Grammarians can be a royal pain sometimes. I’m talking about you — yes you — right there, scrolling by.

In fairness, I’m also talking about me. Heavy is the head that wears the crown…

When you’re at a party and you hear someone utter something grammatically incorrect, it’s like a needle scratch on a record. “Wait,” you think, “that should be—”

You stop yourself with the utmost self-control, your eye twitching because you know that someone made a verbal blunder and because you’re also aware that to correct them in such a setting would out you as someone more interested in pedantry than in social graces.

And you excuse yourself to get more spinach avocado dip.

The lesson is that there is a time and a place for everything, and just there is a time to keep yourself from looking like an early-twentieth century schoolmarm, there may also be a time when improper grammar is not only acceptable, but celebrated.

Grammatically Incorrect Corporate Slogans

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Ed Bastian, CEO of Delta, says that 20 years ago, 80 percent of travelers picked an airline based on price. Ask them today why they fly Delta, and 80 percent will tell you it’s because of the experience: the way they’re treated and the way the brand shows up for them. Price is now the afterthought.

It is a massive shift years in the making, beginning with the culture inside the company.

For you see, Delta didn’t begin by trying to delight customers. It set out to take care of the people who take care of customers — the gate agents, the flight attendants, the mechanics, the thousands of employees you may never see interacting with customers — and let the delight arrive as a byproduct.

Obsessed with Our People

In an interview with Fortune earlier this year,1 Bastian said:

“When you asked people why they chose an airline for their specific flight [20 years ago], 80% of the time it would be whoever had the lowest price. Today, if you ask people why they choose Delta, 80% would say [it’s] because it’s Delta, because of the experience, the brand; 20% is the other stuff. So just a total flip. And so that was the most important thing, getting paid for the great service that our people do.”

How does Delta get great service out of its people?

“You have to let your people know that you’re supporting them and putting them out front, rather than the management being out front. We’re not obsessing on customers, per se, at the leadership levels, because we want to obsess over our own people, so that they can obsess over you as a customer. When your people know that you’ve got their back, amazing things can happen. That had been lost, and bringing that back, and getting their confidence and trust back, was really key.”

Kindness Wins

Twenty-four centuries before that interview, the historian Xenophon wrote of a king who understood the same formula. In the Cyropaedia2, his account of the education and reign of Cyrus the Great, the dying king tells his son that no throne survives on the strength of its scepter:

Cyrus built an empire that swallowed Babylon not by terrifying his soldiers into obedience but, according to Xenophon, by feeding them before he asked anything of them, learning their names, and winning them “not by violence, but by loving kindness.”

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Love ‘Em Up

This is the same principle Alan Mulally distilled into five words at Ford — the first axiom of the Working Together™ Leadership & Management System I now teach to companies and speak to groups about: people first — love ‘em up.

More about working with Scott

This isn’t some would-be inspirational poster hanging in the hallway of corporate headquarters. It is love by design: a decision made to treat everyone with dignity, kindness, and respect — and to have high expectations for them, driven by transparency, accountability, a shared truth through the data, a can-do, find-a-way attitude, and relentless implementation.

Trust doesn’t arrive because a leader says the right things about culture. It shows up when who you are matches what you do (your “Be” and your “Do”), and it works when done consistently and repeatedly, over time. As it quietly accumulates, you feel that were seen, that you were heard, that you will not be discarded when you’re struggling.

Cyrus’s soldiers had that evidence on the battlefield. Delta’s employees have it at the gate and in the air.

Now imagine an organization that got the order backward — that obsessed over the customer first and hoped the employees would simply absorb whatever was left over.

You don’t have to imagine it; this is exactly how most companies operate.

There’s so much to learn,

Get in touch with Scott to discuss more

A question to ask yourself:

What are my principles, and am I being loyal to them?

Reflection

Every one of us follows someone — a boss, a mentor, a party, a cause. The real test of that following isn’t how loyal we feel when things are going well. It’s whether we can name, in advance, the line that would make us walk away. If nothing could cross it, we haven’t given that leader our loyalty — we’ve given them our conscience.

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“The Postliterate Heart” went out a few days ago, and it turns out half the internet had already been circling the same Atlantic essay, arguing about it from opposite ends of the table.

Two of the sharpest responses landed within a couple of days of each other — one confirming the diagnosis, one contesting it. Both worth walking through, because the disagreement is more useful than either piece alone.

Singer, author of Hot Takes, clearly stated: “The post-literate age is here,” which doesn’t so much rebut the Atlantic piece as talk about its implications. The numbers he shares are a stark warning about the effects of less time spent reading: people who were read to more as children score meaningfully higher on IQ tests as adults, and the effect holds even after stripping out wealth and class.

The same dataset’s low scorers report more TV, more celebrity gossip, more lotto playing — and, the detail that stuck with me, they find it more boring to just sit and think. Singer’s conclusion is a K-shaped one: a widening gap between people who can still do the friction of reading a whole book and everyone else, with AI raising the value of the first group by the day.

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Not everyone’s buying the K-shape, though. One rebuttal came from a writer I’ve long admired who has a book of her own coming out in February — which you might think factors into how you read her optimism) — but the argument turned out sturdier than the confluence of interest suggests.

She makes it from a gym, of all places, using her quads as a metaphor, and by the end I wasn’t sure Singer and I hadn’t both been a little too grim. That one’s for paid subscribers — along with the five books I’d actually hand you this weekend if you wanted to start proving Singer right.

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In addition to those two, one of which has been called the finest example of the novella, we have Kafka’s The Metamorphosis, Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Machiavelli’s The Prince — none of them over 200 pages, all of them exactly the kind of friction Singer’s talking about.

Pick one. That’s the whole assignment. Let me know how you do.

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There’s so much to learn,

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See all entries tagged Reading

Every few years, we seem to find ourselves standing in the midst of a socio-intellectual panic over waning interest in the practice of reading. This is hardly a new phenomenon.

About 2,000 years ago, Seneca diagnosed a crisis of attention, caused by an oversupply of papyrus. Scrolls had gotten cheap, wealthy Romans amassed libraries they’d never finish, and Seneca watched their minds grow “restless and unsteady,” noting “One who is everywhere is nowhere.”

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That line is the perfect summary of the latest argument in The Atlantic’s sprawling new essay on America’s “postliterate age,”1 where the algorithm in your pocket takes the blame. It isn’t wrong, but the pain is older than TikTok. It’s the ache of having too much to attend to and no discipline, individual or civilizational, for choosing well.

What’s different now is the scale: fewer than half of American adults read a book of any kind last year, and the proportion reading for pleasure on a given day has fallen from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent today. Reading, once a civic habit, has become what Rutgers reading historian Leah Price calls “a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.”2

Now imagine that hobbyist population is also the population responsible for training the algorithms that decide what the rest of us see.

Warning: Idiocracy Ahead

That line belongs to Roberto Serrano, a Brown University economics professor who gave his students a take-home midterm this spring and watched the class average land at 96 percent — sixteen points above his historical norm. Suspicious, he ran the exam through ChatGPT and got back answers that mirrored his students’: technically correct, oddly convoluted, unmistakably synthetic.

So, he switched the final to an in-person exam. Eighteen students dropped the course. The average score on the final: 48.6 percent, a historic low.3 Take a look at the distribution:

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Employers seem to agree: there is a concern that the decline in literacy rates, social skills, and critical thinking abilities is affecting the workplace. It’s gotten so obvious that one financier said that his firm now avoids “AI-native” STEM graduates in favor of humanities majors, because the AI-fluent hires keep turning out to have alarmingly shallow ideas. “We want critical thinking, not just AI,” he said.4

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The Land of Nectar and Honey

Here is where Seneca becomes more useful than either headline. He compared deep reflection to what bees do with nectar: they pass it among themselves, mixing it with enzymes until it becomes honey. Nectar sours in days. Honey, properly made, doesn’t spoil for millennia.

Information is nectar. Wisdom is honey. And the difference between them isn’t the raw material — it’s the digestion.

What if we sat with just one idea a day, planted by reading? Simplicity and focus rather than complexity and an overcrowded library. It becomes easier to parse through concepts, to remember what we read, and to apply it more deeply to what we need.

Sherlock Holmes knew this in his very first appearance before the public:5

“I consider that a man’s brain originally is like a little empty attic, and you have to stock it with such furniture as you choose. A fool takes in all the lumber of every sort that he comes across, so that the knowledge which might be useful to him gets crowded out, or at best is jumbled up with a lot of other things so that he has a difficulty in laying his hands upon it. Now the skilful workman is very careful indeed as to what he takes into his brain-attic. He will have nothing but the tools which may help him in doing his work, but of these he has a large assortment, and all in the most perfect order. It is a mistake to think that that little room has elastic walls and can distend to any extent. Depend upon it there comes a time when for every addition of knowledge you forget something that you knew before. It is of the highest importance, therefore, not to have useless facts elbowing out the useful ones.”

The Chapter Everyone Skips

And here is the part of the reading-crisis conversation that keeps getting skipped: reading was never primarily a data-delivery mechanism. It’s an empathy-delivery mechanism — the honey made from other people’s nectar.

