 Scenes from the protest on the campus of Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., October 5, 2026. (Photos: Audrey Wansink --National Review 10-8-26). A Guest Column from My Daughter I'm handing this month's column over to my daughter Audrey. She's a Cornell student, who published this piece in the National Review yesterday. It’s about how her campus should respond to a painful moment, and her argument is that facts should lead the way. I’m proud of her courage and clarity. https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/10/cornell-pulled-the-fire-alarm-now-somebody-has-to-find-the-fire/  https://www.nationalreview.com/2026/10/cornell-pulled-the-fire-alarm-now-somebody-has-to-find-the-fire/
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"Poetry sucks," said Charles Darwin. Or close enough — that's what he meant when he called it, in his own autobiography, insipid, a waste of time, fit only for people with holes in their brains. He rails against poetry for two or three paragraphs, then makes a bootlegger's 180 — spins the whole argument around without lifting his foot off the gas — and admits there was a stretch of his life when nothing gave him more joy than poetry. "My mind," he wrote, "seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts." Then he mourns it: the part of his brain that once let him enjoy poetry, had atrophied and was gone, and he's honestly not sure he came out ahead. We've got a new singer in the band I'm in, and her husband said something to me after rehearsal that stuck: "People who've got hobbies are interesting, even when their hobbies are boring." Try explaining to someone what's so great about having a hobby of gardening, quilting, bodybuilding, coin collecting, rocking a nursing home, trap shooting, or playing the bagpipes. If the other person hasn't done it, they'll just stare at you like you're crazy. What they can see, though, is that you're engaged, curious, lit up. That you've got a pilot light burning strong. I've got friends who do all of those crazy hobbies. I've got a lot more who are Charles Darwin — people whose pilot light got crowded out somewhere along the way and they never noticed it go dark. Ask them their hobby and you get "reading the news," "staying in shape," "hanging out at home." One woman told me, dead serious, that her hobby was dieting. Quieter than bagpipes and trap shooting, for sure. But I wonder if there was a version of Darwin's poetry in there once, too — something they let slip away without much of a fight. Get busier, have kids, and it's easy to decide you have to be serious now — no more indulging outside interests. Some things need to go on hold. But there's a difference between turning down a pilot light and letting it go dark for good. Steve was a colleague I admire enormously, who retired early to move to California to spend 365 days a year growing a garden at his home near Monterey. He once asked me, "I just don't get why you like playing a side instrument (sax) in random bands." I was flummoxed that I couldn't explain it either. I just feel a "whoosh" every time I do it. Same with my friend who can't tell me why he likes collecting coins. Even though he's perhaps the most cited living psychologist, he can't explain his own thinking about why he likes 100-year-old nickels and dimes so much. What I can see, however, is that he sends emails at 5 AM, is excited about whatever he's working on, and that he's still on fire at 77 the same way he was when I met him 35 years ago. Somebody once pointed out that "recreation" is really "re-creation" — you find the thing worth clearing space for. It's the thing that re-creates or rebuilds you some way -- even if you can't fully explain it to anyone who doesn't do it. At the end of the summer I string together video clips of our band's summer shows so we can see what needs fixing — bad harmonies, wrong notes, flubbed intros and solos. What struck me this year was that even in the middle of our million mistakes, everyone looks happy. I can't explain the whoosh. My friend can't explain silver dollars. Quilters and bagpipers can't explain it either. But it's easy to see. It's also important to protect. Just like poetry.  The X'Plozionz -- The Rock & Soul Show Band of the Finger Lakes -- at Cool Lea, NY, Summer 2026  What will people remember about you 15-20 years from now?
It's been said that the main thing that people remember about others is how that person made you feel. A while back a former post-doc student from 20 years ago (who's now a professor in France) brought her family over to the US for a family vacation, and they came to see us for a couple days. Super great time together. I have had some great post-docs in my life and my wife has liked all of them, but she is very, very taken by this woman. She is charming, kind, successful, and funny, but that didn't seem to be the real reason. My wife said, "Do you know that of all of the graduate students and post-docs you have had, she is one of only two who has ever had us over for dinner. Others have had us over for group-size BBQs, or potlucks, or pizza parties, but she invited us over for a dinner just with her." My wife had just given birth to our oldest daughter, and I was going to be out of town. Back when this woman was a single post-doc and I was out of town, she invited my wife and baby daughter over to dinner by themselves. This made a real impression. Of all the things a person can do, it's funny what it is that sticks with other people. Maybe it is how they made you feel.  What a powerful thing to say.
