According to clinical psychologist, Meg Jay, the “defining decade” is your twenties. In her new book by the same title, Jay does her best to expel the now socially accepted theory that “thirty is the new twenty.” Having worked with hundreds of twentysomethings in her practice over the past ten years, Jay weaves together personal stories of her clients with findings of other psychologists, sociologists, neurologists, reproductive specialists, human resources executives and economists. From the introduction:

Our cultural attitude toward the twenties is something like good old American irrational exuberance. Twenty-first-century twentysomethings have grown up alongside the dot-com craze, the supersize years, the housing bubble, and the Wall Street boom… [a]dults of all ages let what psychologists call “unrealistic optimism”-the idea that nothing bad will ever happen to you-overtake logic and reason. Adults of all backgrounds failed to do the math. Now twentysomethings have been set up to be another bubble ready to burst.

Being a twentysomething myself, I’m not sure if I buy into the assumption that I am a “bubble ready to burst,” but I can certainly empathize with the notion that twentysomethings are set up to be “too big to fail” and then get lost in the endless possibilities of being young and having everything ahead of them.

Jay sets the book up in three sections- “Work,” “Love,”  and “The Brain and the Body.” The first two sections on Work and Love contain individual accounts of twentysomethings who met with Jay after seeking counseling for each respective subject area of their lives. The third section on “The Brain and the Body” actually explains the neuroscience of the twentysomething brain and its physical development:

By the time we reach our twenties, the brain has gotten as big as it is going to be, but it is still refining is network of connections. Communication in the brain takes place at the level of the neuron, and the brain is made up of about one hundred billion of these, each of which can make thousands of different connections. Speed and efficiency are paramount and are the hard-won result of two critical periods of growth.

The two critical periods of growth occur in the first eighteen months of life and then again in our twenties (which is a fact I was completely unaware of.) Jay concludes the book with sound advice for making a timeline and “Doing the Math” about the reality of future prospects for a twentysomething. Time is a concept that a lot of twentysomethings do not realize has a huge impact on their later lives, and Jay has written a sound work of non-fiction that drives this point home without being too preachy or condescending. I recommend this book for any upcoming college graduates you may know who could use an easy-to-read book of advice for the future.

The Defining Decade by Meg Jay, Ph.D  (Twelve Press, 2012)

by Anna

This book has been in my “to read” stack for quite some time. Typically, if I find that other books keep leapfrogging a particular book, I’ll realize that I’m just not that interested in reading it and I have no problem setting it aside. For some reason, Play Their Hearts Out stuck around. I’d read too many good reviews and too many recommendations to abandon it. I think it’s time.

Yes, baseball has started, but we’re nearly a month in and the excitement of the new season has waned a bit as we settle into the long grind of the regular season. Meanwhile, the NBA playoffs have started after a bizarre shortened season, so what better time to read a good basketball book?

But this book isn’t about NBA millionaires, nor college athletes. The subject is youth basketball, specifically the AAU leagues where all of the very best young players face off. These aren’t school-affiliated teams; these are teams constructed solely for the purpose of developing and promoting the most promising young talent. You can imagine the effect this has on the style of play; AAU games are notoriously devoid of defense, and the offensive strategies tend to highlight individual ability rather than passing and teamplay.

As a result, AAU leagues have received widespread blame for the decline in the quality of basketball at the college and professional level. The best players aren’t receiving solid fundamental instruction at an early age, so goes the argument. There’s some legitimacy to this line of thinking, but it understates the problem. It’s bad that young talented players are learning bad basketball habits; it’s indefensible that these same players are being roped in by coaches, promoters, and shoe companies, and then discarded when their future dims in comparison to their peers. One bad injury, one bad decision — and all the promises are yanked away.

If you want to understand the current state of basketball, read this book.

I love reading debut authors and Kieran Shields does not disappoint with his novel, The Truth of all Things.  He has written a fantastic historical thriller that combines the best of both worlds at least for me, a ‘Sherlock Holmes like’ detective and a serial killer.  Y’all know I love a good MURDER or two or three!!

