“What this landscape is meant to look like”

Is It Too Late to Save the Southern Grasslands?

"…I recently went looking for the grasslands restoration projects newly established at Radnor Lake State Natural Area and Warner Parks, both in Nashville. With the spring wildflowers already bloomed out and the fall wildflowers still setting buds, July is not the ideal time to visit a grassland restoration site, but I was thinking about the buffalo — that magnificent creature we nearly drove into extinction but saved at the last minute — and I wanted to see some of the many restoration projects that are springing up here as awareness of what this landscape is meant to look like continues to grow..."

Margaret Renkl 

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/15/opinion/saving-southern-grasslands.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The Story of Philosophy's "splendid hallways"

One of my undergrad profs denigrated Will Durant's Story of Philosophy, but its "lush, well-constructed sentences" were part of what first drew me to take his class.

"If one grew up with the Book-of-the-Month Club, some corner of a book-shelved house remained forever The Story of Civilization, his eleven-volume, six-million-word chronicle written over half a century and coauthored in later years with his wife, Ariel. The club offered it for decades as an inducement to join, and sold thirteen million of them. An independent scholar who operated outside academe’s protections and won both the Pulitzer Prize (1968) and Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977), Durant jump-started then fledgling Simon & Schuster in 1926 with The Story of Philosophy, the all-time best-selling book about its subject if one excepts the Bible. It’s at least arguable that Durant’s maverick life and stimulating prose cross-fertilized each other.

Born in North Adams, Massachusetts, Durant headed to St. Peter’s Academy in New Jersey in his teens. At first a Catholic seminarian, he soon turned agnostic and socialist, got a job as a reporter at the New York Evening Journal, and merged his progressive interests with a passionate desire to bring the pageant of Western thought and culture to the masses... one wandered happily with Durant through his lush, well-constructed sentences, splendid hallways connecting gilded rooms in a Byzantine palace."

America the Philosophical" by Carlin Romano: https://a.co/bXO8jAC

Americana

It's been fun exploring the intersection of American life & culture with classic American philosophy, about which there's much to be said. "Wildness" runs deep in these barely-united states...


http://dlvr.it/T9WYnZ

Guts

Post by @reboomer

View on Threads

He also said: “If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to plan the day.”

An appalling place, lacking insight

Ray Kurzweil Still Says He Will Merge With A.I.

Now 76, the inventor and futurist hopes to reach "the Singularity" and live indefinitely. His margin of error is shrinking.

...He recalled a conversation with his aunt, a psychotherapist, when she was 98 years old. He explained his theory of life longevity escape velocity — that people will eventually reach a point where they can live indefinitely. She replied: "Can you please hurry up with that?" Two weeks later, she died.

Though Dr. Hinton is impressed with Mr. Kurzweil's prediction that machines will become smarter than humans by the end of the decade, he is less taken with the idea that the inventor and futurist will live forever.

"I think a world run by 200-year-old white men would be an appalling place," Dr. Hinton said. nyt

Well, unless we eliminate the threat of dementia (and patriarchy) first, maybe...

Racing to Retake a Beloved Trip, Before Dementia Takes Everything

My dad always remembered his childhood journey through Europe. Now, with Alzheimer's claiming his memories, we tried to recreate it.
by Francesca Mari

Your father has no insight,” a neurologist at the Memory and Aging Center at U.C.S.F. told me last year, after meeting him for the first time. Insight was defined by the psychiatrist Aubrey Lewis in 1934 as “the correct attitude to a morbid change in oneself.”

That sure sounds applicable to current political events.

“Insight” is something we’d like to think we can get from philosophy and expansive reading and reflection, but so much finally depends on neuro-physiology. And genes. And luck.

“the most hopeful form of patriotism”

Loving America Means Expecting More From It

"…In this country we have come to see patriotism as a positive account of our history that treads lightly upon the nation's sins. The Fourth of July in particular is a time to wrap ourselves in the flag, grill some meat and run through a playlist of songs with lyrics lauding Americana. Talking about slavery, Jim Crow, economic exploitation and what happened to Black soldiers after they finished their service ruins the vibes.

