Things discovered in 2015 that I found useful, informative, and/or inspiring. Covers books, productivity tools, podcasts, documentaries, and best parenting resource discovery of the year (how to do allowances).
PRODUCTIVITY TOOLS
Limefuel Blast Pro external battery pack coupled with a four-in-one multi-USB charging cable connector: Purchased for this summer’s trip to Ireland. Easily kept four teenagers’ worth of tech fully charged throughout the day without a hitch. I continue to use it daily for work-related purposes. But definitely too much (and too heavy) if all you need to do is keep a smartphone charged throughout the day.
Wirecutter.com: A free Consumer’s Reports of sorts on gadgets. I now check this site first before making any tech-related purchases.
Pocket Casts app: Best way to organize your podcasts: skip ahead 30 seconds; skip back 10 seconds; and variable playback speed. Also removes silence/pauses during conversation (this last option saved me three hours and four minutes while playing back episodes of Philosophy Bites since August, when I installed the app.) Available for both iPhone and Android.
Evernote: I’ve experimented with many systems of organization ranging from the complexity of David Allen’s Getting Things Done to the simplicity of WunderList (pre-Microsoft buyout). But in 2015, I finally cracked Evernote, and cannot imagine using anything else ever again. The best example of its usefulness (for me) is the tagging system for filing items. It’s so good that I don’t even have to remember that I’ve saved something in order to find it again. As of this writing, my entire life (to-do lists; work-related items; receipts; PDFs of appliance manuals, etc.) is in Evernote. If this company ever goes down, I’m going down with it.
PODCASTS
ReCode/Decode with Kara Swisher: Kara Swisher is a must-follow journalist if you’re interested in anything related to Silicon Valley. During an interview with Chris Sacca, in which they discussed (among many other things) Twitter, Sacca floated Sheryl Sandburg as a potential candidate to be Twitter’s next CEO (the interview was recorded before Jack Dorsey was named to the position). Swisher responds by noting that she’s already asked Sandburg, and Sandburg isn’t interested. These moments of insight, which take place multiple times in every episode, do not come across as name-droppy or arrogant. Swisher just sounds extremely well informed―which she is. She also puts nearly every guest on the spot with pointed questions about how to solve the problem of Silicon Valley’s rampant sexism. Swisher is also incredibly funny, and she frequently shares stories (relevant) about her kids; her stories about her teenage son and his obsession with SnapChat deserve their own podcast. BONUS: Swisher is a lesbian, which means your IQ goes up by at least five points alone just from listening to her.
PRI’s The World: I subscribed to The World’s podcast edition after they covered the Boston Gay Men’s Chorus’s trip to Israel and Turkey this past June. I really can’t believe what I’d been missing and now I better appreciate Piper’s name-check of Marco Werman during Season Three (at least I think it was Season Three) of Orange Is the New Black.
EconTalks with Russ Roberts: My youngest brother recommended this show, and there’s something thought-provoking and interesting in every episode. The interview with Matt Ridley actually changed my thinking on climate change. I am still worried about climate change, but no longer believe we are facing an apocalyptic future. And by apocalyptic, I don’t mean “climate change refugee crisis” which is obviously a real thing that is already happening. I mean “crocodiles in my backyard” which would signal the end of civilization.
Tiny Spark: The tagline for this podcast is “investigating the business of doing good”―which sounds deadly dull. But I gave it a listen because it kept showing up on lists of recommended podcasts, and most of my clients are in the business of doing good―so I thought I might learn something useful related to my work. That hasn’t happened yet, but the episodes are fascinating. During an interview with Abby Falik, the founder of Global Citizen Year, which offers high school graduates year-long apprenticeships in Africa and Latin America before attending college, Falik ticks off the rather overwhelming list of horrors that afflict many first-year college students: depression, anxiety, binge drinking, and sexual assault. Then she asks if the freshman dorm is really the best place to send a young person who is not yet fully formed as they try to orient themselves in the world. And, the answer, of course, is NO IT ISN’T! (Much has changed about college since I went, but that’s certainly not one of them.) The answer may not be an apprenticeship with Falik’s organization (which sounds amazing, for whatever it is worth). But there might be a lot to the idea of a “gap year” (or two) before college.
