As a kid I remember watching my dad work in our garage, mainly with wood, making things with a table saw, drills and other tools that he handled with apparent ease.  I watched, but seldom participated.  For one, I was often on my way to a basketball or soccer game and simply monitored his progress as a passing observer.  And secondly, to be perfectly honest, I wasn’t too interested.  Maybe it was because I didn’t understand what was going on before my eyes, but I never asked my dad to teach me, though I’m sure at times he tried.

Now, I’m 26 and I can’t make anything.  I can land a $230 million aircraft in the mountains of Afghanistan, but the recent project of putting up a fence in our backyard terrified me (so instead I spent large sums to have other 20-somethings do it for me while I watched suspiciously through my kitchen window).  Lately this has really been bothering me.  I’ve been “struck dumb by my own dumbness,” as William Deresiewicz once wrote.

According to Matthew Crawford, author of “Shop Class as Soulcraft,” I’m not the only one.   It seems to be a trend that more of us our living life with very little control or understanding over the things that we own and operate.   We’ve ceased to be a culture of makers and settled for strict-consumption.  As evidence, high school shop programs are increasingly being cut with their funding redirected to more “modern” endeavors.  We, as a culture, have begun choosing to buy instead of make and replace instead of repair.  In doing so, Crawford contends that we’re losing our grasp on the world around us and ultimately a part of our soul.

Crawford explains in the introduction that he would like to show us what we lose when we no longer work with our hands and to,

“…speak up for an ideal that is timeless but finds little accommodation today: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world.  Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hardheaded: the hardheaded economist will point out the “opportunity costs” of spending one’s time making what can be bought, and the hardheaded educator will say that it is irresponsible to educated the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as jobs of the past.  But we might pause to consider just how hardheaded these presumptions are, and whether they don’t, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that instantly steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work.”

He repeatedly points out that he isn’t trying to attach mysticism to manual labor, indeed plumbing is often just about unclogging drains, but as a burnt-out think tank director turned motorcycle repairmen he delves deeply into what makes manual trades so satisfying.   In doing so he taps into a growing tide of people searching for a measure of self-reliance in an increasingly outsourced and virtual world.

“We want to feel that our world is intelligible, so we can be responsible for it. This seems to require that the provenance of our things be brought closer to home. Many people are trying to recover a field of vision that is basically human in scale, and extricate themselves from dependence on the obscure forces of a global economy.”

Critics of Crawford say he paints too great a divide between office work done in cubicles and manual trades done in shops and construction.  Not all office work is soulless and dull, just as not all manual labor is satisfying and filled with a sense of innocent artisan pride.

I agree that at times Crawford makes it seem as though to work in a white-collar occupation is to leave one’s soul and brain at the door, but he writes from his own life experience.  Growing up in a commune in the Bay Area with a theoretical physicist for a father, Crawford learned to tinker with his VW engine, worked as an electrician in high school and eventually ended up at the University of Chicago where he earned his PhD in political philosophy.

During that time he also took a job writing abstracts for academic journals, a job which he accounts quite hilariously, noting the irony of being forced to dull his inquisitive mind in favor of meeting daily quotas; this in a job that he specifically took for its seemingly intellectual slant.  All this to say, the mix of the academia and manual labor gave him unique opportunities to judge the merits of both ways of life and it’s these personal experiences that make for an authentic discussion.

However, to paint this book simply as a debate between two different types of work would be severely misleading.  Thanks to Crawford’s background in philosophy, he craftily plumbs what is means to be human, quoting Aristotle, Heidegger and others while slowly digging away at the very roots of how we acquire and use knowledge.

He contrasts the very objective truths of motorcycle repair and other manual trades, either the bike starts or it doesn’t, to the often ambiguous and subjective truths found in most knowledge economy jobs where the status quo is often to, “…avoid making decisions, because they could damage your career, but then spin cover stories after the fact that interpret positive outcomes to your credit.”

Francis Fukuyama reviewing the book in the New York Times sums this aspect of “Shop Class” in much more fluent prose than I could muster,

“Crawford argues that the ideologists of the knowledge economy have posited a false dichotomy between knowing and doing.  The fact of the matter is that most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge, come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects — loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or backing a semi rig into a loading dock.  All these activities, if done well, require knowledge both about the world as it is and about yourself, and your own limitations.  They can’t be learned simply by following rules, as a computer does; they require intuitive knowledge that comes from long experience and repeated encounters with difficulty and failure.  In this world, self- esteem cannot be faked: if you can’t get the valve cover off the engine, the customer won’t pay you.”