It costs nothing to sing along to "God Bless America." It requires much more to believe in a place that has failed you.

As an African American who speaks on anti-Black racism, I often hear the refrain, "If you hate America so much, you should leave." But I don't recount my grandfather's story because I hate America. I tell it because to omit stories like his would only hinder us from becoming a better country. On the other side of honesty is the possibility of change. For me, telling the truth is the most hopeful form of patriotism..."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/04/opinion/patriotism-july-fourth.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Independence Day

Self-reliance is a noble intellectual goal, it means thinking for yourself (not by yourself) and accepting responsibility for your presence and activity in the world.


http://dlvr.it/T97986

Stay curious

Like we were saying last night in our first Americana class, the great "sin" against Philosophy is stubbornly dogmatic incuriosity.

"In a world full of people who seem to know everything, passionately, based on little (often slanted) information... what a relief it is to be in the company of someone confident enough to stay unsure (that is, perpetually curious)."

Wonderful read from a wonderful mind: https://www.themarginalian.org/2023/04/09/george-saunders-uncertainty/

Americana

The subject of our course, like its musical namesake, is diverse and sprawling. It's an occasion to philosophize, and to sing along with John and other masters of the Big Tent genre.


http://dlvr.it/T8sMqj

Experience

"I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something."
Shelby Foote, who died on this day in 2005

The joy of morning/"Live because of the sun"

I don't call it god, but dawn is sacred. Or can be. It was for her, until it wasn't. She took her own life at age 45, in 1974. Her obit

Welcome Morning

by Anne Sexton

There is joy
in all:
in the hair I brush each morning,
in the Cannon towel, newly washed,
that I rub my body with each morning,
in the chapel of eggs I cook
each morning,
in the outcry from the kettle
that heats my coffee
each morning,
in the spoon and the chair
that cry "hello there, Anne"
each morning,
in the godhead of the table
that I set my silver, plate, cup upon
each morning.

All this is God,
right here in my pea-green house
each morning
and I mean,
though often forget,
to give thanks,
to faint down by the kitchen table
in a prayer of rejoicing
as the holy birds at the kitchen window
peck into their marriage of seeds.

So while I think of it,
let me paint a thank-you on my palm
for this God, this laughter of the morning,
lest it go unspoken.

The Joy that isn't shared, I've heard,
dies young.

"Welcome Morning" by Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton. © Mariner Books, 1999. Reprinted with permission. 

WA

 Her nyt obit concludes:

The poet, whose work was so largely devoted to the theme of death, gave to the last poem in “Live or Die” the title “Live.” It begins:

Well, death's been here for a long time . . .

And it ends: I say Live, Live because of the sun, the dream, the excitable gift.

The epitome of grace…what makes sports matter

What Willie Mays Meant

"… The value of sports, as the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen writes, is that, although the activities themselves may seem arbitrary or trivial—hit this ball into a pasture so far that it can't be caught, or then try to catch it—chasing such goals creates new paths of agency and aspiration for us to mimic inside ourselves. "Oh, the unruffled nonchalance of that game," was Roth's concluding remark about New York baseball in the forties and fifties. If we feel that nonchalance today when we watch Mays, it's because it models the possibility of being at once urgent and at ease, racing as hard as humanly possible to make the play, with the secret knowledge that you will, indeed, make it. That double pursuit, outwardly hard-charging and inwardly serene, is the epitome of grace in every human endeavor. (Just the other night, Connor McDavid showed, again, how it is done in hockey.) This is what makes sports matter. To borrow an image from Angell: all the rest of us do in life is run down uncatchable balls, drop them, and then pretend we haven't. That's why seeing one perfectly caught is so satisfying that we'll never stop watching it, even after the catcher has left center field for good."

