, and perhaps guide you towards coping with the challenges and benefits of not quite fitting in, and also being more aware of your reaction to outsiders. 

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Review: Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America's Housing Crisis

Neighborhood Defenders: Participatory Politics and America's Housing Crisis by Katherine Levine Einstein
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Neighborhood Defenders is an academic, yet approachable, book that discusses the dynamics around how people stop housing development that can increase affordability in the name of defending the neighborhoods. The book is and exploration of how current zoning (and review) processes , which were set up to give everyone a voice, have served to give certain advantaged groups an outsize say in what can be built. The result is often that larger housing projects which might include a range of market rate affordable, as well as subsidized affordable units often end up getting scaled back or stopped.

“Neighborhood Defenders” refers to the groups of residents that often rally around stopping projects by expressing opposition in terms of rationales along the lines of “this will change the character of the neighborhood.” In the book we learn that even while some of the  Defenders may be well intentioned (but perhaps not all) the end result is that housing that has the potential to diversify make a community more diverse and affordable is less likely to be built.

The theme that most caught my attention is the role of the public meeting process that many cities and towns follow around zoning has in this. The public meeting process has its roots in giving people voice, but in some contexts the voices that participate are limited to certain groups, and often not the ones who might benefit from certain housing projects. It’s easy enough to introduce delays -- which add costs to projects. -- either projects don’t happen, or developers abandon the idea of larger projects with Affordable housing and build smaller market rate housing. For example commenters at meetings often raise issues that are tangential to the original project, leading to the need for new studies and delays.  

While there are many books that opine about housing this one is different in that it is backed by data. The authors have read meeting transcripts and reviewed zoning regulations in cities and towns and used that data to support their conclusions. As such, the book is detailed and not a very  light read, but it is very approachable, and worth a read if you are interested in understanding the dynamics of housing and zoning meetings.  

Anyone who is a resident of a community that has a zoning board -- whether you are an activist or not -- could find this a useful and enlightening read, that will help you understand the obstacles involved in community development and paths around them

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Review: Startup, Scaleup, Screwup: 42 Tools to Accelerate Lean & Agile Business Growth

Startup, Scaleup, Screwup: 42 Tools to Accelerate Lean & Agile Business Growth by Jurgen Appelo
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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Though I’ve never been a founder, I’ve been an early member of startup companies and internal ventures (such as  being a founding member of the, at the time new,  Boston office for Fitbit )  so I was curious to read Jurgen Appelo’s book Startup, Scaleup, Screwup: 42 Tools to Accelerate Lean and Agile Business Growth, and see how relevant it was for me. It turned out to be very much so.  Appelo combines lean and agile principles with a model for business development that is relevant for both an entrepreneur starting a company, and an intrapreneur, leading a product initiative or a team.   

Since the book weaves many agile concepts and processes, such as backlogs, burn down charts, and retrospectives, into the process,  I was tempted to title my review something like “Agile for Startups” or “A Startups with Agile values.” But those names would misstate two key take-aways from the book. First, agile themes like “Inspect and Adapt” are just a really good way to start a venture, as new ideas require that you get constant feedback and adapt to it. If this weren’t the case and you knew what would work and how to do it, it would not be a venture. Second, this isn’t just about startups companies. Appelo addresses these idea in the context of an entrepreneurial startup or any intrepreneruial internal venture. In either case, you need to demonstrate value to secure a continuing funding source, or fail. And the feedback loops agile approaches like experiments and retrospective are essential to building that value.

Reading through the book I was struck by how often Appelo makes points that are both obvious and iconoclastic.  At one point he asserts that “growth” should never be a goal in itself,  but way to achieve  success, such as delivering value to more customers, which seems counter to common business thinking,  but which makes perfect sense. Similarly he describes how teams often frame cultural fit as being “similar” rather than “complementary” -- which is to say that a new person fills a gap on the team.

The book covers everything from funding, and planning to hiring. The hiring ideas are reminiscent of the ones I learned from Johanna Rothman in Hiring Geeks that Fit, albeit with slightly different terms, which are in essence, figure out how to what qualities you need in an employee, decide how you measure them

Appello’s Witty, irreverent  and humorous style make this one of the more entertaining business books to read, and the style reflects a perspective on business that might make you want to reconsider things you took from granted.  At the very least you’ll be tempted to explore the supporting materials that are linked at the end of every chapter

Whether you are in a startup, involved in building a new product for an established company,  of just curious about how businesses succeed, Startup, Scale Up Screw Up is an enjoyable, informative, and actionable read that will likely generate many ideas of things to do or learn more about.

Review: Together The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World

Together The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World by Vivek H. Murthy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars



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 Whether you are an extravert or introvert, connection is an important part of being human, and while we each differ in the kind of ways we connect, we need certain kinds of connections in our lives to be happy and healthy.   “Together”  is an engaging guide to what connection means,  how it benefits us, and how to built it.

While we sometimes need solitude , the absence of the appropriate connections in our lives can lead to loneliness, which has a larger impact on the quality of our lives than we expect.

