Books Read This Month

Reading / /

The Zorg by Siddharth Kara
Wow. I’d never even heard of the Zorg before, let alone understood its role in sparking the abolitionist movement in England and the United States. In 1781, the crew crammed the ship with 442 enslaved people on a voyage to Jamaica. After a series of events—bad weather, navigational errors—the ship veered off course, and supplies began to dwindle. What happened next is almost impossible to comprehend. In an effort to “save lives,” they began throwing people overboard, starting with women and children. Shackled together, often in pairs, people were dragged to the edge of the ship, screaming and begging for their lives, and thrown into the ocean to drown. It was the systematic murder of 133 people. Why? Mostly money. The slaves had been so malnourished and mistreated that they would likely sell for far less than expected. And because they were insured “property,” they’d be worth more dead than alive. When news of the massacre spread, it forced people to confront the true brutality of slavery. True to form, pro-slavery activists used the Bible to defend it. Reverend Raymond Harris “asserted that, ‘the slave-trade . . . appears in perfect harmony with the principles and decisions of the word of God,’ and that Jesus ‘never once condemned, reproved, or even hinted the least disapprobation of the practices of slavery . . . not even in his divine Sermon on the Mount.’” Another slavery supporter, William Gregson, argued that financial catastrophe would occur if slavery was abolished. To which I wrote in the margins: then you be a slave. It’s a hard book to stomach. But the storytelling and historical detail make it readable and unforgettable.

Don’t Give Up, Don’t Give In by Louis Zamperini
My good friend recommended this, and I’m so glad she did. Most people know Louis Zamperini’s story on the surface: Olympic runner, World War II bombardier, prisoner of war. What he endured is almost incomprehensible. What I loved about this book—a collection of advice written near the end of his life—is how he remained cheerful through it all. He laments how you can’t watch sports today without seeing someone lose ungraciously. He talks about hatred and, like Etty Hillesum, believed hatred was a ruse. “You hate and hate and hate, and think you’re getting even by hating.” But you’re really just destroying yourself. That’s the trap. After everything he went through, maybe the hardest part wasn’t surviving. Maybe it was deciding what to do with it all: Carry it? Or put it down and free yourself? And maybe that’s what “not giving up” really means—not just surviving what happens to you, but like Etty—refusing to let it turn you into someone you don’t want to be. Refusing to let jerks turn you into a jerk. Really, really great book.

Football by Chuck Klosterman
Oh my goodness, this book was so much fun. This guy is one of the weirdest, most interesting thinkers I’ve read. He overthinks everything in the most entertaining way. He takes football and uses it as a launching pad into bigger questions about time, culture, and what we choose to value. This isn’t really a book about football. It’s a book about how we think about football. And from there, how we think about everything else. This guy has thought about football in pretty much every context you can imagine. He even argues—convincingly—that Jim Thorpe was a greater football player than Tom Brady. And there’s not even video footage of Thorpe playing football!He said NFL football will continue to grow in the U.S. over the next 15–20 years, but eventually it will become too big. And when that happens, it will break. As obsessed as Americans are with football now, he suggests that in 50 years, it will probably be irrelevant. This sounds ridiculous at first, but he has valid points. And this got me thinking. If something as massive as football can eventually fade into irrelevance…what does that say about everything else we chase? Fame. Legacy. Being “the greatest” at the expense of our happiness. Not only will you not be able to enjoy your legend status because you’ll be, you know, dead, but the people who think of you as a legend will in turn be dead themselves. The next generations probably won’t even know your name, let alone what the thing was that you were great at. This is all to say: nobody cares what you do. So do things that are meaningful to you. Spend time with your parents. Take the vacation. Explore. People talk about hustling 24/7 like it’s a good thing. They hustle just to do more hustling! (Usually it’s because they don’t know what else to do with themselves.) It reminds me of something Marcus Aurelius wrote: “You’re afraid of death because you won’t be able to do this anymore?” In other words, what you do matters, but not nearly as much as how you live.

