#did you not get a sense of my critical thinking skills during the nine thousand other interviews

[wickedhawtwexler]

one more interview and then i'm freeeeeee

[mirekat]

Gutting a Book: on Grad School, Fanfic, and Relearning to Read

Had some intense fandom feelings so I did an essay about it. 

There’s a lot of debate out there about whether or not writing fanfiction makes you a better writer, but what I’ve found most striking over the past year is how reading fanfiction has made me a better reader.

As with any trainee historian, a huge proportion of my life is given over to reading. Monographs, articles, my students’ essays, conference proposals or cover letters when I’m on departmental committees—they’re all words on a page and on a good day I’ll spend hours working with them. But these words are means to an end, not an end in themselves. And the sheer volume of words demands a specific approach to reading. In history patois, the term for this approach is ‘gutting a book.’ I’ve always cringed at the image—too reminiscent of childhood fishing trips—but it’s accurate enough. You learn from other grad students how to parse an argument from a book’s introduction, conclusion, subheadings, a few quotes and maybe a longer block of a chapter that’s directly pertinent to your dissertation. And that’s it. A corpus rendered into digestible parts. There’s no time to immerse yourself in texts when you’ve got 300 of them to process before your qualifying exams.

So I’ve become, of necessity, very good at gutting a book. That’s not inherently a problem: it’s a skill that’s made my big messy interdisciplinary dissertation possible. But somewhere along the way I lost not just the capacity, but the desire, for sustained engagement with text-in-itself. First I stopped reading poetry, then I mostly stopped reading fiction. When I did pick up a novel I was impatient with it, skidding around the twists and turns of plot. A far cry from my Bloomsbury-groupie undergraduate self, who would linger over pages thinking about words.  

Enter The Plague, and, shortly thereafter, Star Trek fanfiction. With the city closed, teaching all online, and, during the summer, a sharp uptick in the intensity and anxiety of my activist life, it was the perfect time for me to develop an obsession with Deep Space Nine. And when I felt like the narrative on the screen was wearing thin, I headed over to AO3 for more. That was where I began relearning how to read—to read gently, carefully, not trying to capture something but to connect.

There are a few factors at play, I think, in why fanfiction was able to foster this kind of attention. To begin with, I had a preexisting relationship to the world and its characters. Starting a new ‘original’ novel or short story, I’d always catch myself waiting for the author to explain why I should care—a habit that springs from the version of my advisor that lives in my head, Metis-like, hammering on the question but how does this contribute to the historiography? That critical impulse, and the goal-directed reading practice it feeds, was blunted by my visceral commitment to the Trek universe. Desire (in multiple senses of the word) was a given.

The patience that came with desire, in turn, freed me up to focus on craft—an aspect of text that’s carved out and discarded in the process of ‘gutting.’ For someone like me, with a limited attention span, the concise, momentary quality of many fics encouraged the kind of reconnection that’s necessary for describing prose. I’d tear through a thousand-word story the first time I read it, but something about it would catch on me—an image, a turn of phrase—and I’d feel compelled to go back and revisit the scene. And why not? A thousand words is nothing, in grad school terms. Bite-sized. Only the second time, knowing I’d gain nothing new from tearing through it again, I’d end up observing it instead, noticing how the words that had hooked me connected to other words, and wondering why that was, and wondering if the author had anticipated my responses and if it mattered whether or not they had. Eventually I was thinking about the play of sounds themselves, their tactility, words on the tongue. Reading again, the way I used to do.  

And yet that kind of analysis wasn’t the end point of my relearning how to read. I take a lot of pleasure in it still, but I also realize it reflects the impulse that demands I justify (to my advisor, to ‘the historiography’) any time spent with words. By this logic, time reading fanfiction isn’t wasted if the fic is��good, and if I can explain why it’s good in terms half-remembered from high school English Lit.

