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At the welcome reception, John told me it wasn’t the magic that helped me stand out. It was the initiative I’d taken in teaching myself—and the courage I’d shown in doing an impromptu performance for him. It was my first interview—I didn’t know we were just supposed to talk, and it was only after becoming an organizational psychologist that I realized I’d given him a work sample. By sharing what stood out in my interview, John had given me a crash course in the importance of character skills. My success wouldn’t depend on my initial ability. It would depend on my ability and motivation to learn.
Hidden Potential
Adam Grant
Many mocked him for that question, though it seems a fair one. Many others shuddered at the implication that Donald Trump, presiding over a trillion-dollar makeover of our entire nuclear arsenal that he inherited as a program from Barack Obama, might feel that he could actually use some of these weapons. But of course he planned to use them, as he had clearly implied to Chris Matthews. He wants to use them like every other president: in “negotiation,” in threats, in exploiting uncertainty in our opponents as to whether he might launch “a nuke” in a stalemated armed conflict or a crisis, or perhaps in pique at what he experienced as humiliating provocation. Whether he would carry out such threats in any given circumstances, or otherwise use them in attacks, remains as uncertain, and as possible, as it has been for every other president in the nuclear era. Trump hinted strongly to Matthews, and he even came close to saying outright—“I’m not going to use nuclear, but I’m not taking any cards off the table”—that he would be bluffing. Most, if not all, of the time. Nevertheless, the last bargaining strategy mentioned above,312† advertising and exploiting his own unpredictability, deliberately creating uncertainty in an adversary by demonstrating impulsive, erratic, vindictive behavior—reminiscent, to many observers, of Nixon’s madman theory313—is especially worrisome to many in America and elsewhere because of a growing sense that this particular president actually may be mad. There’s ample evidence supporting that impression. Still, in some ways he has shown himself to be crazy like a fox, or he would not be president. He may yet elude his domestic pursuers and survive in office, and we and our democracy might survive that too. Or not. Yet what seems to me beyond question is that any social system (not only ours) that has created and maintained a Doomsday Machine and has put a trigger to it, including first use of nuclear weapons, in the hands of one human being—anyone, not just this man, still worse in the hands of an unknown number of persons—is in core aspects mad. Ours is such a system. We are in the grip of institutionalized madness.
The Doomsday Machine
Daniel Ellsberg
You don’t master your recordings to a water-damaged Panasonic boom box if you’re looking to follow up The River. But not only did Springsteen use the Panasonic for mixdown; he also, in the mix process, put all the recordings through a Gibson Echoplex, which put a layer of early Sun Records–style slap echo on, well, everything: vocals, guitars, harmonica, percussion, glockenspiel. As decisions go, to mix every recorded track on a multitrack recording through a single effect is certainly not the kind of choice professional engineers tended to make when they were creating recordings for commercial release. But Springsteen wasn’t thinking like a professional engineer. He just wanted a reference for the “real” recording process, something the band could listen to before they made a final version. “Yeah, everything went through the Echoplex,” he told me, laughing. “Guitar, voice, everything. It all has that weird echo.” When I said to Springsteen that I felt it ended up being a crucial part of the recording’s character, he stopped laughing and nodded, agreeing that it was exactly right for the recordings, even if it was foolhardy.
Deliver Me From Nowhere
Warren Zanes
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