Murthy describes the 3 kinds of connections, all of which are necessary: 

• Emotional (close confidant or partner)

• Relational or Social (quality friendships, social companionship and support)

• Collective (hunger for a network of community of people who share your sense of purpose and interest)

According to Murthy, the presence of one of these kinds of connections, o matter how strong, is unlikely to compensate for missing the others. Even with the strongest marriage, we can still find our selves feeling lonely  without close friends, or a community we belong to. Aside from the practical value of a community network to help us through challenging times, loneliness can be a significant health problem.  Murthy makes the biological connection between loneliness and depression and anxiety. Loneliness can also trigger some of the same fear instincts that cause us to be suspicious of others who are not ‘in our tribe.’  It thus makes it hard to forge connections to bootstrap away from loneliness. This connection to anxiety can be the source of acting on our biases and resisting connections with those different than ourselves. 

Having explained the risks of loneliness, Murthy discusses ways to get out of the rut that loneliness leaves us in, including service to others. Being in a place where we stay open to connections can help us help people step away from dysfunctional situations and mindsets.

Since connection and community is such a universal part of human existence, while reading, I found myself thinking of other books that touched on the topic, including Christopher Alexander’s A Pattern Language, Adam Grant’s Give and Take,  Kate Murphy’s You’re Not Listening, Malcom Gladwell’s  Talking to Strangers, and even Dan Levitin’s  Successful Aging. Together has a different focus than all of those books, namely physical and mental health,  but as I read, I realized that the value of community to our physical and mental health means that by building community we can benefit ourselves in unexpected ways.

Personal stories  make this a relatable read. When combined with  pointers to more information and discussions of organizations that build community which you might be interested in connecting with, it’s also a very actionable one.

The book ends with a story that conveys the importance and power of  what Murthy calls “not the family chosen for you, but  the family you choose.”  As someone who grew up without a lot of extended family near, I’ve grown to understand the value of the friends and neighbors who’ve become part of what I consider to be my family. Reading Together helped me to  truly understand just how valuable those connections are. It also gave me insight into how to do a better job of building them at home, work, and in the communities I’m a part of.

Together is an important guide for our times about why connection matters  and how to built it at various scales: for yourself, for your family, and for your larger communities such as your workplace and town or city. 

Review: You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters

You're Not Listening: What You're Missing and Why It Matters by Kate Murphy
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Listening is hard, and in my quest to be a better listener I’m always looking for information to both understand how I can do better, and to understand dynamics between me and other other people. Kate Murphy’s book is a great resource both for the advice it provides and the insights it leads you too.

One of the reasons listening is hard is that much of what we learn as a culture about “good conversation” and engagement emphasizes witty responses, self promotion and superficial gestures. She cites the Algonquin Round Table as an early example of a model of conversation dynamics that are entirely based on putting people down -- albeit humorously -- rather than building people up and connecting. Many of the “active listening” techniques that are popular are focused on reactions and gestures rather than the mindset of connecting with people. While techniques can encourage us to reframe how we think, they are not enough, and while superficial gestures can give the initial appearance of connection, people generally figure it out later on.

Murphy has some recurring themes in the book, including that how well you listen is, at least in part, tied to how comfortable and secure you are in a situation; it takes confidence to pause to respond and build on what others say, rather than pushing your own agenda, and that listening requires self awareness -- of how present you are, of the kinds of interactions that you tend to tune out on, and of whether you have followed up enough to have a chance at understanding what someone is saying.

Good listening isn’t just about politeness. It forms the basis of good personal, business, and community, relationships. These in turn can help you be successful whether you are a spouse, friend, manager, sales person, or advocate in your community. Murphy closes with a discussion of when to stop listening. Since listening well takes a lot of energy, we can’t always listen, and that’s OK as long as you are intentional and transparent. And there are some circumstances where it’s clear that a dialog won’t happen, even after you’ve given it a reasonable chance. But listening is key to understanding each other and building relationships, so it is important to not always give up simply out of impatience. Listening is hard, and we can all do better, and the effort can be worth it.

You’re Not Listening is a an actionable guide to the various aspects of why listening is valuable, what makes for better listening, and for understanding how you interactions with others can be better, both through self-understanding and empathy. The insights from the book can help you be a better spouse, friend, and neighbor, and perhaps even improve the quality of interactions on social media.

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Review: What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She

What's Your Pronoun?: Beyond He and She by Dennis Baron
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

What’s Your Pronoun is the story of the role of pronouns own grammar and society. Using the right pronoun can be challenging and is important. At the very least using the wrong pronoun can mislead or or offend. But simply if all you see to do is to apply rules to avoid offense, you’ll likely fail more often than you’d like. Baron’s book gives you the tools to go deeper and understand the evolution or pronoun usage in the English Language, so that you can better understand why pronouns are important, and also that the debate has been long running,.