DOCUMENTARIES
“Bill Cunningham New York” was riveting. As a character, Cunningham is entertaining and eccentric (I will never forget the footage from his apartment), but what grabbed me about this documentary was how it showed that by doing the same thing every day over a lifetime (taking photos of people whose personal style of dress he finds interesting), Cunningham turned himself into a fashion maven/genius. This idea of slow, almost imperceptible, daily improvement is also explored in the documentary “Jiro Dreams of Sushi” and in the book “When the Game Was Ours” by Larry Bird and Magic Johnson (which was published in 2009, but I only read this year so it counts as a “best of 2015” item). Chapter Six explains Pat Riley’s ‘Career Best Effort’ project, which is the system he created to help top-performing athletes like Kareem Abdul Jabbar make measurable improvements over the course of the season that, unfortunately, led to the Lakers’ first NBA finals win over the Celtics. In the interest of giving credit where it’s due, I should note that I was inspired to read “When the Game Was Ours” after reading a blog post by James Clear about Riley’s Career Best Effort system.
“Return to Homs” was shot throughout 2013 and follows Syrian soccer star Abdul Basset al-Saroot’s growing involvement in protests against the al-Assad regime. We witness Abdul Basset’s transformation from carefree 19-year-old athlete to rebel warrior. The courage Abdul Basset displays as he learns to fight and lead others in battle is inspiring. The footage of Homs will break your heart. If nothing else, “Return to Homs” provides some recent historical context to the Syrian refugee crisis, but that really isn’t the reason to watch. The reason to watch is the drama of Abdul Basset’s transformation, as well as the self-reflection it will likely inspire as you wonder how you might respond under similar circumstances.
“Meru” documents the attempts by three mountain climbers to scale the technically complicated Shark’s Fin on Mount Meru, which had never previously been climbed. Nearly every scene prompts the question: “How the hell did they film this?” But there are two other reasons to watch besides Jimmy Chin’s cinematography. One is to see Conrad Anker implement his non-negotiable rules around climbing that minimize his risk of injury and death. You see clearly that it is one thing to have rules to live by, it is another to actually live by them. The other is to see how Renan Ozturk prepared himself for climbing Meru after he was nearly killed in a skiing accident. If nothing else, imprinting the scenes of Renan’s monster physical therapy sessions on your brain will make it nearly impossible to ever again hit the snooze button on your alarm.
PARENTING DISCOVERY: CRACKING THE ‘WEEKLY ALLOWANCE’ CODE
Over the past few years, we’ve made half-hearted attempts to do allowances but nothing ever stuck. Then I heard Ron Lieber, author of “The Opposite of Spoiled: Raising Kids Who Are Grounded, Generous, and Smart About Money” describing his system for allowances on several podcasts earlier this year. Basically, you give your child an allowance that is equal to his or her age. Don’t tie the allowance to chores because you don’t want to find yourself in a situation in which your child refuses to do them because they don’t need the money. (They will find many reasons not to do their chores, why hand them an easy one?) Anyway, when they get their allowance, have them immediately (and physically) divide it into three categories: spend (70%); save (20%); and donate (10%). The spending money is for paying for an after-school Starbucks stop with friends and/or saving up for whatever shiny object they have been coveting. The savings are long-term: college and retirement (which can then be used to teach them about investing). The donate is for whatever they want to give to―this year, The Things have contributed allowance money to water projects in Africa, local animal rescue organizations, and school-based charity drives. So far it’s working in that it’s prompting interesting discussions about money. I still haven’t read the book, but I plan to as it also covers other topics including ways to appropriately involve your children in family budgeting decisions.
