For the football team, I still think the NCAA and the school should have: kept the statue at PSU, and team got the death penalty. Colin Cowherd of ESPN got the statue question right — keeping it would have warned PSU (and many others) not to foist godliness upon mortal, fallible men. Juxtaposing that reminder with the death penalty  – “This is the man you loved, but he helped destroy his and your football program” — would not have helped with the healing at PSU, but it would have powerfully reminded many other schools to shine cleansing daylight upon all corners of their worlds, including athletic teams.

As an aside, ‘healing’ at Penn State doesn’t matter a whit. The healing of the victims– as much as possible in this case —  does. But how silly to think that a senior at PSU, whose view of Coach Paterno has shattered and who now faces a far less boisterous last year at the school because of the penalties, needs “healing”. Ridiculous.

With regards to Paterno, the NCAA sanctions do somehow seem appropriate. For years, observers bemoaned his remaining the coach. In hindsight, those commentators appear both right and wrong. Right, because they perceived something had gone wrong. Wrong, because they worried whether Coach Paterno, as he aged, could maintain control of the program. We now know he exercised far too much control on it, and on the university at large.

Finally, I empathetically repeat my Facebook post from July 12: “Penn State Trustees: You are all pieces of shit. If you had any decency left, you’d give up your cushy, esteemed posts and let better men and women assume the mantle of leadership to restore the university’s good name.”

Yet, Jonathan Last writes in this week’s Weekly Standard that community and geography will sever, eventually, at least in one important respect, by the business practice known as “microtasking”—i.e., the use of Internet platforms that operate like job fairs, where willing participants sign up to perform tasks for business involving the Internet and paid upon completion of the task (provided the company is a legitimate, tax-paying and law-abiding one).  In Last’s case, he utilized Amazon.com to land a gig entering search terms into Google, clicking on the first result generated by the search term, and copying the URL into a work page.  He earned a paltry $0.16 for his labor, but worked less than two minutes.  But beyond his meager salary as a “Mechanical Turk,” Last’s participation in microtasking seems innocuous enough, yet highlights a problem with what any future economy may look like—completely remote participation in the workplace.

To be sure, Amazon’s platform—and others like it—represents a novel contribution, matching worker’s skills with jobs, or rather tasks, businesses need fulfilled on a part-time or one-off basis.  It does not make sense for companies to hire for such tasks, nor to allocate them to current employees, so the Internet affords them an outlet for such task completion.  Last notes that free-market advocates ought to like these types of platforms, where work is unforced, the labor and tasks defined transparently, employment discrimination nearly impossible, and the human factors such as résumé review and interview performance reduced.  The biggest and most profound shift engendered by these platforms, however, is the severing of community and geography—and without any pretense of replacing it in new ways.

The work-commute paradigm, where work centers around particular spaces of productivity such as offices, remains a particularly ossified concept, even in the digital era.  At their best, offices are places of dynamism, productivity, idea-swapping, and friendship.  Even if they are, in some senses, economically inefficient, we confirm them despite this inefficiency for the aforementioned reasons.  Microtasking destroys this nexus, however.  US business may contract with citizens of Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, or Mexico.  All that matters is that the task goes fulfilled, not the communal atmosphere of the office, the common devotion to the company and its product(s), or the vested interest of the workers in the long-term future and ethical behavior of the business.  Microtasking encourages fleeting relationships of utility centered on task completion for small monetary remuneration.

The implications, I believe, are straightforward.  Microtasking decreases the likelihood that businesses will view their relationship with the community in which they locate—or eventually, even the nation in which they place their headquarters—as vital to their future.  It decreases the likelihood that business will maintain a vested interest in that community—in its work force, its institutions, its sound government, its education system.  Tout court, it decreases the likelihood of business participation in all that makes a community healthy and vibrant.  The only way microtasking will not lead to the erosion of the nexus between community and geography is if any increased efficiency therein lands within the community or the American economy itself, which, for the nonce, is highly unlikely.  The change that microtasking brings to the American business experience and its historical linkage to communities is something unprecedented and overall, deleterious to the nexus we hold dear.