Deputy Marshal Archie Lean is called to the scene of what is assumed to be another killing of a prostitute until he arrives and sees that the victim”s body has been place in a very stylized way.  The body has been placed in the shape of a pentagram and the murder weapon is a pitchfork which has pinned the body to the ground.  After doing some investigating Archie learns that death by “sticking” is an old traditional way to kill a witch.  When he learns this and being that it is 1892 in Portland, Maine, 200 years after the Salem Witch Trials and the mayor really putting the pressure on to sweep this crime under the carpet,  Archie secretly calls in some help, Dr. Virgil Steig, Helen Prescott, a historian, and Perceval Grey, a criminalist and Pinkerton detective.

I don’t want to tell too much because I found this book extremely fun to read.  There were a few times that I thought I had figured it and would turn the page to realize I was completely wrong.  Also this was the first book I have read in a while that I found myself extremely drawn to every character.  I was worried about them when “danger was lurking around the corner” and I loved the fact that the characters were unsure of each other.  They all have very distinct personalities and are skeptical of each others methods of crime solving which added to the tension especially while following the killers trail through “opium dens, the spiritualist societies and lunatic asylums of Gothic New England”.

If you are looking for a good read for vacation travel time or just sitting on the porch with a glass of iced tea this is it!!

Dear Listener,

I recently stumbled into a book club with my coworker Ellis.  Although we are still waiting to discuss it, we both read Outer Dark by Cormac McCarthy.  Every time I read Cormac McCarthy I go into a non-fiction marathon.  After reading any book by Cormac McCarthy, I can’t really stomach fiction for a while.  It is after reading McCarthy when I read culture books and science books and history books.  I began by ordering a book about time travel and a book about fascism.  As I waited I pushed through John Jeremiah Sullivan’s Pulphead.  (You can see Anna’s blog on Pulphead here.)  It was then I stumbled upon the recent book by science writer Carl Zimmer called Science Ink.  The synopsis on the back cover is such:

In 2007, writer Carl Zimmer began noticing that more and more scientists were sporting science tattoos.  Fascinated, he reached out via his blog, “The Loom,” and began to receive a steady stream of tattoo images, along with compelling personal stories about the designs.  In Science Ink, Zimmer has collected more than 300 of these thought-provoking tattoos.  Expanding on the stories of each one, he deftly explores the science behind the ink and reveals the passions and obsessions of science lovers around the world.

I think my interests in the book have changed.  I first opened it up to flip through it, curious of the tattoos. In that sitting, I just scanned the tattoos, which are all incredibly interesting.  It was my second trip through the book that really grabbed my interest.  I realized that most of these people are brilliant.  With tattoos.  Not vagrants or criminals, but scientists.  What is more interesting is how Zimmer “expands on the stories.”  While reading through it, he is actually covering hundreds of subjects that relate to science and mathematics.  Here is an example from one of my favorites:

Ben Ewen-Campen, a graduate student in evolutionary biology at Harvard, sports a “DNA ladder.”  The ladder is produced by electrophoresis, a technique used to analyze DNA molecules.  The tattoo is made with black-light-sensetive ink, glowing in the ultraviolet just like real DNA in some electrophoresis kits.  “The fact that it looks like a barcode from a futuristic dystopic society is an accident,” he writes.

Most of the tattoos are creatively beautiful.  Even without color, they are so interesting, they are still beautiful.  A  tattoo of fulvic acid is another one of my favorites:

I got this tattoo as an homage to the pain of my graduate work,” writes Corey Ptak.  “It’s a model of fulvic acid, which is a representation of natural organic matter in the soil.  I work with this molecule for my grad work, and I figured I might as well get it etched into my skin so I can look at it and say, ‘Well, ate least it hurt less that grad school at Cornell.'”

A tattoo of a dodo belongs to Cecilia Hennsessy who is working on her Ph.D. in wildlife population genetics.  The H2O molecule belongs to Jerry O’Rourke measures and predicts stream flow.  Dirac’s equation belongs to Melinda Soares who studied physics at the University of California, Ssanta Cruz.  Anastasia Gonchar is getting her Ph.D. in chemical physics at the Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society in Germany, and she has a tattoo of pi orbitals.  It seems like every entry is like this.  Some of the science is very advanced, but much like tattoos, Zimmer holds no pretension.

Whether you consider every person with a tattoo a vagrant or a criminal, maybe they’re just a scientist.  Or a doctor.

by Simon