 —Adam Gopnik

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/postscript/what-willie-mays-meant?utm_source=threads&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=tny&utm_social-type=owned

Space nerd

Kirk was right, we can fight our instinct for violence a day at a time. We can keep our feet on the ground as we reach for the stars. I was a kid when I first heard that--like Dani Poole.


http://dlvr.it/T8Yb41

Starry socks

 The socks tell the tale, with Younger Daughter's latest gift addition to my collection of stellar hosiery. Sock it to me?

I'll own it. I am a "big space nerd" (I prefer enthusiast) and have turned my wife into one too. We've been binge-watching Apple TV's "For All Mankind," with its alternative history premise that the Soviets got to the moon first. 

Commander Poole was just a few words into her soliloquy last night (Season 2,episode 9) when I cottoned  to its source: Star Trek, the original series. Season 1, episode 23. Kirk's concession, we're killers "but we're not going to kill today." I was watching the first time, back in '66. The message still seems right. Lots of humanoids still need to hear it.

 

The show has been awfully kind to Ronald Reagan, so far at least, making him out to be more the peace-loving statesman than I think real history will allow. But he had his good days, as actors will.

==

Postscript. Meanwhile, far removed from more serious concerns like violence, war, death-dealing, and resisting our worst instincts, the Times reports that the younger generations are having a stupid public snit on social media about sock styles. These are the people who are supposed to reassure us that humanity is not doomed?

This I believe

I finally found a credo at the Southern Baptist church I could wholeheartedly embrace.


http://dlvr.it/T8SHXr

Just write

He was a graceful writer and stellar reviewer. He was an inspiration in how he dealt so gracefully with catastrophic late-life health crises, too.

"Just write, get better, keep writing, keep getting better. It's the only thing you can control."
Roger Ebert, born on this day in 1942

https://www.threads.net/@reboomer/post/C8WtpQ7udpi/?xmt=AQGzgil-iv9blp74Mjnu3ND3Fp0QBFoFgg7N4AkdaTq7SA

Fathers Day

Younger Daughter again makes it special.


http://dlvr.it/T8PpbX

“a sense of the future… a direction”

Edward Stone, 88, Physicist Who Oversaw Voyager Missions, Is Dead

"…[Space exploration] provides us with a sense of the future. When we stop discovering new things out there, the concept of the future will change. Space reminds us that there is something left to be done, that life will continue to evolve. It gives us direction, an arrow in time."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/science/space/edward-stone-physicist-dead.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

John Kaag's A.I. experiment

Now You Can Read the Classics With A.I.-Powered Expert Guides
Margaret Atwood and John Banville are among the authors who have sold their voices and commentary to an app that aims to bring canonical texts to life with the latest tech.

For the past year, two philosophy professors have been calling around to prominent authors and public intellectuals with an unusual, perhaps heretical, proposal. They have been asking these thinkers if, for a handsome fee, they wouldn't mind turning themselves into A.I. chatbots.

John Kaag, one of the academics, is a professor at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. He is known for writing books, such as "Hiking With Nietzsche" and "American Philosophy: A Love Story," that blend philosophy and memoir... (nyt, continues)

“Rage?” No, but...

"Rage, rage against the dying of the light…" Dylan Thomas

The poet wrote that when he was 33, drank himself to death at 39--this is not the perspective of a mature older person who's grasped and accepted the human condition.

--

But, I learned shortly after posting that this morning, the 28-year old daughter of a dear friend who married in April and is the soul of kindness has just discovered that she's hosting an advanced brain tumor. Emergency surgery imminent. 

Rage in such an instance would not be misplaced, if there were any agency to lodge it with or against.

Natural causes

They're coming for us all. Presence, living well today, is the only sure safeguard we can rely on.


http://dlvr.it/T85bks

Ben knew

A large-scale study of sleep behavior finds that regardless of your body's preferred bedtime, everyone benefits from turning in early. 💤

https://www.threads.net/@stanford/post/C70aGyeNHeH/?xmt=AQGzV_VgyqL38_ZuPnnIExeC8l-5861S19EJUcjggNOhnQ

toxic positivity

"Optimism has real health benefits, but the idea that we should always look on the bright side has led to a tidal wave of "toxic positivity". What's to be done?"

https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg26234940-200-why-excessive-positivity-is-bad-for-your-health-and-mental-well-being/

Reach for the tonic alternative.