The psychologists studied nearly 7,000 people with an age range of nearly 50 years.  The project tracks its participants as they age on a variety of physical and emotional health issues; this means researchers have the ability to compare a participant’s older self with his younger self.  The results of complex tests demonstrated that those over fifty performed worse on speed and memory tests than their younger counterparts.  “The aging brain was more easily distracted and slower in retrieving information; it had trouble shushing internal chatter and preventing stray thoughts from interfering with concentration.”

Even after controlling for a host of advantages—income, parental achievement, gender, age, and physical activity—the most recent MIDUS report concluded: “All other things being equal, the more years of school a subject had, the better he or she performed on every mental test.  Up to age 75, the studies showed people with college degrees performed on complex tasks like less-educated individuals who were 10 years younger.”  It remains, however, to what extent education plays a factor.  For instance, educated individuals are more likely to attend lectures, read, write, or engage in other critical thinking activities, making it difficult to isolate, years later, any lingering impact of college education.  Moreover, the study admitted that middle-aged participants who left education early, yet engaged in all the usual activities of the educated, demonstrated scores equal to college graduates.  The study also found that less-educated middle-aged participants improved their brain function through computer use (though results are tepid for higher-educated individuals).

While it is difficult, then, to isolate the exact role of education in preventing the onset of dementia and strengthening brain function without the possibility of spurious factors, this MIDUS study and its preliminary findings, i.e., that educational effects are long term, have the potential to change the cost calculus of attending college—as well as those thinking about returning to school.  Young people think often of career or social benefits in weighing the decision to go to college, focusing myopically on their first job or networking opportunities.  Perhaps, it would behoove them to think of their long-term mental health, too.  After all, in an era when the WHO expects dementia and intellectual decline to triple with the prospect of longer life expectancy in developed countries, retaining robust mental fitness is a concern we should all share.

In this paucity of time, Judt produced a trove of scholarship—four books, the last of which, Thinking the Twentieth Century, is a synthetic history that serves as a marvelous homage to his life’s work, his style of thinking, and an insider’s look at a truly incandescent mind. Written with the help of a friend—Yale historian Timothy Snyder, who visited Judt at his home in New York City—the book is a dialogue between the two men of the story Judt hoped to tell in his planned book on the intellectual and cultural history of the Twentieth Century. By its very dialogical nature, however, it sometimes wanders afield of this story—to the great benefit of the reader. 

Thinking the Twentieth Century is a dense but invigorating tome redolent, at times, of a college academic bowl, replete with references to picayune events, facts, statistics, and thinkers off the historical map of even the most profound intellectuals. It contains nine chapters, each beginning with a brief autobiographical account of formative moments in Judt’s intellectual or personal development. Among other things, the chapters cover Judt’s genealogy, his English upbringing, his fascination with Israeli kibbutzim and Zionism, his early adherence to Marxism, his sustained interest in French political and intellectual history, and his increasing interest in Eastern Europe (never fully realized by the time of his passing). In many cases, the autobiographical details run deeper and more personal than in Judt’s other posthumous work, The Memory Chalet. 

Thinking the Twentieth Century affords the reader a consummate image of Judt: uncompromising, critical, and unabashedly opinionated. Judt criticizes American foreign policy, free markets, fellow academics, Israel, journalists, and trends within the academic study of History (e.g., cultural studies are “jejune and callow”). Judt even attacks mainstream public intellectuals in America: he dismisses unapologetically David Brooks as ignorant—“he knows nothing”—and Thomas Friedman as nothing but a social networker—his idea of expertise is “the notion of access to something special.”

Judt has his heroes, however—Albert Camus, Hannah Arendt, Arthur Koestler, Leszek Kolakowski, Eric Hobsbawm, John Maynard Keynes, Primo Levi, Léon Blum, and Czeslaw Milosz, inter alia. His commendation of these Twentieth Century thinkers became the fodder for Reappraisals, published in 2008, a series of essays positioning him soundly in the polymathic category. After all, not many historians have the intellectual range to produce erudite essays on Primo Levi’s novels, yet also turn their attention to, for example, US diplomatic history or a profound analysis of current events for The New York Review of Books.