What It Is Like to Go to War by Karl Marlantes
This war memoir is epic. I couldn’t put it down. It’s so well-written that I had to order another book of his, Matterhorn. Marlantes warns about what war does to a person internally. He argues that we do a great job physically preparing soldiers for war, but a terrible job giving them the tools to survive mentally and spiritually. He talks about the guilt and anger and confusion of trying to reconcile being a “good person” with the atrocities the war enables one to commit. I just love how brutally honest he is. And while I didn’t agree with everything he said, I still think it’s one of the best books I’ve ever read. It’s raw, insightful, full of action, and reflective. I think you’ll love it too.

This is the main thing I learned in CPR training—and it applies to everything else

Life, Philosophy / /

A few weeks ago, my wife, Courtney, stabbed herself.

She meant to stab the sweet potato in her hand, but missed. The point of the steak knife plunged into the meaty part of her left palm, above her wrist, and a geyser of blood shot across the kitchen island.

I went from innocently peeling the shell off a hard-boiled egg to feeling absolute terror in a matter of seconds.

Courtney—who never even tells me when she has a headache, let alone goes to the doctor for anything that isn’t absolutely necessary—pushed a dish towel into the gash and calmly said, “We have to go, now.”

I didn’t know where she’d cut herself—if she’d sliced open her wrist or hit something important. All I could think was that the human body only holds six pints of blood (which I now know isn’t true; it’s closer to ten) and that she was bleeding badly.

I ran to the garage and yelled, “Get in the car!” I had the wherewithal to grab her ID, but that was it. I didn’t even put shoes on. I flew out of the driveway and broke approximately fifteen traffic laws in the two miles between our house and the ER.

I slammed the car into park at the entrance and rushed her through the sliding doors. Shaking and out of breath, I asked a nurse in the lobby to take a look. As she pulled off the towel, I warned her to be careful; blood might still be squirting. I cringed as I looked to see how bad it was and… it actually didn’t look too bad. The dish towel was soaked end to end in blood, but the bleeding had stopped.

Maybe I had overreacted.

A doctor saw us within twenty minutes, cleaned out the wound, patched it up, and sent us on our way.

When we got home, I replayed everything in my mind. Why had I run around like a chicken with its head cut off? Why was I so unprepared? I felt guilty. I decided never again would I feel so helpless. There’s no excuse for not being prepared. So I watched videos on the Heimlich maneuver, bought a LifeVac travel kit, a second fire extinguisher, and hemostatic gauze, and signed us up for a CPR/First Aid class at the Red Cross.

The class was three and a half hours long, and there were nine other students. On a wall-mounted TV, the instructor played the first video: how to properly wash your hands. Courtney turned to me and whispered, “You owe me for this.”

After that, the instructor briefly discussed the material we would learn. She warned that if you save someone’s life, don’t let them repay you with, say, a steak dinner. This could lead to a lawsuit. Courtney grabbed the pocket journal I brought to take notes and wrote, “Do not accept steak dinners.” I had to bite my tongue to keep from laughing.

The next video showed an elderly woman having symptoms of a heart attack. “Honey, what’s wrong?” her alert husband asks. “I’m having chest pains,” she replies. “No, no, no, this isn’t happening,” he moans. Just then, their son—clearly the hero—enters the room.

My journal open, pen at the ready, I leaned forward. Here we go. The secrets of how to save a life were about to be revealed and I, Emily Yaskowitz, would henceforth be prepared to do just that—save lives. What’s the son going to do? I thought. What at-home machine has he invested in that will now pay off and save her life? What tricks would he perform?

The son asks his mom what’s wrong. “I’m having pain in my chest,” she winces. Turning to his dad, the son says, “Call 9-1-1.” He turns back to his mother. “Here,” he says, “chew these aspirins.” The woman chews and rubs her chest while they wait for help. When the first responders arrive, they load her onto a gurney and send her away in an ambulance. The dad is overwhelmed with gratitude. “Son, I don’t know what I would have done without you.” The video ends.

By this point I wanted my money back.

Forty-five minutes in and we’d learned not to accept gifts and to call 9-1-1 in an emergency.

Over the next few hours, though, we practiced CPR on dummies, tied tourniquets, and learned what to do if someone is having a seizure or going into shock. Still, most of what we talked about wasn’t new. By the time the class was over, I realized that was the whole point.