Every day is doomsday

"filled with opportunity"=possibility, chance, ameliorative potential

"All of us might wish at times that we lived in a more tranquil world, but we don't. And if our times are difficult and perplexing, so are they challenging and filled with opportunity."
Robert Kennedy, mortally wounded on this day in 1968 following a victory in the California primary

https://www.threads.net/@reboomer/post/C71O-J2uHlo/?xmt=AQGzGHAd-_fB5wIQztl1zzn96SjkoehRMdrheKOXjSHV4A

A blow to the head

"I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? . . . A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief."
Franz Kafka, who died on this day in 1924*

My impulse is to say that's the statement of someone with very low self-esteem… but then when I think about it, most of my favorite books ARE knocks upside the head. Most recent example: American Bloods by John Kaag…

* https://www.threads.net/@reboomer/post/C7wF0WUO0w2/?xmt=AQGz2ptWoc-E5dYl2LH_2BcL-1ZIyy31oHiCUHEPDP-ofg

Decoration

They still do this, out in the rural Tennessee countryside: gather at the family cemetery, first Sunday in June, to place flowers on the graves and remember the ancestors. A pretty spot to spend eternity, "most of it tucked under" as Annie Dillard said.

There's a nice essay by Margaret Renkl this morning in the Times on re-reading Dillard's classic Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, as good a paean to the tonic of wildness and rebuke to"civilization" as Walden.  "The world is wilder than that in all directions, more dangerous and bitter, more extravagant and bright..."

Sweet

 Who brings donuts to her family on her birthday? Only the very most special and considerate people...

 

Happy anniversary from the bard

31 years ago today-

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments; love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove.

O no, it is an ever-fixèd mark

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wand'ring bark

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come.

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

    --Shakespeare, Sonnet 116

 

 

Butterfly in the sky

We watched this great new documentary last night. Wish I coulda shared it (again) with Older Daughter.

Reading Rainbow was a big part of the best years of my life, c.'95-'02, when I got to spend my days with our daughters in their most impressionable years. We'd watch the show and then go find the books at the old Bellevue public library (before or after playing at the Red Caboose Park* next door).

I used to sing the song with them a lot, too. 🎵"I can go anywhere... I can be anything..." 🎵

 

LeVar's later podcast is also great. In the last episode's epilogue he tells us to "keep looking up." Great advice at any age. But you don't have to take my word for it. 

 

*UPDATE, 5.30.24. Unsettling coincidence: on the day I mentioned our good old times at the Red Caboose Park, this (I learned this morning) also happened: 

Teenage boy killed, sister injured in Bellevue park shooting

A 15-year-old male is being charged in the shooting, according to MNPD. https://www.wsmv.com/2024/05/30/teenage-boy-killed-sister-injured-bellevue-park-shooting/

 In gun-besotted America, there are no innocent and protected places of play anymore. The victim was 13.

Sane advice

"Be a good steward of your gifts. Protect your time. Feed your inner life. Avoid too much noise. Read good books, have good sentences in your ears. Be by yourself as often as you can. Walk. Take the phone off the hook. Work regular hours."

 
--Jane Kenyon, born on this day in 1947

Otherwise...

Four physicists

 and at least one philosopher.

Einstein, Hideki Yukawa, John Wheeler, and Homi Bhabha in Marquand Park, Princeton, N.J, 1954.

“It gives me great pleasure, indeed, to see the stubbornness of an incorrigible nonconformist warmly acclaimed.” – On receiving Lord & Taylor Award, 1953.

