Ron Suskind
Ron Suskind
Ronald Steven "Ron" Suskind is a Pulitzer Prize winning American journalist and best-selling author. He was the senior national affairs writer for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000 and has published the books A Hope in the Unseen, The Price of Loyalty, The One Percent Doctrine, The Way of the World, Confidence Men, and his memoir Life, Animated: A Story of Sidekicks, Heroes, and Autism. He won the 1995 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for articles in the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth20 November 1959
CountryUnited States of America
Choose your words meticulously and then let them rumble up from some deep furnace of conviction.
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.
If you happened to be born on third base, you didn't rub it in the face of the guy who wasn't even born in the stadium. Self-interest was generally checked at the door with your coat and hat.
Younger colleagues tended to draw untested self-confidence from their bonuses and prestigious degrees.
We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we'll act again, creating new realities ... we're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.
I think that there's a lot of anxiety out there in people wanting their children to be part of the mainstream, to achieve based on the well-worn yardsticks.
Summers was simply a master explainer, able to deftly boil down the complexities of economic and financial, and to put them in terms the non-expert could understand. He was brilliant at cultivating a sense of control, even as events spun far beyond what could be managed with any certainty. He could will into being the confidence that eluded others, those less self-assured and, maybe sensibly, on humbler terms with the world.
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.
These were lobbyists—many of them compensated quite handsomely not to react as human beings.
You try to hold on to some notions you might have had before, that this will somehow work out, this is a spell that will lift or be broken.
The key is to put your outrage in a place where you can get it when you need to, but not have it bubble up so much, especially when you're asked to explain new ideas or explain what you observed two people who share none of your experiences.
Reaching out to any fellow ghetto kids is an act he puts in the same category as doing drugs: the initial rush of warmth and euphoria puts you on a path to ruin.
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.
Many years later, a psychiatrist friend of mine said something to us. He said, "Respect denial." It's a powerful force.