Happy Chinese New Year to more than 17% of the world celebrating this week. Enjoy these weekly reads.
#1 Journalism: Robert Caro on his start as an investigative journalist and trying to figure out the mystery of why Lyndon Johnson suddenly became an important congressman in October 1940. It also includes his reflections on when he might start his memoir, being 83 years old now:
Which leads to a final question: Why am I publishing these random recollections toward a memoir while I’m still working on the last volume of the Johnson biography, when I haven’t finished it, while I’m still—at the age of eighty-three—several years from finishing it? Why don’t I just include this material in the longer, full-length memoir I’m hoping to write?
The answer is, I’m afraid, quite obvious, and, if I forget it for a few days, I am frequently reminded of it, by journalists who, in writing about me and my hope of finishing, often express their doubts in a sarcastic phrase: “Do the math.” Well, I can do that math. I am well aware that I may never get to write the memoir, although I have so many thoughts about writing, so many anecdotes about research, that I would like to preserve for anyone interested enough to read them. I decided that, just in case, I’d put some of them down on paper now.
#2 China: Chinese citizens are mostly okay with digital surveillance. Also check out this fascinating tweetstorm on Mao and political power & manipulation during the cultural revolution.
#3 Laughs: Check out these New Yorker cartoon level captions of Peleton ads for a good laugh.
#4 Rationality: Some of our “irrational” heuristics for decision making might not be as silly as people want to believe.
#5 Truthiness: James Clear on the truth, false beliefs and how we can change our minds.
False beliefs can be useful in a social sense even if they are not useful in a factual sense. For lack of a better phrase, we might call this approach “factually false, but socially accurate.
This seems quite relevant as the biggest impact on people that end up creating a different work-life all have one thing in common - they make new friends who are living in different ways. As clear goes on:
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.
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