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Old business first: Tomorrow is September 11. 23 years and 1 day ago, this country was a place where we could speak and act much more freely. I join friends and family in honoring those who lost their lives that day, and I also hope that Americans remember our place in the world as we consider who to vote for in the upcoming presidential election. 50 years before 9/11, Ray Bradbury wrote in Fahrenheit 451: “How in hell did those bombers get up there every single second of our lives! Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it! Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well-fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much?”
Recent business next: Thanks to everyone who sent comments on last week’s photos from Burning Man! One of my favorite people ever asked me, “Why didn’t you say more about the pictures? I love reading your insights and I wanted to know what you thought of what you saw.” I was humbled by that. I consciously chose to show more and say less so that you all could draw your own conclusions. But since you asked… Here is a little postscript.
When I got back, a work colleague asked how I was readjusting to reality. I replied, “I’ve been here the whole time; I think reality is finally readjusting to me.”
A common theme at Burning Man was that people have a need to acknowledge and express their authentic selves with integrity. Many of us often feel like square pegs in a world of round holes, and it’s liberating to be ourselves out loud.
For decades I have advocated for adapting our everyday social institutions – most especially education – in ways that value and leverage individuality. This isn’t simply a matter of inclusion or woke whatever; diversity is a proven competitive advantage in nature, in investing, and in social institutions. Bringing people together to look at things from divergent perspectives is how the Medici family started the Renaissance, and how Abraham Lincoln united these states.
So, as I reflect, I have a mixture of feelings around Burning Man. On one hand, I am so, SO glad it exists and that I got to spend time with one of my best friends and his adopted family in a multi-day state of resilient curiosity and joy. On the other hand, I wish all that humor, creativity, and connected humanity had more of a place in our daily lives, not just a week in a remote section of northern Nevada desert. As John Perry Barlow put it: “If someone like Karl Rove had wanted to neutralize the most creative, intelligent, and passionate members of his opposition, he'd have a hard time coming up with a better tool than Burning Man. Exile them to the wilderness, give them a culture in which alpha status requires months of focus and resource-consumptive preparation, provide them with metric tons of psychotropic confusicants, and then... ignore them. It's a pretty safe bet that they won't be out registering voters, or doing anything that might actually threaten electoral change, when they have an art car to build.”
On the third hand, I love sushi more because I don’t eat it every day. Maybe Burning Man is relevant precisely because, like every dream, it’s gone in the morning. What we think and remember afterward is up to us.
Curiosity is what makes life worth living. I am literally Curious AF. And now you can be too! Click here HERE to unlock your free membership subscription.
Here is a taste of what I’m reading, watching, and thinking about.
Long before I was an English teacher, long before I wrote books or articles for newspapers or peer-reviewed journals, I considered the words we use to share what we think. One of the most fascinating aspects of language is how we misuse phrases so habitually that they just take on their own meaning. For example, “begging the question” has a specific definition in logic that is precisely what everyone does not mean when they use the phrase. And a person who says “I could care less” actually cares more than they would if they cared less, which they apparently can. If you really want to express how little you care, say it right: “I COULDN’T care less.” Since this is one of those things that I actually can’t stand talking about, I am thrilled to report that there is now a simple, easy to use website that perfectly illustrates the point. Head over to https://could.care/ and forward at will – sharing is caring.
I think the eighties might just be the raddest decade ever, especially for those of us who lived through it. It was the music. The MTV. The fashion. The mall. Fast Times and The Bonfire of the Vanities and Greed and (even) Top Gun (which my friends and I walked out on) and … the list goes on and on. We even had better TV/movie monsters. I’ll take a sharp vampire any day over mumbling, stumbling walking dead. But best of all, we had thrill seeking maniacs on primetime television, people who could die at any moment on ABC’s Wide World of Sports while setting world records that will never, ever be broken.
The title of this week’s newsletter is not a reference to Burning Man mutant vehicles. From Popular Science: “Researchers have now learned how to control a robot’s movement using electrical signals produced by the mycelium of the common King oyster mushroom.” Hear me now, believe me later: AI has nothing on nature.
Technology is lust removed from nature.
– Don DeLillo
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Best,
David Preston
Educator & Author
Latest book: ACADEMY OF ONE
Ah, you youngsters who were not "of age" in the 1960s. The 1980s were admittedly more "rad" than the 1970s or 1990s, but as a baby boomer who was high school and college age in the 1960s, they remain the most "rad" decade for me. Beatles, Stones, Dylan et al. plus all the political activity around civil rights and the Vietnam War.