mburnamfink's reviews
1323 reviews

 There's a lot of pressure on the college years. It's the best four years of your life, where you meet valuable friends and partners and make the relationships that'll impact the rest of your life. You'll learn ancient wisdom, postmodern theory, difficult math, and the latest scientific break-throughs. We expect a lot from colleges, especially elite ones. They should admit the best students, without compromising the diversity that is America's strength. The system should be fair, but also allow for human imperfection and holistic assessment. Oh, but what we really want is the assurance that our Precious Child Will Go To The College of Their Dreams, and all those other loud, ugly, stupid teenagers won't knock them out of a slot at Harvard.

The decision about where to go to college is one of the most consequential in a person's life. And that admission decision will be made in less than eight minutes by two poorly paid bureaucrats.

Excuse me. This is the part where if I were closer to the admission process than a decade in any direction I would start laughing until I became the JONKLER.


Selingo is a journalist and editor with the Chronicle of Higher Education (my source for all the news fit for a Vice-Chancellor of Innovation Practices), and he combines his deep knowledge of the field with an insider's study at three schools: University of Washington, Davidson, and Emory. Admissions is a fraught topic, with the Varsity Blues cheating scandal where wealthy B-list celebrities hired a con artist to gin up athletic admits for their fail children, and the ongoing saga of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, which argues that Harvard is discriminating against highly qualified Asian-American applicants in favor of white legacies (something like a third of Harvard is a legacy admit).

Selingo categorizes colleges into sellers, the big name-brand schools that you've heard of, and buyers, which are everybody else. Sellers get too many applicants and have to be incredibly selective, while buyers get too few and have to figure out to fill their classes. There's a similar divide in applicants, with drivers applying to over ten schools, having high parental involvement, and a whole industry of college counseling against passengers, who don't understand the unspoken rules of the game and apply to just a few schools, often with mediocre grades and test scores.

Most of the anxiety is on the part of drivers trying to get into seller schools, and the simply fact that there are too many straight-A students with perfect SATs for all the spaces at Harvard and Stanford. What is mixed good news is that colleges attempt to weigh students against the opportunities available to them at high school, and also that all that high school CV building pays off. The kid from an inner city or rural high school with minimal extracurriculars and APs has a chance to catch the eye of an admissions officer where that exact same file from a wealthy suburban school district would get an instant rejection. Conversely, while you can't buy a seat at an Ivy League school, all that prep does work, and something like just 20% of high schools supply most of the students to elite colleges.

The most important part of the application is the college transcript. The good news is that 9th grade doesn't really matter, but colleges want to see students taking a hard course load and doing well at it. Take as much calculus as you can, and don't neglect physics and chemistry if you're pre-med. Poor grades or an easy cruising course load can sink an application. Doing well at school, as far as your school allows, is something which is not as easy to grade.

There are a few side doors. Athletics can be one, since coaches have limited discretion to offer slots to otherwise qualified candidates. Amherst (1,855 students) has more college athletes than University of Alabama (31,670 undergraduates, and football as religion). Contrary to what March Madness and Bowl Season would have you believe, student athletes are overwhelming rich white kids in sports that no one watches. The impact of student athletics is mixed, some studies say that they have lower grades and are otherwise uninvolved with campus life, while others say athletics is valuable. As a chubby nerd myself, I'd say cancel them all and let god sort it out, but they jocks may disagree.

For the data driven, college rankings like those produced by US News and World Reports are key, but the rankings have introduced their own perverse incentives. Selectivity, the percentage of students who apply that are admitted, and yield, the percentage admitted that say yes, are key parts of most metrics. So colleges attempt to lock in students with early decision, which requires a student to agree to attend a college in December before most applications close. This boosts yields, and helps the college increase selectivity for the general admissions. While admissions officers interviewed talk an idealistic game about shaping the class and holistic diversity, at the end of the day a college is a business, and the goal is to figure out who can pay increasingly steep tuition. One secret that Selingo reveals is that for the typical upper-middle class student, merit financial aid is available, but likely only a "buyer" school, and not the "sellers" that they've applied to.

