Most Americans will say they are “for” racial equality. But to borrow a term coined by an American president decades ago, they (we) are the silent majority.

My sense is that many people want to “do” something beyond treating all individuals they encounter with dignity and self-worth.

That’s OK for most of us, but when someone is in a leadership position, not speaking up become silent ascent.

That’s why I was so taken by the remarks by Lieutenant General  Jay Silveria, the superintendent of the US Air Force Academy, who made a sharp statement to cadets after racial slurs were discovered on students’ rooms. This short video will make you think.

I’m a non-tech guy now working in a high-tech organization. Often, my head spins when I see the kind of technologies that are now changing our lives.

That’s why I was so taken by and article entitled, “Disruption Is the New Normal.” Here’s part of what the writer said:

On a trip over the holidays, my wife rolled her eyes when I realized we’d left the Garmin at home and said we’d have to get a GPS for the rental car. She pointed to the Google Maps app on her mobile phone and said: “I bet this works even better.” It did. We benefited from the kind of technological disruption that is great for consumers, but brutal for businesses trying to survive rapid change and perhaps impossible for government regulators trying to keep up.

A generation ago, the Rand McNally atlas was the state of the art in navigation. Then Garmin, TomTom and other innovators developed satellite-based GPS devices. But barely a decade later, Google added constantly updated navigation to its maps and made them easily accessible as an app on mobile phones for the unbeatable price point of zero. The market value of stand-alone GPS makers fell as much as 85%.

This is the radical new normal for business, according to authors Larry Downes and Paul Nunes. “Before the information age, conventional wisdom held that new markets were created from the top down,” they write in their new book, “Big Bang Disruption.” Analog-era business strategies have been disrupted. Business guru Michael Porter once told companies they could get competitive advantage if they picked one strategy among premium pricing, cost savings or focusing on market niches. In the 1990s, Clayton Christensen urged executives to overcome what he called the innovator’s dilemma by moving fast once newcomers entered markets with lower-quality, lower-priced products.

But powerful new technologies like cloud computing and big data allow entrepreneurs to develop products and services that are “simultaneously better, cheaper, and more customized,” Messrs. Downes and Nunes write. “This isn’t disruptive innovation. It’s devastating innovation.”

Intrigued? You can read the entire article here.

Most would agree that men and women are different. That notion is a bit of a no-brainer. And most would also agree that male writers and female writers bring different skills to the craft.

But for me, I never thought deeply about just what those differences were between male writers and female writers. That’s why I found a recent piece by Nicole Krauss, “Do Women Get to Write With Authority?” so intriguing. Here is part of what she shared:

On forms to be filled out in waiting rooms, I always hesitate over the question of occupation: writer or author? For years it was only writer; now it’s a question of mood. Writer forever has her work ahead of her. Author has already done it. Writer bears no great claim: Like anyone else, she is just scrabbling away at it, unsure, experimenting. Author comes with distinction, and the right to expect that she will be read. Now, though, I think the perceived honor of the word is wrapped up in “author” sounding like a chip off the granite block of authority.

Both “author” and “authority” evolved from the Latin “augere” — to increase, to originate — and expanded in “author” to be someone who invents or causes something. Which returns me to a question that bothered me to no end when I was younger: Who gives her the right? Or more like: How does she take it? How does she claim for herself the authority to increase or originate, or invent or cause something, such as a book that people will read?

Want more? You can read the full article here.

Lots of ink has been spilled on the idea of “The American Dream.” And there has been more heat than light on the subject. That’s why I found Peggy Noonan’s thoughts so enlightening. Here is part of what she said:

I want to think aloud about the American dream. People have been saying for a while that it’s dead. It’s not, but it needs strengthening. We should start by saying what it means, which is something we’ve gotten mixed up about. I know its definition because I grew up in the heart of it and remember how people had long understood it. The American dream is the belief, held by generation after generation since our beginning and reanimated over the decades by waves of immigrants, that here you can start from anywhere and become anything. In America you can rise to the heights no matter where and in what circumstances you began. You can go from the bottom to the top.

