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Book Magic

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Book Magic

If you’d prefer to listen to this as an audio essay, please visit The Natural Curiosity Project or click here.

The hardest thing about writing a book isn’t coming up with the story, or inventing the complicated relationships that help define the characters, or making sure the story flows the way it’s supposed to. It isn’t the painstaking process of finding all the typos and misspellings and missing quotes, or fact-checking every tiny detail so that a reader who has it in for you discovers with chagrin that there’s little to criticize. Nope—it’s none of those, although those do require work.

The hardest thing about writing a novel is creating the one-paragraph synopsis that goes on the back cover. Think about it. The publisher says to the author, “Please take your 140,000-word, 468-page novel and describe it in 125 words or less, in a way that will cause a prospective reader to drool uncontrollably all the way to the checkout counter at the bookstore.”

Good luck with that. Like I said: Hard.  

I’m about to publish a new novel, my fifth, called “The Sound of Life.” My editors have gone through it with their editorial microscopes, identifying mistakes, errors and omissions. My cadre of readers have gone through it, uncovering awkward dialogue, technical errors, and flow problems that I inevitably missed. The final manuscript is called ‘The Sound of Life v48F,’ which means that the book went through 48 complete rewrites before I deemed it ready for publication—although there will be at least two more read-throughs before I give it the final go-ahead.

I’m proud of this book. It’s my 106th title (bad habit), and I felt a sense of letdown when I typed the last sentence and knew it was done. That’s never happened to me before. Because of the story that magically emerged from the creative mists before me, the wonderful characters I met along the way, and the journey they allowed me to join them on, when I typed the last word of the final sentence, I felt like I was pulling into the driveway after a long, memorable road trip. I needed a medicine for melancholy, because it was over.

Author Alice Munro wrote, “A good book makes you want to live in the story. A great book gives you no choice.” That’s how I felt with this one. And please understand, this isn’t my ego talking. I experienced something as I wrote this book that rarely happens, like seeing the mysterious and elusive “green flash” over the ocean at sunset. At some point along the creative journey, I realized that I was no longer writing the book: it was writing itself. My job changed from creative director to scribe. It was like it was saying to me, ‘Here’s the keyboard. Try to keep up.’

Author M.L. Farrell said this about books:

A book is not mere paper and words.

It is a door and a key.

It is a road and a journey.

It is a thousand new sights, sensations and sounds.

It holds friendships, experiences, and life lessons.

A book is an entire world.”

There’s so much truth in that. I’m at the point with this one where people are asking me what “The Sound of Life” is about, and now that I know, I’m excited to tell them. But as I describe the 56-foot boat that’s central to the story, the journey from the eastern Caribbean through the Panama Canal then up the coast to Northern California, the rich interactions among the characters, and the happenings in Peru that tie much of the narrative together, I realize somewhat sheepishly that every time I tell someone what the book’s about, I speak in the first person. Not ‘they,’ but ‘we.’ Well, sure—I was there. I was along for the ride. Why wouldn’t I speak in the first person?

Stephen King is a writer whom I admire greatly, for many reasons. “Books are a uniquely portable magic,“ he once said. A uniquely portable magic. I think about the complexity, richness, excitement, laughter, and delicious food that’s captured between the covers of this book. I think about the immensely likable people and their relationships, around whom the story revolves. I think about the sights and sounds and smells and tastes they experience along the way. And I think about what it felt like when my characters, my good friends, got back on the boat and motored away, waving as they left me behind on the dock, en route to their next adventure. 

A uniquely portable magic.

“The Sound of Life” will be released in December 2025.

The Sounds Below

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I earned my NAUI Certification card—my C-card, as divers call it—in 1977, and proudly pocketed my Instructor card a year later.  As a newly-minted dive shop owner, I taught basic skills in the pool every weeknight, and on weekends I was either somewhere along California’s north coast taking new divers on their first free dive, or in Monterey for final class certification dives. The ocean has always fascinated me; like so many people, I watched, enraptured, as Jacques Cousteau and his team explored the undersea world. When I was a little boy, I pulled a pair of my underwear over my head so that one leg hole served as my face mask and pulled a pair of my dad’s socks onto my feet to serve as fins. I swam down the dark hallway, Jacques at my side. Once I was certified, the ocean became the center of my life, and that has never changed.

My first open water SCUBA dive was at Monterey Bay’s Cannery Row, back when it still had the ruin and wreckage of the old canneries strung along the beach where fancy hotels and restaurants stand today. With the clarity of poignant memory I remember pushing off the surf mat, raising the BC hose over my head, and descending below the calm surface into a world that I would come to love more than just about any other place on the planet. It is a place in which I am so inordinately comfortable that I once fell asleep lying on the bottom of Monterey Bay, my hands under my regulator as I watched life go on, tiny creatures crisscrossing the sandy bottom on their mysterious errands.

In consummate awe I dropped through the kelp on my way to the bottom during my first dive. As I descended, I brushed against the kelp leaves, causing a shower of pea-size crabs, moon snails, nudibranchs and other creatures that before my descent had been in-residence on the various levels of the Macrocystis. I would later teach my own students that at as much as a foot a day, giant kelp is one of the fastest growing plants on Earth, and that its flotation bladders are filled with enough carbon monoxide to kill a chicken in three minutes.

As I approached the sandy bottom on that first dive, I realized I had a problem. I was falling too quickly. I was a new diver, and buoyancy was not yet something I controlled subconsciously. Looking down as I approached the ocean floor, I had the overwhelming realization that no matter where I landed, whether on those rocks in front of me, or that patch of sea lettuce over there to my left, or on those old, eroded pipes from the canneries, or on the flat, sandy bottom over there, in the process of touching down I would crush countless lives. So profuse was the riot of living things that there wasn’t a square centimeter anywhere that didn’t have something living on it. 

Luckily, I was able to arrest my descent before I destroyed the community below me. I managed to go into a hover, where I stayed, unmoving, just taking it all in. My sense of wonder was so great that I lacked the ability to move. But the truth is that I didn’t want to move: I would have had to drain the tank on my back and three more like it before I saw every living thing on the patch of bottom directly beneath me. In fact, I was so motionless in the water column that my instructor came over to make sure I was okay.

As I floated, unmoving, something else crept into my consciousness: the sounds of the underwater domain. The bubbles from my exhalations. The mechanical hiss and click of my regulator. The far-away sound of a propeller frothing the ocean. A deep, unrecognizable rumble, something industrial, far away.

And then there were the clicks, trills, and bloops, the buzzing and scratching and chirping of ocean life. In other words, a cacophony, a joyous symphony, the countless voices of Monterey Bay. 

At night, the score changed. There were fewer human sounds and more natural sounds, mysterious and eerie. This became my favorite time to be in the ocean; night diving is profoundly magical. Once we sank to the bottom, turned off our lights, and allowed our eyes to acclimate to the darkness, we could see remarkably well. Every movement, every fin stroke, every turn of the head created a star-storm as the moving water caused bioluminescent plankton in the water to spark alight. Every passing seal or sea lion or otter drilled a contrail of glowing green through the black water like a living comet. This was nature’s alchemy at its best. 

And, there were sounds—so many sounds. I once did a night dive at the far end of the Monterey Coast Guard Pier where a huge colony of seals and sea lions congregates. Divers know that if they turn on their powerful dive lights during a night dive, their vision goes from a dim awareness of everything around them to brilliant awareness of whatever is illuminated by that narrow white beam directly in front of them, drilling a hole into the darkness. Night divers also know that for reasons known only to them, sea lions enjoy barreling down the light beam toward the diver, blowing bubbles and roaring like a freight train—then veering off into the darkness at the last moment before colliding with the now terrified diver. It has happened to me more times than I can remember, and it still scares the hell out of me when it does.

Twice over the years I heard the siren song of whales while night diving in Monterey; once I heard the telltale blast of sonar, presumably from a submarine somewhere outside the Bay. It was mildly terrifying, and it was more than a little painful. One night I found myself on the Cannery Row side of the Coast Guard Pier, not far from the sea lion incident I just described. Sensing movement beside me, I saw that three gigantic ocean sunfish, mola mola, easily eight feet from top to bottom, had unwittingly surrounded me. They meant no harm and were most likely oblivious to me. But with them came a sound, a combination of stomach rumble and the squeak of a hand rubbing a balloon. It was all around me, and it was loud. At first I thought it was air moving around inside their swim bladders, a common marine sound, but giant sunfish don’t have swim bladders. To this day, I have no idea what I was hearing, but I’ve never forgotten it. All I know is that when the sunfish disappeared into the depths of the Bay, the sound disappeared with them.

I have long been an avid photographer, both above the surface and below it. But as time went on, I began to pay more attention to what my ears were telling me than what my eyes were. I don’t know what caused that focal shift; perhaps it was the fundamental nature of the two senses. Not long ago, on a whim, I sat down with a calculator and my photo database and did a back-of-the-envelope calculation. It turns out that from the time I started shooting seriously until today, a period that covers just shy of 50 years, I shot approximately 500,000 images. Big number. Most of them I shot at a 250th of a second, my preferred shutter speed. That means that every 250 images I shot covered one second of Earth time. 500,000 images, then, translates to 2,000 seconds, which is just over 33 minutes. In other words, my nearly 50 years of serious, near-constant shooting captured a half-hour of my life. 

On the other hand, when I go out to record sound, I often sit for an hour or more with the recorder running, capturing a soundscape. During that time, I immerse myself in the environment and become part of it, something that’s impossible to do in a 250th of a second. With my camera I click and go, rarely lingering after the famous ‘moment it clicks’ to savor the entirety of what I just captured a tiny slice of. 