But the part that makes me want to start injecting Joker venom into random passerbys and taunting the dark knight is that college is likely the most expensive purchase that a person will make, with the exception of buying a home, and it's done on no information! We check reviews when we buy a phone or car, we get houses inspected, but 18 year-olds sign up for hundreds of thousands of dollars of expensive education based on gut feeling and reputation. It is essentially impossible to figure out what college costs, until you're well into April. Bad ideas driven by college marketing and teenage emotions, like a desire for distance from family or a classic red brick campus experience, may blind family to better and cheaper schools.

The dirty secret is that most colleges will be just fine for most students. Systematic surveys show that while grades and SATs are a decent predictor of life-time earnings, where you go to college has no effect. The true elite, Fortune 500 CEOs, bankable talent, national politicians, have their own networks of privilege and influence which overlap with elite universities, but which can't be cracked simply by going to Yale. And as much as these schools compete on US News and World Reports rankings, undergraduate education is a tertiary concern, after the endowment, research, and the professional schools. What you do, an attitude of flexible exploration while also committing to a mastering a distinct field of knowledge, matters far more than where you do.

Just for the love of all that is holy turn you assignments in. 

 How many awful meetings have you attended? Disoriented business planning sessions that end with no plan; bloviating academic conferences and charity galas; empty rituals of religious services and family feasts. Don't you owe it to your community and yourself to stop wasting time and do better?

Parker is a professional facilitator specializing in dialogue across fraught groups, and this book is a distillation of her wisdom and experience. It is fantastic, a 21st century version of Carnegie's How to Win Friends & Influence People, and absolutely critical reading for anybody who plans to host an event of any sort. I'd place it next to Wiggins and McTighe Understanding by Design for most impactful professional advice I've encountered.

Parker's method is fairly straight forward, with a few counter-intuitive wrinkles. The first thing to do is to figure out the real purpose of an event, which may not be obvious. A couple might want to throw a dinner party to repay a prior invitation, build new friendships, and catch up with old friends, but odds are that the dinner which tries to do all three will be a flop. Similarly, an organization like a business or an academic disciplinary network, should figure out what its goals actually are. A corporate offsite with a goal like "have fun in a different setting" is pointless. Ending the feud between sales and marketing is worth trying.

Having figured out the what of your event, the next step is the 'who'. Parker advocates for four reasonable scales of events (6, 15, 30, and 150 people), and considered inclusion and exclusion. The best events aren't just "everybody who shows up", but the right people. And while there is a natural urge to add more people, especially for an existing group the goals and well-being of the group should be balanced against the tendency for unconsidered expansion.

Next is getting the guests in the right mood. A host should use their generous authority to protect, equalize, and connect guests. Do this, and people will feel special and invested. Abdicating authority in the interest of being chill does not erase power, it simply lets the most strong-willed guests bend the event to their own ends, with harm to the experience as a whole and to other guests. And similarly, don't go mad with power. If the purpose of your event is to gather audiences to celebrate you and your organization, perhaps try something different.

Parker is a big fan of temporary rules to create special circumstances at an event. Traditional codes of etiquette are a double edge blade, which excludes those who haven't been raised to the unspoken rules, while also serving to blunt realness in the spirit of 19th century nicety. "No phones" is a simple liminal rule, while odd dress codes and focused limits on conversation like "no work talk" can avoid overly rehearsed stump speeches and elevator pitches in favor of weirder sprout speeches. Sharing personal stories is a favored ploy to build human connections which can be leveraged to make cognitive and social breakthroughs later on.

And finally, the little stuff, like logistics. Events begin and end with a certain energy, and that energy should never be dissipated on details like travel arrangements or what's for dinner. There's a good ritual element to closing down an event, which a host should attend to with equal care as to the beginning.

For all my griping, I have been to some good events, and Parker's advice resonates with the ones that succeeded. Coming from a game studies and tabletop gaming background, much of the advice cross-applies for running an immersive game session. Now that we're emerging from our featureless voids, it'll be good to have some structure to the things we're going back to. Try this book, I promise that it can't hurt the thing that you're planning. 

 This was what the library had at a moment of crisis, when my five month old decided that rather than sleep through the night he would scream continuously until exhausted. After the second such night, we had to do something.