Behind the dream was another belief: America was uniquely free, egalitarian and arranged so as to welcome talent. Lincoln was elected president in part because his supporters brought lengths of crude split-rails to the Republican National Convention in Chicago in 1860. They held the rails high and paraded them in a floor demonstration to tell everyone: This guy was nothing but a frontier rail splitter, a laborer, a backwoods nobody. Now he will be president. What a country. What a dream.

Want more? You can read the full article here.

You know the stereotype – the computer nerd. He’s (it’s always a “he,” right?), writes the computer code that enables the digital devices that we now can’t live without.

But we don’t want to meet him. He’s a young guy with no social skills who’s a loner who doesn’t want to have contact with others.

That’s pretty much the opinion that I had, and that’s why I was so intrigued by a recent New York Times article, “Tech’s Damaging Myth of the Loner Genius Nerd.” Here’s part of what the writer had to say:

Interpersonal skills like collaboration, communication, empathy and emotional intelligence are essential to the job. The myth that programming is done by loner men who think only rationally and communicate only with their computers harms the tech industry in ways that cut straight to the bottom line.

The loner stereotype can deter talented people from the industry — not just women, but anyone who thinks that sounds like an unattractive job description. It can also result in dysfunctional teams and poorly performing products. Empathy, after all, is crucial to understanding consumers’ desires, and its absence leads to product mistakes.

Take digital assistants, like Google Home or Amazon Echo. Their programmers need to be able to imagine a huge variety of home situations, whether households with roommates or abusive spouses or children — as made clear when a child ordered a $160 dollhouse and four pounds of sugar cookies on the Echo.

“Basically every step is very collaborative,” said Tracy Chou, who was an engineer at Pinterest and Quora and is now working on start-ups. “Building a big software system, you could have dozens or hundreds or thousands of engineers working on the same code base, and everything still has to work together.” She added, “But not everyone is the same, and that’s where empathy and broader diversity really help.”

Want more? You can read the full article here.

Philip Roth is one of the most celebrated writers of our generation. Like many of us, I gobble up each one of his new books as soon as it is published.

That’s why I was intrigued by James Campbell’s review of Roth’s latest book, Why Write? And what writer among us wouldn’t want to read it. I did, and it was well worth the time.

Here is part of what Campbell said in his review:

Why write? In an interview with the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in 2014, four years after the publication of what he claimed would be his final novel, Philip Roth offered an oblique answer to the question that gives the title to this collection. “Writing for me was a feat of self-preservation. . . . It was also my good luck that happiness didn’t matter to me and I had no compassion for myself. Though why such a task should have fallen to me I have no idea. Maybe writing protected me against even worse menace.”

If Mr. Roth’s basic subject is me and my novels, the former is protective of the latter. An amusing 14-page letter to Wikipedia, titled “Errata,” sets out to correct the misrepresentations of his work that he found on the website. The first concerns the novel “The Human Stain” (2000), described in the Wikipedia entry at the time of writing (2012) as “allegedly inspired by the life of the writer Anatole Broyard. ” Broyard was a book critic for the New York Times, who, although African-American by heritage, passed in literary society for white (there is debate about how much of a secret his passing was). When Mr. Roth contacted Wikipedia to correct the misstatement that his novel was based on Broyard’s experience, he was told (through his “official interlocutor”) “that I, Roth, was not a credible source. ‘I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,’ writes the Wikipedia Administrator—‘but we require secondary sources.’ ”

Want more? You can read the full article here.