Except I don’t only read fics I can justify in those terms. I don’t only enjoy fics I can justify in those terms. And the more I’ve accepted that I’m not reading fic in order to practice for ‘work’ reading, the more I’ve let myself read. I spend time with stories because they make me laugh, or they get me off, or—this is especially the case with trans readings of Trek characters—because they reflect something about my own way of being in the world that I want to see more of. To be clear, this isn’t to say I can’t find these stories elsewhere. Of course not—I’m a queer trans historian myself, writing a dissertation about queer trans life which, I hope, will be gutted in its turn by other queer trans grad students. But I want more. I want more stories about existing while queer and trans. I want more stories about fucking while queer and trans. I want iterative, derivative queer and trans stories, schools and shoals of them, combining and recombining in unexpected ways; I want stories that are impossible to gut because there’s too much of them or because their shape is totally unfamiliar and I can’t even begin to guess where the guts would be. I want stories that don’t try to justify their existence to me, because they don’t have to—because they exist to answer a different reader’s raw desire for more.

That’s what I mean when I say fanfiction has made me a better reader. Not just that it’s helped me find the patience to form relationships with texts, not just that it’s helped me relearn how to tease out the intricacies of prose, but also that it’s helping me let go of the idea that words are only worthwhile if they are useful. There’s utility in gutting a book, but there’s violence too. And there’s something about reading a stranger’s fic, reading it for what it is, that feels both precious and surprising—like a bright thing in the water, silver flickering briefly under your fingertips and then gone. Maybe you’ll find it again. Maybe you won’t. But it’s out there, and it exists for itself, and that’s reason enough to keep reading.  

[jacewilliams1]

Dealing with distractions

“In the event you find yourself distracted, focus!” There is a certain hilarity in that statement, if one allows it to congeal in between the ears. If you are distracted, how do you know you are distracted, since distraction has got you trapped in its realm?

To illustrate that point, let me tell you a real happenstance that occurred recently. On a clear day when the blue was all blue and not a spot of moisture hung in the air, I decided to get three more instrument approaches under my belt to keep the currency in my proficiency, current. Tagged with a copilot (of many thousand hours in various Air Force jets and large aluminum-bodied airliners) sitting beside me, I donned the “foggles” and off we went, severing the surly bonds.

Instrument skills quickly atrophy.

It was immediately apparent to anyone inside the aircraft, and probably those on the ground looking up, that I was a bit rusty. It took all of 10 minutes to clear those phugoid oscillations that were human-induced and had nothing to do with aircraft aerodynamics or forces of nature. The lesson was quite stark: the moment practice ceases, and the effort becomes an object of striving, it becomes subject to unhealthy distortions. Hence, constant practice makes imagination the object of cognition, where one can foresee the immediate future to a related input, rather than constantly trying to catch up and overshoot.

As time would have it, the yaw damping finally and reluctantly happened and the non-turbulent air we were voluntarily bucking in became non-turbulent. My safety pilot let out a soft sigh, and I heard it loud and clear. No words needed to be said.

But that was not going to be the end of it. I had requested the RNAV approach to Runway 31 into ACY and that had been granted by ATC. Vectoring a long downwind over water was not my favorite thing, especially at 2000 feet, but the controller had control. My safety pilot, probably seeing my struggle, suggested I use the flight director to make it easier on myself. Hmm… he must really think I stink at this instrument thing, I thought.

So, I pressed the FD button on the Garmin box and the command bars dutifully popped up on the primary flight display. I protested that using FD is akin to cheating. But, I thought, since the rust was defining itself in large patches, why not? I surmised that flying the flight director would make it easier on me and might impress him a bit. I figured the sharper sense of discomfort would quickly interweave with the bliss of past expertise and render my inadequacy moot. The sense of this relatedness was short-lived, however.

I had the command bar pegged to the FD and was sailing along towards the final approach fix. I dutifully pulled the manifold pressure to 18 inches, RPM was at 2400, and the airspeed slowed to a comfortable soft drone. The aircraft steadily hurtled along the quiet path and I started feeling on top of my game again as the multi-function display peeled away the blue water behind and dragged in the green below us. Everything seemed whole again. My currency had aligned itself with proficiency.

The final approach fix came and I kept flying the flight director, enamored and comforted by the ease of automation. Another mile went by and I realized that I had failed to put the gear down at the final approach fix. Oops. So I did. I heard a distinct throat clearing from across the aisle. Damn, I thought, this was a terrible exercise in progress. I needed to fix this quick.