I recently read that Minnesota Vikings head coach Kevin O’Connell briefly played quarterback in the NFL. He threw six passes as a New England Patriot and was cut after one year. He then signed with the Lions and was traded five days later. He auditioned for teams constantly, and it rarely went well. As Seth Wickersham writes, “He always wanted to create ‘the wow factor,’ […] an exceptional throw that would make a team believe. ‘I learned that’s the last possible thing you should do,’ he says now.”

He learned that good quarterbacking involves taking care of the mundane. “He watched Brady and Joe Montana execute game-winning drives in the Super Bowl. What stood out was how unspectacular they were when the stakes were the highest. ‘If they called the same play in the middle of spring practice, they would have executed it the same way,’ [O’Connell] says. ‘They weren’t trying to do anything other than just play the position consistently at a high level.’”

That’s what I learned in the CPR class. It’s about executing the basics—preparing and practicing.

“We don’t rise to the level of our expectations,” the Greek poet Archilochus said. “We fall to the level of our training.”

It’s not about dramatic heroics, but consistent steadiness.

That’s true in the ER, and it’s true everywhere else.

No matter how many influencers or life hacks there are, I’ve yet to find a better prescription for a good life than this: go to bed early, get up early, journal, read, exercise, do the right thing, care about others, and eat decently.

Do these things consistently and in a few years you’ll be a different person.

But that’s the thing: we already know this. The problem is that it’s terribly unsexy. It’s boring. That’s why there’s always a new life hack or mud cleanse or cage-free yoga class or whatever.

It’s why someone will attend a self-help seminar or watch motivating YouTube videos and still never change. The important stuff is often so straightforward—like calling 9-1-1 or calmly applying pressure to a wound—that it can be easily overlooked.

We know we should save and invest—that fortunes aren’t made from windfalls but from small, consistent savings. We know we keep our job not because we have a revolutionary idea, but because we show up each day and stay steady. “Your teeth don’t not rot because you go to the dentist twice a year,” Simon Sinek said. “They don’t rot because you brush them for a couple minutes every day. It’s the little things adding up over time.”

Four years ago I could barely run half a block without stopping. Last week I spontaneously ran a 4.5 mile route—one I’ve never run before—in a little over a half hour, and I could have kept going. And I’m not saying that to sound impressive, because it’s not impressive. What else is supposed to happen when you run three to four miles a day, four days a week, for four years, while gradually increasing your speed?

I fell to the level of my training.

Bob Dylan didn’t wake up one morning and write “Blowin’ in the Wind” because genius struck. “These songs don’t come out of thin air,” he said. “If you sang ‘John Henry’ as many times as me—if you had sung that song as many times as I did, you’d have written, ‘How many roads must a man walk down?’ too.”

He sang the same old songs so many times that when he began to write his own lyrics, he felt like he “was just extending the line.”

He fell to the level of his training.

Feeling confident in an emergency is less about skill than preparation. You don’t need to know how to perform an emergency thoracotomy, but you should have the Heimlich maneuver down pat. You should be prepared enough that if an emergency happens, you can keep your head and assess the situation calmly—exactly the opposite of what I did when I showed up at the ER in my socks.

This matters in big things and small ones. Brilliance and willpower are unreliable.

We fall to the level of our training.

That’s true in an ER lobby. It’s true in your finances, your career, your whole life.

It comes down to doing the most important, basic things consistently.

Go to bed early.
Get up early.
Journal.
Read.
Move your body.
Tell the truth.
Do the right thing.
Go easy on the sweets.

Simple.

Far from easy.

But simple.

Books read this month

Reading / /

Moral Animal by Robert Wright
I love evolutionary science, and this book deepened that love. It reinforced what I first learned in Wright’s other book Why Buddhism Is True: our genes don’t care about our happiness; they care about getting into the next generation. So many of our “choices” are driven by wiring we can’t see. It’s unsettling how unaware we are of the forces shaping us. But it’s hopeful too. Once we see our blind spots, we can question our impulses and make better choices.

