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From Disappointment to Resilience: Finding Strength in Life's Setbacks

Release Date: 11/06/2024

Human Meme

Three seconds. That is all it takes. Three seconds of your voice, captured from a public meeting, a conference call, a video posted to social media, and a machine can learn to speak as you. It can produce your cadence, your rhythm, the way you pause before a name, the way your pitch drops when you are certain. It can say things you have never said, in rooms you have never entered, to people you have never met. And the people who hear it will believe it is you, because the only test the human ear can perform is recognition, and recognition is no longer proof of origin. This is the condition...

The Counterfeit Bargain

Human Meme

Twenty-one violinists walked into a hotel room in Indianapolis in 2010. They were experienced soloists, people who had spent decades training their ears. The room was dimly lit. They wore modified welding goggles so they could not see the instruments. And they were handed violins, some worth twelve million dollars, some worth a few thousand, and asked to play them, compare them, and choose the one they would take home. Two-thirds chose a modern violin. The most-selected instrument in the entire test was new. The least-selected was a Stradivarius. That experiment opens my new book, The...

Forty-One Houses and the Price of the Empty Seat

Human Meme

There are forty-one Broadway theatres. That number has been effectively frozen for nearly a century. The oldest of them opened in 1903. The newest was assembled in 1998 from the demolished remains of two older houses. Between those dates, the city tore down theatres, condemned theatres, converted theatres into parking garages and television studios and conference venues. What remains is forty-one buildings, most of them constructed before 1930, clustered in a rectangle of midtown Manhattan roughly thirteen blocks long and three avenues wide. On a Wednesday evening, all of them are running....

A Horror in Five Skins

Human Meme

I want to talk about a face. Specifically, I want to talk about the face you see when you look in the mirror and the face other people see when they look at you, and whether those two faces have ever been the same face, and what happens to a person who discovers, at the age of five, that the answer is no, and that the distance between the two can be closed by reaching out and copying someone else's bone structure onto your own skull. That is the premise of my new novel, The Borrowed Saint: A Horror in Five Skins. A boy named Asa Greer stands in a bathroom in Decker, Ohio, and watches his...

From Genius to Joke

Human Meme

I want you to think about the last time you encountered an achievement that seemed too large for the person who produced it. Something that made you pause, narrow your eyes, and reach for the comfortable explanation. Maybe it was a historical figure whose story sounded exaggerated. Maybe it was a living person whose accomplishment struck you as implausible given what you thought you knew about their background, their body, their circumstances. You felt a flicker. A small, quiet impulse that said: that cannot be right.

"The Failed City: An Autopsy of Urban Collapse" and The Question of Why We Bury What Fails

Human Meme

There is a street in Jersey City called Baldwin Avenue. If you drove down it today you would see nothing unusual. Asphalt. Cars. A fire hydrant. The usual negotiation between infrastructure and weather. But if you had been standing on that street in late September 2013, you would have seen something that has stayed with me for thirteen years. A road crew was rolling fresh asphalt over granite cobblestones. The cobblestones were a hundred and fifty years old. The asphalt would last about twenty. I asked the man operating the road roller why they were burying them. He gave me a one-word answer....

Go to Every Funeral

Human Meme

I want to tell you about something I overheard in a cafe in Newark, New Jersey, about twenty-five years ago, and about the book that grew out of it, and about why it took me a quarter of a century to understand what I heard. I was teaching at the time. A colleague from my department was sitting near the window with her daughter, a young woman just starting her freshman year of college. I came in, we exchanged the usual pleasantries, and then I sat down at the next table and we performed that ritual of urban public life where you pretend you cannot hear the person three feet away from you. But...

What the Light Carries: On Writing to the Future

Human Meme

The book is twenty-one letters. I use the word "letter" loosely. A surgical dictation is a letter. A cockpit voice recorder transcript is a letter. A recipe card annotated by three generations of the same family is a letter. A homestead deed from 1884 is a letter. A radio signal broadcasting Chopin and a list of forty-seven names into a dead frequency is a letter. A mathematical theorem inscribed into the DNA of a bacterium is a letter. Each one crosses a gap. The first gap is one second. A surgeon dictating an operative report while the patient is still on the table. The last gap is 4.24...

The Grammar of Leaving

Human Meme

I want to talk about a sentence. A very specific kind of sentence. The kind of sentence you hear every day, in every newscast, in every corporate press release, in every school board meeting and church bulletin and government report, and you never notice it, because the sentence was designed not to be noticed. The sentence goes like this: "Jobs were lost." Or: "The congregation dwindled." Or: "The neighborhood changed." Or: "The program was discontinued." Listen to the grammar. In every one of those sentences, the subject is the thing that was abandoned. The job. The congregation. The...

Miscast: The Body on Stage

Human Meme

When an actor walks onto a stage and says the words a playwright has written, whose body is it? Not legally. Legally the question is settled. The actor owns the body, the playwright owns the words, and an intricate web of union contracts and intellectual property law keeps the two from colliding in ways that require attorneys. The legal answer is clean. I am asking a different question. I am asking what happens, at the level of consciousness, when a human being stands in a defined space and pretends to be someone else. Whose experience is the audience receiving? The character's? The actor's?...

More Episodes

Disappointment is the uninvited guest at the table of life. It sits heavy in our hearts, clutches our dreams, and whispers doubts that gnaw at the edges of hope. Yet, disappointment is not a dead end; it’s a waypoint, a necessary stop on the task of human growth. To be disappointed is to be alive, to care deeply about outcomes, to have risked enough to feel the sting of falling short. And while the pangs of disappointment may seem like the final word, they are often just the prelude to resilience.

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