An interesting study was done on people who recovered from being bullied and body shamed when they were young. One of the questions it asked was if they had a mantra or quote that helped them through their darkest days of being bullied and body shamed. About half of them did. One woman said, "Don't waste 95% of your life worrying about weighing 5% less." She didn't want to let a little extra bit of weight ruin everything else in her day or her life. This is touching. I suspect she did go through a lot of worry and pain before she came to this "Aha" moment. It's easy to spot the one thing that isn't perfect in our life. While some people might think its makes them a perfectionist, obsessing on it is probably just going to make them less happy with the rest of their life. There's a story of a man who's at a work meeting and the boss asked if there are any other announcements. The guy stands up, looks around the room, clears his thoat, "My wife just completed a 40 week body building program this morning, It's a girl and it weights 7 pounds. 12 ounces." There's a lot of amazing things to think about and focus on in your amazing life. If 5% of your weight is a concern, maybe it only deserves 5% of your attention  To commemorate D-Day a couple weeks ago, my wife and I went to see the movie Pressure. It's a WWII movie about Eisenhower's decision to launch a potentially cataustraphic D-Day invasion in the face of conflicting weather reports. "Pressure" relates to both nail-biting pressure as well as atmospheric pressure. As June 6, 1944 approached, Eisenhower (the Allied Commander) faced one of the biggest "Do we take an umbrella or do we stay home" decisions in history. Nearly 160,000 Allied troops were preparing to cross the English Channel. The weather was uncertain and the two American and the British meteorologists had exact opposite predictions and personalities. Weather conditions might or might not be deteriorating. Delay the invasion and the operation could have to be postponed for weeks. Launch it under poor conditions and thousands could die before hitting the beach and then retreating. You and I will never decide the fate of nations, but all of us know what it feels like to make a decision when the stakes feel high. What I find instructive is what Eisenhower wrote after he had made his decision to go (during a brief weather clearing) but before the Normandy invasion had actually began. Between the time of this "Let's go" order and the time when the boats actually reached the French coastline, Eisenhower wrote two notes to send to the press -- depending on what happened. One said, "We did it as a team, Yahoo!" The second said "I screwed up, and it was my fault and mine alone." Not the fault of the two crazy weather guys. Not the intelligence reports. Not the generals. Not the troops. Mine alone. Since you are reading this in English, you know the invasion succeeded, and the "I screwed up" note never had to be sent.  "Our landings in the Cherbourg-Havre area have failed to gain a satisfactory foothold and I have withdrawn the troops. My decision to attack at this time and place was based upon the best information available. The troops, the air and the Navy did all that bravery and devotion to duty could do. If any blame or fault attaches to the attempt it is mine alone." The idea of someone saying "The success was a team effort vs. the failure was my fault" isn't common. It's much more common to see people do this in reverse. "The success is because of my awesomeness. The failure is because of him and her." When our kids get a disappointing grade, they say the teacher's bad. When someone gets fired, the problem's with their incompetent boss or their horrible company. When a marriage ends, it's the spouse. We are acrobatically creative when we explain why our disappointments belong to someone else. Yet grow when we ask a different question: What part of this belongs to me? The student who blames the teacher learns zippo. The student who asks how they can prepare differently is course-correcting. The employee who blames every boss keeps circles around the drain of frustration. The one who asks what they could improve might still get fired but they do better at their next job. If thinking honestly about how you can improve after a setback doesn't cause you to leap ahead, it at least helps you become a better person. There's a funny song by Tim Wilson that has one line that says: "Been married 8 times? Hey, it might be you." Most of us won't face a D-Day sized decision this week. But we'll all face smaller moments that test our character. A mistake at work. A screw-up at home. A goal or field goal we missed by a mile. In those moments, we can write our acrobatically creative explanation, or we can write our own Eisenhower "My Bad" note. But this isn't a "I'm a loser" note. It's an ownership note.  A while back I had an interesting conversation with a person who was recounting the "Big Break" he had in life. What's much more rare is to hear about successful people who mainly only had "Bad Breaks."
Meet Charles Henry Turner. Many discoveries about how insects communicate with each other and how they think come from the crazy-creative shoe-string experiments and research papers of Turner. Born in 1967 -- right after the Civil War -- Turner was a standout zoology student at the University of Cincinnati and is thought to be the first African-American PhD graduate from the Univeristy of Chicago. Despite a strong start, he was never able to find a University professorship and instead taught high school biology in St. Louis until passing away at 56. Interestingly, there's not any record of him complaining about being overlooked, passed over, or not having a Big Break. He must have been too busy. For 30 years, he kept his passion, and he stayed the course of the mission he saw for himself. For these 30 years he continued to think to ask out-of-the-box research questions -- like, can insects hear? can they think? and how do they solve new problems? Then he'd design of ingenious experiments to test his ideas. He would then spend his nights collecting data, and he'd spend his weekends writing and publishing scientific papers in some of the best journals in his field. Still, no university every hired him. No big break, mainly bad breaks. Still he didn't complain, he kept working, and he kept his "eyes on the prize." That seems to be his super power and why 100 years later he stands so tall above all of those who were hired instead of him. There's an inspiring article on him in the Feb 2024 American Scientist. |
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