I made a version of this case in these pages last year: we read many books because we cannot know enough people. Harold Bloom put it better, describing reading’s gift as “a real capacity for apprehending otherness,” a way past the trap of our own mortality into some real sense of other selves.6

That capacity isn’t a soft skill; it’s the operating system of a functioning team. Our Working Together^TM system opens with a posture, not an org chart: seek to understand before seeking to be understood; people first, love ‘em up.7 You cannot execute either instruction toward a person you’ve never bothered to imagine from the inside.

Literature is the cheapest empathy-training available to the species, and its dividends compound — a leader who’s spent a few thousand hours inside the consciousness of others walks into a hard conversation already fluent in a language most colleagues are still learning on the job.

Take away the emotional connection and teams stop trusting each other because no one has practiced imagining anyone else’s interior life in years. Cal State Chico ethics professor Troy Jollimore’s warning — “massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate”8 — isn’t only a literacy problem. It’s a trust problem disguised as a literacy problem.

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We are, in other words, several decades into a neglect not unlike the one that quietly emptied the Great Library of Alexandria — not a single dramatic fire, but centuries of scrolls left to rot while no one thought preservation worth the expense. The classicist Roger Bagnall’s line from The Atlantic article has stuck with me since I first read it:

“It is not that the disappearance of a library led to a dark age, nor that its survival would have improved those ages. Rather, the dark ages... show their darkness by the fact that the authorities both east and west lacked the will and means to maintain a great library.”

Have we lost the will to read?

None of this requires despair — only, per Seneca, the harder discipline of attention. You don’t need to finish every book in the library. Most mornings, you just need one idea, held long enough to become honey instead of nectar.

Do that consistently, with your team and in your family, and you’re quietly rebuilding the exact muscle the postliterate age is letting atrophy: the capacity to imagine your way into someone you’ll never fully know.

There’s so much to learn,

From the Timeless & Timely archives

“To Read Is to Live” (2022) — on the Library of Alexandria and the permanence of the written word.

“The Real Reason to Read” (2025) — the empathy argument, with Harold Bloom and Alan Mulally.

“The Best Leadership Advice of All Time” (2022) — Thales, distraction, and the discipline of knowing yourself.

Look at the photograph above. My hand — a man’s hand, a watch strapped to the wrist, marking off minutes we didn’t yet know were numbered — wraps entirely around his. He isn’t looking at me. He’s looking down at a can in his other hand, a red straw balanced between his lips, already somewhere else. Below us: weathered boardwalk, leaves scattered along the rail, a pair of watermelon-print Crocs he’d outgrow before the summer was over.

I snapped it twelve years ago, when my younger son was eight, walking together on an ordinary day I didn’t know was extraordinary.

I knew, even then, that a day was coming — not far off — when he’d no longer want to hold my hand. Not because he stopped loving me. Because little boys grow up. Because independence calls to them, and their peers’ opinions start to matter more than their father’s hand around theirs. I was that way. You probably were too.

Looking at that photo now, I notice something I missed at the time: he wasn’t looking at me even then. His attention was already somewhere else — a can of juice, a red straw, the small immediate world in front of him. I held on anyway. That’s most of what parenting turns out to be.

You think you’ve outgrown what looks like a childish show of dependence and affection.

What I know now: our connection to others matters more than what anyone thinks of us. Adolescents will always weigh outside opinion heavily — that’s just how it is. But we can still show them there’s no shame in loving out loud, whether it’s a friend, a family member, or a colleague.

Caring about others is the foundation every relationship is built on.

To love and to be loved — in that order — is the purpose of life.

My son and I hug frequently now. We say “I love you” without thinking twice about it. And some part of me knows we’ll hold hands again someday — though it’s more likely to be his hand closing around mine, at the end, rather than the other way around.

The watch is still running. The boardwalk is probably still there, somewhere in those woods. Those watermelon Crocs didn’t make it to the next size.

There’s so much to learn,

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P.S.

I help executives and companies understand that love and humility are key aspects of leadership and growth. I speak and consult on Our Working Together^TM system, as created and shared with me by former Ford and Boeing leader Alan Mulally.

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I’ve never once, in my adult life, used the word “eke” by itself. Eke is always paired with “out” — eke out a living, eke out a win, eke out a paragraph on deadline.

And yet I understood it instantly the first time I heard it, the way you understand a word you’ve never looked up but have absorbed by osmosis, through sheer repetition of the phrase that carries it.

That’s because “eke” isn’t really a word anymore, in the sense that “run” or “table” or “disappointed” are words. It’s a fossil. It went extinct in the wild sometime in the last few centuries, and the only reason we still have it at all is that one particular phrase decided to preserve it, the way a mosquito gets caught in amber and outlives everything else in the forest.

Linguists have a real term for this: a fossil word, one that’s “broadly obsolete but remains in use due to its presence in an idiom or phrase.” The Oxford English Dictionary made this sense official in a 1993 update, though Emerson had already given us the poetry of it 150 years earlier: language itself as a kind of limestone, built from the compressed shells of a million dead metaphors.

Longtime readers may recall that we’ve brushed up against this territory before. A year ago, I wrote about phrases like “spick and span” and “vim and vigor,” where one half of the pair has quietly gone obsolete while the phrase itself refuses to die — I filed those under a subcategory I called simply “Fossils.”1

And a year before that, we looked at ping pong and flip flop, pairs locked in place by the order of their vowel sounds rather than by extinction.2

Fossil words are a related phenomenon, but a broader one. They don’t have to travel in pairs, and they’re not bound by any rule of sound. They’re simply words that lost their independence — words that no longer work alone, and survive only because they once got lucky enough to be standing next to the right neighbor when the rest of their generation got wiped out.

So consider this a companion piece to that earlier dig. Let’s excavate ten of them. And for those with some vim, an impressive etymological feat awaits you at the conclusion of the list: all ten of these fossil words are combined in two sensible sentences.

Ready? Let’s dive in. With each word, you get the definition, its origin, and an example of it in a sentence.

Ten Fossil Words

Ado

Bother or fuss over something trivial.

From an old Northern English construction, “at do” — literally “to do” — that fused into a single word. Shakespeare gave it permanent shelter by putting it in a title in 1598: Much Ado About Nothing.

The board spent the first hour arguing about parking before, without further ado, turning to the actual merger.

Bated

Restrained, held in check

From “abate.” Its only surviving job is standing next to “breath.” Shakespeare is the earliest source we have for the phrase, in The Merchant of Venice (1596–98): Shylock speaks of addressing a rival “with bated breath and whisp’ring humbleness.”

The interns waited with bated breath while the partners filed back in to deliver a verdict on the pitch.

Fro

Away, or backward.

A dialectal cousin of “from,” borrowed from Old Norse “frá” and current in Northern English and Scots by around 1200. In modern English it does exactly one job: standing across from “to.”

The porch swing kept creaking to and fro long after everyone had gone inside for the night.

Eke

To supplement or make something stretch further

From Old English “eacian,” “to increase” — a distant cousin of “augment.” Ironically, the phrase has drifted from its own original sense: “eke out a living” once meant supplementing a fixed income, not scraping by on nothing.

During the lean years after the factory closed, the family eked out a living selling vegetables from a roadside stand.

Kith

Acquaintances, neighbors, one’s own country

Old English “cyþth,” related to words for “knowledge.” A thousand years ago it could mean your homeland or simply what you knew; today it survives only as the first half of “kith and kin,” a pairing first recorded in the late 1300s.

When the storm hit, half the town’s kith and kin crowded into the high school gymnasium until the water finally receded.

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On the same day this week, in two countries, two leaders answered corruption problems with the same audacious solution: they embraced it.

In France, an appeals court upheld Marine Le Pen’s conviction for embezzling European Parliament funds — some €2.8 million over more than a decade — and within hours she announced she would seek the presidency anyway, the ruling having conveniently restored, as she put it, the voter’s freedom to choose her.1

On the same day in Britain, Nigel Farage resigned his seat in Parliament rather than wait out an inquiry into undisclosed gifts, then declared he would run to win it back, recasting an ethics investigation as a “people versus the establishment” crusade. “Making money is not a crime,” he offered, completely ignoring the method. By that logic, bank robbery would be a respectable vocation.2

Neither one of them denied the charge. Each used it to their advantage.

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Le Pen and Farage are the counter-tide: the accused no longer retreat before public judgment — they run on the charge, betting the public rewards defiance. The machinery of shame hasn’t just rusted; it’s been reverse-engineered into a campaign engine.

We know the American edition. A president convicted on 34 felony counts and inaugurated all the same — a sequence recited so often it has lost the power to startle.

That is the tell of a post-shame society: not that misconduct occurs, but that it no longer shocks, no longer needs to be hidden. The accusation that was once a liability to be buried is now a credential to be brandished. The trial becomes a referendum. The verdict of the court is appealed not to a higher court but to a friendlier crowd.

Was it always thus? In a sense, yes — there has always been a path for those shameless enough to abandon self-respect in exchange for power.

When Vice Still Wanted Cover

In 62 BC, Publius Clodius Pulcher disguised himself as a woman to slip into the rites of the Bona Dea, a festival closed to men, held that year in the house of Julius Caesar. Caught and tried for sacrilege, he was acquitted by a jury that Cicero — who testified against him — was certain had been bought.

In his letters, Cicero recorded the sordid arithmetic with a lawyer’s contempt: the jurors had demanded their bribes up front, trusting the defendant no further than he trusted them. And then Clodius was elected tribune of the plebs, and used the office to drive Cicero himself into exile. Vengeance upon corruption upon sacrilege.