The book benefits from its dialogic nature and the spontaneity entailed inevitably by any conversation. The conversation “reflects the spontaneity, unpredictability, and sometimes playfulness of two minds purposefully engaged through speech.” The book’s many tangents do not detract from its quality or readability; rather, they enhance it and ensure against a formulaic, interview-style feel. In fact, although the book aims at “small truths” and focuses on topics or several topics within each chapter, it avoids the rigid feeling of a Socratic dialogue, laser-focused on discovering one, universal truth. Moreover, Judt’s mind and his mental library, an “improbably capacious and well-catalogued one” of thousands of books, commands respect even whilst Lou Gehrig’s Disease rendered his body impotent. Yet, it is not the only mind worthy of note in this story: Snyder proves himself a brilliant and worthy interlocutor on topics of philosophy, politics, and economics. Indeed, the reader walks away with the impression that very few people in the world shared the requisite reading list or were equipped to handle an intellectual conversation of this depth with Tony Judt.

Thinking is a passionate indictment of simple explanations—“the urge to insist that the complex is just a disguise for the simple was one of the plagues of the Twentieth Century”—whilst simultaneously broadening and complicating the terms of many of these debates. The book’s intellectual range is, tout court, stunning, if occasionally overwhelming: Fascism and Communism, Zionism and nationalism, identity politics and cultural studies, psychoanalysis, current affairs, the role of the historian and public intellectual. What is more, the book benefits from a delicate handling of subject matter, i.e., the Twentieth Century, the squalid, best forgotten, malevolent, and turbulent period, on the one hand, and the remarkably innovative, thriving, and scientific one, if only in retrospect, on the other.

Of great interest to many readers is the chapter on Judt’s transformation into a public intellectual, shortly after his arrival in New York. He and Snyder tackle some of the most vexing questions pressing on any aspiring public intellectual: what are appropriate métiers, or professions, for intellectuals to affiliate with, and how do these change over time? On what grounds may an intellectual comment on or criticize, say, the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict or the Iraq war if his or her written oeuvre hitherto consists of novels or histories of a provincial character? Which types of media contribute appropriately to a broader public conversation? Judt proffers the public intellectual as a creature of the nation, operating most effectively within a middle register of action, facing great difficulty sparking anything resembling a global conversation.

It was Robert Silvers, the well-respected editor of The New York Review of Books, who urged Judt to expand his intellectual horizons: he “taught me in spite of myself that I really could do this sort of writing; that I could think and comment upon subjects far removed from my formal scholarly concerns. Silvers offered the occasion to write about things I would have thought beyond me.” This is a particularly sobering and enlightening chapter in the book for any intellectually-inclined reader. At a time when many scholars, especially in the field of History, are overly provincial, Judt sees it as the “responsibility of the intellectual” to do more than excel in his or her (narrowly) defined field, a notion lost on contemporary scholars (cf. Judt’s The Burden of Responsibility). The latter envisage their scholarship in primarily vertical terms, i.e., they move from undergraduate majors and specialty programs to even more refined graduate specialty programs, and finally on to (hopefully) tenured professorship as one of the leading voices on some parochial subject. Whilst these scholars may indulge in areas outside of their field, such as theater, the arts, or politics, they likely consume it rather than create it. In other words, Judt excoriates—implicitly and explicitly—those Historians who fail to escape this vertical conception of an intellectual career, “building a career path among Historians alone.”

When asked pointedly about the best way to remain critical and insightful on one’s topic, imperative to the function of a public intellectual, Judt offers a characteristic response: remain an outsider. Judt’s thoughts are those of the spectateur engagé, to borrow Timothy Garton Ash’s phrase—the simultaneously engaged yet independent intellectual. Ironically, this is an apt metaphor for Judt’s entire life: the son of Eastern European Jews who never felt completely at home in England; an autodidact at Cambridge who never learned historiography or became part of a dedicated “school;” an expert by training in French social thought with serious and evolving interests in Eastern European history; and an American denizen and critic without the faintest bond to the United States. In all his various identities, historical topics, and methods, Judt remains an outsider. What makes him so trenchant is his ability to find himself on the inside of variegated debates, to pass through them with “eyes and ears wide open,” and to return “to the outside to think and write.”

