Jayson Blair

 Dear Friends: I know that many of you ask to hear my thoughts in moments like these and there is no question that I  have yet to get my head around the events that happened at the Capitol on Wednesday. I want to write to say that this is un-American, but, as much as I want to say those words, the reality is that this virulent strand of violence is very much American.  From The Knight Riders, the militant band of tobacco farmers who burned the farms of poor growers in Kentucky in the 1900s to Timothy McVeigh and the Michigan Militia that were responsible from the Oklahoma City Bombing in 1996  1995; from the neo-Nazis who took shelter in Idaho in the 1990s to the people who attempted to kidnap Michigan Governor Jennifer Whitmer just last year; from Ku Klux Klan terrorizing blacks in the Deep South to the beatings by police on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma on Bloody Sunday in 1965; from the Birmingham Church Bombing that killed Condoleezza Rice’s childhood frien...

  Dear Goose Creek Family, I know that reading all the words of this note may be  painful for many of you. But I would encourage you to read them. They are just as painful for me and it is very difficult for me to say. A truth is that I have been, shamefully reluctant and fearful, as a black man, to address the protests that have been occurring across the country. As a person who has come from a Southern family that has experienced continuous and nonstop discrimination for more than 300 years, including beatings, racist acts and even the lynching of my grandfather’s brother, I am cautious about touching the third rail of American life – our original sin of slavery and racism. Three things inspired me to write about this topic. First, a white colleague wrote a touching note of support to me earlier this week. It reminded me that I should, as a leader, take a stand and say that discrimination in any form does not align with our values. Second, another white colleague happened to...

I had a spring in my step this morning that had been absent for so long that it took me a moment to recognize that light, blissful feeling I felt. As I walked down our long driveway to pick up my copy of the Sunday New York Times , I literally took in the smell of the cherry blossom petals that lined my path as I marveled with them with my eyes.  The afternoon before it was raining outside. That rain was just as responsible for petals on my path as the wind that was still blowing. As the rain came down the day before, I was 48 miles to the east, at a funeral only a few blocks from the Potomac River. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote, "We do not live an equal life, but one of contrasts and patchwork; now a little joy; then a sorrow; now a sin; then a generous brave action." Life is a journey in contrasts. Just like my weekend. _____ A few hours after taking in the beauty of my driveway, I was at our local grocery store. As I rounded the corner into the dairy aisl...

I was thumbing through the internet one recent evening, participating in one of an introvert’s favorite pastimes, as I aimlessly wandered from idea-to-idea, transversing what, to me is not the greatest productivity tool of modern time, and, instead, is simply the the world’s biggest library. I came across an image that had the fictional character from Star Trek: The Next Generation , Seven-of-Nine, juxtaposed with the character Data from the sister-show, Star Trek: Voyager . They are both an outgrowth of the character Spock from the original series, designed to give a third-person view of human condition. In as many ways as they are similar, they contrast. Seven was born Annika Hansen, the daughter of maverick space-traveling exobiologists who were searching for a species called the Borg. The hunters became the hunted, and that was quickly all she wrote as they were assimilated into the Borg’s interconnected cybernetic collective, where free will took at back seat to robotic di...

Regardless of your religion, the color of your skin, your ethnic origin, your political affiliation or the way you cast your ballot in the recent Presidential election, you would have to have a blindfold wrapped around your eyes and earplugs in your ears to not notice that many Americans are afraid. In the days since the election of Donald Trump, a wash of anxiety and fear has flowed through my office, one client at a time.  To be sure, some of my clients are indeed excited and hopeful about the prospect of the Trump presidency. They are the ones who felt that the y were on the outside looking in during the last 8 years of Barack Obama’s presidency. But there is no question that the overwhelming number of people I have encountered a re experiencing a level of angst and disquiet that they say they have not experienced since 9/11, in some cases, and, for others, in their lives. Indeed, a Gallup poll released on November 11 showed that 42 percent of Americans were afraid as a r...

John Forbes Nash Jr. was a brilliant mathematician and a suffer of something, depending on whom you ask, in the neighborhood of schizophrenia and manic depression. Nash, who died in a car accident with his wife a little more than a week ago, was, first and foremost, a Nobel laureate, whom, like many mathematicians, made his greatest discoveries in his 20s (As G.H. Hardy wrote in 1940, of “all the arts and sciences mathematics is the most remote” and “no mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than an other art or science, is a young man’s game”). Knowing that history and those peculiarities of mathematics and mathematicians, strange behaviors –extended solitude, writing equations on walls, a frenetic pace to develop solutions, mumbling to themselves in public – probably did not seem so far outside the norm among his brethren at Princeton University. But, according to a 2010 edition of The Princetonian , the daily newspaper at Princeto...