But note what Clodius still wanted: an acquittal. A verdict of not guilty, purchased though it was. Even bribery is a backhanded compliment to the idea of innocence — it wants the appearance of virtue badly enough to pay for it.

That is La Rochefoucauld’s tribute: vice doffing its cap to a standard it has no intention of meeting, but whose existence it concedes.

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Crime as a Platform

James Michael Curley of Boston moved the practice closer to our own moment. As a young man on the make, he sat for a civil service examination using another man’s name. He was convicted of fraud and turned the offense into virtuous folklore: he had done it for a friend, the story went.

Curley was elected him anyway — as a state representative, then to the Board of Aldermen, then to Congress, four non-consecutive terms as mayor, including a stint as governor of Massachusetts along the way. His term as governor was described as “ludicrous part of the time, shocking most of the time, and tawdry all of the time.”

He served part of that final mayoral term in a federal prison, after a mail-fraud conviction. When his sentence was commuted, the city welcomed him home. Curley neither hid the crime nor bought an acquittal. He sold it — as proof of loyalty, of a man who took care of his own. The corruption was not the embarrassment to be explained away. It was the platform.

Between Clodius and Curley lies the whole distance we have traveled: from vice that still craves the cover of innocence to vice that runs on the rap sheet.

Shame Needs an Audience

Aristotle, cataloguing the virtues, called shame aidōs — the fear of disrepute — and thought it fit chiefly for the young, who need the pressure of others’ regard until better habits take hold. The decent and mature person, he reasoned, should have no occasion for shame, having no wish to do shameful things.

But here’s the thing about shame: disrepute requires a public that still disapproves. The feeling was never purely private. It has always depended on an audience whose good opinion you feared to lose. Remove that audience — or worse, replace it with one that cheers — and shame has nothing to grip.

We blush because there are witnesses to our missteps.

The Buyers

We keep asking the shameless whether they have any shame, as though the defect were housed entirely in them. It isn’t.

A politician who runs on his convictions — the criminal kind — has read his market correctly. Shamelessness is a supply that rises to meet a demand.

Shame is a transaction, and every transaction needs a buyer.

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The disgraced do not survive in a vacuum; they are returned to office — by us, in numbers large enough to win. We are the market that clears them.

The relevant question is not whether they have any shame left to feel, but whether we have any left to enforce. And we answer it, quietly, every time we reward the very defiance we claim to deplore.

Twain meant the above as a rebuke. But perhaps he was more right than he knew, and in a way he never intended. The involuntary rush of blood to the cheeks that once told the tribe we knew we had transgressed is now firing at nothing

We may not be watching the death of shame so much as waking up from an emergency surgery, discovering that it has been quietly removed, much like an appendix that no one misses.

The question is: can it ever grow back?

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There’s so much to learn,

For further reading

• The Rascal King: The Life And Times Of James Michael Curley 1874-1958 by Jack Beatty. Da Capo Press, 1992

• “Have You No Shame?” — the phrase traced from Joseph Welch to the Senate floor, and the argument that shame requires a conscience to register it.

• “Scandal Without Scrutiny” — the same rusting machinery read through Richard III and a summer of viral disgrace.

• “Being a Leader Means Having a Moral Compass” — Margaret Chase Smith’s Declaration of Conscience, and the courage to name the Four Horsemen of Calumny when almost no one else would.

• “From Shame to Self-Awareness” — the lens turned inward, from the failings of others toward the cultivation of one’s own conscience.

• “Scandalous Language” — an Off the Clock wander through the words the world has coined for scandal and calumny.

In the entry “Leader. Compassionate Leader.”, I shared some encouraging research — and a genuinely touching story — worth resurfacing.

McKinsey research found what we’ve always known (and still know) to be true:

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In the autumn of 1774, a 37-year-old Englishman stepped off a ship in Philadelphia carrying a letter of introduction from Benjamin Franklin and little else. He had failed at corset-making, failed at tax collecting, and left behind a second marriage that had just collapsed. No fortune. No family name. Nothing that would have qualified as a credential in that age.

Fifteen months later he published a 47-page pamphlet that reached a larger share of the colonial population than anything printed before or since. Thomas Paine’s Common Sense1 worked because of an assumption embedded in every sentence: that the tradesmen, farmers, and printers who read it could be reasoned into a conclusion they had not yet reached. Paine presented his position with arguments, not flattery, and made a good case in doing so.

He had tested the method a year earlier, writing for the first time under his own name in “Reflections on Titles,” where he staked liberty itself on the willingness to keep thinking:

By December 1776, argument alone would not hold the army together. Washington’s forces were disintegrating at their encampment on the Delaware — desertions running into the thousands, enlistments expiring at year’s end. Paine, who had marched with the retreat from New York, wrote The American Crisis in the days before Christmas. Washington had it read aloud to what remained of his men.

Whatever combination of those sentences and that river crossing accomplished, it held the army together long enough to win at Trenton. A pamphlet did that. Not artillery — sentences.

Two hundred and fifty years on, we still like to say that words can hold something together. The question worth asking this particular Fourth of July is whether we believe it the way Paine did — or whether we’ve quietly stopped expecting an argument to change anyone’s mind at all.2

The Manufactured Consensus

“Self-evident” truths are rarely self-evident. Jefferson’s Declaration and Paine’s pamphlet did not discover a consensus already latent in the colonial mind — they built one, through careful rhetorical construction, timed publication, and relentless argument.

The Enlightenment’s great confidence trick was persuading an audience that the conclusion they had just been argued into had actually been there all along, waiting to be recognized. That is not a knock on Paine. It is an accurate description of what persuasion is: not the discovery of pre-existing agreement, but the patient construction of it.

Paine kept making that bet through less flattering weather. In 1791, defending the French Republic in a stance that cost him friends and eventually his freedom, he still insisted that a reasoning mind deserved to be reasoned with:

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By 1794, imprisoned in Paris and drafting The Age of Reason under threat of the guillotine, he turned the same instrument on religious falsehood, in a line that reads like it was written for a Tuesday in our own news cycle:

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Consider that word: complaisance. Paine is not describing he who issues a falsehood — he is describing the audience that lets the lie pass, out of a preference for comfort over friction. That is the exact posture an engagement-optimized feed, or a fluent language model, will always reward in us, because it’s easier to accept that which encourages our beliefs rather than challenges them. And so we scroll past.

The Truth About Truth

We walked this same ground three years ago in “The Truth About Truth” — the observation that we go on believing con men not because we are fooled, but because we want to be led somewhere by someone smarter than us, and only feel betrayed once the bill comes due. Paine’s readers wanted the opposite of that. Not to be led, but to be convinced. That distinction is the entire difference between a demagogue and a pamphleteer, and it is disappearing from our information diet at precisely the moment it is most worth protecting.

By 1798, exiled in Paris and mostly written off by the country he had helped found, Paine made his last and most confident claim for the method that had carried him that far:

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He was, by then, poor, unpopular, and largely ignored. History has been kinder to the claim than his contemporaries were to the man. Principles did outlast the armies that carried them in 1776 — but only because enough people were still willing to write, and read, as though minds could be changed by something other than volume or velocity.

That is the inheritance actually worth marking at 250 years — not the fireworks, the fairs, or the hamburgers, but the harder discipline underneath them: the willingness to argue rather than assert, and the humility to assume your reader is capable of following you there.

The pamphlet is gone. The obligation it created is not.

What would it cost you this week to write, or lead, or argue as if the person on the other end could still be persuaded — rather than simply captured?

No Paine, no gain.

There’s so much to learn,

I was in Chicago last week, a few miles from Jackson Park, where a lagoon still traces the shoreline that once held the grandest lie in American history.

You wouldn’t call it that now. What’s left is dignified: the Museum of Science and Industry sits exactly where Daniel Burnham’s Palace of Fine Arts stood — one building of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition1 that was solid enough, and important enough, to be built to actually last.

Everything else is grass now, and geese, and the quiet of a Chicago afternoon. It’s hard to conjure the 27.5 million visitors who came to see a city that rose from a swamp in 22 months and that vanished within two years of opening.

They Came for the White City

Burnham, with Frederick Law Olmsted laying out the grounds, built fourteen “Great Buildings” around a Grand Basin, each dressed in the vocabulary of Rome and the Renaissance. A Scottish travel writer called it “the most flawless and fairy-like creation, on a large scale, of man’s invention.”

At night, thousands of electric bulbs turned the basin to gold. It wasn’t merely a fair. It was an argument: that a young, sooty republic could conceive of order and beauty on a scale to rival anything Europe had built in a thousand years — and do it in 22 months, from nothing.

That argument outlived the fair. Out of the White City came the City Beautiful movement,2 the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Science and Industry, and, in the most peculiar circularity of this story, Washington DC’s National Mall itself.

In 1901, Burnham sat on the Senate Park Commission alongside three colleagues from the fair, and together they redrew L’Enfant’s plan for Washington into the grand, axial space that exists today.3 The very lawn on which a very different spectacle recently unfolded owes its shape to Daniel Burnham’s ambition.

Direct Deceit in Service of Ambition

I say ambition, and not honesty, deliberately, because the White City was, physically, a lie. Those fourteen buildings were never marble. Their façades were constructed of “staff” — plaster, cement, and jute fiber over wood, painted white to mimic stone. Critics called them “decorated sheds.”