It’s in the depth of this argument that many will find the words they’ve been searching for to describe their general unease about everything moving to a knowledge economy, team-building activities and all, where everyone is a manager, a manager of other people’s stuff and ideas.  Rather than simply moving things around and repackaging them in the ether of the markets Crawford stands as an educated voice warning us not to abandon our manual competency in search of admittance into a theoretical, creative class that is often more concerned with consuming rather than actually creating.

It’s true that not everyone can be a motorcycle repairmen or electrician, nor should they, but for those who have slipped into passive consumerism as a lifestyle, this may be the best argument yet as to why we all need to spend a little more time in the garage, building things, not to mention ourselves.

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I know I’ve been quoting a lot of Niebuhr lately, but I just can’t get over how much meat is packed into the pages of “The Irony of American History.”

I just finished the book and sat in quiet awe reflecting the final two paragraphs.  Niebuhr is speaking of the enemy of communism, but the enemy of radical Islam could just as easily be inserted.

There is, in short, even in a conflict with a foe with whom we have little in common the possibility and necessity of living in a dimension of meaning in which the urgencies of the struggle are subordinated to a sense of awe before the vastness of the historical drama in which we are jointly involved; to a sense of modesty about the virtue, wisdom and power available to us for the resolution of its perplexities; to a sense of contrition about the common human frailties and foibles which lie at the foundation of both the enemy’s demonry and our vanities; and to a sense of gratitude for the divine mercies which are promised to those who humble themselves.

Strangely enough, none of the insights derived from this faith are finally contradictory to our purpose and duty of preserving our civilization.  They are, in fact, prerequisites for saving it.  For if we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster.  The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory.

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First, the books:

1) “Freedom” by Daniel Suarez

An awesome follow-up to Suarez’s first novel, “Daemon,” a high-tech thriller that turned the heads of national security experts, technologists and futurists alike.  The sequel focuses on the role of resilient communities in building a different future for those who detest the decreasing self-sufficiency (therefore freedom) of the common citizen and community.

Both “Daemon” and “Freedom” plus Robb’s “Brave New War” and Pollan’s “Omnivore’s Dilemma” provide a great blue print for those wanting to see the near-future of conflict for power and resources and operational space.  (h/t @TimothyThompson)

2) “The Collapse of Complex Societies” by Joseph Tainter

Two chapters into the book that ZenPundit says is the “academic to mainstream crossover book of 2010.”  More to come…

3) “The Irony of American History” by Reinhold Niebuhr

I’ve heard Andrew Bacevich sing the praises of Niebuhr for long enough now that I had to consume some of his writing for myself.  Thus far I have been blown away by his C.S. Lewis-like style and depth.

Writing during the postwar years, Niebuhr, the scholar, theologian and prophet honed in on “…the persistent sin of American Exceptionalism; the indecipherability of history; the false allure of simple solutions; and, finally, the imperative of appreciating the limits of power.”

4) “Cloud Atlas” by David Mitchell

Have heard about this book for a while, shortlisted for the 2004 Booker Prize and other awards, excited to read a contemporary novelist who has been compared to David Foster Wallace.

5) “For the Win” by Cory Doctrow

Lots of hype from TwitterNation, will crack open once I finish the above.

And posts and articles…

1) “The Sun in the Sky: The Relationship Between Pakistan’s ISI and Afghan Insurgents” by Matt Waldman

2) “Who is Ayn Rand?” by Charles Murray (h/t Isegoria)

3) “West Point Faculty Member Worries it is Failing to Prepare Tomorrow’s Officers” by Maj. Fernando Lujan, U.S. Army

4) The Cheap Vegetable Gardener (h/t Shloky)

5) “The Scientific Scandal of Antismoking” by J.R. Johnstone, PhD and P.D. Finch, Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Studies (h/t Isegoria)

6) David MacKay’s Without The Hot Air (h/t Carl Rigney)

Oh yeah…and about those $1 trillion of minerals underneath the mine-laden dirt of Afghanistan, I’ll put money on China getting way more contracts than the U.S.  Why?  They care more about business than changing governments.  The only question they’ll have for Karzai regarding his corrupt brother in the South is, “yuan or dollars?”