C.S. Lewis and the Art of Writing by Corey Latta
I loved this book. It builds on the advice collected in On Writing by C.S. Lewis but goes deeper. Latta doesn’t just share Lewis’s writing principles—he explores the conditions that made Lewis’s writing possible. What shaped him? What fueled that kind of output? How did he actually work? One of the biggest takeaways for me was how widely and deeply Lewis read. As a young boy, he devoured books in the attic of his family home, wandering through myth, history, poetry, and story. By adulthood, he was one of the most well-read writers of his generation. Like Bob Dylan, C.S. Lewis’s genius didn’t come out of nowhere. He read book after book… and then he extended the line.

Outlive: The Science and Art of Longevity by Peter Attia
My good friend recommended this a while ago, and I’m finally reading it. Oh man, this book is so good. I’m only halfway through, but I’ve already made changes to my diet. I even stopped eating cupcakes and ice cream on the weekends (and me and cupcakes and ice cream were like this 🤞). When a reputable physician writes his magnum opus and page after page details the dangers of poor metabolic health—how it underlies nearly every major disease of aging—you sit up and take note. And you make changes. It’s only been a few weekends since I cut out my excessive sugar intake, and I’m determined to keep it up. This quote by Henri Amiel has been helping: “Every desire abates, and every vice grows after it is satisfied.” I’ve also been thinking about what Leo Tolstoy said—that all behavior stems from thoughts. So if you want to improve your behavior, first work to improve your thoughts. Please read this book. You really have to.

Till We Have Faces by C.S. Lewis
Corey Latta said this is Lewis’s best literary fiction, so of course I had to read it. It’s not my usual go-to genre, but I ended up really liking it. A favorite takeaway is the meaning behind the book’s title: we can’t expect God to meet us face to face “till we have faces.” Until we’re honest with ourselves. Until we get clear about who we are. Until we move past the tangle of thoughts and get to what’s truly in our heart. Becoming our real selves is uncomfortable, but it’s the prerequisite for transcending ourselves.

The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis
Okay. I knew C.S. Lewis was a genius, but I didn’t know he was a genius genius. This book blew my mind. (By page 68 I’d already written “Wow!” or “omg” 72 times.) I’m putting it in my top 10 favorite books of all time. I remember reading parts of this book as a teenager and loving it, but I never finished it. Thankfully, I picked it back up this month after learning, in C.S. Lewis and the Art of Writing, why Lewis wrote it. The premise is brilliant: a series of letters from Screwtape, a senior demon, to his nephew, advising him on how to subtly steer humans away from God/what’s best for them. The wisdom in this book surpasses almost any other book I’ve read. I’ve also ordered more of Lewis’s books, including Mere Christianity, The Great Divorce, The Weight of Glory, and Surprised by Joy.

Take a Closer Look

Creativity, Philosophy / /

Look at your fish

In 1864, a young man named Samuel Scudder arrived at Harvard to interview with the celebrated biologist Louis Agassiz. He likely expected a conventional test—something meant to measure what he knew, or to probe his intellect.

Instead, Agassiz placed a preserved fish in front of him and gave a single instruction: “Look at your fish.” Then he walked out of the room.

As Ryan Holiday writes in Wisdom Takes Work, hours passed. Scudder fought boredom. He examined the fish from every angle he could think of. He handled it, turned it over, traced its contours, counted its scales. Maybe it was a test of patience. With nothing else to do, he drew it.

When Agassiz returned, he was unimpressed. He told Scudder that he hadn’t truly seen the fish yet and urged him to look again. Then he left.

This pattern continued for days.

Each time Agassiz returned, he asked what Scudder had observed. Each time, the answer fell short. Eventually, Scudder could only admit the truth: “I see how little I saw before.”

That admission marked a turning point. After another long stretch of uninterrupted looking, something finally clicked. Scudder began to notice the fish’s underlying order—its symmetry, the way its organs mirrored one another on both sides. When he offered this observation, Agassiz responded with enthusiasm: “Of course! Of course!” When Scudder asked what he should do next, Agassiz replied, “Look at your fish.”

In the end, Scudder discovered… well, nothing.