Photography is about capturing a still image, a single, frozen moment in time. But what in the world is a ‘still sound’? The answer of course, is there is no answer. The difference between a photograph and a sound recording, beyond the obvious, is time. A photograph captures a moment in time; a sound recording captures a moment over time. Photography is often described as a “run-and-gun” activity. But when I go out to record, that approach doesn’t work because sound recording by definition is immersive: I have to settle down in the environment, get my gear sorted, and be quiet by being still. If I’m still, I pay attention. And if I pay attention, I notice things. My awareness of my surroundings isn’t limited to what I see through the narrow viewfinder of a camera; it’s as broad as I choose to make it, and the longer I sit, the richer my awareness becomes. 

Maybe it’s age-related. I’m older now than I was when I started photographing seriously; with age comes patience, and patience is a critical element of sound recording. Saint Augustine said, “The reward of patience is patience.” And it isn’t because I have more time now that I’m older; I have the same time now that I had when I was 21, a full 24 hours every single day. It’s a question of how I choose to use those 24 hours. Bernie Krause, writing in The Power of Tranquility in a Very Noisy World, said, “Heed the narratives expressed through the biophony. Our history is writ large within those stories. Be quiet. Listen. Be amazed.” 

Be quiet. Listen. Be amazed. Great advice for all of us.

Why I Write

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I wrote my first novel, Inca Gold, Spanish Blood, in 2015. By the time I really started to work on it, I’d been a dedicated writer—meaning, I knew that writing was who I am, not what I do—for decades. By then I’d written not only books but countless magazine articles, essays, white papers, poetry, training manuals, and short stories. I’d read every book on writing I could find, and every book recommended by people who write books about writing. I had favorite authors across many genres, and I knew why they were favorites. I had attended writing workshops; I was in numerous writing groups; and I wrote constantly—not in the self-flagellant ‘force yourself to get up at 5 AM every morning and write for two hours before going to work’ way, but whenever the mood struck—which was nearly every day. Sometimes all I wrote was a paragraph, or a meaningful sentence; sometimes I wrote 40 or 50 pages. All that matters is that I wrote. 

I developed the Zen-like patience required to deal with the publishing world. I accepted the fact that the magic number for submitting an article or a manuscript or pretty much any new material to publishers is around 30, meaning, the number of publishers you must submit to, on average, before one of them takes the bait. 

And, I learned the secrets of getting noticed by an editor. I learned that the phrase “Submission Guidelines” is a lie. It should say, “Don’t even THINK about straying from these iron-clad, inviolable, unwavering, universally-applied rules for submitting your work to the publishing gods if you want anyone to even consider looking at your submission.” 

I developed a carefully-curated Council of Druids, my personal cadre of editors, each of which has the same fundamental characteristics: they’re voracious readers; they’re endlessly curious; and they’re willing to read what I write and provide detailed, brutally-naked feedback. Do you know what’s less-than-useless to a writer? Someone who provides a crazed smile, two thumbs-up, and the word ‘awesome’ as their feedback to a written piece. Empty calories. My Druids, on the other hand, are never afraid to say, “Steve, with all the love in my heart, you need to drop this back into whatever swamp you dredged it out of, and here’s why.” In other words, they actually provide feedback that’s meaningful and that can be acted upon. And as much as it hurts sometimes, I carefully read and consider, and usually incorporate, every single comment. Their reading makes my writing better.

As a result of all this, I learned my way around the English language. I became grammatically proficient. I paid close attention and learned how dialogue works—and why it often doesn’t. I found myself reading about 140 books every year, and because of that I developed an extensive vocabulary and an awareness of when not to use polysyllabic words, just because I know them (thank you, Mr. Hemingway). I paid careful attention to structure and flow. I began to realize that genre is merely a suggestion: that some of the best books have elements of romance, science fiction, history, travel, global affairs, poetry, and politics, in spite of the label they’re given by the bookstore. 

I also trained myself to ignore the naysayers, the trolls who make it their mission to savage other peoples’ work because they can. They’re cowards, hiding behind the bastion of the Internet. Some reviewers give constructive or kind comments, and for those I’m grateful. But many don’t. Do NOT let their negative comments slow you down. You wrote a book, dammit. They didn’t. Ignore them for the miserable people they are.

I began to understand that I write so that others may read. When I drive my grandkids home after a day with my wife and me, I take the responsibility very seriously indeed. And when I take my readers on a journey, I take the responsibility no less seriously.

So, you can imagine how I felt when I found myself running into roadblock after roadblock as I tried to get a publisher to look at my novel. Here’s what was clattering around in my head, like a handful of marbles. I clearly knew how to write because I’d been doing it for a long time. I was published many times over by big, well-known houses, and I had two bestsellers to my name. I always met or exceeded deadlines. Yet time and again I submitted, and time and again I got back … nothing. Crickets. Even though I followed the submission rules, I didn’t even get rejection letters to add to my already impressive folder of same.

So, I called my editor at one of the big houses whom I had known for years and with whom I had created many successful books—and a genuine friendship. I explained my situation to him, knowing that he doesn’t publish fiction but hoping he could provide some insight. He did, and his response was blunt: 

“Steve, here’s what you’re facing. The fact that you have had major success in the non-fiction realm is meaningless to editors in the world of fiction. The firewall that exists between the two domains is so thick that it’s as if you have never written or been published at all.” 

And this was the clincher: “Your chances of getting this book published are roughly the same, whether you submit it or not.”

Bummer.

This glaring realization kicked off a new chapter in my writing. I ended up self-publishing the novel, and it did well. I then wrote a second, self-published it, and it became a number-one global bestseller on Amazon for a few weeks. I wrote two more, and they also did well—not bestsellers, but readers buy them and like them. And what I realized, and frankly, what I knew all along, was that in some ways, getting a book published was more important to me than writing one. That was a significant realization, and it changed how I think about why I write, because it was the wrong perspective for a writer. Yes, of course I want my work to be published, but first, I’m a writer. Writing is enormously creative; publishing is enormously mechanical. And when I write, I write for my readers and I take that responsibility seriously. But honestly, I write for myself. I write books that I would like to read. It makes me feel good. It challenges me, forces me to work hard to be better at it. 

As writers—all writers, regardless of genre—our goal should be to write books that people want to read, and who then come back for more after they’ve done so. We shouldn’t write for the likes, or the thumbs-ups; those are more empty calories. We write because we have something to say that matters. If we do that, our audiences will find us. 

I’m currently writing sequels to two of my novels: Inca Gold, Spanish Blood, and Russet. Russet is my most recent work, so the characters and plot line are still fresh in my mind. But Inca Gold came out in 2016 and I had forgotten some of the story’s details, and I’m embarrassed to say, the names of some of the characters. So, I put on my reader hat, picked up the book, and read it, ignoring the fact that I was its author. And I mean, I really read it. And you know what? I liked it. A lot. It didn’t waste my time, and it made me want to read more. And that’s all the motivation I need to keep going.

The Research Myth

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I recently had a conversation about technology’s impact on the availability and quality of information in the world today. It’s an argument I could make myself—that tech-based advances have resulted in access to more data and information. For example, before the invention of moveable type and the printing press, the only books that were available were chained to reading tables in Europe’s great cathedrals—they were that rare and that valuable. Of course, it was the information they contained that held the real value, an important lesson in today’s world where books are banned from modern first world library shelves because an ignorant cadre of adults decides that young people aren’t mature enough to read them—when it’s the adults who lack the maturity to face the fact that not everybody thinks the same way they do in this world, and that’s okay. But, I digress.  

Image of chained books in Hereford Cathedral. Copyright Atlas Obscura.

When moveable type and the printing press arrived, book manuscripts no longer had to be copied by hand—they could be produced in large quantities at low cost, which meant that information could be made available to far more people than ever before. To the general population—at least, the literate ones—this was a form of freedom.But to those who wanted to maintain a world where books were printed once and kept chained to desks where only the privileged few (the clergy) could read them, the free availability of knowledge and information was terrifying. Apparently, it still is. Knowledge is, after all, the strongest form of power. How does that expression go again? Oh yeah: Freedom of the Press…Freedom of Expression…Freedom of Thought…Sorry; I digress. Again.

Fast-forward now through myriad generations of technology that broadened information’s reach: The broadsheet newspaper, delivered daily, sometimes in both morning and evening editions. The teletype. Radio. The telephone. Television. The satellite, which made global information-sharing a reality. High-speed photocopying. High-speed printing. The personal computer and desktop publishing software. Email. Instant Messaging and texting. And most recently, on-demand printing and self-publishing through applications like Kindle Direct, and of course, AI, through applications like ChatGPT. I should also mention the technology-based tools that have dramatically increased literacy around the world, in the process giving people the gift of reading, which comes in the form of countless downstream gifts.

The conversation I mentioned at the beginning of this essay took a funny turn when the person I was chatting with tried to convince me that access to modern technologies makes the information I can put my hands on today infinitely better and more accurate. I pushed back, arguing that technology is a gathering tool, like a fishing net. Yes, a bigger net can result in a bigger haul. But it also yields more bycatch, the stuff that gets thrown back. I don’t care about the information equivalents of suckerfish and slime eels that get caught in my net. I want the albacore, halibut, and swordfish. The problem is that my fishing net—my data-gathering tool—is indiscriminate. It gathers what it gathers, and it’s up to me to separate the good from the bad, the desirable from the undesirable.

What technology-based information-gathering does is make it easy to rapidly get to AN answer, not THE answer.

The truth is, I don’t have better research tools today than I had in the 70s when I was in college. Back then I had access to multiple libraries—the Berkeley campus alone had 27 of them. I could call on the all-powerful oracle known as the reference librarian. I had access to years of the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature. I had Who’s Who, an early version of Wikipedia; and of course, I had academic subject matter experts I could query. 