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From Andrew Bacevich’s introduction to “The Irony of American History“, by pastor, teacher, theologian and author Reinhold Niebuhr which I started reading yesterday.  Niebuhr writes the following concerning preventive war,

“The idea of preventive war sometimes tempts minds, whose primary preoccupation is the military defense of a nation and who thinks it might be prudent to pick the most propitious moment for the start of what they regard as inevitable hostilities.  But the rest of us must resist such ideas with every moral resource.”

“Nothing in history is inevitable including the probable.  So long as war has not broken out, we still have the possibility of avoiding it.  Those who think that there is little difference between a cold and a hot war are either knaves or fools.”

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“I also have in mind that seemingly wealthy, but most terribly impoverished class of all, who have accumulated dross, but know not how to use it, or get rid of it, and thus forged their own golden or silver fetters.” – Henry David Thoreau

A few years ago Timothy Ferriss wrote a silly-sounding book called “The 4-Hour Workweek“ that was dismissed by many as some sort of Gen-Y gimmick.  Most boomers sneered from behind their Wall Street Journals at this naive young Princeton grad who they saw as encouraging the very sort of fairyland, entitlement behavior they believed to be so rampant among 20-somethings joining the workforce.  They didn’t read the book.

But other people, including yours truly, did and were challenged by the well-crafted manifesto Ferriss had laid out which took direct aim at the conventional work/life progression.

The essence of book revolves around questioning why we do what we do when it comes to our work/life mix or timeline, a.k.a. work for 40+ years then retire.  Ferriss explains the source of many ideas for the book came about after being asked to speak, alongside other millionaire entrepreneurs and CEO’s, to students at Princeton University about his business adventures.  He explains his dilemma,

“Over the ensuing days, however, I realized that everyone seemed to be discussing how to build large and successful companies, sell out, and live the good life.  Fair enough.  The questions no one really seemed to be asking or answering was, Why do it all in the first place?  What is the pot of gold that justifies spending the best years of your life hoping for happiness in the last?

The lectures I ultimately developed, titled “Drug Dealing for Fun and Profit,” (Tim had started a sports supplement company) began with a simple premise: Test the most basic assumptions of the work-life equation.

• How do your decisions change if retirement isn’t an option?
• What if you could use a mini-retirement to sample your deferred-life plan reward before working 40 years for it?
• Is it really necessary to work like a slave to live like a millionaire?” (pg. 8,9)

The Sabbatical Year

“For six years you are to sow your fields and harvest the crops, but during the seventh year let the land lie unplowed and unused.  Then the poor among your people may get food from it, and the wild animals may eat what they leave.  Do the same with your vineyard and your olive grove.” – Exodus 23:10-11, NIV

According to Jewish tradition the Shmita, or Sabbatical year, “is the seventh year of the seven-year agricultural cycle mandated by the Torah for the Land of Israel.”  Why would God mandate this year of rest for the Israelites?   From our perspective it seems so wasteful, inefficient, even…lazy.  Was the Creator trying to send a subtle message to the created?

College and twenty-something pastor Aaron Stern wrote the following concerning this phenomena,

Rhythms in life are so important.  In the first chapter of the first book of the Bible God establishes rhythm.  He creates and works for six days and on the seventh he rests.  The amazing thing is that God didn’t have to rest…he can’t tire.  So He his communicating something much bigger than a six day work week.  He is setting a pattern we are to mimic. Leviticus 25 highlights the seventh year as a year for fields to rest and rejuvenate.  God is saying that rhythm and rest provided the needed time to produce again.

Few people follow this mandate today, but might it be a worthwhile exercise to ask why?  What would our lives look like if we decided to follow the Shmita, taking one year off every seven?

New York-based designer Stefan Sagmeister decided to do just that and the results have been quite surprising.  In the following TED talk he shows how his life has been molded by incorporating a sabbatical year every seven.  Watch and comment – is this feasible?  Why or why not?

(h/t Aaron Stern for the TED talk and his general awesomeness)

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Once in a great many moons you open up a book and step on a mental land mine like the following,

“Does Leadership Exist?”

This question has caused me confusion, frustration, anger, enlightenment and ultimately a humble clarity and desire for further thinking in the three days since having it posed to me in “The 52nd Floor: Thinking Deeply About Leadership” by Dr.’s David Levy, James Parco and Fred Blass.