Louis Sullivan, a mentor of Frank Lloyd Wright, worried the fair’s classicism would damage American architecture “for half a century from its date, if not longer.” John Ruskin, forty-four years earlier, had already passed sentence on exactly this maneuver:

“The intermediate shell were made of wood instead of stone, and whitewashed to look like the rest — this would, of course, be direct deceit, and altogether unpardonable.”4

By his own lamp of truth, the White City fails inspection. It was theater, held up by timber, sold as permanence.

And yet history — which is not obligated to be consistent, only honest about what it rewards — was generous to that particular lie. Because the lie wasn’t really about the plaster. It served an idea large enough to survive its own props: that a nation could aim at greatness and be judged, eventually, on what it actually built once the scaffolding came down.

Burnham said as much himself, seventeen years later, in a line quoted past the point of cliché but still earning it:

“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood and probably themselves will not be realized. Make big plans; aim high in hope and work, remembering that a noble, logical diagram once recorded will never die, but long after we are gone will be a living thing, asserting itself with ever- growing insistency. Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger us. Let your watchword be order and your beacon beauty.”

The plaster was a promissory note. It got cashed — the World Congress Auxilliary building became the Art Institute of Chicago, the Palace of Arts was transformed into the Museum of Science and Industry, in a stave church shipped back to Norway in 2015 having outlived two world wars and the country that hosted it.5

Which brings me, reluctantly, to a fairground on the National Mall.

The Fair-to-Poor State Fair

I won’t recount the news at length; you’ve seen it, and the facts satirize themselves better than I could. The Great American State Fair — Donald Trump’s contribution to the nation’s Semiquincentennial, cast in his own image of gimcrackery and cheap ornamentation, attempting to appear authentic — is staged this June on the same lawn Burnham helped design

It opened to power outages, a Confederate flag controversy, and crowds thin enough that every attempted fawning by certain media outlets was belied by visual evidence of how empty it was. A plywood-and-vinyl mockup of a proposed $100 million “Triumphal Arch,” planned to stand taller than the Lincoln Memorial, began wrinkling and separating at its seams within days. Reporters compared it, not unkindly, to the collapsing Stonehenge prop in This Is Spinal Tap.

Plaster with a Purpose vs. Plywood with None

Burnham’s staff dressed up a real argument about American ambition; the hastily assembled Semiquincentennial celebration scrapped a nearly decade-long Congressionally-approved, Smithsonian-backed set of plans that would have resulted in a grandeur that was intended to rival the 1976 Bicentennial celebrations.

Instead, it is reflective of the conceptually vague plans, lack of expertise, inattention to detail, and poor execution for which this administration is becoming notorious.

When Ozymandias demanded future generations look on his mighty works and despair, his error was building a monument to the appearance of greatness instead of the substance of it, expecting the desert not to notice the difference.

The more uncomfortable parallel isn’t architectural. It’s Russian, and it’s a lie about a lie.

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It Takes a Potemkin Village

The phrase “Potemkin village” comes down to us as settled fact: that Grigory Potemkin built fake portable settlements along the Dnieper in 1787 to fool Catherine the Great, disassembled overnight and floated downriver to be admired again. It’s a wonderful story.

It is also, by the consensus of historians who’ve actually gone looking, almost certainly untrue — a defamation campaign cooked up by a Saxon diplomat who wasn’t even present, laundered into respectability 60 years later by a French travelogue trading in exactly the caricature its readers wanted. Potemkin decorated real towns along the route. But he didn’t hide that he was doing it.

I find this more damning, not less. It means the lie we tell about liars has outlasted the liars themselves. We built ourselves a myth to condemn deception with, and the myth has proven sturdier than most of the buildings involved.

That’s the real inheritance of a summer that gave us a fairground of plywood and a 240-year-old rumor still doing honest work as an idiom. The species that erected Burnham’s plaster city in 22 months is the same species that has spent two centuries retelling a story about villages that were never actually built.

Where does that leave us?

Not with the easy verdict that appearances lie and substance tells the truth. Appearances aren’t the enemy; dishonest appearances are. Burnham’s staff and stucco were about as flimsy as this year’s plywood arch — the difference was never the material. It was whether the builder believed in something large enough to be worth the deception, and whether, once the props came down, anything was left standing that could survive an honest inspection.

A White City evaporates and leaves us with a handful of buildings.

A Potemkin village — real or invented — leaves us nothing but the rumor of its own dishonesty.

And a vinyl arch, celebrating a nation’s 250th birthday, sends a message that the builder thinks the audience is dumb (with a ‘b’) enough to believe the lie and miss the obvious metaphor for how appearance is being sold over substance — the great irony being that even the appearance itself is shoddy.

An honest builder and a con man use the same materials. The only test history ever applies is what remains standing once the scaffolding is stripped away and no one is left to applaud.

Burnham bet his plaster on an idea worth building twice — once in temporary glory, once, later, in stone. That bet is the whole difference between a legacy and a rumor.

Ask yourself, honestly, which one you’re building — not this year, but with the parts of your life and work that will still be standing after everyone watching has gone home.

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There’s so much to learn,

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Charlie Pappas was fascinated with world’s fairs and similar large-scale events — particularly with their proclivity to introduce new ideas and new products to the public. He compiled a series of significant ones in his book Flying Cars, Zombie Dogs, & Robot Overlords: How World’s Fairs and Trade Expos Changed the World. (Amazon | Bookshop.org)

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It has become the custom, around this time of year, to issue advice to graduates — most of it well-meant, much of it forgotten by autumn, none of it likely to alter the trajectory of a life already underway.

The more interesting question, born from lazy summer days of childhood but perhaps forgotten in our all-season screen-driven fervor, is: What is summer itself meant to do?

We are handed three months in which the structure of the school year, or of the working calendar, loosens slightly; whatever else those months are for, they ought to be for reading.

In years long past, a weekly visit to our town library, high on a hill, would result in stacks of books — vividly recall stacks of books, ten or twelve at a time — coming home with me and returning the next week as I prepared to find more favorites. It was not a question of whether it would happen; it was a welcome habit. Reading was part of summer life.

The case for reading — sustained, slow, in books, for no reason other than the books themselves — is not nostalgia. It is the only case anyone has ever made for what the humanities are, and the only one that has ever been worth making.

This entry from gives you a summer reading list, which is filled with some timeless entries:

1. Meditations — Marcus Aurelius

2. Legacy — James Kerr

3. We Were Soldiers Once… and Young — Harold G. Moore & Joseph L. Galloway

4. The Boys in the Boat — Daniel James Brown

5. The Old Man and the Sea — Ernest Hemingway

6. Treasure Island — Robert Louis Stevenson

7. 1776 — David McCullough

8. Washington: A Life — Ron Chernow

9. A Gentleman in Moscow — Amor Towles

10. The Great Gatsby — F. Scott Fitzgerald

What other titles would you add?

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In the spirit of not taking much of your time on the weekend, I have some additional reading, in the form of three pieces from the Timeless & Timely archives on what reading is and what it does:

These essays, taken together, are an argument for what to do with the long warm months ahead. Read deliberately. Read what does not pay you back immediately. Read what you do not have to.

What you read when you don’t have to, as the old line goes, determines what you will be when you can’t help it.

There’s so much to learn,

P.S.

You can browse our recommended titles on Amazon and Bookshop.org

In the image above, we see a boy leaning over the edge of a still pool. Near him, half-dissolved into the trees, stands the nymph who loves him and whom he will never bother to notice.

She is Echo, and she has lost the power to say anything of her own; she can only repeat the last words spoken to her. He is Narcissus, who has just been introduced to the most fascinating face he will ever meet and does not intend to be parted from it. He will keep the appointment until it kills him.

When Narcissus was born, his mother asked the blind prophet Tiresias whether the child would live a long life. The answer was one of those riddles the Greeks loved: yes — if he never knows himself. It sounds like a blessing. It was a sentence.

Above the temple of Apollo at Delphi the Greeks had carved their standing instruction to humans — know thyself.1 Tiresias simply inverted it. Narcissus would be ruined not by the failure to find himself but by finding only his reflection, and taking the reflection for the man.

The Two Reflections

Here is the thing the myth conveys and we forget. “Reflection” is one word doing the work of two ideas, and the two have almost nothing to do with each other. One is the image thrown back by a still surface — the face on the water. The other is the act of a mind turning to examine itself — the hard, unglamorous work of asking what we are doing and why.

Narcissus had an inexhaustible supply of the first and not a drop of the second. He studied his own features for the better part of a lifetime and came away knowing nothing, the water showing him everything except himself.

We have built a civilization fully fluent in the first kind of reflection and increasingly starved of the second. Our surfaces have never been more available to us: front-facing cameras, curated feeds, the endless little pools we carry in our pockets and consult during meetings, at red lights, and in the restroom.

What we are short of is the older discipline — the still hour, the examined purpose, the willingness to ask a question whose answer might cost us something.

A Pool on the Mall

It would be hard to invent a tidier illustration than the one currently on offer in Washington. Ahead of the country’s 250th birthday, the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool — the long, mirrored rectangle built to hold the image of the memorial and the monument beyond it — was selected for a makeover. The job was estimated at under two million dollars. It has since passed fourteen.