Mumbling my displeasure at my own actions, I resolved to be more precise. That expanding idea. The resilient thought. The continuous play of motion in a three-dimensional universe made all the more real the initial collapse of action. The desire to fix what had been broken ceased upon my nerves and now my multiple thousand hours melted away and I felt I was back in training. A certain drift of scent that emanates from failure hit me square in my nostrils and I realized that the glide path indicator had drifted down to the lower end, in accordance with a required missed approach. Damn! Tracing across over the expansive countryside at race-car speeds without the object of arriving the destination in airline fashion was getting worse by the minute.

“It’s a missed approach!” I croaked.

Flight directors are very helpful, but only if you push the right buttons!

“Yes,” is all my copilot said as I flew over the runway at 1500 feet.

What happened? It was all I could think about. Common sense and reason eventually unveiled causality, as they did.

First let me quarry the marble out of this flight and sculpt a phoenix from it.

Distraction was the all-encompassing natural beast that had membered itself to my mental capacities. The suggestion of using the flight director, when pushed by itself, will register stability in the pitch and roll mode only for the current flight path according to Garmin. If I had pushed other buttons, as I should have done when flying the autopilot—namely the approach mode button—then the FD would have taken me through the vertical descent as well. Automation has its, “If This Then That” moments and linearity of thought and action is what the black boxes seek from the pilot in conducting their affairs. None were apparent here, cobbled together in a ball of a single fixated distraction.

Total dependence on automation without careful monitoring-with-expectation is like tranquilizing oneself with certitudes of hope. Imagination as cognition means to look at the forecast future from any action undertaken. A cluttered mind fails to register intentions akin to throwing pebbles in a stormy sea. Distractions clutter the mind and simple but necessary actions go unheeded.

Looking at accidents and incidents related to approach and landing distractions,

72% are acts of omission

63% are acts of crew lack of coordination

52% are due to loss of situational awareness

45% are due to slow reaction

All of these were in force at that RNAV approach I detailed above. All of them!

And factors related to such events are:

Communications in 50-68%

Head down activity 22%

Response to anticipated activity or situation 14-19%

Again, all these factors were also at play in the above scenario. My total abdication of authority to the use of the FD without the anticipated need for additional inputs caused the missed approach.

How could it have been better?

Sterile cockpit technique and not heeding to the use of FD during the vectoring phase without briefing myself.

Using a checklist for the type of approach.

Monitoring and scanning all data rather than fixation only on the FD.

Number 3 is of importance since our brains function to the laws of recency. We are asked to repeat instructions to ATC to ensure a) we heard the correct instructions and b) we remember to input the instructions correctly in the black boxes. The short term memory lasts in the short term memory banks for 15-18 seconds. Repeating the instructions fortifies them for a bit longer. Otherwise we resort to “Say again.” In this case the suggestion to use the flight director at the last minute was the culprit that brought the entire universe of thoughtful actions to a halt.

We must remember that the human mind is filled with disquieting gaps of the daily life that fill in constant distractions. Achieving the purpose at hand requires clarity of mind and focus. To keep distractions at bay, secure a sterile cockpit and use checklists to bring back the required focus.

To illustrate the dangers of said distractions, here are a few facts and real-life examples:

A study found that children using cell phones are 43% more likely to be hit by a vehicle while crossing the street than children who are not using cell phones.

A 25% increase in pedestrian injuries among 16- to 19-year-olds over the last few years is being attributed to the increase in cell phone use.

Statistics show that texting and driving is three to four times more dangerous than operating under the influence of alcohol or drugs.

Two Northwest ­Airlines pilots flew 150 miles past their destination at Minneapolis while going over schedules using their laptop computers.

A Teterboro tower controller, during a Piper’s departure, was “engaged in a bantering personal phone call about a dead cat while directing traffic.”

A phone conversation was implicated in the Hudson midair collision between a tour helicopter and a Piper Lance that killed nine people.

A few thoughts to keep in mind:

Conversation is a powerful distracter… keep it to a minimum.

“Head-down tasks” during flying are distracting, especially in IFR conditions.

Defer all non-critical activities.

Consider any interruption as a “red flag.”