Before you cross this off as a cute little Jedi mind trick take a second to chew on it.  And while you’re at it here’s the story (my riff) the authors present to go along with it.

An elderly gentleman who once was the CEO of a Fortune 100 company is invited to give a talk on leadership to a group of senior executives.  He starts as most would expect by talking about things like vision, hiring good people, empowering employees, etc.  Then he suddenly pauses for an uncomfortably long period of time and says the following,

“I’m sorry, I don’t think I can continue this speech.  The truth is that I don’t think leadership exists.”

The execs in the room look at one another with a bit of embarrassment and sadness for an elderly gentleman who has obviously lost his way…and possibly his mind.  Before they can exhale the speaker continues,

“Believers in leadership can recite many phrases, slogans and variants of definitions regarding what they think leadership is, but it is always used to describe what happened in the past.  Actually, it’s a bit of a tautology.  Companies that have done well are said to have had great leadership.  Poorly performing companies have had poor leadership.  None can reliably tell us where it is going to be, how it will get there, and most importantly, whether it will succeed once it arrives.  I’m not saying that leaders don’t exist; I’m not that crazy, yet.  Leadership?  Damned if I have a clue?” (emphasis mine)

Here’s what I wrote in the book after thinking about the question and story for a little while,

After spending four years at an institution dedicated to “producing leaders” and reading countless books on the subject, I know all of the canned definitions of leadership, all the phrases like “influence” and “common objectives.” But, of what help this is I’m not sure. I know good leadership when I see it, but I have begun to believe that so much depends on context — the specific time, place, leader, operating environment all dictate a unique approach or paradigm. Not only that, but a great deal depends on the follower as well. All this to say, it is complex, far too complex to sum up with a few bullet points or checklists. In fact, I wonder if these formulas do more damage than good, causing us to believe we have a map in our hands and calling off the search before it has even begun. What we need may be less about learning how to lead and more about learning how to think.

Those were my initial thoughts. Now that I’ve had some more time to think, here are a few more.

The majority of books on leadership are not just a waste of time, they are a fraud. As the elderly former CEO stated, leadership always describes something that happened in the past. As Nassim Taleb pointed out in “The Black Swan” we humans have an extreme penchant for what he calls the narrative fallacy, or our desire to simplify, summarize or otherwise explain complex things that happened in the past rather than having to deal with the uncertainty that comes with not knowing.

In other words, things that we can’t explain scare us, so we invent stories (or 5-step plans) to make ourselves feel better.

Leadership on a large scale requires dealing with complex, dynamic systems that never remain the same long enough to completely control.  This requires more synthesis and less analysis, holistic thinking rather than strict reductionism, an excellent ability to OODA, build snowmobiles (see John Boyd) avoid the trap of the narrative fallacy…but here I go again, jumping down the rabbit hole of listing traits for what it means to be a great leader.  I’ll stop before I do damage.  My head hurts.

So what do you think?  Does leadership exist?  If you took it out of the dictionary would anything change?

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So, I’m reading “War and Peace.” I know, I know, “…people don’t actually read that book,” you’re thinking, they just strategically drop it in conversation every once and a while, or keep it in the hip pocket in the off chance they need it for a trivia game.

But, I figured if I was going to make my way through the classics, Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” was an inevitable stop in the journey and what better time to knock out the 1000+ pages then now while I’m young and my eye sight is still ok.

It started off quite slow for me, trying to wrap my head around the dozens of characters who each have 3 different names depending on who is addressing them and a culture and time so different than my own.  I keep having to reference the character list in the front of the book to keep the Bolkonskys, Rostovs and Bezuhovs all sorted out.

However, I’m now 400 pages in and it’s starting to flow for me.  I feel like I’ve caught the stride that a reader must find in every book, especially one like this, if he has any chance of making it through with any understanding or appreciation of what just happened.

The timing of this book for me is quite significant because the topics of “war” and “peace” have been taking up most of my brain’s bandwidth for the past year or so.

When men take up arms against each other it sends a ripple throughout all of society.  People must decide whether they’re for, against, or in many cases, not sure.

Reading about the individual thoughts and passions of Russian families and soldiers in the early 1800′s  as they go to war against Napolean’s France helps one realize that while much is different about fighting wars today, on the human level, a surprising amount remains the same.