In sum, on a panoply of issues, Judt leaves little ambiguity where he stands; such was his wont. With the help of Snyder, he challenges comfortable historical narratives and explicates why such discomfort is part of the truth with which we must live; after all, the worst we can do is spin dulcet lies about ourselves. Mirroring the intellectuals Judt commemorates in Reappraisals and Thinking the Twentieth Century, he brims with original thought and has the courage of his convictions—both undervalued traits in his beloved Twentieth Century, and increasingly rare in our own.

* N.B.: All quotes are from Tony Judt and Timothy Snyder, Thinking the Twentieth Century, (London: Penguin, 2012).

Unfortunately for an Oxford student such as myself, Clinton contains barely a scant mention of his time here as a Rhodes Scholar.  Indeed, although Clinton’s political ambitions were clear to many who knew him, the documentary neglects Clinton’s higher education and its incubation of his political desires to focus on his more formative high school years.  In fact, Clinton was so outstanding in high school that the school’s principal barred him from running for class president, to preserve some accolades for other students.  The only mention Clinton’s other institutions—Georgetown University and Yale Law School—receive is in connection with his eventual wife, Hillary Rodham, a young feminist whom he met during “a rare visit to the law library.”

After giving up a promising opportunity with a Washington, D.C. law firm, Hillary Clinton moved to Arkansas where Bill first ran—unsuccessfully—for US Congress at the tender age of 28.  Hereafter, the Clintons’ marriage, perhaps unsurprisingly, features prominently in the documentary.  Clinton employs the oft-used-but-rarely-fruitful technique of utilizing ex-aides and childhood friends, turned amateur psychologists, to analyze the Clintons’ relationship.  A panoply of high-profile characters including James Carville, Dee Dee Myers, and John Podesta attempt to offer insight into the Clintons’ mysterious relationship.  In the end, however, the Clintons’ marital life remains recondite.  The documentary’s interviewees only offer the viewer platitudinous explanations, such as “there is a strange affinity about them;” “they are mystified with one another;” “they really love each other;” “somehow, they just make it work,” or Walter Lippmann’s famous quip, “Love endures when two people love not just each other, but mutual things.”

An insight into the mysterious dynamics of the Clintons’ marriage occurs after Bill loses the race for US Congress to the Republican incumbent, John Paul Hammerschmidt.  Originally skeptical of this young parvenu, many Arkansas Democrats recognized Clinton’s charisma and work ethic.  Clinton won the state’s governorship at the age of 32, but a utopian vision of government led to an unpopular tax increase on driving license renewals, and Clinton lost the governorship to a Republican just two years later. (At that time, Arkansas’s State Constitution established gubernatorial terms of 2 years; an amendment passed under Clinton later changed it to 4 years.) Determined to stave off the death of a political career that ended just as quickly as it began, Clinton plotted his comeback meticulously, tapping Hillary as the mastermind of his victorious campaign just two years later.  Clinton became governor again at 34, and Hillary forever stepped into the spotlight as a political wonk in her own right, spearheading efforts on education reform (previously, Hillary’s feminist, Midwestern background, lack of accent, and thick-rimmed glasses did not sit well with Southern Democrats).

The documentary elides many of Clinton’s gubernatorial years, picking up again in 1988 when speculation began that Clinton might run for President.  In some of the best five minutes of the documentary, Clinton’s campaign manager sits him down just one day before his expected Presidential announcement to provide him a long list of women with whom he has been “involved.”  Clinton moves forward with the press conference, but stuns reporters by announcing that it is “too soon” for him to run for President.  Later that year, Clinton gives a poorly-received and verbose speech in favor of Michael Dukakis at the Democratic National Convention.  Yet again, Bill Clinton’s political career appears destined for the graveyard.

Four years later, Clinton announces his run for the Presidency and shoots to the top of the polls in New Hampshire.  His message of “entitlements in exchange for responsibility” caught fire and brought “Reagan Democrats,” looking for something different from the typical social model endorsed by liberals, into the fold.  Weeks before the primary, a young lounge singer named Gennifer Flowers appeared with recorded phone conversations.  The possibility of Clinton’s characteristic stratagem—deny, deny, deny—was foreclosed quickly.  Instead, Clinton campaigned for nearly 20 hours a day, adopting a mantra of “second chances.”  In an interview, former White House Press Secretary, Dee Dee Myers, muses: “How many second chances does any one person deserve? Clinton’s view is as many second chances as a person is willing to try and take.”  Clinton lost his lead in New Hampshire but managed to finish, respectably, in second place.  Clinton dubbed himself “the Comeback Kid,” an apropos epithet for the remainder of his political career.

