I do love Starbucks coffee (just regular coffee with a bit of cream – nothing fancy), though that was only a very small reason why I read Onward, by Howard Schultz. Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, had stepped away as CEO in the early 2000s, only to return to that role in 2008 when the…
The Mirror of Leadership
The timing was fortuitous. We were driving into New York to see family, and listened to the 18Forty podcast interview with Rabbi Yissy Kaminetsky, the Rosh Yeshiva of DRS, an all-boys yeshiva high school in Long Island. Now, when I finish a podcast I just go straight to the next one, but my wife has…
Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up – Jerry Colonna
One of the genres I tend to read is leadership books, and they come in all shapes and sizes. Some are more prescriptive and researched based (e.g. The Human Side of School Change, by Robert Evans), others written from the experience of the authors (e.g. Onward, by Howard Schultz about Starbucks). Reboot: Leadership and the…
Finding Ruchniyut
On my recent trip to Israel I was privileged to spend a couple of hours with Rabbi Yishai Zinger. Rav Dov Zinger, his father, started a yeshiva high school in Israel that has a very intense focus on sparking religious commitment (Rav Zinger also does a lot of other interesting things, especially around tefilah, across…
Station Eleven – Emily St. John Mandel
One of my patterns is that if I like one book by someone, I’ll generally read one or two more in a short period of time to get to know the author better, their range of writing, and hopefully some continued enjoyment. This was the case with Emily St. John Mandel. After reading Vanishing Sky,…
Missing Idealism
In my early 20s I chose to learn in a Haredi yeshiva. I was deeply attracted to the idealism of that world. Though over time I took some distance from that world and its hashkafot, though its idealism, and the desire for it, stays with me. On my recent visit to Israel that sense of…
Sea of Tranquility – Emily St. John Mandel
Sea of Tranquility, by Emily St. John Mandel, is a hard book to categorize, though it is certainly a book worth reading. The book takes place in four time periods – the early 19th century, the present day (approximately), two hundred years from now, and four hundred years from now. While each of the storylines…
A Torah Life is Inefficient
I recently heard a couple of provocative, and ancient ideas, in an interview with the entrepreneur Kunal Shah on the Farnam Street Podcast. He said two things that stuck with me deeply. He said that a, “spiritual life is inefficient,” and “standardizing is the enemy of soulfulness.” I want to think through each one here,…
Etgar Keret – Seven Good Years
After listening to Etgar Keret’s entrancing stories about his mother that he read on This American Life, I knew I needed to read more of his books. What arrived first from the library was The Seven Good Years: A Memoir. I must note that it’s the most unconventional memoir I’ve probably ever read. There is…
The Ring – Andre Alexis
I had to look up the word quincunx, a word I’d never come across before, when it described a series of novels by Andre Alexis. Google says that a quincunx is “an arrangement of five objects with four at the corners of a square or rectangle and the fifth at its center, used for the…