The post Dealing with distractions appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2020/04/dealing-with-distractions/

[yes-dal456]

A Modest Proposal: Mr. President, Get Some Sleep

Donald Trump’s first week as president of the United States is in the bag, and what a week it’s been. He came in promising to be an unconventional president, and on that score he’s delivered. But in another sense, he’s off to an all too conventional start. Whether he recreates America’s greatness remains to be seen, but in the meantime, what he seems to be recreating is the chaotic Bill Clinton White House. Of course they’re miles apart politically. But what Trump is recreating is the Clinton working process — complete with all of its feverish, frantic, late-night, sleep-deprived chaos.

Let’s go back and look at the Clinton White House. Clinton came in bragging about his style of burning the candle at both ends and that’s exactly the M.O. he imported into the White House with—as we know—disastrous impulse control and decision-making consequences. “Perhaps because his father died before he was born, President Clinton was keenly aware of the fleeting nature of his time in office,” Paul Begala, one of Clinton’s advisors, said. “He seemed to believe that sleep was overrated.”

Whatever the origins, right from the beginning Clinton seemed to treat sleep as a political opponent to be resisted and defeated. In his book Eyewitness to Power, David Gergen, long-time advisor to several presidents, including Clinton, described those early days. “Clinton was still celebrating the victory and loved staying up half the night to laugh and talk with old friends,” Gergen wrote. “The next morning, he would be up at the crack of dawn to hit the beach for an early run or perhaps a game of touch football.”

This style of working was not without consequences. “He seemed worn out, puffy, and hyper,” Gergen wrote. “His attention span was so brief that it was difficult to have a serious conversation of more than a few minutes.” At one point, Gergen tried to give the president some gentle advice — which was, after all, what he was hired to do. “In a short encounter with Clinton, I tried to say gently that the presidency is a marathon, not a hundred-yard dash, and I hoped he would have a chance for some downtime in the three weeks still remaining,” Gergen wrote. “I don’t think I registered. . . . Those who saw him in his first weeks at the White House often found him out of sorts, easily distracted, and impatient.” Sound eerily recently familiar?

Of course it went way beyond the first few weeks. And it also had a spillover effect, because when the president doesn’t sleep, neither does anybody else around the president. “My wife and I, we had the official phone right next to our bed,” Bill Richardson, Clinton’s energy secretary and former governor of New Mexico, said. “And whenever it was after 1 a.m., it was President Clinton. And he did it quite frequently.” Not surprisingly, it even became an issue with Richardson’s wife. “I remember some of those late phone calls my wife would turn over in bed and say ‘Oh my God,’” said Richardson. “We put the phone in another room and I’d lock the door so she wouldn’t hear.”

And despite its considerable downsides, this way of working never really changed. As Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala said, by the end of the eight years, with the soon-to-depart President Clinton frantically eager to address overlooked policy proposals, she began sleeping with her massive briefing books right next to her bed, ready for the inevitable late night calls. “I was numb the last two weeks,” Shalala said.

How big of an effect did this have on Clinton’s presidency? His first week was dominated by his clumsy handling of the gays-in-the-military issue, which earned him criticism from those on both sides of the aisle. And according to Gergen, this way of working “planted seeds that almost destroyed Clinton’s presidency.” Bill Clinton himself later acknowledged “every important mistake I’ve made in my life, I’ve made because I was too tired.”

And Hillary Clinton might make the same admission one day, given that it was on the same night that she refused to rest after having been diagnosed with walking pneumonia that she made one of her worst mistakes of the campaign — calling Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.”

And now let’s look at Trump’s first week. Here’s a handy summary of it — in a series of nine tweets — by The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman:

A few final thoughts on the weekend/first few days. Trump had less than 4 hours sleep on Saturday, when he woke up and, at about 7 am., 1/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

... started calling advisers and aides angry about the @BCAppelbaum RT by parks, accusing media of being out to get him. Trump's worst 2/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

...impulse control is when he's tired or overstretched, or in an uncertain situation. All three took place Saturday. Trump is unable 3/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

...to let go of any grievance or perceived slight. And he is genuinely transfixed by people thinking his election isn't legit. He is 4/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

...as his advisers say often, at his most self-destructive when the stakes are high (see post-primary, post-convention, debates) and 5/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

...has historically been the one who most undercuts himself. He is also driven by desire to be treated seriously/with respect. For the WH 6/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

...the idea was that people would be around him who knew him or knew DC or could calm him. The more time ppl spend w Trump, the more they 7/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

...tend to adopt his mindset about how he is treated. Not all aides thought Spicer jeremiad was a bad idea. But all shared view POTUS 8/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

...was being treated poorly. by press. None could get him to move past the feeling of injury, to focus on the enormity at hand. 9/9

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

And perhaps the reason the aides “tend to adopt his mindset” is because they’re also forced to adopt his sleeping habits.