The pool was drained and its already waterproofed concrete surface was repainted a patriotic blue with a substance that would not adhere to the treated concrete; algae turned it green; crews arrived with hydrogen peroxide and nanobubblers. The new paint began peeling off in strips and floating to the surface.

Asked to account for it, the man who ordered the work blamed vandals — unnamed, unevidenced — and countered his earlier claim that the surface couldn’t be cut with a knife by claiming the vandals used…knives.2

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I raise it not to dwell on one man; the symbolism is too exact to ignore. A narcissist obsessed with a reflecting pool is the peak of life imitating mythology.

A reflecting pool is an instrument built to show you something other than yourself — the memorial, the sky, the obelisk at the far end. Fill it with your own image and you have produced, at considerable public expense, the precise condition Tiresias warned about: the pool that cannot reflect, commissioned by the man who will not.

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Sophrosyne

The Greeks, who gave us Narcissus, also gave us the remedy, and they gave it a name we have unwisely let fall out of use: sophrosyne. It is usually rendered as “sound-mindedness,” though it gathers up a whole constellation — moderation, self-restraint, and above all self-knowledge: the capacity to know yourself and to know the limits of what you know.3

Heraclitus, around 500 BCE, called it the highest virtue of all. Plato described it as a kind of harmony among the parts of the soul. Its opposite is the quality that destroys Narcissus and a great many boards, cabinets, and command structures since: hubris — the overconfidence that has lost the ability to see itself.4

What makes sophrosyne so difficult is that it cannot be installed. It is not a trait you either have or lack; it is a practice, learned the way one learns an instrument, through repetition and a tolerance for being bad at it first. And the practice is reflection — the second kind.

The leader who reflects is doing what Narcissus never managed: turning away from the flattering surface long enough to ask the questions that don’t flatter.

I have written before that the best leaders ask a great many questions — not the bad-faith “just asking questions” that smuggles in a conclusion, but the genuine kind, the kind that leaves you open to an answer you didn’t want.5

That openness is reflection pointed outward. Pointed inward, it becomes the harder discipline still: the readiness to say I don’t know, to admit the thing isn’t working, to look into the mirror when the team is failing and consider that the problem might be standing in front of it.

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Learned Self-Knowledge

This is not soft. It is the hardest thing leadership asks. When Alan Mulally ran Ford, the heart of his Working Together™ system was a weekly review called the BPR, in which executives marked their projects red, yellow, or green — and the only unforgivable move was to mark a failing project as green. We had to be honest with ourselves and each others.

The whole system existed to make self-knowledge mandatory, to keep a room of capable, ambitious people from gazing into the pool of their own competence and seeing only green (or American Flag Blue). “People first,” Alan would say — which is, when you think about it, an instruction to look up from your own reflection at someone else’s face.

Note the verb Marcus Aurelius used above. Not gaze — dig. The fountain is not the surface you admire; it is the depth you have to work to reach. Narcissus, had he ever stopped looking at the water and started looking into it, might have lived to the old age Tiresias dangled in front of him. Instead, he wasted away beside an image, and the gods, with their usual economy, turned him into a flower that bows its head toward the ground.

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The cost of skipping reflection is not borne by the leader alone; it is borne by everyone downstream of him. Socrates, on trial for his life, offered the line that ought to hang in every executive suite: the unexamined life is not worth living. He might have added the corollary we keep relearning at greater and greater expense — unexamined leadership is not safe to follow.

An organization led by someone who cannot bear to look past his own surface will, sooner or later, find itself repainting the same pool, blaming the same phantom vandals, and wondering why the water keeps turning green.

It is easy, and a little too comfortable, to point at the figure on the Mall. The more useful exercise is to admit that each of us keeps a pool we would rather admire than see past — a flattering account of our own competence, our own motives, our own indispensability, that we consult the way Narcissus consulted his.

We can’t avoid the water entirely; that would be unrealistic. But when the water finally goes still, are you willing to look past your own face?

There’s so much to learn,

Further reading from the archive

• Taking Time to Think It Through — know thyself before you gather the facts.

• From Shame to Self-Awareness — the uses, and the side effects, of seeing yourself clearly.

• Humility Can Seem Soft When Problems Are Hard — Odysseus, Polyphemus, and the price of self-assertion.

• How to Make Reflection a Daily Habit — first published beneath this same Waterhouse painting, five years ago.

Also browse our sections on Reflection, Self-Awareness, and Emotional Intelligence.

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Reflection

Fifteen years ago, Simon Sinek made a name for himself with the book Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. He offered these bits of wisdom, which I’ve updated with parent-related words for Father’s Day:

• Be the leader father you wish you had.

• Leadership Parenting is not about being in charge. Leadership Parenting is about taking care of those in your charge.

• Great leaders fathers are always learning and ensuring that those they lead benefit from their growth.

• Leadership Parenthood isn’t about being the smartest or the most powerful― it’s about continuously improving and helping others grow.

• The best leaders fathers invest in themselves so they can better serve and support those they lead.

There’s a temptation to believe that leadership is a position — a title, a seat at the head of the table, a name on a door. It’s the same temptation that whispers parenting is about being in charge. Both are wrong, and they’re wrong in the same way. To lead and to raise are not acts of authority but acts of care: leadership isn’t about being in charge, it’s about taking care of those who are in your charge.

The best fathers and the best leaders understand that the people in front of them are not there to serve their ambition; they’re there to be served by it.

What unites the great parent and the great leader is not certainty, or strength, or having the answers. It’s the willingness to keep growing — to remain a student long after the world has started calling you the teacher.

We can’t give our children, or those we lead, what we haven’t first cultivated in ourselves; the investment we make in our own character becomes the inheritance they draw upon.

And perhaps the truest measure of either calling is this: to become the leader, and the father, you wish you’d had. And in doing so, to make it just a little more likely that those in your charge will one day surpass you.

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Around 560 BC, the richest man in the known world received a visitor. Croesus, king of Lydia, had accumulated such staggering wealth that his name became, and has remained for twenty-five centuries, a synonym for fortune beyond measure.

He welcomed Solon, the Athenian lawgiver and sage, into his treasury, festooned with gold and jewels and the haul from conquered kingdoms — and then asked the question he already knew the answer to: who was the happiest man alive?

Solon named Tellus of Athens, a simple man who had lived well, raised honorable children, and died defending his city. Croesus, unsatisfied, pressed him. Surely, among all the men Solon had encountered in his travels, Croesus ranked near the top?

The philosopher shook his head. “Call no man happy until he is dead.”

Not because happiness is impossible, but because the full accounting — what a life cost, what it was worth, what it left behind — cannot be rendered until it is complete.

Croesus dismissed Solon as a fool.

He would later lose his kingdom to Cyrus the Great, and when facing execution on the funeral pyre, cried out three times the name of the man he had sent away unanswered: “Solon. Solon. Solon.”

Out of This World

On June 12, 2026, when SpaceX priced its initial public offering at $135 a share and the stock soared on its first day of trading, Elon Musk — already the most distant outlier in the history of recorded wealth — crossed $1 trillion in personal net worth. The first trillionaire in human history.

The number resists ordinary comprehension: a trillion dollars exceeds the GDP of most nations on earth, exceeds the combined wealth of the next five richest people in the world, exceeds any individual accumulation our species has ever produced.

The question Solon asked of Croesus is the question history now asks of us.

The tension between wealth and morality is not a modern invention. Aristotle diagnosed the disease in the fourth century BC, calling it pleonexia — the sickness of always wanting more. He observed that it split every society into a city of the rich and a city of the poor, at permanent war with each other. He warned of the “prosperous fool”: the class of men so intoxicated by the love of money that “they therefore imagine there is nothing it cannot buy.”

Money and Class

Lewis Lapham, the great chronicler of American plutocracy, spent a career watching the prosperous fool come into his inheritance. In Money and Class in America, he examined not merely the acquisition of wealth but the moral architecture that wealth erects around itself — the way it conflates net worth with virtue, fortune with wisdom, and market capitalization with human worth.2

Voltaire understood this with characteristic sharpness: “When it’s a question of money, everybody is of the same religion.” In Lapham’s estimation, it is a civil religion — one that has colonized the moral and cultural space once reserved for faith, duty, and civic responsibility.

What all of them understood — Aristotle, Voltaire, Lapham — is that money is not inherently corrupting. It is a tool. The corruption lies in the confusion of the tool for the purpose, the instrument for the end.

Comic Sans

There is an instructive counter-example hiding in plain sight. In 1991, a cartoonist named Bill Watterson, creator of Calvin and Hobbes — one of the most beloved comic strips in the history of the medium — sat down to negotiate with United Press Syndicate over a sum of money that would have made him a very wealthy man indeed.

“The syndicate” (as he called them, appropriately designating them as some group of criminal masterminds) wanted to license Calvin and Hobbes: toys, t-shirts, an animated series, the full commercial machinery. Watterson said no. He said no for six years, while trainloads of money waited at the station. “I went into cartooning to draw cartoons,” he explained, “not to run a corporate empire.”

In the end, Watterson won. But the more interesting fact is that he never considered it a question of business at all. For him, it was a question of integrity. He understood that the moment Calvin became a product, something essential would be lost — not something he could name on a ledger, but something that could only be understood by the millions of readers for whom the strip constituted “private realities, the magic of imagination, and the specialness of certain friendships.” He chose that over the money.3

The world’s first trillionaire chose otherwise.