HIGH SCHOOL GRADUATION GIFT
I can’t swing a cat these days without hitting a niece or a nephew who is about to graduate high school. So this year I created a motivational, “words to live by” high school graduation gift pack. (NOTE: Linda makes sure they also get what they really want, which is MONEY.) The gift pack consists of a copy of the Holstee Manifesto poster and the following three books: Art of Living: The Classical Manual on Virtue, Happiness, and Effectiveness by Epictetus; Letters from a Stoic (Penguin Classics) by Lucius Annaeus Seneca; and Mastery, by Robert Greene.
BEST AMBITION GONE AWRY
Inspired by Sarah Bakewell’s “How To Live Or A Life of Montaigne In One Question and Twenty Attempts At An Answer,” I decided that 2015 would be the year I read Montaigne’s essays.
That didn’t happen.
BEST FICTION
Jane Smiley’s The Last Hundred Years trilogy consisting of the novels Some Luck, Early Warning, and Golden Age is everything the positive reviews say it is: innovative, immense, dizzying, tragic. But the books (which I read in a row as if they were one massive novel) left me gob-smacked for one reason: Smiley’s fictional stories about the hardships of farming, dealing with Monsanto, shrinking topsoil, and debt left me anxiously obsessed (in a way that Michael Pollan’s masterful Omnivore’s Dilemma sort of did, but really didn’t) about how in the hell the next generation will get their food.
Redeployment by Phil Klay: “The Things They Carried” for the Iraq War.
Dept. of Speculation by Jenny Offill: A short, trenchant, experimental novel in which the main characters (a novelist who is unable to complete her second book and her husband whom she discovers is having an affair) are never named. Brilliant. As James Wood puts it in a New Yorker review: “If it is a distressed account of a marriage in distress, it is also a poem in praise of the married state. If it brutally tears apart the boredom and frustrations of parenthood, it also solidly inhabits the joys and consolations of having a child.”
Bonfire of the Vanities by Tom Wolfe. I cannot believe I didn’t read this until 2015. Somewhat alarming that much of what Wolfe satirized about race, money, and politics in the 1980s is still relevant in the 2010s.
BEST NON FICTION
The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics by Barton Swaim. This book horrified me. Swaim worked as a speechwriter for former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford. Before Sanford pulled his infamous disappearing act during which he told his staff he was hiking the Appalachian Trail but was, in fact, in Argentina with his girlfriend (at the time, Sanford was married), he was seen as potential GOP vice presidential candidate material for the 2008 election. Details about Sanford we learn from this memoir? His frugality (which was spun as a political asset) was actually something else entirely. He was so cheap that his Christmas gifts to staff were recycled items that had been given to him by constituents, such as cans of shoe polish and three-year-old jars of preserves. He is rude, arrogant, self-centered, and hypocritical. This book demonstrates how little we really know about the people we cast our votes for.
The Oregon Trail: A New American Journey by Rinker Buck. An account of Rinker and his brother Nick’s adventure traversing the Oregon Trail old-school style in a period-replica covered wagon powered by a team of mules. The book is an adventure story, but also a history lesson that puts the economic and social impact of the massive land migration that took place via the Trail in the decade before the Civil War in a context you’ve likely never come across before. The most significant is that the journey across America made by pioneers, which is so often cited as an example of individual Americans’ do-it-yourself spirit, is actually an example of American achievement via community, collaboration―and government policy-making:
“In 1857, to encourage continued settlement of the West, Congress passed the Pacific Wagon Road Act, which among other improvements to the trail called for the surveying of a shorter route to Idaho. … This model of government support for a major development project became popular and was accepted as the new norm for western growth. Each new phase of frontier growth―the railroads, ranching, mining―was also supported by either outright government subsidies, land giveaways, or federally supported irrigation and bridge-building projects. That was the tradition established by the Oregon Trail and it has always amused me that the myth of ‘rugged individualism’ still plays such a large role in western folklore and American values. In fact, our vaunted rugged individualism was financed by huge government largesse.”