Recalcitrant Egg 3

K and I just donated to World Central Kitchen, a chef-run charity that deploys to areas of need to feed people. They are active in Poland feeding Ukrainian refugees fleeing from Russian aggression.  I had heard about the work Chef Jose Andres had done around the world and when I saw his charity was deployed to support Ukrainian refugees, K and I felt that was one small way we could help. You can learn more and donate here:   https://wck.org/relief/activation-chefs-for-ukraine

  Somebody "has a philosophy" - we ordinarily say - when she has a thoughtful view of what is important, a view of her major ends and goals and of the means appropriate to reaching these. A coherent view of aims and goals can help to guide someone's life without being invoked explicitly. Most often, it will not be. Rather, a person will devote some of her general alertness to monitoring how her life is proceeding. Only when she is deviating significantly from what her philosophy calls for will it be brought to conscious attention. A philosophy of life need not make life overintellectualized.  That is from the penultimate chapter of Robert Nozick's 1989 book, The Examined Life .  I have been working for a long time to have a coherent philosophy. I feel like I am getting there, and with another 50 years or so, I will probably have it. I do feel classical liberalism informs much of my thinking, and I think that classical liberalism is the best philosophical framework for

  After reflecting about my year of daily art and realizing I had spent too much time working on something that was important, but not important enough to justify they time I committed to it, I decided this year that I would refine my approach to self-improvement goals. The main thing I realized that I really came to dislike about the daily art project was its dailyness. In other words, the fact that I had to do it every day or I failed became overwhelming. That, and it was taking away from other, more pressing priorities. So this year I have decided to establish a series of weekly goals. I have to admit, I came up with them rather quickly during the first week of the new year - I know that is lame, but I really needed a break, I was so burnt out from the daily art discipline. So I came up with a series of weekly goals, and over the first couple of weeks made a few tweeks, and now I am in my 7th week. Crucially, none of them are daily, though reading is 6 days/week, so that is fairly

Over the winter break I found a new podcast, The Splendid Table . It's the first cooking podcast I have listened to. I have found some really interesting food bloggers through the podcast, and even bought a few of their books!  Anne Byrn is a cooking blogger, and has a Substack that I now follow called Anne Byrne: Between the Layers . The week before Valentine's she posted a recipe from another cooking blogger, Jolene Handy, for a pink champagne cake. Now K. is a prosecco girl, but pink champagne is close enough, so I decided I had to make this for Valentine's Day.  I didn't do an adequate job of checking the pantry, so we didn't have pink food coloring (we did have pink sprinkles), but otherwise the cake was a real treat. The champagne gave it just a touch of fruity tang.  Check out the recipe here: https://annebyrn.substack.com/p/her-pink-champagne-cake-my-red-velvet?r=9tum8&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=email  

I'm pleased to share I have a new paper out with some former colleagues from my Army-Baylor days. It's called  "Throw You to the Wolves" and Other Strategies for Developing the Interpersonal Skills of Recent Entrants to Healthcare Management: A Mixed-Methods Study and you can read it for free here:  https://www.proquest.com/openview/2ea51d7dcab979a7dec834ae0910aa19/1/advanced We examine some of the techniques that preceptors and interns identified as being effective during administrative residencies (internships). 

  I don't recall how I came across this link, but I LOVE this video. It's cool as a piece of speculative science, but if you read the comments, there are lots of smart sounding people who are saying this couldn't work as pictured. I'll be honest, that is way outside my area of knowledge. What I love so much about this video is it is the perfect metaphor for how I view teaching.  As a teacher, I see my role as metaphorically spinning kids up so that they get a boost into their lives - and then they can fire off on their own, building on what I and my colleagues have been able to give them to launch.  It's literally a metaphor I had in my head years before I saw this video. I get chills whenever I watch it. Which I am going to admit - I have watched it many times now. Whenever I need a little boost of my own, I flip over to it and get a hit of, "Yes! This is what I do!" There is a follow-up video where they ostensibly actually launch something, but I see a l

I was a freshman in high school back in 1985 - the year the song We Are the World was recorded. Esquire recently published, ' We Are the World': Inside Pop Music's Most Famous All-Nighter which tells the story of how the recording session went down. The people in this story, who made that song, were all of the people on the radio in my childhood. This is a fun read if you are a person of a certain age . But also fun to think about how to bring together so many creatives to produce something so quickly.  I think what is most interesting about this article is what is hinted at - which is how does one go about bringing together so many people who have high-demand social roles for so short of a time to make something which is (sort of) still iconic. If you haven’t listened to it lately (or never heard of it), you can check it out on YouTube here: https://youtu.be/9AjkUyX0rVw My twenty something daughter came in the room while I was listening to it and said, “What is that ?”

I came across this article, TED Ideas, Why a company is not a family — and how companies can bond with their employees instead https://ideas.ted.com/why-a-company-is-not-a-family-and-how-companies-can-bond-with-their-employees-instead/?utm_source=recommendation&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=explore&utm_term=ideas-blog-1 and it gave me some pause. I have some tangential observations about work identity and sociality based on this article. I think we all want different things from work, and I think we all want different things from our workplace. Some people have a transactional relationship with their work - work is a way to pay the bills and to enable these people to do the things they really care about - which might be family or hobbies or church or whatever. For some people their work is integral to their identity - I know this is true for many physicians for example - their work defines who they are. I’ve interviewed close to 40 physicians for a leadership study I was w

I've always struggled with the Buddhist principle that desire is the source of suffering - take for example: The Buddha believed that most suffering is caused by a tendency to crave or desire things. A person might crave something nice to eat or desire to go on a nice holiday or earn lots of money. Buddhism teaches that through being dissatisfied with their lives and craving things, people suffer. source:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/guides/zd8bcj6    In James Clear's Atomic Habits he talks about happiness in a way that I think illuminates this Buddhist principle: Happiness is not about the achievement of pleasure (which is to say joy or satisfaction), but about the lack of desire. It arrives when you have no urge to feel differently. Happiness is the state you enter when you no longer want to change your state.  however, happiness is fleeting because a new desire always comes along. As Caed Budris says, "Happiness is the space between one desire being fulfilled and a n