Goldfinger

The Midas myth is almost exactly the story of where we find ourselves today. Midas, king of Phrygia, was granted a wish by the god Dionysus: that everything he touched would turn to gold. The wish was granted. And for one bright morning in antiquity, Midas rejoiced as sticks and stones and sunflowers became precious metal.

Then so did his food, and his drink, and the things and people he loved. He would have died of thirst and hunger had the god not released him from the prison of his own desire.

The ancient king was self-aware enough to realize that something was amiss. He recognized the prison and requested parole. Whether the world’s first trillionaire — who simultaneously controls electric vehicles, private space flight, satellite internet, social media, and a seat at the table of government — has noticed any gold on his food is a question the ledger cannot answer.

Schopenhauer was right: the accumulation of wealth, pursued without limit, is like a gilded cage that “prevents people from pursuing the true, intangible rewards of life — love, wisdom, and spiritual fulfillment.”

Now imagine a gilded cage the size of a civilization.

My Kingdom for a Sled

, reflecting on the milestone this week, reached for the most searching account of this transaction ever put on screen: Citizen Kane.

“We have built a culture that celebrates the world-gainers with very little curiosity about what they traded to get there. Net worth has become our proxy for wisdom, which is how we end up inviting the wealthiest person in the room to lecture us on education, public health, and democratic values — subjects where accumulated fortune confers exactly zero wisdom or expertise.”4

Or, put as another wise soul wrote last year:

“Society, in its haste to worship the rich, has conflated wealth and morality.”

Charles Foster Kane — Orson Welles’s monument to the American promise corrupted — died speaking a word that meant nothing to anyone around him: “Rosebud.” The name of a childhood sled. Everything he had traded away first, before he knew what the road would cost.

One wonders what Elon Musk’s “Rosebud” will be.

At What Cost?

Solon told Croesus that happiness cannot be judged in the midst of life, only at its end — and not by the man himself, but by history. Croesus wasn’t wrong to be rich. He was right about everything except what the wealth meant. He had the gold, the armies, the territory, the admiration. He had missed Solon’s point entirely — which was not that prosperity is a curse, but that prosperity is not the measure.

We have built a civilization in which the accumulation of money has become the primary measure of human worth. And now we have arrived, for the first time in our species’ history, at the summit of that civilization: a single human being worth a trillion dollars.

The question Solon would ask is not how did he get there, but what did the journey cost — and not only to him.

The first trillionaire has everything — except, perhaps, the one thing that makes wealth meaningful: a life well-spent in service to something larger than himself.

In the end, it is not the wealth we accumulate that defines us. It is the moral choices we make with it, or in spite of it, that history will remember.

There’s so much to learn,

Of America and the Rise of the Stupefied Plutocrat

The 2018 foreword to the reissue of Money and Class in America is one of the essential documents for understanding how we arrived here. Lewis Lapham traces the arc from Reagan’s “release of the free market from the prison of government regulation” to what he calls the conversion of “a weakened but still operational democracy” into “a dysfunctional, stupefied plutocracy.” (Literary Hub)

Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity

Matthew Morgan’s deeply researched account of Bill Watterson’s six-year battle with his syndicate over the licensing of Calvin and Hobbes is a study in what it costs to hold a principle when the alternative is a very large check. Watterson refused millions in merchandise deals, not because he was naive about money, but because he understood that art and commerce operate on different currencies — and that confusing the two destroys the thing you were trying to protect. A useful corrective to the era of wealth-without-work. (The Republic of Letters)

Malefactors of Great Wealth

Theodore Roosevelt’s 1907 speech gave this essay its title and its organizing tension: “In the man of great wealth who has earned his wealth honestly and uses it wisely we recognize a good citizen.” The question, which TR left open and our era has answered badly, is what happens when the recognition is granted regardless of the “wisely.” (Timeless & Timely)

The Billionaire Puzzles

Can one person be too rich for democracy to work? Who decides what the winners owe? Can the winners fix the game they won? Raj Chetty’s research on mobility — from 90% of children out-earning their parents (born 1940) to roughly 50% (born 1980s) — is the sharpest empirical frame for why the trillionaire milestone is not merely a financial curiosity. (John Dickerson)

The Knicks, Trump’s Octagon, and the World’s First Trillionaire

Kareem Abdul-Jabbar invokes Citizen Kane and asks the question that no ledger can answer: what is Musk’s “Rosebud”? His observation that “net worth has become our proxy for wisdom” is the cultural diagnosis that pairs with Dickerson’s structural one. For those who prefer their moral philosophy delivered with a jump shot. (Kareem Takes on the News)

The Founder of Craigslist Has Given Away Half a Billion Dollars

In a world where a growing number of billionaires are lashing out against philanthropy, Craig Newmark has a message for them — and everyone else (The Independent)

“It’s just the wind.”

You’ve probably thought that to yourself (or even said it out loud) when you were alone at home at night and heard an unexpected noise.

“It’s just the wind,” you say, as you try to convince yourself that there’s nothing to worry about.

Then, thinking that the wind couldn’t make that kind of a sound, you pivot: “Or maybe it’s a squirrel in the attic.”

You desperately want to try to outsmart the fear center in your brain. Maybe you succeed. Maybe you don’t. It depends on the kind of story you tell yourself.

Stories as Explainers

Aside from things that go bump in the night, the world can be a scary place.

Even now, amid advanced technology that connects us to each other's homes around the world, we don't know what the future will look like.

Imagine what it must have been like thousands of years ago, before calendars were in use, when weather forecasts were unheard of, and when we had no idea where we came from.

It’s human nature to want to simplify the complex, shape the world into a more orderly place, and make sense of things we don't understand.

So what do we do? We tell ourselves stories to explain away the inexplicable.

It’s been happening since we were first able to communicate. Humans developed myths, traditions, and stories that made sense out of a big and sometimes terrifying world.

One of my favorite scenes from Disney’s 1940 classic Fantasia is the mythology sequence1 (no doubt because of my background both as a classics major and a devotee of Beethoven). It’s set to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, “Pastoral,” and in it, we experience an idyllic scene of centaurs, winged horses (recall there was only one original Pegasus), and Dionysus [Bacchus],2 the god of wine, all enjoying themselves.

Then the sky darkens and the dark clouds part, revealing an amused Zeus [Jupiter], who called to Hephaestus [Vulcan] to supply him with lightning bolts. The creatures scatter in fear, desperately seeking cover. Eventually, Zeus tires of this exercise, kicking off his sandals as he tucks in for a nap on a cloud. The storm recedes.

It’s a creative and illuminating mise-en-scène that literally illustrates how the ancients created stories to explain unexpected, unexplained, or confusing things in the world around them.

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Modern Mythology

It shouldn’t be much of a surprise then, when surrounded by advanced technology — incomprehensible to some and awe-inspiring to others, all of whom are grappling with the tumult and uncertainty — that modern-day myths arise in the form of conspiracy theories.

From the moon landing to chemtrails, the suspicions that land on Freemasons to the desperate rantings of Flat-Earthers, the dangers of vaccinations and fluoride, and the sore-loser election-rigging claims, you can find people who are willing to believe fanciful stories that seemingly explain everything to them.

Everything is a conspiracy theory when you don’t understand how anything works.

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The best leaders know how to rely on facts and data to guide their teams forward.3 It’s how I help them understand and implement the Working Together™ Leadership & Management System.

Danger arises when a leader is surrounded by sycophants.4 The best leaders include people with a variety of opinions, viewpoints, and experience, in order to arrive at a better plan.

When the guardrails are off and a person in power is never told “no,” they become isolated from reality, which in turn affects their ability to make decisions that affect the lives of others.5

Populism Rejects Facts

It’s astounding to see the degree to which people will go to contort facts and logical thinking into crazy theories to fit their worldview.

It may be rooted in a lack of understanding of scientific principles. In her book Democracy and Truth, Sophia Rosenfeld finds that conspiracy theories flourish in societies where there’s a gap between the governing and the governed classes. When populism takes hold, the public “tend to reject science and its methods as a source of directives.”6

Advances in modern science and technology call even more attention to the disparity between experts and non-experts, leading to the doubting of basic truths.

Thank Heaven We’ve Seen This Before

This isn’t necessarily a new phenomenon, though: in 1623, Galileo wrote about the same phenomenon in The Assayer, noting that his observations of the heavenly bodies were based on math:

“…what I had set forth was supported and proved by geometrical demonstrations; and such is the strength of men's passion that they failed to notice how the contradiction of geometry is a bald denial of truth.”

Galileo’s most significant challenge wasn’t wrestling with equations and figures. His was a battle for the mind, a struggle for a different perspective. He tried to convince people that the Earth revolves around the Sun, but rather than other scientific defenses, he was met with powerful emotions and biases — powerful defenses that prevented others from seeing the truth.

When we let our emotions overpower facts, we miss the opportunity to be enlightened.

In trying to persuade others, the best efforts take into account emotions, making our audience feel a certain way, creating the desire to change. When backed by facts, it’s even more powerful.

Isn’t this what the best stories do? They’re vessels for information that create an emotional connection.7

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The world is complex. And we have experts who make it their business to try to understand it. We ought to put our trust and faith in them. There's no need to make up stories about things in order to assuage our fears.

The best antidote to fear is dealing with reality.

