Interesting Thingies

Convincing someone to change their mind is really the process of convincing them to change their tribe. If they abandon their beliefs, they run the risk of losing social ties. You can’t expect someone to change their mind if you take away their community too. You have to give them somewhere to go. Nobody wants their worldview torn apart if loneliness is the outcome. The way to change people’s minds is to become friends with them, to integrate them into your tribe, to bring them into your circle. Now, they can change their beliefs without the risk of being abandoned socially. The British philosopher Alain de Botton suggests that we simply share meals with those who disagree with us: “Sitting down at a table with a group of strangers has the incomparable and odd benefit of making it a little more difficult to hate them with impunity. Prejudice and ethnic strife feed off abstraction. However, the proximity required by a meal – something about handing dishes around, unfurling napkins at th...

A common sight at the entrance to Whittier is of people who missed the last crossing sleeping in their cars. Many residents own T-shirts that say "POW." Prisoner of Whittier, that is. The thing is, Whittierites never have to take the tunnel if they don't want to, even though the tiny southwest Alaska town is severed from the outside world in so many ways. It snows 22 feet a year here, more than 1,000 times the normal national average (OK, Boston this past winter doesn't count). Residents don't even have to leave the building they live in if they don't want to. That's because Whittier, including its hospital, school and city government, functions within one self-sufficient structure: a Cold War behemoth that seems better suited to a city like Newark (no offense to Jersey). The 14-story Begich Towers Incorporated, known around these parts simply as BTI, is probably the last thing you'd expect to see in an outpost as remote as this. It soars skyward, rude...

In one of the many letters he wrote to his son in the 1740s, Lord Chesterfield offered the following advice: “There is time enough for everything in the course of the day, if you do but one thing at once, but there is not time enough in the year, if you will do two things at a time.” To Chesterfield, singular focus was not merely a practical way to structure one’s time; it was a mark of intelligence.  “This steady and undissipated attention to one object, is a sure mark of a superior genius; as hurry, bustle, and agitation, are the never-failing symptoms of a weak and frivolous mind.” Read More ...