Rapid change, accommodating it can be one of the great human capacities. But living through it can be the stuff of stress and often suffering.

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community?

Rapid change, accommodating it can be one of the great human capacities. But living through it can be the stuff of stress and often suffering.

Once they arrive, affirmative action kids are generally left to sink or swim academically. Brown (University) offers plenty of counseling and tutoring to struggling students, but, as any academic Dean will tell you, it's up to the students to seek it out, something that a drowning minority student will seek to avoid at all costs, fearing it will trumpet a second-class status.

Two sons, they'll both be presidents after they win their Nobel Prizes. And the daughters, they'll be prima ballerinas before they become the president of Princeton and start their Internet company. And I just started to think about What's the conventional load of those expectations you carry around? You have to pull them out one by one and smash them in the corner. You realize the pile is quite high. But in a way, it becomes oddly liberating to do that.

Wars tend to be very public things, they are visible. There are correspondents traveling with the troops and you get daily dispatches.

A little known area often defines the fortunes of leaders -- management skills.