And now we’ve learned that on his first morning as president of the United States, Trump personally called acting National Park Service director Michael T. Reynolds and ordered him to come up with photos of the inauguration crowd that would counter the media’s reporting that the size of the crowd had been smaller than that of President Obama’s. Asked about the call, deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it is just the result of President Trump’s style of being “so accessible, and constantly in touch.”

In fact, the decision to make that call, and bizarrely keep the issue going for the entire first week of his presidency, seems to be more the result of President Trump being almost constantly awake with his executive functioning impaired. (Highly recommended that the White House staff, if not the president himself, read the McKinsey study on the impact of sleep deprivation, excerpted in the Harvard Business Review).

And by the end of the week, he was still up at all hours, tweeting and intensifying his feud with Mexico at 5:51 a.m.:

The U.S. has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with Mexico. It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2017

of jobs and companies lost. If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2017

It’s not much of a surprise, given that Trump has long regarded sleep as just another adversary to be dominated into submission. “You know, I’m not a big sleeper,” he said during a campaign rally in Illinois. “I like three hours, four hours. I toss, I turn, I beep-de-beep, I want to find out what’s going on.”

And many of his campaign’s most divisive moments came in the middle of the night or early morning. The attack on Megyn Kelly? 3:53 a.m.

I really enjoyed the debate tonight even though the @FoxNews trio, especially @megynkelly, was not very good or professional!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2015

 The attack on Alicia Machado? 5:30 a.m.

Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2016

So in effect he told us he wasn’t going to be sleeping much, and he’s keeping that promise. But this is one of the many promises he should consider breaking. The science and data on sleep are as clear as the photos of inaugural crowds. And ignoring the former might account for his irrational beliefs about the latter. There are, of course, thousands of studies on this, but to cite just one, here are the results from a study on the effects of sleep deprivation from the Walter Reed hospital:

RESULTS: Relative to baseline, sleep deprivation was associated with lower scores on Total EQ (decreased global emotional intelligence), Intrapersonal functioning (reduced self-regard, assertiveness, sense of independence, and self-actualization), Interpersonal functioning (reduced empathy toward others and quality of interpersonal relationships), Stress Management skills (reduced impulse control and difficulty with delay of gratification), and Behavioral Coping (reduced positive thinking and action orientation). Esoteric Thinking (greater reliance on formal superstitions and magical thinking processes) was increased.

It’s like a summary of President Trump’s first week. Just look at what happened on day three. According to The New York Times, Trump opened his meeting with House and Senate leaders on Monday by restating his claim that 3 to 5 million “illegals” had voted in the election, denying him his rightful victory in the popular vote. He backed this up with a strange taleabout former professional golfer Bernhard Langer. In Trump’s telling, Langer, a German native living in Florida, was denied the right to vote at his polling place, even though others in line, who looked to be from Latin America, were allowed to cast provisional ballots. But according to Langer’s daughter, her father couldn’t have voted anyway. “He is a citizen of Germany,” she said. “He is not a friend of President Trump’s, and I don’t know why he would talk about him.”

And now the president says he’ll soon sign an order for a full-fledged investigation of these supposed 3 to 5 million votes.

Esoteric thinking, formal superstitions, magical thinking — not exactly traits you want in a president. And whether you voted for him or not, it’s now in everybody’s interest — it’s in our national security’s interest — that he begins to charge his phone in another room and gets a good night’s sleep. We of course have no control over the president’s sleeping habits, but we do have control over our own. And as we’re headed into a very bumpy week two and beyond, we need all the calm, clear-headedness, and resilience we can muster.