Clinton depicts a President lacking a majority and thus a mandate for governing with only 43% of the vote; learning on the job; an inexperienced staff; an ill-managed first term in the White House; and a family unprepared for the media scrutiny of the spotlight beyond small-town Arkansas.  Mogadishu, Rwanda, Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell (DADT), the Whitewater land scandal, a failed stimulus bill, a failed healthcare reform act, and the Republican Revolution of 1994 that made Clinton himself the issue of the midterm elections—again, Bill Clinton’s Presidency appeared finished just as quickly as it started.

Clinton, who lacked confidence as Commander-in-Chief after “Black Hawk Down” and the failure to intervene in Rwanda, became a slave to public polling and his chief pollster, Dick Morris, after the momentous midterm defeat of 1994.  Clinton even vacationed in Wyoming rather than Martha’s Vineyard, in order to avoid the elitist stigmatization of the latter.  Yet, it was this same reliance on public polling that afforded Clinton the opportunity to blaze a new path, the so-called “Third Way” of moderate pragmatism.  Clinton won the budget showdown against House Speaker Newt Gingrich by agreeing to balance the federal budget, but not with Medicare spending.

Predictably, the documentary devotes 45 minutes of the second installment to the Lewinsky scandal that dominated the second term of Clinton’s Presidency.  The film does so with considerable deft, interviewing reporters like Michael Isikoff and independent prosecutor Kenneth Starr.  It cobbles together fascinating footage of Clinton testifying under oath, declaring judiciously, “There is no relationship,” leaving many to speculate whether there was one.  Viewers see Hillary on national television excoriating the “vast right-wing conspiracy” against her husband, later told privately by Clinton that he lied.  Such footage may satiate viewers who enjoy the mysterious dynamics of the Clinton marriage—admittedly, nearly all of us—especially the tidbits about Hillary’s calculated plotting for a New York Senate seat with political advisers, occurring in the Oval Office literally the day of the US Senate’s impeachment vote against her husband (the vote ultimately failed).  Yet, for those interested in the policy decisions of the Clinton Presidency, this focus on the Lewinsky Scandal comes at a cost.  Clinton neglects key foreign policy decisions and the domestic policy relationship between Clinton and Newt Gingrich.  Somalia, Rwanda, the Balkans, the Dayton Accords, the East Africa bombings, the emergence of al-Qaeda as a transnational threat, and the secret plan to reform Social Security—all receive only scant mention in this documentary.

In sum, Clinton leaves viewers with the image of a man growing into the Presidency, who loved being President until the very last day of office (he literally remained in the Oval Office on Inauguration Day until George W. Bush’s aides kicked him out).  Clinton depicts a President who recovered like none other, gaining (and subsequently losing) the trust of the American people innumerable times.  A tragic figure, he leaves voters with the curious sense of unfulfilled promise.  Perhaps, no other American President in modern history has had so many second chances and political accomplishments, and yet left an impression of his time in office as wasted on some levels.  Clinton does a commendable job of unpacking this mystery.

Col. Littleton, a purveyor of fine leather and other goods out of Tennessee, sells its wares directly and via a few distributors. I found the journal through Orvis. I ordered the journal with ruled paper (paper comes in unruled, fly fishing and golf versions as well), and monogrammed with my initials.

Upon receiving the journal, I first noted the excellent quality of the leather. While soft, the leather feels sturdy in your hands, which adds a sense of permanency in journal writing. I like that feel a great deal. The feel also puts me in a contemplative mood whenever I write in it, even for quick-hit notes. If possible, I believe the high-quality and even beauty of the journal contributes to better thinking. Winston Churchill observed that, “We make our buildings and then our buildings make us.” That insight seems true of this journal as well.