Anecdotes can come later.

I.

Of course you’ve seen the President storm off of a news interview because he couldn’t handle difficult questions. The blow-up made the questions become the story, rather than the answers. ()

II.

A significant portion of leadership is accountability. In fact, we have an entire section on Accountability. (Timeless & Timely)

III.

Put plainly (and with some great links in the article), “Everything Is A Conspiracy Theory When You Don’t Bother to Educate Yourself.” (Techdirt)

The stories we tell ourselves about our food are some tall tales indeed.

I.

“Take a look at the 1928 painting used for early Land O’Lakes boxes. If you think the original butter maiden looks less like a Native American woman than the daughter of a Minnesota dairy farmer playing dress-up, you’d be right: that’s actually what she was.” Land O’Lakes finally changed the iconic image on their butter earlier this year. (The Baffler)

II.

Many foodies and soda lovers swear there’s a discernible difference between Coke made with sugar and Coke made with high-fructose corn syrup—a truer, less “chemical-y” taste; a realer real thing. The story behind Mexican Coke is more complex than you might think. (Smithsonian Magazine)

III.

Did you ever stop to think about how Triscuits got their name? This man did, and he was in for a big surprise. (Delish)

🎧 Myths and Legends brings you folklore that has shaped our world. Some are incredibly popular stories you think you know, but with surprising origins. Others are stories that might be new to you, but are definitely worth a listen. These are stories of magic, kings, Vikings, dragons, knights, princesses, and wizards from a time when the world beyond the map was a dangerous, wonderful, and terrifying place.

📘 Bulfinch’s Mythology offers approachable accounts of ancient legends in a compilation of the works of Thomas Bulfinch, banker and Latinist. This volume includes all three of Bulfinch’s original titles: The Age of Fable, The Age of Chivalry, and The Legends of Charlemagne. “Our work is not for the learned, nor for the theologian, nor for the philosopher, but for the reader of English literature...who wishes to comprehend the allusions so frequently made by public speakers, lecturers, essayists, and poets, and those which occur in polite conversation.”

There’s so much to learn,

This entry is tagged:

Truth, Communication, Trust, Emotional Intelligence

Reflection

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There is a scene in The Twilight Zone that deserves to be far more famous than it is.

In “The Brain Center at Whipple’s,”2 a CEO named Wallace Whipple has decided to replace his factory workers with machines. His chief engineer, Hanley, pushes back with the kind of moral clarity that leaders rarely permit in subordinates:

“Tell me, Mr. Whipple, why are you so eager to replace men with machines? Did it ever occur to you that you might be trading efficiency for pride?”

“Pride?!?”

“Yes, pride, Mr. Whipple! Craftsmanship. What a man feels when he makes something.”

Whipple is contemptuous.

“What the devil can I do with pride? Can I can it? Bottle it? Wrap it? I’m not selling pride, I’m selling product.”

Hanley presses further, invoking Whipple’s father — the founder, a man of different instincts:

“Nobody ever accused him of inefficiency, but he had something else on his mind.”

“What else did my father have on his mind, Mr. Hanley?”

“Goodwill. And the welfare of the people who worked for him.”

Whipple dismisses him. The machines go in. Hanley is let go. Progress, it seems, has been achieved.

And then, in the episode’s quiet devastation, Whipple himself is replaced. The board, as cold as the logic he’d preached, informs him that his position has been automated. He finds Hanley at a local bar and, with remarkable lack of self-awareness, rails against the injustice of it:

“It’s not right, Hanley, it’s not right. Cold, dispassionate, impersonal… they chuck a man out right in his prime — chuck him out like he was some kind of a part! Said I was neurotic about things. Said that being alone with the machines had warped me…”

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Rod Serling wrote that episode in 1964. He was watching the first great wave of industrial automation — and he understood something that our era has yet to learn. Whipple is not a villain. He is a man who adopted a philosophy without counting the cost, who optimized himself right out of the moral imagination, and who did not notice until the logic he’d championed was turned against him.

We are all, in some measure, living in Whipple’s world now.

Lower-Value Human Capital

Last month, Standard Chartered CEO Bill Winters addressed investors with a phrase that would have made even Whipple pause: his company, he explained, was not cutting costs so much as

“replacing in some cases lower-value human capital with the financial capital and the investment capital we’re putting in.”3

Lower-value human capital.

Sit with that for a moment. The de-humanization of individuals to data points on a chart, as decimal points in a financial statement.

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The words landed badly enough that by the next morning Winters had sent a memo to his employees assuring them that “where roles do fall away, it reflects changes in the work, not the value of our people.” One can only wonder what the people whose roles had already fallen away made of that particular reassurance. The memo is the modern equivalent of Whipple’s speech to Hanley — an attempt to retain the vocabulary of human dignity while executing a strategy that has already discarded it.

This is not an isolated incident. It is increasingly the lingua franca of an era.

Amazon’s mass layoff initiative was christened “Project Dawn” — a branding choice that deserves its own chapter in the history of corporate euphemism. Tens of thousands of employees learned their fates through calendar invitations and Slack speculation as the sun came up.

No conversation. No dignity. Just confusion at scale, delivered with the efficient impersonality of a system that had, somewhere along the way, stopped remembering that people were at the other end.

Thomas De Quincey wrote in 1845 that the human brain is a palimpsest — a piece of writing material that has been used, erased, and reused — that those layers of experience, memory, and feeling stacked upon one another, each apparently buried but none truly extinguished.4

The danger of delegating our thinking, our judgment, our empathy to machines is not merely that we will make worse decisions. It is that we will become worse thinkers — flatter, less attuned, less capable of the lateral understanding that makes compassion possible. We will lose the very strata that make us human.

AI doing our thinking for us doesn’t just make us lazier. It erases the layers. Or worse: creates conditions such that we never have to create or be aware of those layers in the first place.

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A Man Has Value

The encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, issued by Pope Leo XIV last week,5 is the most comprehensive moral argument against the current trajectory of AI that any major institution has produced. At over 40,000 words, it is a document that — as one observer noted — should shame many professional technology journalists who have preferred credulous access reporting to the harder questions the pope is now demanding we ask.6

In its core argument, it is Whipple’s lesson written in theological language. Or Winters’ statement “Where roles do fall away, it reflects changes in the work, not the value of our people,” rephrased.

The encyclical answers that framing with something more philosophically durable: human dignity does not depend on the work you perform. It precedes it. It exists just as the air we breathe and cannot be optimized away.

The encyclical names as “particularly insidious” the ideology that every person must earn or justify their worth through efficiency — that those who produce more matter more. This is not merely a spiritual error. It is the operating assumption of a great deal of contemporary management practice, and it is producing predictable results. summarizes Leo’s argument: “Stop treating human labor as a corporate liability.”7 The phrase lands with such force precisely because it shouldn’t need to be said.

That this argument is being made by a pope rather than a CEO is itself instructive.

Refer a friend

What’s in a Name — Revisited

A year ago, on the day of his election, this newsletter noted that Cardinal Prevost’s choice of the name Leo XIV carried specific historical weight. Leo XIII had been the Social Pope, the Pope of the Workers — the man who, in his 1891 encyclical Rerum Novarum, had insisted that the proclamation of the Gospel could not overlook the concrete lives of people. To take that name, we suggested, was to presage a mission that would be “thoughtful, inclusive, and humanitarian.”8

Magnifica Humanitas is the fulfillment of that prediction — and then some. It positions itself explicitly as a successor document to Rerum Novarum, written on that encyclical’s 135th anniversary.

Where Leo XIII addressed the new things of industrial capitalism — the displacement of workers, the concentration of power in private hands, the moral accountability of those who hold economic leverage — Leo XIV addresses the new things of our moment: AI, algorithmic management, data extraction, and a small class of transnational technology companies whose resources exceed those of many governments.

The structural parallel is exact. The moral argument is unchanged. What has changed is the scale of what’s at stake.

, reflecting on the encyclical’s language, notes that Leo XIV uses the word colonialism to describe how AI is reshaping the balance of power — noting that data about ordinary people has become “the new ‘rare earths’ of power,” extracted from entire regions by platforms that answer to no electorate and whose values are those of their shareholders.9

This is a harder charge than most secular critics have been willing to make, and it is worth contemplating.

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The Palimpsest We’re Erasing

Last month Steve Wozniak spoke to graduates in Michigan, offering his own version of this argument with characteristic directness. Reflecting on decades spent with engineers trying to recreate human cognition in software, he reminded the graduating class that they already possess what the machines do not: actual intelligence.

The most reliable method for producing a brain, he observed, still takes nine months. He urged students to think independently — to resist treating AI as a substitute for genuine understanding and intuition.10

This is De Quincey’s palimpsest argument in commencement speech form. Every layer of genuine thinking, genuine feeling, genuine encounter with difficulty and ambiguity — these are not overwritten by what comes next. They form the substrate on which wisdom is built. When we outsource that process, we don’t gain efficiency. We lose depth. We arrive at more answers and fewer insights.

The Ringer’s Brian Phillips, in a piece that manages to be both funny and genuinely alarmed, puts it simply: the problem with the tech industry isn’t a messaging problem:

“When you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”11

There is no algorithm for that kind of accountability.

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Nehemiah’s Section of the Wall

Magnifica Humanitas offers two biblical images as its organizing framework: the Tower of Babel and the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah.