Tolstoy seems to have a startling grasp of all of this and it is what makes his writing…classic.  This seems to be one of those books that rewards those willing to make the effort.

The following are some passages I’ve enjoyed…

War

“…there was no one between the squadron and the enemy, and between them lay that terrible border-line of uncertainty and dread, like the line dividing the living from the dead.  All the soldiers were conscious of that line, and the question whether they would cross it or not, and how they would cross it, filled them with excitement.”

“Just as in the clock, the result of the complex action of countless different wheels and blocks is only the slow, regular movement of the hand marking the time, so the result of all the complex human movement of those 160,000 Russians and Frenchmen – of all the passions, hopes, regrets, humiliations, sufferings, impulses of pride, of fear, and of enthusiasm of those men – was only the loss of the battle of Austerlitz, the so-called battle of the three Emperors, that is, the slow shifting of the registering hand on the dial of the history of mankind.”

“Every soldier felt cheered at heart by knowing that where he was going, to that unknown spot were going also many, many more of our men.”

Faith

“…while thou art more foolish and artless than a little babe, who, playing with the parts of a cunningly fashioned watch, should rashly say that because he understands not the use of that watch, he does not believe in the maker who fashioned it.”

Flattery

“…and flattered him with that delicate flattery that goes hand in hand with conceit, and consists in a tacit assumption that one’s companion and oneself are the only people capable of understanding all the folly of the rest of the world and the sagacity and profundity of their own ideas.”

More to come….

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Margaret Feinberg posted the following on Tuesday and, though I read “The Pursuit of God” by A.W. Tozer several years ago, this quote made me want to go through it again.  As Feinberg pointed out, Tozer wrote this over 30 years ago.  Stunning how true it rings today.

Every age has its own characteristics. Right now we are in an age of religious complexity. The simplicity which is in Christ is rarely found among us. In its stead are programs, methods, organizations and a world of nervous activities which occupy time and attention but can never satisfy the longing of the heart. The shallowness of our inner experience, the hollowness of our worship, and that servile imitation of the world which marks our promotional methods all testify that we in this day, know God only imperfectly, and the peace of God scarcely at all.
If we would find God amid all the religious externals, we must first determine to find Him, and then proceed in the way of simplicity.

–A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God, p. 17-18)

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A couple weeks ago I finally got around to reading, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma” by Michael Pollan after having it recommended to me by several people. I will never look at food the same way again.

I know people make flippant remarks like that all the time, coming out of “Super Size Me” exclaiming with enraged gusto, “I’ll never eat another Big Mac!” In fact, I’m almost hesitant to make a comment like the aforementioned lest it cheapen a shift in my thinking that is actually quite real and startling even to myself.  I’m being honest when I say that Pollan shook my worldview and forced me to confront an industrial food system of which I had been willfully ignorant, partaking in its cheap delicacies without understanding the repercussions. I mean, its just food right? Maybe not.

“Eating is an agricultural act,” as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world — and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them.  There are things in it that will ruin their appetites. But in the the end this is a book about the pleasures of eating, the kinds of pleasure that are only deepened by knowing.

There was a ton of information packed away in the pages of this book, but I want to highlight two main points, discussed in the opening chapters of the book that really caused me to pause:

We are a nation of corn-eaters

“But I rarely eat corn!” you say.  Do you eat any of the following:

• steak (corn is what feeds the steer)
• chicken, pork, turkey, lamb (all corn-fed)
• catfish, tilapia, salmon (all increasingly trained to eat corn)
• eggs, milk, cheese yogurt (once came from dairy cows raised on grass, now Holsteins tethered to machines, eating corn)
• soda and many juices (high-fructose corn syrup)
• beer (alcohol fermented from glucose refined from corn)
• any processed food with starch, glucose syrup, maltodextrin, crystalline fructose, absorbic acid, lecithin, dextrose, lactic acid and lystine, maltose, MSG, caramel color, xanthan gum (all corn)
• Cheez Whiz, frozen yogurt, canned fruit, ketchup, frozen waffles, syrups, mayonnaise, mustard, hot dogs, salad dressing

As Pollan explains, “…the food industry has done a good job of persuading us that the forty-five throusand different items of SKUs…in the supermarket…represent genuine variety rather than so many clever rearrangements of molecules extracted from the same plant.”