Technology like AI doesn’t create higher quality research results; what technology gives me is speed. As an undergraduate studying Romance Languages, I would often run across a word I didn’t know. I’d have to go to the dictionary, a physical book that weighed as much as a Prius, open it, make my way to the right page, and look up the word—a process that could take a minute or more. Today, I hover my finger over the word on the screen and in a few seconds I accomplish the same task. Is it a better answer? No; it’s exactly the same. It’s just faster. In an emergency room, speed matters. In a research project, not so much. In fact, in research, speed is often a liability.

Here’s the takeaway from this essay. Whether I use the manual tools that were available in 1972 (and I often still do, by the way), or Google Scholar, or some other digital information resource, the results are the same—not because of the tool, but because of how I use what the tool generates. I’ve often said in my writing workshops that “you can’t polish a turd, but you can roll it in glitter.” Just because you’ve written the first draft of an essay, selected a pleasing font, right and left-justified the text, and added some lovely graphics, it’s still a first draft—a PRETTY first draft, but a first draft, nonetheless. It isn’t anywhere near finished.

The same corollary applies to research or any other kind of news or information-gathering activity. My widely cast net yields results, but some of those results are bycatch—information that’s irrelevant, dated, or just plain wrong. It doesn’t matter why it’s wrong; what matters is that it is. And this is where the human-in-the-loop becomes very important. I go through the collected data, casting aside the bycatch. What’s left is information. To that somewhat purified result I add a richness of experience, context, skepticism, and perspective. Ultimately I generate insight, then knowledge, and ultimately, wisdom. 

So again, technology provides a fast track to AN answer, but it doesn’t in any way guarantee that I’ve arrived at anything close to THE answer. Only the secret channels and dark passages and convoluted, illuminated labyrinths of the human brain can do that. 

So yeah, technology can be a marvelous tool. But it’s just a tool. The magic lies in the fleshware, not the hardware. Technology is only as good as the person wielding it. 

When in the Course of Human Events

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When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. 

Those, of course, are Thomas Jefferson’s opening lines of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. I’ll be referring back to them throughout this essay, so keep them close at hand. 

I am not a political scientist, nor am I a historian or sociologist. Here’s what I am: well-educated, with an undergrad degree from UC Berkeley in Spanish, and a minor in Biology; a Masters from St. Mary’s in International Business; and a Doctorate from the Da Vinci Institute in South Africa, where I studied technology and its sociological impacts across the world. I am well read, averaging 140 books per year, including everything from fiction of all kinds, to poetry, history, geography, travel, narrative essay, biography, technology, children’s books, and biology. I’m well-traveled: I spent my teen years in Francisco Franco’s Spain, I’ve lived and worked in more than 100 countries, and one of my favorite genres to read is the travel essay, which gives me insights into places I haven’t had the opportunity to visit. Finally, I’m a professional writer, speaker, and educator, with more than 100 books and hundreds of articles and white papers on the market.

Here’s how this all sugars off (that’s a Vermont term, by the way, that refers to how we boil maple sap to create syrup). First, I’m ferociously curious. I live to ask the question, ‘Why?’ I’m not satisfied simply knowing what something does, or even how. That quality served me well throughout my career as a consulting analyst to corporate executives, who wanted help with their strategic decision-making processes. I’m not satisfied with something because somebody said it—I want to know why, and I want to know that it’s true. That takes work; it means I have to check my sources and dig into the facts before I accept a conclusion. If more people were willing to do that simple thing, to exercise their right, obligation, and responsibility to be healthily skeptical, to respond to a ‘stated fact’ with, “Are you sure about that? I’m just gonna check one more source to verify,” the fake news issue wouldn’t be an issue. Like it or not, believe it or not, the Earth is not flat, vaccines work and do not cause autism, we really have been to the moon, the universe is expanding, and evolution is a fact, not a theory. Science is science for a reason: because by its very definition, the things it proposes have been exhaustively verified through a rigorous, competitive process of validation. It’s not opinion: it’s fact. Period. Furthermore, news is precisely that—news. It isn’t opinion. Yet in the minds of many, the two are seen as one and the same, and far too many people are willing to just accept what they hear or read without question as an undeniable truth. THAT is an abdication of responsibility as a citizen in a free country. It’s an extreme form of laziness, laziness of the worst possible kind.

When we moved to Spain in 1968, we were indoctrinated in the rules of the expatriate road. Do NOT make public comments about the government. Do NOT criticize any public figure. Remember, you’re living under a dictatorship. Be wary of the police; they are not your friends. There were two television channels, one sporadically broadcasting soap operas and cartoons for the kids for about three hours a day, the other what we called the “All Franco, All the Time” channel—hours and hours of the Generalísimo standing on a stage, waving his arms.

Let me be clear: I loved growing up in Europe; Spain will forever be in my blood. The experience played a large part in making me who I am today, a person entranced by languages, diverse cultures, strange foods, and the allure of travel. But it also put me in a place where I developed the intellectual wherewithal to critically compare the USA to other countries, especially when I started traveling extensively for a living.

America’s involvement in Vietnam was just starting to wind down when I started college. Like so many young people, I was critical of our involvement, because there was no logical reason whatsoever that I could discern for our presence there, certainly no tangible return that was worth the loss of life that that ugly war created. But I remained an ardent supporter of the United States, the Shining City on a Hill, in spite of my disagreement about Southeast Asia.

Years later, I became what I am today—writer, teacher, audio producer, photographer, speaker, observer of the world. I’ve worked all over the planet and have had the pleasure and honor to experience more countries, cultures, linguistic rabbit holes, ways of life, and food than most people will ever see. For that I am truly, deeply grateful.

But it hasn’t always been good. I’ve spent time in countries ruled by totalitarian regimes, seeing how people who have no other choice must live, and feeling slightly embarrassed by the fact that I have the choice—the choice—not to live that way. In China, in Tiananmen Square, I was stopped by police and questioned aggressively for an hour because I was carrying a professional-looking camera. In that same country, I was told by the chipper hotel desk clerk when I checked in that I had to ‘register’ my laptop and mobile phone because, as a non-Chinese, I could be bringing in and distributing subversive materials that could be detrimental to the state. In Venezuela, my client would not allow me to go anywhere by myself, and assigned me a round-the-clock bodyguard to keep me out of trouble. In Yugoslavia, while driving in a car on the highway, I was frantically hushed by the other people in the car because they were afraid that my question about life under the current regime might be overheard by people outside the car. I listened and tried to understand the logic of a Russian man, who, when I took him (at his request) to a grocery store in California to see what it was like, stopped halfway down the coffee aisle, turned to me, and asked, “So many coffees! Why don’t they just pick the best one and give us that one?” It took me a few minutes to wrap my head around what he was really saying, and when I did, my hair stood on end. Why would I want they, whoever they is, picking my coffee? And in Africa and Australia, and frankly, parts of the American south, I watched as institutionalized racism turned my stomach. In Australia, I got into a cab, and soon after out of a cab, when the driver began spewing racial epithets and talking about the new Abo bars he had installed on his car. In Australia, many cars have pipe bumpers on the front that they call “Roo Bars,” referring to the fact that they are designed to keep kangaroos, when struck by the car, from damaging it. Abo bars refer to Aboriginal people—you understand why I got out of the cab. The man was a pig.

So you can imagine why I am hypersensitive to such behaviors, especially when I encounter them at home. There’s a lot to criticize about the United States. Racism, Sexism, and Ageism are alive and well in America, and by some estimations, once again getting worse. There is a growing income gap, driven by the overzealous forces of capitalism and manipulation of the rules by certain sectors of society, and it is tearing at the very fabric of national society. Educationally, we are in a tailspin, and the perceived value of education for the sake of education and its profound impact on the future of the country is at an all-time low. For all the rhetoric to the contrary, the skilled trades are still looked down on and often described as ‘what you do if you can’t get a real job.’ What short-sighted, hypocritical garbage. Education, in all its many forms, isn’t a barrier to progress; it’s a gateway that makes it possible.

Politically, we’ve never been more polarized. Some months ago, I had a conversation with a well-educated man—I emphasize that, well-educated—in the deep south, who took exception to something I said about the polarized nature of American politics. So, I invited him to have a conversation. 

“What do you believe?” I asked him.

“I’m a Republican,” he replied. 

“That’s not a belief—that’s a club you belong to,” I pushed back. He couldn’t get past that. So, I tried to make it easier. 

“Look—I’m going to give you a series of questions; answer any one of them. Here we go: Tell me one thing that we could do in this country to fix the education system, or healthcare, or the economy, or infrastructure, or political gridlock, or the widening economic divide.”

He was unable to answer. But he reiterated his position as a Republican three times. 

This is part of the problem. In the 60s and 70s, the chant that was often heard or seen on bumper stickers was, “My country, right or wrong.” Today, it seems to be, “My party, or my candidate, right or wrong.” And this is where I have a fundamental problem. ‘Country’ and ‘government’ are two very different different things that cannot and should not be conflated. 

In the United States, we have a tricameral government to ensure checks and balances, to prevent one of the three from becoming more powerful than the other two. And, we have a two-party system, because they are ideologically different. One conservatively stresses small government, big business, and a culture of pulling yourself up by your bootstraps. I applaud that, when it’s possible. 

The other party advocates for larger, more involved government, expanded social programs, and a more liberal approach to success. Interesting word, liberal. The dictionary defines it as ‘someone willing to respect or accept behavior or opinions different from their own, someone open to new ideas.’ And ‘someone’ can be an institution as much as it refers to an individual. The definition goes on to say that ‘liberal relates to or denotes a political and social philosophy that promotes individual rights, civil liberties, democracy, and free enterprise.’ By those definitions, every person in this country should proudly claim to be liberal, if we are committed as a nation to moving forward, not backward.