On the plus side, Dr. Weissbluth had simple clear advice which worked. According to his long experience in the field, most babies with sleep problems are simply overtired. To avoid this, the cure is to move bedtime up, even to as early as 5:30 if you think your baby has sleep deficit. And while there are many approaches to sleep training, at some point your baby has to learn to go to sleep on his own, and 'extinction' or 'cry it out' is a rough few night that simply works. More complex graduated extinction processes mostly just take more time and energy, and actually deliver worse results since kids can learn things other than "I must go to sleep on my own."

And you know what? Dr. Weissbluth was absolutely right! My son's nap times have been better, he's figured out how to go to bed in 10 minutes, and we're all sleeping through the night. Collective familial madness adverted.

So why three stars? First, this book needs a hefty editing pass. It's 600 pages long with lots of redundancy. I read quickly and getting the information I needed was still a slog. There's a really excellent 250 page book in here. And second, the opening chapters take a hysterical tone towards sleep hygiene, as poor sleep habits now can doom your child to a life of mental illness and failure. I get that defending sleep is Dr. Weissbluth's whole career, but it's the wrong tone to take with stressed parents who are already worrying about so much. 

I watched the 1955 Dam Busters movie on tape repeatedly as a kid, and the movie has become iconic, as well as the source of the Death Star trench run in Star Wars, but as Holland points out, only a handful of historical books have been written about the operation (subsequently, Hastings published his Chastise). This one aims to correct the record, focusing primarily on the pilots who carried out the attack, though there is a solid delve into organizational and technical details.

An attack on the Ruhr dams was the obsession of Barnes Wallis, who had focused on the strategic chokepoints of natural resources. His initial plan involved a six-engined super bomber and multiton earthquake bombs, but an afternoon playing with his children made him realize that a specially designed bomb could be skipped over the surface of the reservoir like a stone. It'd sink and explode in contact with the dam face, where the magnifying effects on an underwater explosion would enable a charge of a few thousands pounds to crack the dam.

This was an easier lift. All it'd require is developing an entirely new type of weapon, modifying Lancasters to carry it, training crews in precision low-level attack, and doing it during the full moon when the dams were highest, which meant the operation had to be mid May 1943, or not at all. Bomber Command Chief Arthur Harris was profoundly against any panacea superweapon attack, which he regarded as a distraction from his strategy of night area bombing. "Bomber" Harris believed that only constant bludgeoning of cities could meaningfully disrupt Nazi military production and shorten the war, and in 1943, he finally had a force that was just barely capable of finding and destroying cities in night raids. Pulling twenty precious Lancasters and elite crews wasn't in the offing.

Barnes Wallis was far from the brilliant rogue outsider he's portrayed as, and along with F.W. Winterbotham, maneuvered the byzantine British defense establishment, into approving the raid. Once he'd been ordered to carry out a job, Harris put his reservations behind him and set one of his favorite commanders, Guy Gibson, as commander of the new specialist 617 squadron. The problem was it was now February 1943, and there were barely 10 weeks to figure out the raid.

Training and development was one of those continuous brilliant improvisations which characterized the best of British success in World War II. Gibson's pilots practiced flying the mighty Lancaster at 100', just above the ground. Elementary trigonometry, in the form of angled spotlights that merged at the right altitude, and fixed pin bombsights that aligned with towers of the dam for range, helped the crews drop their bombs at the right distance and altitude. The bomb had worked exactly once, in testing, by the time mid-May arrived, but that was enough to give the go ahead.

19 Lancasters took off late on May 16th, headed for the Ruhr. Low-level navigation was a channel, and Holland argues that a failure in the weather reporting system means that the crew was unaware of winds over the English channel, meaning that many of them crossed into Europe over flak concentrations rather than the planned weak spots. Two planes turned back with critical damage, two flew into power lines, and six were shot down, for nearly 50% casualties on a single attack. And while bailing out of a Lancaster at 10,000 feet was hardly safe, it was possible. When things went wrong at low altitude, they were inevitably fatal.

The survivors made their attacks on the Möhne, Eder and Sorpe dams, destroying the first two. The devastation was incredible, spreading miles downstream. Thousands were killed (many of them slave laborers, unfortunately), bridges were torn away, and steel manufacturing severely impacted. The end effect was less than Wallis had hoped, as Albert Speer embarked on a crash plan to rebuild the dams, but the propaganda was spectacular, and the systemic effects may have impeded building Atlantic Wall defenses before the Normandy invasion.

Holland has presented a fascinating and informative exploration of the famous raid, and its human cost.