So, you and I eat a lot of corn without even realizing it, but why?  Because its cheap.  And why is it cheap?  Because the U.S. government heavily subsidizes the corn industry.  As Pollan explains,

America’s farm policy was forged during the Depression not, as many people seem to think, to encourage farmers to produce more food for a hungry nation, but to rescue farmers from the disastrous effects of growing too much food – far more than Americans could afford to buy.

This system changed, however with the 1973 farm bill which replaced,

…the New Deal system of supporting prices through loans, government grain purchases, and land idling with a new system of direct payment to farmers…Instead of keeping corn out of a falling market, as the old loan programs and federal granary had done, the new subsidies encouraged farmers to sell their corn at any proice, since the government would make up the difference.

The history of American farm policy is vital in understanding our country’s food culture.  While the free market advocate in me has always abhorred the idea of agricultural subsidies, the discussion presented by Pollan shows the various factors which make the debate more than just a black and white issue.  However, regardless of the economic implications of paying our farmers to produce mountains of cheap corn, the fact is we end up subsidizing the most unhealthy calories in the supermarket.

Very simply, we subsidize high-fructose corn syrup in this country, but not carrots. While the surgeon general is raising alarms over the epidemic of obesity, the president is signing farm bills designed to keep the river of cheap corn flowing, guaranteeing that the cheapest calories in the supermarket will continue to be the unhealthiest.

For one of the fattest nations on earth, this isn’t welcome news.

We also eat a lot of oil

For some, the idea that we end up indirectly eating gallons of oil each year may be an even bigger leap than acknowledging the prominence of corn in our diets, but the unsettling truth is that we’ve built our modern-industrial food system on a foundation of cheap oil. From the chemical fertilizers that cause many of the crops to grow quicker and bigger, to the pesticides that keep insects away, to the gasoline used by tractors to harvest the crops and trucks to transport them thousands of miles across the country and finally to the packaging used to keep the food from spoiling — each link in the chain requires us to further rely on non-renewable resource.

How much oil is used? 50 gallons of oil per acre of corn, 1/3 gallon per bushel. “Put another way, it takes more than a calorie of fossil fuel energy to produce a calorie of food…”

These costs are largely hidden to the consumer, but they remain nonetheless. What makes this scary is what will happen when a barrel of oil goes back to costing $150 or more and doesn’t mercifully come back down as it did a couple years ago. For a food system that relies on large amounts of oil to produce and transport its products, this spells huge increases in the price of food.  Unless we choose to opt out, which of course is what a large section of the book is devoted to teaching the reader how to do.

Pollan goes much deeper into the food system than just corn and oil.  He looks at the repercussions of feeding animals food they weren’t naturally made to eat, the treatment and quality of life of those animals, the somewhat disappointing realities of the big organic movement and why Whole Foods isn’t necessarily the answer, the vegetarian debate, the history of the modern food industry and even the challenges and unexpected pleasures of hunting and foraging for food in the modern world.

It would be hard to do this book justice without going on for another few thousand words.  So I won’t.  Instead, read this book and really chew it over (no pun intended…ok, maybe it was).  You, like me, may end up surprised at how much your answer changes regarding the question of, “what’s for dinner?”

“We’ve become a culture of technicians.  We’re all into the how of it and nobody’s stepping back and saying ‘But Why?’.”  – Joel Salatin, Farmer (my new hero)

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Below is a copy of an e-mail I sent out to several friends and family this weekend announcing the e-mail newsletter I’m creating covering great books and wine. Since I don’t have a lot of your e-mail addresses and I know that I missed a lot of people in my initial round of e-mails, here is my attempt to reach everyone.

If you want to receive the quarterly newsletter send an e-mail with “subscribe” somewhere in the body to:

cameron.schaefer@gmail.com

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Friends,

**Total Reading Time: 3-5 min**

I hope this note finds you enjoying your Fall, my favorite time of year. It’s rare for me to send out a mass e-mail, but over the past few weeks I have had an idea bouncing around in my head that I just can’t shake, so I thought I would send it your way to get some honest feedback. Here it goes…

Two things in life that I really enjoy are: BOOKS and WINE.

I’ve been an avid reader my entire life, going through a book every week or two, and have recently begun to explore the fascinating and incredibly diverse world of wine.