Somewhere in the territory between the ideologies of our political parties lies the fundamental essence of democratic freedom. Today, however, there is a massive, unfathomably wide gap between them, driven by political zealotry, greed, and government representatives who have forgotten that public service was never intended to be a career, an opportunity to feather one’s own nest. Government is not a business—and yet, based on the money that changes hands, and the extraordinary influence it wields over decisions that affect the governed, it is.  

And yet: I support American Democracy, the so-called American Experiment, because I’ve seen the other side. I know what happens when totalitarianism is allowed to flourish, eroding individual freedoms, crushing the hope of women and minorities, destroying entire swaths of regional and national economies, stifling individual and organizational innovation, forcing businesses to flee to more open countries, slapping down the will of the people, and shuttering the media. 

During Donald Trump’s first term, I wrote an essay in response to many of his actions which I ended with this statement:

I never express political arguments on a public forum, but for this, I make an exception. As someone who grew up in a country run by a dictator, and has traveled and worked in more than 100 countries, many of them run by despots and autocrats whose police harassed me because I carried a camera, required me to register my phone and laptop because I might engage in subversive activities, and suppressed the rights of their people to have a basic, fulfilling life and denied them a voice over their own destiny, I say ENOUGH. I can tolerate a lot, but this decision on Donald Trump’s part to ignore and openly criticize what we stand for as a free people and as a democratic nation goes far beyond ‘a misstep.’ This is not politically motivated on my part: I am motivated by indignation, anger, disappointment, and shame. I am tired of having to spend the first half-hour of every class I teach outside of this country, trying to explain the actions of this pompous fool who pretends to represent our country. ENOUGH. ENOUGH. ENOUGH.

That paragraph talks about what happens when totalitarianism and one-person rule are allowed to become the law of the land. It describes Russia, North Korea, China, Turkey, Venezuela, Myanmar, the Philippines, and others. 

Now, cast an eye on the United States. Singlehanded, unilateral decisions, in the interests of big business, are swiping away vast swaths of public wild lands and National Park and Monument holdings. The current president and his appointees are giving a voice to extreme right-wing ultra-nationalists and white supremacists, destroying years of civil rights work. Women’s individual reproductive rights are being taken away, thanks to conservative appointments and ill-thought-out court decisions. News flash: a woman’s body is her and hers alone to govern, and governments cannot and should not legislate morality. That model is already taken: It’s called Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan. 

And what of the incipient trade wars looming on the horizon? Yes, there may be reasons to engage in tough conversations with our economic allies about trade imbalances, but waging a tariff-based trade war is not the answer. Here’s what we know from economic history that goes back to 15th-century China, when they were the dominant economic force on the planet. Global competition keeps the price of many goods down, which is good for everybody—and which is severely impacted in a tariff war. Free trade allows access to a wide range of services and goods, which tariffs diminish. Many of the gains of protectionism are short-lived and counter-productive; in fact, periods of protectionism have a historical habit of ending in economic downturn, most notably the Great Depression of the 1930s. 

Closer to home, and more relevant in today’s world, when trade barriers go up, jobs that rely on the Internet disappear, as the barriers to the free movement of capital and labor get higher. Companies that are protected from outside competition may flourish in the short term, but are invariably less efficient in the longer term. 

Truth: The only winning move is not to play.

Not long ago, I was in Northern California and southeastern Oregon, and I got into a conversation with a farmer who runs an enormous operation—thousands and thousands of acres. I asked him how things were going, given the talk of tariffs and such. He told me that tariffs were the least of his concerns, although they were concerns. His biggest issue was that his entire workforce had disappeared, because of fears of immigration coming down on them. And, all thoughts to the contrary, he couldn’t find local people willing to do the work that his previously Hispanic workforce was willing to do. He told me that he was down 80% of his staff, and that that was common across all the farms in the area. His solution? “Easy,” he told me. “Since Trump’s immigration policies have made my workforce disappear, I can’t operate my farm. So, I’m moving my farm to Mexico. The country is giving me tax breaks, so it’s a great deal.” 

Great deal indeed. If the workers can’t come to the farm, the farm goes to the workers. And, of course, any products shipped out of Mexico to the United States will be classified as agricultural imports, and will therefore be taxed at a higher rate—which means higher prices at the grocery store. Very smart.

Finally, I have to speak out on behalf of the Press. I believe fervently that the single most important Freedom listed in the Bill of Rights is the first one: ‘Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.’ One thing that makes our system of government as good as it is, is that the press has the right, the obligation, and the responsibility to question government at every turn. That’s its job. When I hear our current president taking potshots at the Fifth Estate, it chills my blood. If you don’t want the press questioning your actions, then don’t engage in controversial actions that attract their attention. And by the way, be happy that you live in a country where the press has the right to do precisely that—and doesn’t serve as a marketing arm of the government. Again: that’s called Iran, or Russia, or North Korea, or Yemen, or Albania. Are those the countries we want to be lumped in with? The free Press serves as our collective societal conscience, and today we need it more than ever.

So yes—our government is not perfect, by any measure. It has warts, ugly parts, and is prone to mistakes. But it also has an obligation and responsibility to ultimately do the right thing for the people of this country. Go back to those opening lines:

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. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. From the consent of the governed—not the other way around. 

This is not about blame: it’s about responsibility. It is not a partisan issue; it is a People of the United States issue, and ‘people’ includes those that we, the governed, place in office to serve us—not the other way around. As I told one person who commented on a different but related post, this challenge is not political—it’s genital. It’s time for the people of this country to grow a set, put on our big boy pants, and do the hard work of being responsible by reminding Washington, through our voices and actions at the polls, that this country is better than its government, and that the government serves the will of the people. I’ve spent too much of my life seeing firsthand what the alternative looks like in less-privileged countries: we must not and will not allow despotism or nationalism to define who we are. We’re better than that.

I close with this. Not long ago I read Brené Brown’s book, Braving the Wilderness. In it, she suggests four actions that would go a long way toward helping us get through this dysfunctional, angry, blame-ridden period. 

People are hard to hate close up. Move in.

Speak truth to bullshit. Be civil.

Hold hands. With strangers.

Strong back. Soft front. Wild heart. 

Those four statements are profound, and they define, as clearly as anything I’ve ever read, the soul of America. It’s time to get back to that, to the Shining City on the Hill, the model of strength, kindness, reason, and diplomacy that much of the world has historically held up as the model of global decorum. Washington, grow the hell up and start acting like there are grownups in the room. Politicians, from both sides, start doing your damn jobs, the ones you were elected to do. You might want to keep in mind the words of US Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who in 1950 said, “It is not the function of our government to keep the citizen from falling into error; it is the function of the citizen to keep the government from falling into error.” And citizens? Enough with the doom-speak; enough with the hand-wringing. Speak up, think, be curious, and act. It is your right, and it is your responsibility. We owe this to our children, and we owe this to the world.

This is life. There is no easy button, and there never has been. It’s time we stopped looking for one.

Indifference

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‘The only thing I owe you is my utter indifference.’ 

I heard Dennis Miller say that on his show, years ago. It stuck with me, and in the last few weeks it’s come back into my memory. Recent events in my life have made me think long and hard about who I am, what I am, and how I am. Let me explain.

I don’t care what color you are. I don’t care who you love. I don’t care what beliefs help you get through the day. I don’t care if you are skinny, fat, old, young, rich, poor, feeble, or sharp. I don’t care what you studied, where you studied, why you studied, or IF you studied. I’m indifferent to these things because they don’t—matter.

Here’s what I do care about.

Kindness. Your ability and willingness to engage with others. Your level of curiosity (more is better). Your interest in things outside yourself. Your story. Your family. The things that make you laugh, smile, cry, and despair. These are the things that make you human.

Let me tell you a story. When I was 13 years old, my family moved to Spain, thanks to a job transfer. Considering that we moved to cosmopolitan, European Madrid from Midland, Texas, in the heart of the oil (and prejudice)-soaked Permian Basin, the adjustment was—jarring. But I dealt with it—I adjusted—I went native, as seasoned (and, perhaps, jaundiced) expats say. But it didn’t happen without help. 

We rented a house in a small village a few miles west of downtown Madrid, a cozy little pueblo called Aravaca. To call it a house was a gross understatement: it was a house in the same way that Costco is a ‘shop.’ It had nine bedrooms, five bathrooms, a beautiful garden with a pool, two kitchens, and Loli.

Loli, at right, modeling a Flamenco dress; her parents, at left.

Loli worked for the family that preceded us in the house as a domestic—a maid, I suppose—and she saved us. When we rented the house, it was just assumed that she was part of the package, and thankfully, she was. That was 50 years ago; I still see Loli every time I go to Spain on business. She’s a few years older than I am, and as much a part of my family to me as my parents and brothers are. She’s my sister.

One winter day, we accepted an invitation from Loli to join her at her parent’s home for coffee and dessert. They lived in an even tinier town beyond ours called Majadahonda, a scrubby little pueblo that looked like a Star Wars outpost town—no paved streets, cattle and sheep running around, ancient Spanish women dressed all in black, the sign of a lost husband. Light snow was falling; it was December, and it was very cold.

We parked the car and climbed a half-completed brick staircase on the outside of an equally incomplete building that led to their home. It comprised two rooms: a kitchen and dining room about eight feet on a side, and a bedroom and bath about the same size. In the center of the kitchen was a small round table with a heavy felt table cloth that reached all the way to the floor. Under the table was a heavy metal brazier, filled with burning coal; this was what heated the home. We were instructed to sit at the table, and wrap the table cloth around our legs to stay warm.

My prejudices began to surface—I felt them rise, like the tide. These people were so poor—they had nothing. The only things hanging on their bare, whitewashed walls were a large crucifix, and a slightly crooked photograph of Generalísimo Franco. I felt embarrassed, awkward, out-of-place. I didn’t know how to—BE.