But as Scudder later explained, “it was a deeper lesson,” Ryan writes, “perhaps the most important one he ever got in his career as a scientist: the power of focus. The importance of intensely looking, with dedication and without interruption, at something as simple and ordinary as a fish in order to truly see it. It was, [Scudder said], ‘a lesson whose influence has extended to the details of every subsequent study; a legacy the Professor had left to me, as he has left it to many others, of inestimable value, which we could not buy, with which we cannot part.’”

David McCullough uses this story in his writing classes. “Seeing is so important in this work,” he said. “Insight comes, more often than not, from looking at what’s been on the table all along, in front of everybody, rather than from discovering something new. Seeing is as much the job of a historian as it is of a poet or a painter, it seems to me. That’s Dickens’ great admonition to all writers, ‘Make me see.’”

Nobody bothered to look closely enough

David McCullough recalls his own Agassiz Jr. moment while writing Mornings on Horseback. He was trying to understand what had caused Theodore Roosevelt’s severe asthma attacks as a boy—episodes so intense they sometimes left his family fearing for his life.

McCullough consulted physicians. One asked whether there had been a cat or dog in the house, or whether the attacks coincided with pollen season. A psychosomatic specialist wondered if they happened around emotionally charged events like birthdays and holidays.

Using young Theodore’s diary entries, McCullough made a calendar of what he did each day. “In pencil, I wrote where he was, who was with him, what was going on, and in red ink I put squares around the days of the asthma attacks. But a little like Scudder and the fish, I couldn’t see a pattern.”

Then one day, as he looked at the calendar on his desk, he noticed something: every asthma attack happened on a Sunday. McCullough asked himself what Sundays meant in Theodore’s childhood. And then the answer became clear. If Theodore had an asthma attack on Sunday, he didn’t have to do something he hated: go to church. Instead, he got to go to the country with his father—just the two of them. For young Theodore, this was heaven.

This didn’t mean that the asthma attacks were planned, but the anxiety brought on by the prospect of going to church likely triggered them. (A high price to pay, because the attacks were horrible.) Other things may have contributed to the attacks, but the Sunday pattern was too pronounced to be coincidental.

“The chances of finding a new piece are fairly remote—though I’ve never written a book where I didn’t find something new—but it’s more likely you see something that’s been around a long time that others haven’t seen. Sometimes it derives from your own nature, your own interests. More often, it’s just that nobody bothered to look closely enough.”

What had been there all along

DNA is the master cookbook of who we are and how we function. Its sibling, RNA, is the messenger. RNA tells our cells what to do.

In the early 1980s, scientists had discovered something crucial: RNA could replicate itself—by itself. “If some RNA molecules could store genetic information and also act as a catalyst to spur chemical reactions,” Walter Isaacson explains, “they might be more fundamental to the origins of life than DNA, which cannot naturally replicate themselves without the presence of proteins to serve as a catalyst.”

In 1998, biochemist Jennifer Doudna was on a mission: to show how, exactly, RNA could replicate itself. First she would need to know what an RNA model looked like. Back in the 1970s, researchers had mapped the structure of smaller, simpler RNA molecules. But when it came to larger RNAs, progress stalled. For nearly twenty years, scientists found it difficult to isolate them clearly enough to understand their structure. “Colleagues told Doudna that getting a good image of a large RNA molecule would, at that time, be a fool’s errand.”

But if she wanted “to understand the workings of a self-splicing piece of RNA, she would have to fully discern its structure, atom by atom”—something most scientists at the time believed would be too difficult, if not impossible, to do. “Hardly anyone was trying anymore,” famed biologist Jack Szostak recalls.

It took two years, but Doudna and her partner, Jamie Cate, did it. They produced a working model of the structure of an RNA molecule—work that would eventually lay the foundation for CRISPR, the most widely used gene-editing system today.

When they started, RNA was old news. But by giving it sustained, almost stubborn attention, they discovered something entirely new.

It hadn’t been impossible after all. It’s just that no one else bothered to look closely enough at what had been there all along.