Great writing and wine-making have a lot in common. Both are the work of an artist and require imagination, persistence, experimentation and love. The writer starts with a blank piece of paper, the winemaker with a vineyard and each must take the basic elements of his or her craft and turn them into something inspiring.

Since I enjoy exploring both books and wine so much, I thought it might be fun to let you in on my journey. After all, things aren’t nearly as fun unless you can share them with others.

My plan is to craft a quarterly e-mail newsletter highlighting some of the BEST books and wine I have experienced during that time. No fluff, just my honest opinion on what has really caught my eye and taste buds – what I’ve found worth sharing with my friends!

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If you’re already convinced this is something you would like to be a part of (I don’t think you’ll regret it), you can stop reading now and simply reply to this e-mail with the word “Subscribe” in the body of the e-mail. If you’re skeptical, but interested, continue reading. If you know right now this is NOT something you want to be a part of, no problem, don’t do anything – you won’t be e-mailed anything further (don’t worry, we can still be friends).

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So, for you skeptics, I love you guys because I am right there with you saying, “Sell me on this!” Here’s a few questions you might be asking:

“Cameron, you already have a blog, why don’t you just publish a quarterly blog post instead of sending out an e-mail newsletter? Aren’t those lame and old-school?”

I do have a blog and many of you are already subscribers, however, I’m looking at this newsletter as more of a supplement to my blog, an insider’s guide for a select audience. I subscribe to a few different e-mail newsletters and have found them very useful, even when written by people who already have a blog. This newsletter will be more personal and detailed than most of my blog posts since it will only be coming out 4 times a year and I will know exactly who will be reading it. Rest assured, the content of the newsletter will be completely original, not just a copy of previous blog posts.

“But Cameron, lately all you’ve been reading is books on war and politics, I don’t care about those things so why would I want book recommendations on them? Oh yeah, and don’t you just drink red wine?”

This summer I made it my goal to educate myself on warfare after realizing how little I actually knew, especially being a military officer. While I still plan on continuing that education, the initial blitz is over. I’ve already gotten back to reading books on a variety of topics from crime to gardening to aliens from Mars – both fiction and non-fiction. You can be confident that by signing up for this newsletter you’ll be receiving book picks covering a wide range of topics and genres.

The same goes for wine. I started out drinking red wine, mainly Merlot, simply because that’s what my dad drank for many years (all boys like to imitate their fathers) – however, I’ve since branched out. Part of the fun of exploring wine has been trying ALL KINDS from every corner of the globe, both Red and White (I’ve become a huge fan of Riesling and Viognier and Fume Blanc). If you’re expecting page after page of Napa Valley Cabernet Sauvignon or Washington Merlot you’re going to be disappointed. Hopefully I can introduce you to new wines a bit further from home, the ones you may have wondered about, but have always been to nervous to try. Bottom line: If you enjoy wine at all, there will be something for you in each newsletter.

“You’re not a wine expert, you just started tasting it a few years ago, why should I listen to you for which wines to try?”

The very fact that I’m not an expert helps ensure that my views on various wines will be completely independent, unique and untainted by relationships with those in the industry. Wine experts can often be so smart on wine that they leave the rest of us in the dust with their terminology and swagger. I’ll simply try a bunch of different wines and tell you what tastes good! Taste in wine is obviously very subjective, but I invite you to try out some of my picks. If you hate them you can let me know and unsubscribe at any time, no hard feelings.

In addition, I am continually seeking to learn more about wine, how it’s made, what makes some wines last decades and others a year or two, why the ’05 Bourdeaux has been so popular, etc. – as I pick up interesting tidbits of information I will pass them along to you with my recommendations.

So, are you convinced?! I hope so – I think too often we look to experts for recommendations on what to read and drink instead of the people we know and who know us. It’s my hope that I can provide you with some good book and wine picks each quarter and I hope you will send me yours as well. In the end, blogs, twitter, e-mail, etc. are only as good as the relationships they produce and enhance.

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If you’re ready to subscribe now, just reply to this e-mail with “SUBSCRIBE” in the body of the e-mail. No further information is required and you will begin receiving the newsletter as soon as it rolls off my fingertips. If you don’t want to subscribe, do nothing, you will not be e-mailed anything further.

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Thanks for giving me a slice of your busy day, I can’t wait to hear back from you!

-Cameron

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