We spoke enough Spanish to carry on a halting conversation with our hosts, but most of what we exchanged were smiles, and hand gestures, and a tremendous amount of laughter. I had no idea what they were talking about most of the time, but I don’t think I’ve ever in my life had a more fun day. These people were poor, they spoke no English, but they were kind, and they were inclusive.

Soon, neighbors began to arrive because they wanted to meet us, and with them, a cornucopia of food. An entire Serrano ham came through the door, the entire leg of a pig, air cured, strongly flavored, delicious. Strings of chorizo and lomo and morcilla and salchichón sausages, rich with paprika and garlic and savory fat. Bowls of fried and marinated anchovies. Olives and peppers. Mushrooms, sautéed in olive oil and garlic. Bags of French bread, torn apart to soak up the leavings on the plate. And a universe of cheeses from all corners of Spain. 

We ate until we were full, and then we ate some more. Desserts arrived, mysterious and unknown and incredibly tasty. And then, the music started.

Spain is a musical country. Spaniards are wired with arpeggios; 16th notes flow through their veins, and their hearts beat to the staccato attack of a Flamenco dancer’s shoes. And so it was that spontaneous singing began to break out. One person would begin to wail, that sad, lonely sound that makes me think of foghorns and that is completely unique to Spanish love songs, and everyone else would join in, clapping in syncopated rhythm as the music progressed. As each song approached its final chorus, a voice would begin a different song, and the group would switch over, seamlessly. I did not understand the words, but the music, the rhythm, the emotion, spoke to me. I was entranced.

And it was at that moment that I became aware of a deep shifting in my heart, or perhaps in my soul, a feeling that I can recall to this day, with crystalline clarity. I was changing, fundamentally. My preconceptions about poverty and the measure of a person’s worth shattered, and were remade that day. Our nine-bedroom house, with its landscaped garden and pool that I had bragged about to my friends in letters, was meaningless. These people, these wonderful, warm, giving, caring, connected people, were far richer than I would ever be. 

The Dalai Lama once said, ‘My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.’ That’s the most profound thing I’ve ever heard a religious figure say.

So, let me go back to my original thought, the one that transported us to a family gathering in Majadahonda. That experience, and countless others that I was honored to be part of during my time in Spain, changed the way I look at the world. I don’t care about those superficial, unimportant, physical and metaphysical things that surround you, and I expect the same indifference of you. But: I also expect you to seek kindness in me, and to expect my interest in those deeply human things that truly make you who you are.

Look, I’m not naïve. I’ve been around long enough to have witnessed acts of human cruelty that defy my ability to rationalize them. I watch, as more and more people in the world today try to define themselves by the things that they surround themselves with, rather than by the things that lie inside them. I shake my head as we glorify actors and sports figures and call them society’s game changers, yet we pay little attention to teachers, scientists, activists, aid workers, and artists, the REAL game changers.

On the other hand, I’ve also seen breathtaking examples of human kindness. I’ve seen ordinary people engage in acts of bravery that, in wartime, would have earned them a medal. I’ve seen art and listened to music and read literature that made me cry with unfettered emotion, and that made me feel that we humans, for all our faults, still have redeeming qualities.

So, this is my pledge, to myself as much as to others. I will strive to be more aware. I will think before I open my mouth. And I will try, very hard, to understand that the way I experience the world is vastly different than the way many others do.

The Wisdom of Loren Eiseley

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One of my favorite writers is an obscure guy that most people have never heard of. His name is Loren Eiseley, and he was a physical anthropologist and paleontologist at the University of Pennsylvania for over 30 years. As a young man, during the Great Depression, he was a ‘professional hobo,’ riding freight trains all over the United States, looking for work and the occasional adventure; his academic career came later. I’ve met few people who have read his books, yet few writers have affected me as much as he has.  

Loren Eiseley in his office at the University of Pennsylvania Museum, May 12, 1960. Photo by Bernie Cleff, courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Archives and Records Center.

I discovered Loren Eiseley when I was at Berkeley; a friend loaned me his book, All the Strange Hours: The Excavation of a Life. It’s mostly an autobiography, but it’s powerfully insightful about the world at large. He draws on his early experiences as a vagabond as much as he does as an academic, both of which yield a remarkable way of looking at the ancient and modern worlds.

I have all of his books, in both physical and ebook formats, and they’re among the few I never delete. I keep a list of quotes from Loren’s works in my phone, and I pull them up and read them every once in a while. Here are a few of my favorites. Remember, this guy is a hardcore scientist, although you’d never know it from what you’re about to read.

If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water.

One does not meet oneself until one catches their reflection from an eye that is other than human.

The journey is difficult, immense. We will travel as far as we can, but we cannot in one lifetime see all that we would like to see or to learn all that we hunger to know.

If it should turn out that we have mishandled our own lives as several civilizations before us have done, it seems a pity that we should involve the violet and the tree frog in our departure.

When man becomes greater than nature, nature, which gave us birth, will respond. This last one strikes me as particularly prescient.

Ray Bradbury, another of my all-time favorite writers, said that ‘Eiseley is every writer’s writer, and every human’s human. He’s one of us, yet most uncommon.’

More than anything else, Loren Eiseley was a gifted observer and storyteller. In All the Strange Hours, he writes about a chance encounter on a train. I’d like to share a bit of it with you.

“In the fall of 1936 I belatedly entered a crowded coach in New York. The train was an early-morning express to Philadelphia and what I had been doing in New York the previous day I no longer remember. The crowded car I do remember because there was only one seat left, and it was clearly evident why everyone who had boarded before me had chosen to sit elsewhere.The vacant seat was beside a huge and powerful man who seemed slumped in a drunken stupor. I was tired, I had once lived amongst rough company, and I had no intention of standing timidly in the aisle. The man did not look quarrelsome, just asleep. I sat down and minded my own business. 

Eventually the conductor made his way down the length of the coach to our seats. I proceeded to yield up my ticket. Just as I was expecting the giant on my right to be nudged awake, he straightened up, whipped out his ticket and took on a sharp alertness, so sharp in fact, that I immediately developed the uncanny feeling that he been holding that particular seat with a show of false drunkenness until the right party had taken it. When the conductor was gone, the big man turned to me with the glimmer of amusement in his eyes. “Stranger,” he appealed before I could return to my book, “tell me a story.” In all the years since, I have never once been addressed by that westernism “stranger” on a New York train. And never again upon the Pennsylvania Railroad has anyone asked me, like a pleading child, for a story. The man’s eyes were a deep fathomless blue with the serenity that only enormous physical power can give. People on trains out of New York tend to hide in their own thoughts. With this man it was impossible. I smiled back at him. ‘You look at me,’ I said, running an eye over his powerful frame, ‘as if you were the one to be telling me a story. I’m just an ordinary guy, but you, you look as if you have been places. Where did you get that double thumb?’

With the eye of a physical anthropologist, I had been drawn to some other characters than just his amazing body. He held up a great fist, looking upon it contemplatively as though for the first time.”

That’s just GREAT writing. Powerfully insightful, visual, and entertaining. And, it demonstrates Eiseley’s skill as a naturally curious storyteller, and the use of storytelling as an engagement technique. His willingness to talk with the odd guy in the next seat over, to ask questions, to give the guy the opportunity to talk, demonstrates one of the most important powers of storytelling.

For most people, storytelling is a way to convey information to another person, or to a group. And while that’s certainly true, that’s not the most important gift of storytelling. The best reason to tell stories is to compel the other person to tell a story BACK. Think about the last time you were sitting with a group of friends, maybe sharing a glass of wine. People relax and get comfortable, and the stories begin. One person tells a story, while everyone else listens. When they finish, someone else responds: ‘Wow. That reminds me of the time that…’ and so it goes, around the group, with everyone sharing. 

When this happens, when the other person starts talking, this is your opportunity to STOP talking and listen—to really listen to the person. They’re sharing something personal with you, something that’s important and meaningful to them—which means that it should be important and meaningful to you, if you want to have any kind of relationship with that person. It’s a gift, so treat it accordingly. 

In west Texas, there’s an old expression that says, ‘Never miss a good chance to shut up.’ This is one of those times. By letting his seat mate talk, Loren Eiseley discovered amazing insights about him, but not just about him. He also learned about his views of society and the world. The conversation goes on for many pages beyond what I quoted earlier, and it’s powerful stuff. So never underestimate the power of the story as an insight gathering mechanism, as much as it is an opportunity to share what YOU have to say.

Here’s one last thing I want to mention. In the tenth episode of my Podcast, The Natural Curiosity Project, I talked about a book I had recently read called ‘The Age of Wonder.’  It’s the story of the scientists of the Romantic Age (1798-1837) who made some of the most important discoveries of the time—people like Charles Babbage, William Herschel, Humphrey Davy, Michael Faraday, and Mungo Park, scientists who had one thing in common: their best friends, partners, and spouses were, without exception, artists—poets and novelists, for the most part. 

These were serious, mainstream, well-respected scientists. For example, Charles Babbage was a mathematician who was the father of modern computing (he invented the Difference Engine, a mechanical calculator that had more than 25,000 brass gears). He was married to Ada Lovelace, the daughter of the poet Lord Byron, and a writer and mathematician herself. William Hershel built the world’s first very large telescopes in England, and his best friend was George Gordon, better known as Lord Byron, the romantic poet. Humphrey Davy was a chemist and anatomist who discovered the medicinal properties of nitrous oxide. His closest friend was the poet and essayist Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.

In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, 

A stately pleasure-dome decree: 

Where Alph, the sacred river, ran, 

Through caverns measureless to man, 

Down to a sunless sea.

John Keats, a poet and the author of Ode on a Grecian Urn, was also a medical student whose scientific pursuits shaped his poetry. Mary Shelley is well known as the author of Frankenstein; her last name is Shelley because she was married to Percy Bysshe Shelley, another romantic poet and essayist:

I met a traveller from an antique land, 

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone 

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, 

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, 

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, 

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read 

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, 

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed; 

And on the pedestal, these words appear: 

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; 

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Shelley’s work was filled with and flavored by the wonders of science. 