Babel, the encyclical argues, is not merely a story of divine punishment. It is a story of what happens when a great project is built on uniformity rather than communion, on efficiency rather than dignity, on the ambition to “make a name” rather than to serve. The result is not unity but dispersion. The languages fracture. The project collapses under the weight of its own scale.

Nehemiah offers the counter-vision. Arriving at a ruined Jerusalem, he does not impose a top-down plan. He convenes the families. He assigns each of them a section of the wall. He listens to their concerns. He makes everyone accountable for their piece, and no one accountable for everything. The city is rebuilt not through one man’s efficiency but through shared, human, distributed responsibility.

This is not merely a theological model. It is the Working Together™ Leadership & Management System described in theological language. Every section of the wall belongs to someone. No one is a resource. No one is lower-value human capital. Everyone has a section, and everyone is responsible for it, and the city rises because enough people take that responsibility seriously enough to show up.

The great failure of the Whipple model — and its contemporary equivalents — is not that it replaces workers with machines. It is that it mistakes the product for the purpose.

Whipple’s father understood that the company existed for the people. The machines existed for the company. When you invert that hierarchy, you do not simply lose goodwill. You lose the organizing principle that made the whole enterprise worth building in the first place.

The Work No Machine Can Do

Alan Mulally arrived at Ford in 2006 and did something that no algorithm would have recommended: he made every leader in the room stand behind a red, yellow, or green status on their piece of the plan. No hiding behind dashboards. No automated summaries. A human being, accountable to other human beings, in real time. The discomfort was the point.

That friction was the trust.

Hire Me to Speak

About the Working Together System

The best leaders — and the encyclical is making this argument in universal terms — are not those who eliminate the difficulty of human interaction. They are those who embrace it. Those who remain present within it. Who sit with bad news. Who close the loop not because a metric flagged an engagement dip, but because a person told them something that mattered and they chose to act on it.

AI can process information faster than any human. It can identify patterns, generate options, summarize complexity. These are genuine capabilities, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of foolishness.

But it cannot be accountable. It cannot be responsible. It cannot take the call when someone’s section of the wall is falling and decide that the relationship matters more than the efficiency of the outcome. It cannot, in Whipple’s forgotten father’s phrase, hold goodwill and the welfare of people in mind.

Meaning is still the work of human hands.

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And in an age that is very rapidly convincing itself otherwise, insisting on that truth is not sentiment. It is resistance.

There is no algorithm for life.

There is no optimization function for dignity.

The question before every leader, every organization, every person building or deploying or simply using these technologies is the oldest question in management and in moral philosophy alike:

Are we treating people as ends, or as means?

Whipple learned the answer the hard way. The Standard Chartered CEO is learning it in real time. Leo XIV is asking the whole world to learn it before it’s too late.

There’s so much to learn,

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Readers (or even casual browsers) have seen the Timeless & Timely tagline: “Because character doesn’t change with the headlines.”

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Such is our shorthand for the timeless principles that bind all humans and give us pause to consider what we need in leaders and in each other in a world otherwise fraught by constant chaos, cacophony, and change.

Last year, when Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost was elevated to Pope Leo XIV, we pondered on the significance of his name, noting “the names that popes select for themselves carry meaning, ranging from their personal values to their strategic goals.”1

Lest there be any doubt about Leo XIV’s values and goals, last week he released his first Encyclical (more about that in the main newsletter this week — make sure you’re signed up). But over the weekend, this tweet from the pope caught my eye:

“Connecting young people to digital networks serves no purpose if they remain disconnected from themselves, others, and their own interiority. We must help young people rediscover silence, reflection, the ability to ask questions, the depth of relationships, and openness to transcendence. To listen to the soul, we must lend an ear, because the soul’s voice is not a shout, but a whisper.”

There’s quite a bit to unpack here — and my preference is to avoid taking up too much of your valuable Monday analyzing these three sentences — so I’ll be brief and Ill supply you with further reading to reflect on this message.

Knowing ourselves2 is one of the most important and profound things we can do. Ancient philosophers knew this and it remains true to this day.

Being connected to ourselves means taking time to slow down, looking at things slowly and deliberately. “We seem to be always running to one thing or another—and in some cases, running from ourselves.”3

In addition to silence and reflection, one of the best ways to know yourself and to understand others is by asking questions.4 5

In 2022, I wrote: “We can learn a lot — about ourselves, about others — if we pay attention to the silence in our lives.”6 Nearly four years later, the same simple but profound truth remains.7

One last item worth calling out is the popes use of the word transcendence. The word may be unfamiliar to some, but its widely appreciated around these parts, as transcendence is a broad category of character and values we talk about.

According to the VIA Institute on Character, transcendence includes traits such as appreciation of beauty8, spirituality, gratitude9, hope10, and humor11. These are traits that go beyond the observable, residing deep within us. And they come out when we spend time getting to know ourselves.

I could go on (I already went longer than I expected to), but here’s the main takeaway:

Be sure to read the footnotes12, explore more using the search function, and our Browse page for whatever topic speaks to you.

Thank you for being part of this journey and being interested in the timeless values of humanity.

There’s so much to learn,

Last summer, we waded together into the shallow end of English’s great forgotten lexicon1 — a place where scholars once labored over words that the rest of the world had quietly decided it could live without. The response was, to use a word from that list, scripturiently enthusiastic.

Now we’re back with a second volume of beautiful, obscure, and largely pointless words. The list itself isn’t pointless — consider it like your attic, holding both treasures and puzzlements, unseen for years. If jentacular and deipnosophist became household words in your home after Vol. 1, you are more than ready for these. If not — the door remains open, and the list is linked below.

What strikes me, reviewing the full list, is how much human behavior had once earned itself a word. The person who pretends to refuse what they want, the enthusiast who opines past their knowledge, the lover who only pretends to love, the writer hiding behind anonymity while contributing little.

These are not historical curiosities. They are live conditions, updated daily, simply awaiting the right vocabulary.

Here, then, is the second installment2 of words you will probably never use — but will be genuinely glad to know.

Roorback

Definition: a defamatory falsehood published for political effect

What makes roorback special is that it is a lie built on a lie, twice removed from reality. The word comes from the invented “Baron von Roorback,” a fictional European nobleman conjured in 1844 to smear presidential candidate James K. Polk with an accusation that Polk had branded the initials of his ownership onto dozens of enslaved people.

The accusation was false. The Baron was fictional. And yet the word roorback survived — a monument to the durability of political bad faith. The irony is that the broader accusation was true: Polk did own enslaved people, a fact that somehow got lost in the outrage over the forgery.

Now, 180 years later, the phenomenon the word describes is no longer obscure. Only the word itself is.

Ultracrepidarian

Definition: giving opinions on matters beyond one’s knowledge

This one traces to Apelles, the most celebrated painter of ancient Greece — so respected that Alexander the Great reportedly allowed only him to paint his likeness. According to Pliny the Elder, when a shoemaker once dared to critique Apelles’ rendering of a sandal strap, Apelles corrected the flaw. When the emboldened cobbler moved on to criticizing the figure’s leg, Apelles cut him off: ne sutor ultra crepidam — “let the shoemaker not go beyond the sole.”

From that exchange, we get ultracrepidarian: one who opines about things they know nothing about. The concept predates the Roman Republic. The word arrived in English only in the nineteenth century.3 The behavior has never required either a name or an era to flourish.

Anecdotage

Definition: garrulous old age

Here is a portmanteau of genuine elegance: anecdote blended with dotage (that decline of mental acuity that visits the elderly) to produce a word for the condition of being old and unstoppably full of stories.

The word captures something real about the relationship between memory and age. As the future compresses, the past expands. The long-term storage is often intact; what changes is the editorial instinct about which stories to tell and when to stop telling them.

Every family has someone in anecdotage. They are often the most interesting person at the table. They are also, occasionally, the reason the table runs two hours long.

Jackassery

Definition: a piece of stupidity or folly

There is a dignity to precision. When the St. Charles Republican Intelligencer of Iowa used this word in 1857 to describe a political maneuver it found contemptible, it was doing what good prose always does: reaching for the exact word rather than the approximate one.

The construction follows the pattern of foolery, knavery, trickery — the suffix -ery denoting a condition or collective practice. It is a word that sounds exactly like what it means, which is the highest compliment you can pay to a word.

Accismus

Definition: the pretended refusal of something one keenly desires

Ancient rhetoric had a name for every trick in the book — because ancient rhetoric wrote the book. Accismus is the technical term for the feigned rejection: the politician who “reluctantly” accepts a nomination, the actor who “resists” the standing ovation, the child who says “no thank you” to a second cookie while staring at the cookie.

The Greeks classified it as a figure of speech. The moderns call it something less flattering. Either way, it has been in continuous operation since at least the age of Pericles, which suggests either that the stratagem works or that humanity has never quite located the off switch.

🔒 This is where the paywall falls — and where things get considerably stranger.

The words above are merely neglected. The ones below are a different category entirely: words for smells that recall undercooked meat, words excited beginnings and insignificant writers, and at least one word Shakespeare himself deployed and then the rest of civilization quietly abandoned. If your curiosity is intact after five perfectly good words, you may be exactly the kind of reader who needs the next twelve.

Subscribe to Off the Clock to read on — and to receive every future installment of words the world forgot but probably shouldn’t have.

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