• “At least once a day, allow yourself the freedom to think and dream for yourself.”
• “I thought of that while riding my bicycle.”
• “Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth”
• “It seems to me that the idea of a personal God is an anthropological concept which I cannot take seriously. I also cannot imagine some will or goal outside the human sphere."
• “I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a God who concerns Himself with the fate and the doings of mankind." -to Rabbi Herbert Goldstein (1929)
• "Science has been charged with undermining morality, but the charge is unjust. A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death.”
• “I don't try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, insofar as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.”
• “Do not grow old, no matter how long you live. Never cease to stand like curious children before the Great Mystery into which we were born.”
• “Now he has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”
• “Strange is our situation here on Earth. Each of us comes for a short visit, not knowing why, yet sometimes seeming to divine a purpose. From the standpoint of daily life, however, there is one thing we do know: that man is here for the sake of other men - above all for those upon whose smiles and well-being our own happiness depends.”

"The Northern Lights I Did Not See" (the cosmic light I did)

I didn't either, nor did I bother to point my phone at them. It's the sort of experience that needs to be unmediated. But that un-diminishing sense of smallness, the sense of scale that elevates the mind and heart can be got at second-hand. It's the cosmic perspective.

"…I felt small, which I expected to feel, and untroubled by my smallness, which I did not. Standing beneath the open sky, pondering an event that was happening so far away as to be incomprehensible, reminded me again of my own infinitesimal role within a system whose magnificence even the most brilliant of my kind can understand in only the meagerest measure — if only briefly, such moments have a way of making my earthly worries seem more manageable…" —Margaret Renkl

Elbert Hubbard's morning mantra

“Dwell on the beauty of life. Watch the stars, and see yourself running with them.” —Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

BUT, Marc evidently did NOT say…

Epictetus, the Roman slave, and Marcus Aurelius, the Roman Emperor, taught a similar gospel: “When you arise in the morning think on what a precious privilege it is to live – to breathe – to think – to enjoy – to love! God’s spirit is close to us when we love. Therefore it is better not to resent, not to hate, not to fear. Equanimity and moderation are the secrets of power and peace.” Elbert Hubbard, “The New Thought”

Hubbard (no relation to L. Ron) allegedly also said:

• “The greatest mistake you can make in life is to be continually fearing you will make one.”
• “Every man is a damn fool for at least five minutes every day; wisdom consists in not exceeding the limit.”
• “Happiness is a habit—cultivate it.”
• “Know what you want to do, hold the thought firmly, and do every day what should be done, and every sunset will see you that much nearer the goal.”

Britannica bio...

An American original

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fERNixxZXqM

But can it philosophize? (Rhetorical question)

"A student shares his iPad screen with OpenAI's new AI model GPT-4o, and the AI speaks and helps the student learn in real-time.

The world just changed forever. Every student will now have his own personalized tutor."

[ 🎥: @openai ]

https://www.threads.net/@evolving.ai/post/C666S8sIYCw/?xmt=AQGzBf4B58Hj1X6DZw8sqUQ3tlMkhr-5x2eoWvCMkBZ4Ag

Possibilism & hope

"…I share the view that a Trump election would pose immense damage to American political and legal systems. But in the scientific world we would continue to move forward with new vaccines for breast cancer, new drugs to combat obesity and new CRISPR gene-editing techniques to treat sickle cell and other diseases.

How can we weigh democratic decline against lives saved through medical progress? Of course we can't. As my intellectual hero, Isaiah Berlin, might say, they are incommensurate yardsticks — but that does not mean that they are irrelevant to our well-being.

And no one can accuse me of ignoring the problems that beset us at home and abroad, for they have been my career. They've left me a bit too scarred to be a classic optimist. Hans Rosling, a Swedish development expert, used to say that he wasn't an optimist but a possibilist. In other words, he saw better outcomes as possible if we worked to achieve them. That makes sense to me, and it means replacing despair with guarded hope.

This isn't hope as a naïve faith that things will somehow end up OK. No, it is a somewhat battered hope that improvements are possible if we push hard enough.