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from http://ift.tt/2jB3fz2 from Blogger http://ift.tt/2kEUMs7

[imreviewblog]

A Modest Proposal: Mr. President, Get Some Sleep

Donald Trump’s first week as president of the United States is in the bag, and what a week it’s been. He came in promising to be an unconventional president, and on that score he’s delivered. But in another sense, he’s off to an all too conventional start. Whether he recreates America’s greatness remains to be seen, but in the meantime, what he seems to be recreating is the chaotic Bill Clinton White House. Of course they’re miles apart politically. But what Trump is recreating is the Clinton working process — complete with all of its feverish, frantic, late-night, sleep-deprived chaos.

Let’s go back and look at the Clinton White House. Clinton came in bragging about his style of burning the candle at both ends and that’s exactly the M.O. he imported into the White House with—as we know—disastrous impulse control and decision-making consequences. “Perhaps because his father died before he was born, President Clinton was keenly aware of the fleeting nature of his time in office,” Paul Begala, one of Clinton’s advisors, said. “He seemed to believe that sleep was overrated.”

Whatever the origins, right from the beginning Clinton seemed to treat sleep as a political opponent to be resisted and defeated. In his book Eyewitness to Power, David Gergen, long-time advisor to several presidents, including Clinton, described those early days. “Clinton was still celebrating the victory and loved staying up half the night to laugh and talk with old friends,” Gergen wrote. “The next morning, he would be up at the crack of dawn to hit the beach for an early run or perhaps a game of touch football.”

This style of working was not without consequences. “He seemed worn out, puffy, and hyper,” Gergen wrote. “His attention span was so brief that it was difficult to have a serious conversation of more than a few minutes.” At one point, Gergen tried to give the president some gentle advice — which was, after all, what he was hired to do. “In a short encounter with Clinton, I tried to say gently that the presidency is a marathon, not a hundred-yard dash, and I hoped he would have a chance for some downtime in the three weeks still remaining,” Gergen wrote. “I don’t think I registered. . . . Those who saw him in his first weeks at the White House often found him out of sorts, easily distracted, and impatient.” Sound eerily recently familiar?

Of course it went way beyond the first few weeks. And it also had a spillover effect, because when the president doesn’t sleep, neither does anybody else around the president. “My wife and I, we had the official phone right next to our bed,” Bill Richardson, Clinton’s energy secretary and former governor of New Mexico, said. “And whenever it was after 1 a.m., it was President Clinton. And he did it quite frequently.” Not surprisingly, it even became an issue with Richardson’s wife. “I remember some of those late phone calls my wife would turn over in bed and say ‘Oh my God,’” said Richardson. “We put the phone in another room and I’d lock the door so she wouldn’t hear.”

And despite its considerable downsides, this way of working never really changed. As Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala said, by the end of the eight years, with the soon-to-depart President Clinton frantically eager to address overlooked policy proposals, she began sleeping with her massive briefing books right next to her bed, ready for the inevitable late night calls. “I was numb the last two weeks,” Shalala said.

How big of an effect did this have on Clinton’s presidency? His first week was dominated by his clumsy handling of the gays-in-the-military issue, which earned him criticism from those on both sides of the aisle. And according to Gergen, this way of working “planted seeds that almost destroyed Clinton’s presidency.” Bill Clinton himself later acknowledged “every important mistake I’ve made in my life, I’ve made because I was too tired.”

And Hillary Clinton might make the same admission one day, given that it was on the same night that she refused to rest after having been diagnosed with walking pneumonia that she made one of her worst mistakes of the campaign — calling Trump supporters a “basket of deplorables.”

And now let’s look at Trump’s first week. Here’s a handy summary of it — in a series of nine tweets — by The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman:

A few final thoughts on the weekend/first few days. Trump had less than 4 hours sleep on Saturday, when he woke up and, at about 7 am., 1/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

... started calling advisers and aides angry about the @BCAppelbaum RT by parks, accusing media of being out to get him. Trump's worst 2/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

...impulse control is when he's tired or overstretched, or in an uncertain situation. All three took place Saturday. Trump is unable 3/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

...to let go of any grievance or perceived slight. And he is genuinely transfixed by people thinking his election isn't legit. He is 4/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

...as his advisers say often, at his most self-destructive when the stakes are high (see post-primary, post-convention, debates) and 5/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

...has historically been the one who most undercuts himself. He is also driven by desire to be treated seriously/with respect. For the WH 6/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

...the idea was that people would be around him who knew him or knew DC or could calm him. The more time ppl spend w Trump, the more they 7/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

...tend to adopt his mindset about how he is treated. Not all aides thought Spicer jeremiad was a bad idea. But all shared view POTUS 8/

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

...was being treated poorly. by press. None could get him to move past the feeling of injury, to focus on the enormity at hand. 9/9

— Maggie Haberman (@maggieNYT) January 25, 2017

And perhaps the reason the aides “tend to adopt his mindset” is because they’re also forced to adopt his sleeping habits.