Books read this month

Reading / /

Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson
Isaacson takes enormous people and ideas and turns them into swift, gripping narratives. Leonardo da Vinci and Elon Musk were fabulous. Code Breaker was no different. The subject alone—gene editing, curing disease, rewriting the very code of life—is insane, but what makes it such a pleasure to read are the stories behind the science. “The key to true curiosity is pausing to ponder the causes,” Isaacson writes. Why is the sky blue? Why does this molecule behave the way it does? For Jennifer Doudna, the book’s central character, it was not enough to get the answers—she needed to know how the answers could be of use to the world. Her breakthroughs came from a willingness to move into unfamiliar fields, to take intellectual risks, to ask questions that were bigger than she felt qualified to answer. Real discovery, Isaacson suggests, begins not with answers, but with the courage to linger inside a good question. To keep looking.

The Greatest Sentence Ever Written by Walter Isaacson
The second sentence of the Declaration of Independence is, Isaacson says, “the greatest sentence ever crafted by human hand.”

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

In each chapter of this tiny book, Isaacson pauses over a single phrase or word. What did the founders mean by “self-evident”? What about “unalienable rights”? Where did these ideas come from? What should they mean to us now?

These shouldn’t be abstract questions. The Declaration of Independence was intended to be used in our lives and laws, written not to become a relic of history but to be questioned, returned to, and practiced. You couldn’t ask for a better starting point than this book.

A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
My aunt-in-law started a family book club this year, and this book was the first on the list. I probably wouldn’t have read it on my own, so I’m glad it was forced on me. I really enjoyed it. The only thing I wasn’t prepared for was how sad it was: after the first night of reading I had to emotionally detach. (Once detached, I was fine. Mostly.) It reminded me of another fictional character named Babbitt, although Ove is much more endearing. Ove is rigid, rule-bound, and easily irritated. The obvious message is that you can’t judge a book by its cover: the gruff, inflexible exterior conceals a surprisingly tender heart (as depicted in the trailer of the 2022 movie adaptation, A Man Called Otto). But my biggest takeaway was how much time this guy wasted. How opinionated he was about stuff that wasn’t in his control (namely, other people’s behavior). It turned out to be the perfect book to begin the year with. My word for this year is focus. Namely: focus on what I do. Less time forming opinions about what everyone else is doing, and more time paying attention to what I do and what I think about. My own thoughts and actions. Those two things alone will give me more than enough work this year/the rest of my life.

The Johnstown Flood by David McCullough
Imagine a dam 72 feet high and nearly 900 feet wide, sitting above a small Pennsylvania town. Imagine it holding back a lake more than two miles long, containing 20 million tons of water. Imagine the lake sitting on one of the most exclusive country clubs in America, owned by powerful, wealthy men such as Andrew Carnegie, Benjamin Ruff, and Henry Clay Frick.

Now imagine the dam breaking.

That’s what happened in 1889, when the South Fork Dam collapsed and sent a wall of water roaring downstream at forty miles an hour, flattening everything in its path. Entire neighborhoods vanished. Trains were lifted from their tracks. Houses, trees, animals, and people were swept together into a single moving mass. By the time the water finally stopped, more than 2,200 people were dead.

McCullough once said he wrote this book because he wanted to read a good account of the tragedy and couldn’t find one, so he decided to write the book he wanted to read. The result is both a gripping historical narrative of the event, and a sobering reminder that the people in charge definitely don’t always know what they’re doing. It’s also a reminder of how even the biggest catastrophe—the biggest anything, really—is eventually forgotten.

Travels with Epicurus: A Journey to a Greek Island in Search of a Fulfilled Life by Daniel Klein
The Art of Happiness by Epicurus and The Pocket Epicurean by John Sellars are two of my favorite philosophy books. And now I can add another Epicurean one to the list. Epicurus wasn’t a hedonist, as some people claim. Yes, he said the ultimate goal of life is pleasure. But pleasure from moderation, not excess. By keeping his tastes simple, bread and water were exquisite tasting. The best pleasures, he said, are the tranquil ones, not the wild ones. A clear conscience, good company, and a mind free from mental disturbances. It doesn’t get much better than that, he’d say.

Tales of Soldiers and Civilians by Ambrose Bierce
Oh man, this book was FUN. It’s a collection of short stories by the philosopher and cynic Ambrose Bierce. The stories are dark and macabre, and set mostly during the Civil War. Each story has a twist at the end. And yet the stories are philosophical? It’s like guilty pleasure reading without the guilt.

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