So, you may be wondering if there’s a ‘so what’ coming any time soon. The answer is yes: Don’t you find it interesting that these scientists were all supported by and influenced by their artistic friends, and vice-versa? What does that tell us about the importance of the linkage between science and the arts? Well, there’s a huge focus right now in schools on STEM—Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. Now look: I’ll be the first to tell you that those are all important, but there’s are two letters missing: it should be STREAM. The ‘R’ is for ‘Reading,’ a necessary and critical skill, and the ‘A’ for ‘Arts’ needs to be in there as well, with as much emphasis and priority as the others. Anyone who doubts that should look to the lessons of earlier history.

And Loren Eiseley—remember him? Where does he fit into this? Well, think about it. What made him such a gifted scientist was the fact that he was, in addition to being a respected scientist, a gifted essayist and poet. During his life he wrote nine books, hundreds of essays, and several collections of poetry, all centered on the wonders of the natural world. His philosophy, his approach to his profession, embodied the learnings from the Age of Wonder. 

In one of his essays, ‘How Flowers Changed the World’ (which you’ll find in his book, ‘The Immense Journey’), Loren Eiseley had this to say:

If our whole lives had not been spent in the midst of it, the natural world would astound us. The old, stiff, sky-reaching wooden world (he’s talking about trees here) changed into something that glowed here and there with strange colors, put out queer, unheard of fruits and little intricately carved seed cases, and, most important of all, produced concentrated foods in a way that the land had never seen before, or dreamed of back in the fish-eating, leaf-crunching days of the dinosaurs.” 

Imagining the first human being who pondered the possibility of planting seeds, he writes: “In that moment, the golden towers of man, his swarming millions, his turning wheels, the vast learning of his packed libraries, would glimmer dimly there in the ancestor of wheat, a few seeds held in a muddy hand. Without the gift of flowers and the infinite diversity of their fruits, man and bird, if they had continued to exist at all, would be today unrecognizable. 

Archaeopteryx, the lizard-bird, might still be snapping at beetles on a sequoia limb; man might still be a nocturnal insectivore gnawing a roach in the dark. The weight of a petal has changed the face of the world and made it ours.” 

The poetic power of Loren’s science writing infuses the facts with human wonder. Here he is, writing about the stupefyingly boring topic of angiosperms, seeds that are enclosed in some kind of protective capsule, yet, we’re mesmerized by the imagery his words create.

What a world. And it’s ours.

More Thoughts on Books and How They’re Born

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As many of you know, I released a new novel not long ago called Russet. It’s my fourth work of fiction; all my prior titles (all 90+ of them) have been about technology, history, photography, writing, sound recording, storytelling, leadership, biography, and a few other genres. Anyway, Russet’s doing well, especially given the fact that I haven’t done much since its release to market or promote it. It’s my first science fiction book, and I had a blast writing it.

Ever since Russet hit the shelves, I’ve been getting an unusual number of emails and messages from people, asking me about writing books. Actually, they’re asking more than that. Many feel that they have a book inside themselves begging to be written, and want to know how to get it from mind to paper. Or, they have an idea that they think would make a good book, but don’t know how to bridge the gap between their idea and a finished work.

Well, I’ve thought about these questions, because they intrigue me, too. When I started out as a writer, I asked for and was kindly given advice by a handful of established journalists, feature writers, and novelists, and as my skill developed over the years I also learned from the soul-sucking and dehumanizing process of iterative manuscript submission, and the inevitable accumulation of an impressive collection of rejection letters. It’s painful, but it’s a necessary part of the writing and publishing process. It’s also educational.

So, after thinking about these questions, and about my own experiences as a professional writer, I think I have some additional wisdom to impart—at least I hope so. So here goes. 

First, to the question of how to write a book. Writers are wired, you see, to believe, to conclude, that the story they want to share should be in the form of a book. And while that MAY be the best way to present a particular story, it’s not the ONLY one. Here’s an example. 

Whatever Happened to Mister Duncan cover.

In 1987 (yep, you read that correctly—almost 38 years ago!) I started writing a book called Whatever Happened to Mister Duncan, a collection of essays about childhood games and activities that were mostly played outside and that didn’t require anything other than our imaginations to play—okay, some of them required a pocket knife or a Popsicle stick, maybe a roll of caps and a rock, but that was pretty much it. No batteries, no screens, no keyboard or joystick. I had a hard time finishing the book; along the way I interviewed hundreds, maybe thousands, of people, asking them about their own childhood memories and what their favorite games and activities were. I then sat down and designed the book, laying out the logical sections which became chapters. But every time I thought I’d finished it, I’d get a call from somebody who wanted to share a long-forgotten memory, or a toy, or an experience that was so rich that it had to be in the book. So, I’d go back and do yet another rewrite. Because they were right—it HAD to be in the book.

The point at which I finally called a halt to the process was the 318th complete rewrite of the book. Yes, that’s a real number. I ended it by adding a paragraph that acknowledges the fact that the book will never actually be finished, but that I’ll include new material in a later edition. 

So: 319 versions, by the time I finally had a complete, polished, nine-chapter, fully illustrated, 300-some-odd page book manuscript.

Which I have now decided should not be a book at all—at least, not exclusively.

This is a book about childhood. It’s experiential. I want it to evoke poignant memories of the period in our lives that caused us to become who we all are, before we had to start the odious task of adulting. You see, during those 38 years between the time that I first got the idea to write the book and when it finally emerged from its literary chrysalis, I did, as I said, hundreds of interviews; collected at least that many sound effects; and watched dozens and dozens of adults revert to childhood for the briefest periods during our conversations to show me something, before reverting back to boring, predictable, well-behaved adults. In other words, Duncan (my shorthand title for Whatever Happened to Mister Duncan) is a multiple media experience of sounds and different voices, none of which can adequately be presented between the pages of a book. Sure, I can transcribe the interviews, and I probably will, eventually, but what’s more fun: me writing down a list of all the different kinds of marbles that are out there, or listening to people struggle to remember the names of marbles as they dredge the murky depths of their own childhood memories? (Go ahead—I know you want to. Answer the question: how many marbles can YOU name?)

So: the decision was easy. This has to be an audio book.

NOT TOO LONG AGO, I took stock of the activities that give me pleasure, beyond the obvious ones—family, chasing grandkids, recording the sounds of the natural world. I love to write; I love to interview people so that I can learn about them and then tell their story on my Podcast; I love to teach; I love photography; and I love field recording. When I analyze all of those, I find that they all have one thing in common: they’re all different ways to tell stories. I’m a storyteller—plain and simple. I don’t write to publish a book; I write to tell a story. Here’s a little secret for you: I only publish about 30 percent of what I write. And what I mean by that is that I only TRY to publish about 30 percent. The rest? It’s for me, and the people I share it with.

Stories. Always, stories. It’s what people want to hear; it’s what gets them to focus; and it’s what has to be wrapped around facts if those facts are to be absorbed and retained. No story? No context. No context? No understanding. It’s that simple.

So, Duncan: I’ve decided to give it away, because the material is too good, too precious, too human to sell. It belongs to everybody, which is why it will soon emerge as a nine-chapter audio book as a gift to my listeners on the Natural Curiosity Project. I think you’ll like it—I really do. And check it out: just like that, my creative project is published. Who cares if I published it myself? The joy comes from sharing it, and engaging with those who choose to write or call me about it.

I USED TO RUN LEADERSHIP PROGRAMS at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business. Some of them were multi-week programs, which meant that I’d often be in LA over a weekend. Well, one weekend I had nothing to do, so I walked over to a local science museum because it was only a couple of blocks away and I love museums. I’d never been to this one.

SR-71.

The place was pretty cool: outside, on stands, like gigantic versions of the model airplanes I built when I was a kid, they had an F-104 Starfighter and an SR-71, both amazing aircraft. Inside they had a whole collection of satellites, along with the usual kid-oriented science displays. As I explored the place, I found myself walking down a hall between exhibits, and as I passed a doorway, I looked into a dimly-lit room, and there, lined up in front of me, were a Mercury, a Gemini, and an Apollo capsule. Well, I’m a space geek, so I spent the next hour just walking around these things, peering inside, marveling at how—primitive they were. I kid you not, the seat the Mercury astronauts had to sit in was basically a lawn chair, made out of a metal pipe frame and braided leather straps. And based on the space inside, the astronauts couldn’t have been more than four feet tall. Gemini was no better. I’m exaggerating, but not by much. And Apollo? Bigger, but they also stuffed three people in there for the trip to the Moon. Here are the facts, according to NASA. The average length of a Mercury flight was 15 minutes. Gemini flights ranged from a few hours to one extreme endurance mission that lasted 14 days, But the average was three days. Apollo missions lasted an average of just over eight days. 

Apollo capsule.

Let me interrupt myself with another story before finishing this one. As I was standing there, admiring these early space capsules, I realized how dark it was in the room. So, I looked up at the ceiling to see the lights. Except I couldn’t see the lights. Why? Well, because just over my head, between me and the ceiling, was the gigantic delta wing of the Space Shuttle Endeavor. The one that they pulled down the streets of LA to get it there. It was so massive and took up so much space in the room that I didn’t notice it, I was so focused on those little capsules hiding in the shadows underneath it. 

Space Shuttle Endeavor. Hard to see, but the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo capsules are in the dark background under the starboard wing.

Yep—tears. Geek tears.

WHICH BRINGS ME TO THE SUBJECT OF ADVERBS. You remember—who, what, when, where, how, why. As a writer, adverbs are the best friend you can have.