Quick: Think of a benefit of getting older. Are you stuck? I was, until something happened to me. I knew what it was, but couldn’t articulate it. Then veteran CBS correspondent came to the rescue with her article: “Grandbabies: The Great Reward.” Here is part of what she said:

Happy Mother’s Day to all us grandmothers [and grandfathers] we band of lovesick indulgers whose ability to say no seems to be disabled the day our grandbabies are born. We sneak them candy when Mom says no, we let them play on iPads, read them “Fancy Nancy” over and over … and over. We get out our wallets whenever they point to something and say, “I want dat.” Yup, that’s us. And it’s Grampa, too. Someone wise said, “If God had asked Abraham to sacrifice his grandson, he’d have said, ‘No way!’ ”

As a demographic, we have swelled into a giant bulge in the population. There are more than 27,000 new grandparents in the United States every week. Many are the “revolutionaries” of the 1960s and ’70s — the pioneer women who entered the white-collar work force. Well, now, 40, 50 years later, these same women are pioneers again, this time reinventing grandparenting.

One way is that we’re in our grandchildren’s lives more than ever before, whether from across the country thanks to Skype and FaceTime or as “granny nannies” — in some cases full time.

And my generation is spending more money on our grandchildren, 64 percent more than grandparents did just 10 years ago, doling out, for instance, roughly $4.3 billion a year on primary and secondary school tuition. We’re also spending on everyday needs like baby food, clothes and tricycles as well as big-ticket items like the crib, the stroller, a piano (that was me). We’re straightening their teeth when they get a little older.

Want more? You can read the full article here.

Few novelists have been as wildly successful as John Grisham. And unlike some writers, Grisham shares his secrets! Here are his first two suggestions:

1. DO — WRITE A PAGE EVERY DAY

That’s about 200 words, or 1,000 words a week. Do that for two years and you’ll have a novel that’s long enough.

Nothing will happen until you are producing at least one page per day.

2. DON’T — WRITE THE FIRST SCENE UNTIL YOU KNOW THE LAST

This necessitates the use of a dreaded device commonly called an outline. Virtually all writers hate that word. I have yet to meet one
who admits to using an outline.

Want the other six? You can read them here.

It has been a busy year from a writing perspective, embarking on a number of fiction and non-fiction projects. One thing that has made the work joyful, rather than drudgery, has been a super-supportive family, as well as a community that has embraced the arts in a positive way. Read more about the City of Coronado Cultural Arts Commission here: http://coronadoarts.com/

Probably the most exciting writing adventure this year has been joining Braveship Books. A creation of writers and entrepreneurs Matt Cook and Jeff Edwards, this new publishing imprint leverages emerging technologies in printing, distribution and communications to produce books in the action adventure, thriller and sci-fi and fantasy genres. You can read more about Braveship Books here: http://braveshipbooks.com/index.php.

Braveship Books has just published my first Rick Holden Thriller, the Coronado Conspiracy in both print and e-book versions.

Last month, Coronado Eagle-Journal reporter, David Axelson, caught up with me and captured my recent writing adventures. Want more? You can read the full article here.

Not everyone is comfortable with telling others, even family members, “I love you.” For those of us who are proud baby-boomers, it’s not something our parents were comfortable with.

I always wondered why this was. That’s why I was so taken by a New York Times article entitled: “My Dad’s Change of Heart.” Here is part of what the writer said:

“I love you.”

Those three simple words messed me up for an entire week. I asked my wife if she heard them, too, or if I was hallucinating. I couldn’t believe the man in front of me said them. It wasn’t the message, but the messenger: my father.

Who was this impostor? Could it be that this Pakistani-American immigrant, who grills halal lamb chops in boxers and sandals while listening to Sabri Brothers qawwali, had just said this to his almost-3-year-old grandson, Ibrahim?

I understand how fatherhood, and grandfatherhood, can profoundly change a man. The joyous burden forces some of us to adjust our career priorities, creates excessive anxiety for tiny people who don’t pay rent and inspires a lifelong goal of trying to become the only man in existence who looks cool driving a Toyota Sienna.

But this sentiment from my father was a drastic disruption of a life I had always known.

In my 36 years of existence, my parents have never said “I love you” to me or vice versa. We are not an “I love you” family. Years ago, my mother told me “I love you” was for “Amreekans” and “goras” (white people), which at the time were synonymous, until they realized South Asians and other immigrants had every right to claim the American label as well.

Want more? You can read the full article here.