In 2004 I introduced Times readers to the story of an illiterate woman named Mukhtar Mai, whom I met in the remote village of Meerwala in Pakistan. She had been gang-raped on order of a village council, as punishment for a supposed offense by her brother, and she was then expected to disappear in shame or kill herself. Instead, she prosecuted her attackers, sent them to prison and then used her compensation money to start a school in her village.

Instead of giving in to despair, Mukhtar nursed a hope that education would chip away at the misogyny and abuse of women that had victimized her and so many others. Then she enrolled the children of her rapists in her school.

Mukhtar taught me that we humans are endowed with strength — and hope — that, if we recognize it and flex it, can achieve the impossible."

Nicholas Kristof 

Chasing Hope

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/opinion/journalism-reporting-progress.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Reasons to Have Hope

"More than three-quarters of Americans saythe United States is headed in the wrong direction. This year, for the first time, America dropped out of the top 20 happiest countries in the World Happiness Report. Some couples are choosing not to have children because of climate threats. And this despair permeates not just the United States, but much of the world.

This moment is particularly dispiriting because of the toxic mood. Debates about the horrifying toll of the war in Gaza have made the atmosphere even more poisonous, as the turmoil on college campuses underscores. We are a bitterly divided nation, quick to point fingers and denounce one another, and the recriminations feed the gloom. Instead of a City on a Hill, we feel like a nation in despair — maybe even a planet in despair.

Yet that's not how I feel at all.

What I've learned from four decades of covering misery is hope — both the reasons for hope and the need for hope. I emerge from years on the front lines awed by material and moral progress, for we have the good fortune to be part of what is probably the greatest improvement in life expectancy, nutrition and health that has ever unfolded in one lifetime..."

Nick Kristof

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/09/opinion/journalism-reporting-progress.html

HDT (and WJ & Frank Bascombe) on words

But he'd still agree: Life and reality cannot and must not be reduced to "talk, talk, talk! ...words, words, words…"

"A written word is the choicest of relics. It is something at once more intimate with us and more universal than any other work of art. It is the work of art nearest to life itself."
Henry David Thoreau, who died on this day in 1862

 

It’s gonna take way more than a day

"Saturday, May 4, is the National Day of Reason!

With Christian nationalist influence in Congress, and with the threat to our judiciary looming large, it has never been so important to affirm our commitment to the constitutional wall of separation between religion and government, and to celebrate reason as the guiding principle of our secular democracy. Learn more"

https://www.nationaldayofreason.org/about

The Holdovers

 We saw this last night. Good message for all teachers, especially those on the edge of burnout. Young people really are our future. We need to prepare them for it. And trust them.

Hoping for a sea-change

My mostly-retired philosopher pals, having (like my semi-retired minister pal) too much time on their hands, started another too-early-in-the-day text thread.

The discussion of academic presidents who are also humanities scholars led one of us to say "there won't be many Shakespeare scholars in [U.S.] presidential suites in the future..."

That led me to point out that POTUS likes to quote Seamus Heaney:

History says, don't hope
On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.

So hope for a great sea-change…

Another of us said that's pretty highbrow.

And someone said something about Ted Lasso.

So I said Heaney's not so highbrow (Joe's definitely not), his poem can be rephrased in Ted Talk:

"So I've been hearing this phrase y'all got over here that I ain't too crazy about. 'It's the hope that kills you.' Y'all know that? I disagree, you know? I think it's the lack of hope that comes and gets you. See, I believe in hope. I believe in belief."

Ted's pretty wise:

"What I can tell you is that with the exception of the wit and wisdom of Calvin and Hobbes, not much lasts forever."

But he's a highly improbable sort of coach, apart from being hired to lead a professional English football club when his only experience is High School (American) football:

"For me, success is not about the wins and losses. It's about helping these young fellas be the best versions of themselves on and off the field."

Nick Saban said that too, said my pal the 'bama fan. But of course his alums had a different notion.