And now we’ve learned that on his first morning as president of the United States, Trump personally called acting National Park Service director Michael T. Reynolds and ordered him to come up with photos of the inauguration crowd that would counter the media’s reporting that the size of the crowd had been smaller than that of President Obama’s. Asked about the call, deputy White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders said it is just the result of President Trump’s style of being “so accessible, and constantly in touch.”

In fact, the decision to make that call, and bizarrely keep the issue going for the entire first week of his presidency, seems to be more the result of President Trump being almost constantly awake with his executive functioning impaired. (Highly recommended that the White House staff, if not the president himself, read the McKinsey study on the impact of sleep deprivation, excerpted in the Harvard Business Review).

And by the end of the week, he was still up at all hours, tweeting and intensifying his feud with Mexico at 5:51 a.m.:

The U.S. has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with Mexico. It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers...

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2017

of jobs and companies lost. If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2017

It’s not much of a surprise, given that Trump has long regarded sleep as just another adversary to be dominated into submission. “You know, I’m not a big sleeper,” he said during a campaign rally in Illinois. “I like three hours, four hours. I toss, I turn, I beep-de-beep, I want to find out what’s going on.”

And many of his campaign’s most divisive moments came in the middle of the night or early morning. The attack on Megyn Kelly? 3:53 a.m.

I really enjoyed the debate tonight even though the @FoxNews trio, especially @megynkelly, was not very good or professional!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2015

 The attack on Alicia Machado? 5:30 a.m.

Did Crooked Hillary help disgusting (check out sex tape and past) Alicia M become a U.S. citizen so she could use her in the debate?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2016

So in effect he told us he wasn’t going to be sleeping much, and he’s keeping that promise. But this is one of the many promises he should consider breaking. The science and data on sleep are as clear as the photos of inaugural crowds. And ignoring the former might account for his irrational beliefs about the latter. There are, of course, thousands of studies on this, but to cite just one, here are the results from a study on the effects of sleep deprivation from the Walter Reed hospital:

RESULTS: Relative to baseline, sleep deprivation was associated with lower scores on Total EQ (decreased global emotional intelligence), Intrapersonal functioning (reduced self-regard, assertiveness, sense of independence, and self-actualization), Interpersonal functioning (reduced empathy toward others and quality of interpersonal relationships), Stress Management skills (reduced impulse control and difficulty with delay of gratification), and Behavioral Coping (reduced positive thinking and action orientation). Esoteric Thinking (greater reliance on formal superstitions and magical thinking processes) was increased.

It’s like a summary of President Trump’s first week. Just look at what happened on day three. According to The New York Times, Trump opened his meeting with House and Senate leaders on Monday by restating his claim that 3 to 5 million “illegals” had voted in the election, denying him his rightful victory in the popular vote. He backed this up with a strange taleabout former professional golfer Bernhard Langer. In Trump’s telling, Langer, a German native living in Florida, was denied the right to vote at his polling place, even though others in line, who looked to be from Latin America, were allowed to cast provisional ballots. But according to Langer’s daughter, her father couldn’t have voted anyway. “He is a citizen of Germany,” she said. “He is not a friend of President Trump’s, and I don’t know why he would talk about him.”

And now the president says he’ll soon sign an order for a full-fledged investigation of these supposed 3 to 5 million votes.

Esoteric thinking, formal superstitions, magical thinking — not exactly traits you want in a president. And whether you voted for him or not, it’s now in everybody’s interest — it’s in our national security’s interest — that he begins to charge his phone in another room and gets a good night’s sleep. We of course have no control over the president’s sleeping habits, but we do have control over our own. And as we’re headed into a very bumpy week two and beyond, we need all the calm, clear-headedness, and resilience we can muster.

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from Healthy Living - The Huffington Post http://huff.to/2jIzWIj