My curiosity kicked in. There I was, in awe of the mighty space shuttle looking over me, looking at those capsules, thinking about how brave or crazy a person had to be to be bolted into one of those things, and how crowded it was, and how the Apollo astronauts basically just sat there in a space about the size of a VW Beetle for four days, one way, before turning around and doing it again in reverse. There was no bathroom, no privacy, no way to really get up and move around. Just shoot me now. 

And that got me thinking—and here’s where the adverbs kicked in. A trip to Mars is somewhere between four-and-a-half and six months, depending on timing. How in the world could we possibly convince a crew to crawl into a ship for a journey that long? Why would they be willing to do it? How would we physically get them there? And thus was born the germ of an idea, the spark of a story, that led to all 625 pages of Russet. Because I figured it out—at least, I figured out ONE way. And I must be pretty accurate, because I got a call from a friend who works at our vaunted space agency, asking me after reading my book whether I had hacked their firewall (I didn’t). Gotta love that. Anyway, that’s how Russet got its start. It was all about the power of adverbs, especially how and why. Those two little words define curiosity. And when curiosity and storytelling are combined? Wow. 

Acclaimed author Dorothy Parker once wrote that curiosity is the cure for boredom, but that there is no cure for curiosity. Thank goodness. Curiosity is what keeps the world moving forward. Would you like to see the Dark Ages again, the period that Bill Bryson describes in his book, The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, as “A period when history blends with myth and proof grows scant”? It’s easy: stop being curious. Does Bryson’s description of the Dark Ages sound alarming, given current events? Does it strike a bit close to home? Good. Get out there. Be curious. Share ideas. And don’t just blindly trust what you read or hear. Wield those adverbs. Question everything. It should be the law. Oh wait—it IS the law. It’s why we have a free press. My bad.

HG Wells and the World Brain

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Photo by George Charles Beresford, black and white glossy print, 1920

Not long ago, I started doing something I always said I would do, but honestly never thought I’d actually get around to doing. Remember when you were in high school or college and your English teacher assigned you a book to read? And it wasn’t something fun like Hardy Boys or Tom Swift or Doc Savage (showing my age, here) or Little House on the Prairie. No, it was something BORING by Mark Twain or Charles Dickens or John Steinbeck. If you were like me, you faked it badly, or in college you might have run down to the bookstore to buy the summary of the book to make your fake a bit more believable. Either way, it rarely ended well.

I’m a writer and storyteller by trade—it’s who I am. And, because I’m a writer, I’m also an avid reader—and I mean, avid. I average about 140 books a year. So, a couple of years or so ago, I decided to start mixing the classics into my normal mix of books, starting with Arthur Conan Doyle. At first, I was dreading it. But once I started reading and allowed myself to slow my mind and my reading cadence to match the pace of 19th-century writers, I was hooked with the first book. I blazed through them all, the entire Sherlock Holmes collection, and then moved on to Jules Verne and Mark Twain and H.G. Wells. Reading those books as an adult, with the benefit of a bit more life behind me, gave the stories the context that was missing when I was a kid. 

By the way, I have to interrupt myself here to tell you a funny story. I’m a pretty fast reader—not speed-reading fast, but fast. I pretty much keep the same reading cadence in every book I read, unless I’m reading poetry or a book by someone whose work demands a slower pace. Some southern writers, like Rick Bragg, slow me down, but in an enjoyable way. But a typical book of two or three-hundred pages or so, I usually blast through in about three days.

Not long ago, I read David Attenborough’s First Life, a book about the earliest organisms on the planet. That book took me two weeks to read. And it wasn’t because I wasn’t regularly reading it, or because the book was complicated, or poetic. It was because David Attenborough is one of those wonderful writers who writes the way he speaks. Which means that as I was reading, I was hearing his voice, and my reading began to mimic the pace at which he speaks on all the BBC programs: These … extraordinary creatures … equipped … as they are … for life in the shallow, salty seas … of the Pre-Cambrian world … quickly became the hunted … as larger … more complex creatures … emerged … on the scene. 

I just couldn’t do it. I tried to read at a normal clip, and I stumbled and tripped over the words. It was pretty funny. It was also a great book.

Anyway, I just finished The Time Machine by H. G. Wells. I saw the movie as a kid, loved it, but the book was, as usual, quite different from the movie. I loved Wells’ writing, and it made me want to read more. So, I decided to read one of his lesser-known works, his Outline of History, a massive work of about 700 pages. And, as so often happens when I read something new, I had an epiphany.

Let me tell you a bit about Herbert George Wells. During the 1930s, he was one of the most famous people in the world. He was a novelist and a Hollywood star, because several of his movies—The Invisible Man, Things to Come, and The Man Who Could Work Miracles were made into movies (the Time Machine didn’t hit the screens until later). In 1938, Orson Wells reportedly caused mass panic when he broadcast a radio show based on Well’s War of the Worlds, which also added to his fame. That story has since been debunked, but it did cause alarm among many.

Wells studied biology under T.H. Huxley at the UK’s Royal College of Science. He was a teacher and science writer before he was a novelist. Huxley, who served as a mentor for Wells, was an English biologist who specialized in comparative anatomy, but he was best known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” because of his loud support for Darwin’s theory of  evolution. He also came up with the term, ‘agnosticism.’  “Agnosticism,” he described, “is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle… the fundamental axiom of modern science… In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration… In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable.” Pretty prescient words that need to be broadcast loudly today. Ask questions, and don’t accept a statement as truth until you know it is. That’s precisely why I started this series.

Sorry—I’m all over the place here. The Outline of History tells the story of humankind from the earliest days of civilization to the end of World War I—The Great War, The War to End All Wars. If only. 

From there, I went on to read Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind, another of his lesser known works. Both are interesting takes on history and sociology, and somewhere between them, Wells invents the World Wide Web. Really.

Here’s how he begins the concept: 

Before the present writer lie half a dozen books, and there are good indexes to three of them. He can pick up any one of these six books, refer quickly to a statement, verify a quotation, and go on writing. … Close at hand are two encyclopedias, a biographical dictionary, and other books of reference.

As a writer, Wells always had reference books on his desk that he used regularly. As he developed the concept that he came to call the World Brain, he wrote about the early scholars who lived during the time of the Library of Alexandria, the greatest center of learning and scholarship in the world at the time. It operated from the third century BC until 30 AD, an incredibly long time. Scholars could visit the Library, but they couldn’t take notes (there was no Paper), and there were no indices or cross-references between documents. So, Wells came up with the idea of taking information to the people instead of the other way around, and figuring out a way to create detailed cross-references—in effect, search capability—to make the vast stores of the world’s knowledge available, on demand, to everybody.                

His idea was that the World Brain would be a single source of all of the knowledge contained in the world’s libraries, museums, and universities. He even came up with a system of classification, an information taxonomy, for all that knowledge.             

Sometime around 1937, with the War to End All Wars safely in the past, Wells began to realize that the world was once again on the brink of conflict. To his well-read and research-oriented mind, the reason was sheer ignorance: people were really (to steal a word from my daughter) sheeple, and because they were ignorant and chose to do nothing about that, they allowed themselves to be fooled into voting for nationalist, fascist governments. The World Brain, he figured, could solve this problem, by putting all the world’s knowledge into the hands of all its citizens, thus making them aware of what they should do to preserve the peace that they had fought so hard to achieve less than twenty years earlier. What he DIDN’T count on, of course, was that he was dealing with people—and the fact that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink from the intelligence well. 

Nevertheless, he tried to raise the half million pounds a year that he felt would be needed to run the project. He wrote about it, gave lectures, toured the United States, and had dinner with President Roosevelt, during which he discussed the World Brain idea. He even met with scientists from Kodak who showed him their newest technology—the technology that ultimately became microfiche. But sadly, he couldn’t make it happen, and sure enough, World War II arrived.             

Here’s how he summed up the value of the World Brain: 

The general public has still to realize how much has been done in this field and how many competent and disinterested men and women are giving themselves to this task. The time is close at hand when any student, in any part of the world, will be able to sit with his projector in his own study at his or her own convenience to examine any book, any document, in an exact replica. 

In other words…the World Wide Web. Imagine that.

World War II caused Wells to fall into a deep depression, during which he wrote The Time Machine, which is, I think, the first post-apocalyptic novel ever written—at least as far as I know. He describes the great green structure on the hill, made of beautiful porcelain but now falling down in ruins; I suspect he was thinking about the sacking and burning of the great Library of Alexandria when he wrote that part of the book. 

Or, perhaps he was thinking of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”:

I met a traveller from an antique land,

Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Never underestimate the power of great literature. And never underestimate the power of curiosity when it’s unleashed on a problem. 

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES!!!

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THE BOOK AMAZON REFUSED TO MARKET!

Okay, enough with the histrionics. Although, histrionics or not, it’s true. For almost a year, Amazon refused to let me run a marketing campaign for my novel, Brightstar, because they deemed it too controversial. Why? Apparently, because Russia is the ‘bad guy’ in the novel. That’s not true: Putin is the bad guy in the novel, a title he deserves. The irony is that as Amazon’s army of AI evaluators decided, thanks to their Byzantine algorithms, that my novel was unkind to Putin and therefore ineligible to have its own paid marketing campaign, their biggest advertised product was the latest Jack Ryan series on Amazon Prime, which took place in Russia and did plenty of Russia-bashing. Of course, they had the enormously talented John Krasinski. I … didn’t.

But this is not about sour grapes or Amazon bashing (it isn’t even about Russia bashing). This is about the role that technology increasingly plays in our world, and the fact that while its value is beyond reproach, it does deserve to be questioned before it’s implemented. 

I’ll start with the book. It’s a great story: even without Amazon’s help, it has sold well. And to Amazon’s credit, yesterday, right after I launched the marketing campaign for Russet, I tried again to launch a campaign for Brightstar, and lo and behold, they allowed me to do so. Not sure what changed, but the campaign is now active.