The second aspect of the journal I noted — its heft. It measures 9″ x 7″ x 1.5″ and it weighs more than most journals of that size. The leather and the high-quality, thick paper both contribute to the weight. Normally, I consider the weight as contributing to the sturdy feel of the journal. On travel around town, and out of town, it can make the journal a lot to carry. To jot down notes in meetings around town, I’ve begun traveling with smaller, lighter journals (including the Col. Littleton No. 23 Pocket Journal, and Field Notes memo and steno books). When on overnight travel, I’ll usually take the Col. Littleton journal with me, although sometimes opt for lighter notebooks.

The journal comes with a pencil, but I’ve replaced it with a very nice, and thin, Kaweco fountain pen.

The pen makes a light and excellent writing companion for the journal. As noted above, the journal paper has some thickness in it and the fountain pen ink looks great on it.

The leather serves as a journal cover, and paper insert holder. Col. Littleton sells refills, which you must tie into the leather cover:

The first time I replaced the insert, I worried about tying it in improperly, needlessly as it turned out. The system adds a level of elegance and almost rustic beauty to the journal.

I use this journal almost every day. In it, I record my daily thoughts, reflections, hopes and concerns. It also contains the record of my daily walking, in miles and steps taken. I treasure it as I do few of my possessions.

All of those positive qualities noted, I would change a few things about the journal. First, the insert system generally prevents the paper from lying flat. As a result, writing on the left-hand side of the page (for a right-handed writer) proves challenging. In fact, with this insert, I’ve taken to only writing journal entries on the right-hand side. I use the left-hand side to write in landscape (often sketches of charts), and preserving articles or other items of interest:

That system has worked out fine, but I’d prefer to write on both side of the page. (Lines on the left-hand side of the paper would help, too.)

Second, the journal closes via a small brass knob on the front. That closure sticks out slightly from the rest of the journal, and therefore makes stacking other items against the journal (for example, books) awkward. As a workaround, I’ve taken to placing the journal as the item closest to the outside of the briefcase or bag I’m carrying it in. That works fine, but I’d prefer a different closure, which allows the journal to take a completely rectangular shape, or no closure at all.

Finally, the cover page of each insert contains a quote from Col. Garry A. Littleton. It’s a decent, although unspectacular quote, in terms of conveying wisdom. It clearly belongs in the company’s marketing materials for the journal. But I’d prefer to use that space as I see fit; the company should remove it from the insert covers.

However, those requested improvements should not detract from an outstanding and cherished journal. Now on my second insert, I’ve used the journal for over a year. Because of the Colonel’s focus on singular quality, I’ll use it as my main journal for years to come.

Yet, I cannot neglect another narrative—a scathing self-inquiry into male culture.  It strikes me that there exists a cultural difference in the way young men and young women often socialize.  Quite simply, the capital needed to sustain a lifestyle similar to one of the unambitioned college male is not particularly prohibitive.  Again, anecdotal evidence indicates that such a lifestyle—assembling a house of young men working menial jobs (perhaps still in a college town), renting a house for several hundred dollars per month, and playing video games, eating pizza, and fraternizing during most of one’s free time—is an appealing form of social life for most young men.  It is high school or college, part deux.

It also strikes me that this form of socialization is not as appealing to young women.  Interestingly, American cinema provides further proof of this anecdotal evidence, given the popularity of such comedies like Old School, Van Wilder, and Animal House before them.  Indeed, an entire coterie of Hollywood actors—ironically and conveniently dubbed “the frat pack”—makes their living playing typecast male characters that are immature, incompetent, and unwilling to accept many of society’s greatest responsibilities.  Thus, group or gender collective behavior may drive the need for high-income or status careers—or lack thereof.

When it comes to the rest of the population—the males who find themselves within one standard deviation of mean ambition—I must admit that I find the situation particularly vexing.  An economy with high unemployment, shrinking economic sectors traditionally employing men, a youth increasingly postponing marriage (or viewing the institution itself as archaic), and some aspects of American feminism, all make it difficult for the American man with average education to aspire to a mortgage, a wife, and a family by the time he is in his mid-to-late twenties.  This is to say nothing of the overwhelming and obvious social anxiety many men feel to be, and—almost as important—for others to view them as, the family’s primary breadwinner.

