Letters from Cambridge
Then, As Now, Trumpism Dreams of America
It is Nov. 22, 2016, and the newly minted Senior Counselor to Donald Trump is angry. Even if Asians are navigating America fairly, Steve Bannon doesn’t like the fact that there are so many Asian CEOs in Silicon Valley. “A country is more than an economy,” he explained. “We’re a civic society.” Apparently Asians still tear apart the social fabric of this country if we do too well.
It is Nov. 22, 2016, and Harvard is about to break for Thanksgiving. And for many people at Harvard, there seems to be awfully little to be thankful for.
On Election Day, Some Things Are More Important Than Yourself
I’m not going to tell you to go vote today.
I can’t make you, and if you don’t want to vote, that’s your own choice.
Is the American University Ready for Donald Trump?
In a year of the unexpected, one thing surprises me more than anything else: Cosmopolitan America is trying to take the white working class seriously.
The white working class has spoken. It spoke for Bernie Sanders and it spoke for Donald Trump. And so in the run-up to Election Day, the media’s been churning out feature after feature on “forgotten middle America.” Even Foreign Affairs is getting in on the action!
Let’s Celebrate Stanford’s 125th Birthday by Admitting Some Things
(With apologies to The Globe and Mail’s Ivor Tossell.)
Stanford gets sunny days, to the point that you get bored of them. It’s a cliché. It’s also true. Back when I lived in New England, if there was a sunny day, you bet I was going to go out and enjoy it. At Stanford students spend sunny days inside studying.
Dreams of Things that Could Have Been
A few nights ago, I stayed up way too late drawing up a CV of my various professional failures. For most of America’s existence, we’ve made a point to celebrate risk-taking, boldness, and even sometimes failure, and I wanted to get a sense of how I stacked up. But what I learned from that exercise was absolutely not what I had expected: While I make a lot of mistakes and get rejected from a lot of opportunities, in the grand scheme of things, I frankly don’t think I’ve failed enough.
The man who popularized the idea of a “CV of failures,” Princeton professor Johannes Haushofer, chose to publicly admit his disappointments and shortcomings because he understands that “Most of what I try fails, but these failures are often invisible, while the successes are visible.” Just look at his actual CV—it’s a holy terror. By any account, he is one of the most highly educated men on the planet. But as his anti-CV demonstrates, he went through a lot of failure to get to where he is now.