As an occasional writer, who is also a bit of a grammar geek, I’ve often lamented that there is not good neutral third person singular pronoun; I’d like to have a third person form that is well understood, not awkward to read, which doesn’t imply the gender of a person. From Baron’s book I learned that this has been an issue since at least the 1780s (according to the written record he found -- perhaps longer). The grammar geek in me also appreciated Baron explaining concepts in the context of language ( “gender” means “kind,” having nothing direct to do with gender identification) and the differences in how grammarians and linguists view issues like these.

The implications of pronouns extend beyond being imprecise or offensive to interpretation of laws. “He” was sometimes taken to be generic, but also used to say “just men” -- for example: “a law saying that he shall be punished who...”, the same logic, when applied to voting rights for women, didn’t stick. and other, larger, social issues, (for example, the difference between “gender neutral” and “non-binary” usage). Placing the discussion in the context of history and the present day, Baron explores the approaches people have tried in order to achieve some sort of “third person singular” without assuming a gender.

In the end, it seems that “they” has a long track record of being the neutral pronoun of choice for English speakers, much as “you” migrated from being plural to plural and singular. I hope that my saying that doesn't lead you to believe that you don’t need to read the book. The journey the book takes you on is educational and also entertaining. I recommend it to anyone who is curious about how language evolves and relates to society, or just if you are curious about how pronouns are, and could be used.

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Review: Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet

Underground: A Human History of the Worlds Beneath Our Feet by Will Hunt
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

As someone who was fascinated by, NYC subway tunnels while I was a subway commuter in high school, I appreciated the theme of the book, and that it had much of a chapter balanced around the story of a famous NYC Subway graffiti artist. The challenge I had with this book is that I wasn’t sure what to expect. Based on the cover text, I was expecting a discussion of the history with humans’ relationship to the dark unground spaces, with tendrils to mythology, history and science. In the end, there was that, albeit woven into a travel journal, where the mix of journal and background that varies throughout. I found the first chapter a bit slow going, but the book seemed to flow better for me as I progressed.


The book starts off as more travel log than history. The first chapter, being more travel memoir than history almost has me putting the book down. But in chapter 2 the book became what the title promised: history of human obsession with dark, foreboding places, even in the face of our desire to seek light safety.

The history, science and mythology are woven into stories of the authors travels to obscure and not so obscure places, and the personal touch emphasized the connection that these places have to humans, so in the end the person story made for a more engaging read for me when it was in the right balance.

The book has un-captioned photos scattered through out it, which added to a sense of discovery, but at times I wished they were captioned so that I could quickly find out what they were. I was a bit more frustrated that the end notes only sometimes explained the photo rather than simply being a photo credit.

The issues I had with the book are mostly matters of personal preference though. Overall, this is an interesting read; you do need to start it with the right expectations (or even none) for the best experience. While the book was not as compelling as I had hoped, but was a great way to contemplate what the underground means to us, and to the extent it got me thinking philosophically about the contradictions inherent in our obsession with the underground, it was worth the effort for me.

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Review: Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives

Successful Aging: A Neuroscientist Explores the Power and Potential of Our Lives by Daniel J. Levitin
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

You will get old, and you will (eventually )die. While some things are beyond our ability to control, there are things  we can influence so that the amount of time  (or at least the proportion of time) you live with a good quality of life (a concept captured by The World Health Organization HALE (Healthy Life Expectancy measure) is greater. Successful Aging is a guide to how to change our personalities and response to our environments to make this happen.

The key idea in the book is that your life can be thought of as having a “health span” at the start, and a “disease span” at the end, and successful aging is when the ratio of health span to disease span is highest. Levitin uses the acronym COACH --  Curiosity, Openness, Associations, Conscientiousness, and Healthy practices -- to describe the principles that can help you to achieve this: .

The book is divided into 3 parts. The first is a tour through the science of how we learn, feel, and interact, with a focus on how these change over time. I found this section to have a lot of information that helped me to understand day-to-day dynamics with people, independent of concerns of aging.

The second part of the book is about the science behind, and the choices we make with respect to diet, exercise, and sleep. These are the things we most can control, or at least influence, and this section will give you some context for evaluating whether something you hear about has any basis in science or is simply hype. In many cases, simple changes can have a great impact.

The third section of the book tackles the science behind longevity, discussing research into the limits of human life, and how cognitive function can change as we age, and how to keep your brain active. Levitin makes the case that continuing to  learn new skills that you enjoy, keeping active, and maintaining social connections will do far more for youy cognitive health than simply doing “brain training” puzzles (though if you like doing puzzles, go for it). The section and the book end with a chapter that ties the ideas in the book together, and provides some practical advice for the inevitable end of life issues we will all have to address as our abilities change.

Successful Aging is an engaging, easy to read, book that is rooted in science but weaves in stories about people who have led active productive lives in their 70’s, 80’s, 90’s a beyond, and also includes the occasional -- well placed -- witty aside from the author.

This is a book that will be useful to most everyone, whether you are thinking of your own life, of the life of a loved one, and want to understand how to help the latter portions of life better.



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