Though American feminism reformed some of its ideas and conceptions, a great tragedy of early feminism—unfortunately, a tragedy of staid character—was the stark juxtaposition of career and relationship/marriage, positioning the dynamic as one of unequivocal diametric opposition.  Such a characterization is, of course, an unnecessary and tragic over-simplification.  A more proper characterization of the dynamic is that romantic life and marriage carry with them the potential for profound personal or spiritual grounding, out of which women can tackle professional advancement head-on.  My anecdotal evidence also hints that American culture and university life teach even young women of modest ambition that they should ready themselves to pursue professional advancement above all else—in some cases, for no other reason than that their mothers or grandmothers could not—and bear the loneliness that may result from shunning relationships and marriage until one’s thirties.

In summation, it seems that men occupy a perplexing position in the ambition distribution—both ahead and far behind.  Thus, we have important layers of nuance in the “crises of male ambition” to which I referred in the title of this post.  My hope is that this is a plausible start to explaining this newly highlighted disparity in vocational and educational ambition between the sexes.  However, I am unsatisfied with the amount of speculation and reliance upon anecdotal evidence.  A fuller treatment of this topic would necessitate a contextual positioning of this trend within what I believe is a broader trend of American cultural decline.

I believe strongly that the Millennial generation will inhabit, unavoidably, an America profoundly different than that of our parents—one that will require families to have reformed lifestyles and institutions, such as sound financial footing; well-paying jobs; robust family structures and values; and an international consciousness, not only on the business level, but to reshape and reinvigorate America’s role in the world.  Within this necessary contextual positioning, male ambition on the lower ends of the normal distribution appears grimmer: the stereotypical lifestyle of the unambitious male repulses insofar as it appears nihilistic in its total ignorance of some of these obvious and gripping realities.

Economic analysts say this trend could portend a phenomenon akin to the G.I. Bill, when returning World War II veterans attended college in droves, and then returned to a recovering postwar economy with newfangled skills and ambition.  Further, like the G.I. Bill, one sex is the primary beneficiary; thus, “the next generation of women may have a significant advantage over their male counterparts, whose career options are already becoming constrained.”  What is more, “The education gap aside, in some ways young women will already have an advantage over men in the coming decade. Many of the occupations expected to have the most growth, like home health aides and dental hygienists, have traditionally been filled by women.”  This is not to say that men cannot fill these positions, but they may not want to, for various personal or cultural reasons.  Something seems to be off track in the young male community—and in more areas than this article treats.

This article raises a passel of interesting issues—e.g., student loan debt and the value of graduate degrees such as “strategic communications” (in which course the article’s main interviewee is enrolled), as opposed to engineering, nursing, computer science, or, done rigorously, humanities and social science fields.  However, I would like to highlight another topic implicitly underlying the entire article and its argument: the potential lack of male ambition vis-à-vis females.  First, we must ask whether we should read the situation as such.  I contend that the article demonstrates a marked disparity between men and women in vocational and educational ambition—at the mean level.  This qualification obviously brings forth several caveats that I will elaborate later.  Second, we must inquire as to the reasons for this lack of male ambition, although I must admit, I am somewhat unsatisfied with my answers.

I would like to preface my argument with several comments.  First, I do not want to leave the reader with the impression that I am somehow invidious toward women or the feminist movement for this development.  On some levels, we ought to celebrate this reality—and what it may portend for improvements in women’s equality in the years to come.  Second, I do not want to leave the reader with the impression that I am somehow out of touch with the host of issues with which women deal in the workplace on a daily basis—to wit, stereotyping, sexism, and of course, lower median salaries than their male counterparts for equal work.  Further, since the start of the economic downturn, men aged 16-24 gained 178,000 jobs while their female counterparts of the same cohort lost 255,000, according to the Department of Labor (but as the article shows, many of these males may be employed or under-employed in dead-end jobs).

What leads males to take any job they can find, while their female counterparts are fussier with their employment prospects? What explains lack of male ambition?

For one thing, it does not seem that a disparity in ambition exists at all levels of society.  Fascinating data collected at Princeton University by the Committee on Undergraduate Women’s Leadership in the interest of gender equality highlighted what I suspect some readers’ anecdotal experience may have told them already: at the very top levels, men tend to be more ambitious and, frequently, more accomplished than women, as manifested in student leadership on college campuses.  The committee measured “leadership” as presidents of influential and visible student groups, winners of prestigious scholarships or undergraduate fellowships, valedictorians, salutatorians, and the top 10% of a graduating class.  Of course, we can point to any number of talented and ambitious women, but why this disparity exists at the top levels is an ongoing and important discussion.

I, for one, do not have many clear ideas on why this is the case.  However, some of my anecdotal experience from both college and graduate school indicate that talented and ambitious women often obsess over the idea that their career advancement is a giant step forward, much to the detriment and great neglect of other aspects of their lives, i.e., extracurricular leadership and romantic relationships—although this criticism holds generally for many students of both sexes at top universities.  So, I throw this preliminary idea out with great caution: could it be, paradoxically, identity and gender studies programs, focused on implanting in women the absolute necessity of becoming a trailblazer, failed to make women more ambitious than their top male counterparts?

Regardless of whether this intuition is true (and it is only an intuition), or whether one could measure it in any significant way, the data show not just a discomfiting disparity of ambition at the very top levels, but also a disparity in mean ambition, too.  I think we should model ambition, like many other attributes, on a normal bell curve, with most of the population fitting within one standard deviation of mean ambition.  With the information brought forth by the Princeton Committee, we know that men tend to disproportionately occupy the spots two, three, or four standard deviations away from mean ambition in the positive direction (rightward on the bell curve).  Likewise, as I contend the New York Times article shows, they also disproportionately occupy the spots two, three, or four standard deviations away from the mean in the negative direction (leftward on the bell curve).  This is the biggest of the aforementioned caveats, and it makes the idea of gender ambition more complex than simply saying, “men are less ambitious.”  On the whole, this may be true, but such a statement glosses over the complexities of the situation.

I will post part two, which explicates a narrative of the unambitious male, tomorrow.

While reading it, I couldn’t help but think about the similarities between this book and Dan Roam’s Back of the Napkin. They have similar looks and feels, and advocate a visual – and visually compelling – path to business problem solving. Business Model Generation has a specific business problem in mind—namely, that of designing the proper approach for a company or firm.

The authors and collaborators on the book “are convinced that the tools and attitude of the design profession are prerequisites for success in business model generation” (125).

They advocate that approach because of its benefits, and ultimately, its relatively efficiencies in arriving at a business model. “The attributes of design attitude include a willingness to explore crude ideas, rapidly discard them, then take the time to examine multiple possibilities before choosing to refine a few – and accepting uncertainty until a design direction matures. These things….are requirements for generating new business models. Design attitude demands changing one’s orientation from making decisions to creating options from which to choose” (164).

A tool they call the Business Model Canvas serves as the fulcrum of this approach. It has nine building blocks: Customer Segments; Value Propositions; Channels; Customer Relationships; Revenue Streams; Key Resources; Key Activities; Key Partnerships; and Cost Structure (16-17). Through use of the Canvas, business owners (in the inclusive sense of the term) can iterate and experiment to arrive at the right business model, or at options on which they can run experiments.

In the book, the authors then demonstrate the Business Model Canvas ‘in action’ in dissecting a host of business models, and what they term ‘patterns,’ or well-defined and ‘archetypal and reusable’ models (54). They then highlight a number of exercises business owners can employ to design their own models. Those approaches include: Customer Insights; Ideation; Visual Thinking; Prototyping; and Scenarios,

This book fits is so well with Steven Gary Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany. Blank articulates the ‘what’ of entrepreneurship: the process, the steps. Business Model Generation describes tangible and engaging practices for doing those activities. Both books include insightful and humbling diagnostic questionnaires.

I wish I’d read both books earlier on in developing Chiefist. Curiously, when we started, we took a broad, sweeping look at potential business models, or what we then termed a “taxonomy” of models we could pursue. But we used Excel, and so naturally our process did not visually engage us – and the results likely reflected that lack of a visual, and even more iterative, process. In the end, our initial product idea began to drive the entire model. Fortunately, we have iterated that product and others across the last year, and have taken some of the design principles from the book to heart, before even learning about the book. Now that I’ve read it, we can inject much of its sound advice and practical exercises into our continued client engagement and product iteration activities.