Here’s the point I want to make. I tried for a week to speak to a human at Amazon about their refusal to allow me to advertise the book. But the decision to give Brightstar a thumbs-down for a marketing campaign, a campaign that I have to pay Amazon for, was made (apparently) by one or more AI instances without the benefit of a human in the loop. After a week of trying to get somebody on the phone to explain to me why I was ineligible for Amazon’s marketing services, I gave up and went elsewhere. “Elsewhere” turned out to be a very effective choice, and the book sold very well. It still does.

So, why am I telling you this? To sell books, of course, but there’s another reason, one that’s more important. For 43 years, I worked full-time in the technology, media and telecom industry: more than a decade in the telephone industry, network analysis and IT mostly, then ten years as a senior consultant with an advisory professional services company, then 24 years on my own as a consulting analyst to companies striving to understand the implications of technological change for their businesses. I did this work all over the world, in more than 100 countries. What I discovered in all those years of focusing on the contact point between people and technology is that technology is a game-changer. I have watched in humble awe as it catalyzed education, reinvented healthcare, made government more transparent, forced a shift in power from the few to the many, grew local, regional, and national economies, empowered individuals, and created hope—so much hope. Here are some examples.

I sat on the ground with a group of educators in the shade of acacia trees and watched as the kids from a local rural school unpacked the bright green laptops they had been given by the One Laptop Per Child Project. The adults were largely mystified by the machines, choosing instead to immerse themselves in their mobile phones. Within a half hour, the kids had created social media accounts and were online, chatting with people all over the world. By the end of the day, the machines were old news; they had become experts.

I watched in awe and with no small number of tears as an elderly woman in a different African village was handed a mobile device for the first time and told to push a particular number on the screen. Within seconds, she was videoconferencing with her son, whom she had not seen or communicated with directly in ten years. He left the village to get work in the city; the arrival of mobile connectivity and solar charging stations in her village made it possible for her to routinely speak with distant family members.

In Ghana, in west Africa, an organization I had the opportunity to work with decided to tackle one of the country’s greatest challenges: adult literacy. Without literacy a person can’t take a driver’s test, can’t read road signs, can’t read a map, can’t read medical prescriptions, can’t help their children with their homework, can’t fill out a job application, can’t read loan documents, can’t read a services contract. In Ghana, large swaths of people may not be able to read, and the remote villages may not have running water, or sewer, or electricity, but everyone has a mobile phone—everyone. So, the folks I got to know came up with an idea: let’s send reading lessons as text messages to peoples’ phones. They did. The result? A climb from complete illiteracy to a grade eight reading level in eight weeks.

In one of Southern Africa’s slums, I was invited into a rural clinic by a healthcare organization I was working with. The clinic was a metal shipping container that had been divided into two rooms, one twice the size of the other. The larger room served as the waiting room, exam room, diagnostic center, and prescription dispensary. The smaller room was a full-blown surgical suite. I was invited to sit in while a patient had her gall bladder removed. The procedure took 40 minutes from open to close; they sent her home that afternoon with a bottle of aspirin, four tiny puncture wounds in her belly from the surgical tools, and four band-aids. Nothing magical about this story until I tell you that the procedure was performed by a team of surgeons who were located at a hospital in Maryland, 7,500 miles away, using a robotic surgery machine. The machine was connected on each end to an optical network that provided the bandwidth necessary to perform the procedure remotely.

One of the most poignant photographs I saw during the Arab Spring uprising was of a group of teenagers running past a low brick wall on the perimeter of Tahrir Square in Cairo. The wall was splashed with graffiti, French words that said, “Thank you, Facebook. Thank you, Twitter, for our freedom.” I’m no fan of social media—I believe it has largely become a corrosive and destructive force in modern society—but during Arab Spring, it gave voice to those who for so long had not had one.

Finally, a personal note about the role that technology has played in the lives of so many. The first time I went to South Africa to do work for the small university that became such a big part of my life, I had been there for three days when the founder and chair of the school told me that they had a graduation taking place the next evening and asked if I would please be their commencement speaker.

“Tomorrow? Sure … I think,” I fumbled out a response. Not much notice for a commencement speech.

So, I prepped and got ready, fully prepared to say all the appropriate things. The next evening, we all filed into the auditorium in the standard processional to the familiar tune of Pomp and Circumstance, and sat in the front row. The graduates sat behind us, resplendent in their caps and gowns. One by one they stood when their names were called and climbed to the stage, where they were presented with their rolled certificates.

In the audience, tears flowed on the faces of the gathered family members. What an amazing thing this was: their child was graduating from a university program. 

What I haven’t told you is that these students were not graduating with two-year or four-year degrees, nor were they graduate students. They were employees of various South African companies who had attended and were graduating from a one-week Microsoft Project course. Sounds silly, doesn’t it, to wear caps and gowns and march in a processional? It’s not. It wasn’t all that long ago that these students, all black, were denied access to education in general and would never have had the opportunity to graduate from ANY kind of program, degreed or otherwise, much less from one offered at a highly regarded university.

I won’t bore you with the post-graduation gathering, or the emotional, heartfelt tributes I heard for the next few hours, or the number of hugs I got from graduates, or how humbled and lucky I felt just to be part of the ceremony, but I will say this: technology, whether it’s telecom connectivity, or telemedicine, or the extensive tentacles of the Web, or videoconferencing, or a company’s need to train its employees on the use of a project management application, changes lives. It makes us better people. It gives us the velocity and acceleration we need to move forward, always forward. It can be one of the most powerful eliminators of social and economic inequality ever created. Technology can be, in the truest sense of the word, awesome—as in, awe-inspiring.

But to be fair, tech also has its dark side. Computers and mobile devices tear at the fabric of community, all-too-often forcing us into fearful and paranoid communities of one, obsessed with fear of missing out and not being good enough, smart enough, thin enough, pretty enough, or connected enough. Social media then pits these one-person communities against each other, emphasizing our scant differences while minimizing just how similar we really are. It’s a tragic addition to our reality, it’s destructive, and it’s dangerous.

Artificial Intelligence, the latest innovation to be added to the technological pantheon, is, like all technologies, an amazing thing that has enormous potential. But it also has the potential to make us complacent and lazy, convincing us that its ability to replace human function is up to the task, when in fact it’s not—not even close. It causes us to develop blind spots, makes us believe that good enough is good enough and that the status quo is as good as it gets. Meanwhile, ubiquitous, near-seamless broadband connectivity enrolls us all in a cult of speed, driving us to worship velocity rather than being part of a community of goodness and richness and caring for each other.

As I said at the beginning of this essay, I spent my entire professional career in the technology world, which means that I am no stranger to it. It also means that I appreciate what it does for us in all its many forms, and am sometimes awed by its breathtaking complexity, carefully hidden from view by those who developed it. But I also bear a sense of healthy skepticism about technology because of its potential to do us harm. I can quickly assemble a new piece of furniture with a screwdriver, but I can also stab somebody in the eye with it. Alfred Nobel invented dynamite as a way to cut roadways and tunnel through mountains and accelerate the pace of human infrastructure development; he was deeply saddened when it became a central component of mass warfare. AI can revolutionize healthcare, engineering, and the arts, but as we’re now seeing, when co-opted by ne’er-do-wells, it can be turned into a destructive weapon with great effect.

Two lessons emerge from this essay, one of them admittedly selfish (I’d like people to read Brightstar because it’s a GREAT story with a GREAT ending). The first is to make what I believe is a very, very important observation that we must all keep in mind. Technology in and of itself is always—ALWAYS—a sideshow attraction until it is put to good use by a human. Robots, for example, like AI, cannot begin to replace human capability and capacity, but they can augment it. Remote video is wonderful, but it will never, ever replace a handshake and a conversation over a cup of coffee. I love email, but quite a few of my friends and I exchange hand-written letters several times a year, the receipt of which makes me feel good for days after opening the envelope. Fear not, humans: technology augments us, not the other way around. Never lose sight of that.

My second observation is that I wrote Brightstar to show what happens when an innovative new technology, wielded by people who have their heads screwed on right, wreaks havoc on totalitarian, despotic regimes that would oppress their own people in the name of power-grabbing. The description on the back cover says it all:

Jason and Nicky are much closer than most brothers—they are best friends, growing up in a military household, moving constantly, with an alcoholic, abusive father and a caring mother who tries to shield them from their father’s demons. When Nicky dies in a freak accident, Jason is devastated. He ultimately recovers and joins a company that has developed a remarkable radio-based communication technology called Brightstar that, when deployed, will become one of the most powerful allies to freedom and one of the greatest threats to totalitarianism the world has ever seen.

When a natural disaster gives the company the chance to deploy their new technology to save countless lives, another opportunity unexpectedly arises. Regime change is underway in Russia, and the challenger to Putin sees Brightstar as the lever he needs to bring about hopeful change in the country. It becomes Jason’s job to deploy it—in the face of an incumbent regime that will deny its installation at all costs. 

The book ends with a shattering, unexpected conclusion that will stop readers in their tracks and make them beg for a sequel.

The Brightstar technology does one thing very well: it catalyzes the democratization of information. In other words, the more people know, the better informed they are about the fact and fiction that define an issue. And the more informed they are, the better they can make informed decisions, decisions that have a positive impact on themselves and their community. 

That, you see, is the power of technology. When it’s used to move society toward the future, when it’s used to shine a light on the things that don’t, it serves us as it should. But when it’s used as a bludgeon to disguise the beauty of our attainable future, to move us backward, to create divisiveness by falsely showing us how different we are in our wants and needs and desires, rather than how similar we really are, it does damage. Our job is to prevent that from happening. And that is what Brightstar is about.

By the way, if you’re interested in the Brightstar technology, I wrote a short essay about how it might actually work. I’m happy to share it with you. And if you’d like to read the book, check it out here: