The 2026 US Open begins tomorrow. We may still see a one-hander in the semifinals this year, keeping the streak alive. It doesn’t matter. There are so few of them now, and so few coming up, that it may become extinct at the pro level.

A few days ago, Roger Federer was asked about why the one hander is dying out. He gave many of the standard reasons: it is harder, it takes time, the balls, the strings, the rackets, the courts. But the one that stood out to me was how he was taught almost exclusively by one handers.

That is my story too.

Tennis has always been a family sport. My uncles in Mexico loved to watch it when I was young, and I watched along with them. The first match I ever watched on my own was a Wimbledon final. Borg and McEnroe.

Watching tennis growing up was always a study in polar opposites. Lefty against righty. One hand against two. McEnroe at the net, Borg back behind the baseline, retrieving.

Then it became Sampras and Agassi. Agassi the two-handed counterpuncher. Sampras the net rusher, the one-hander, the more flamboyant of the two in style if not in personality.

And then the apex of the sport. Federer and Nadal, the 2008 Wimbledon final, into the dark. Fourth set tiebreak. Nadal held match point and came to the net behind a ball to cross-court to the righty’s backhand. Federer passed him down the line, a shot that started outside the singles sideline sailed back into the court and landed in the corner.

Every one of those matches I rooted for the two-hander. That was the one I loved, because of the counterpunching style.

Ironically, I play with one, not with two. Now I watch the highlights and reminisce about the beauty of the one-hander.

Maybe it was because of my uncle Luis Enrique Corpi. He started out in soccer, a local star in San Luis Potosi as a junior soccer player. In tennis he found true love. My uncle was good, much better than me. He hit a compact one handed backhand. Clean, reliable, like clockwork. His favorite shot. It still is.

Mine was not as natural. It took a while to take hold. Over time I kept working on it. Hours on the wall, one backhand after another. I read tennis magazine articles to see how to improve it. It became my badge of honor. The shot that defined everything for me. Touch, placement, brute force.

Today I can just blast it. Preparation, acceleration, and then watching the other person when I hit it. As my buddy Mike Mason said, you’re punching that guy and he doesn’t even know it.

It’s supposed to be a defensive shot. I have never thought of it as defensive. I’m always holding back, because what I want to do is rip it. When I do, it’s the most satisfying thing in the world.

When my children began to play, my oldest daughter Kiara chose a two-handed backhand. She never thought twice about it. I never thought twice about teaching her a one-hander. I remember how she would throw herself into it. She wound up naturally, two hands on the grip, coiled her body, then unwound, and the ball went where she wanted it to. We hardly worked on it. It was so natural. To this day she still hits it.

My son was different. He liked his two-hander when he was young, but as he got older he began to slice more. One day at thirteen he said he was going to hit a one-hander as well. I let him. His one-hander was a beast of a shot. He would accelerate and the ball would go over the net, not like mine, not flat. His was oval shaped. It would feel like it was going four or five feet over the net and then land inside the line. On his high school team, where he was the only one-hander, and at tournaments, where he was often the only one-hander, people asked him why he was hitting the lob with his backhand.

That’s how much it had. That’s how high it floated. It was beautiful.

When my son and I went to Paris, to Bercy, to watch the Masters in 2015, there were two one-handers in the quarterfinals. Gasquet and Wawrinka.

Gasquet would literally unload on every backhand. Huge, long, beautiful windups, and then boom. Every so often you’d sit there and watch him wind up and hit one down the line, and Andy Murray, his opponent that night, would just stare back at him knowing there was nothing he could do.

Then the final match of the night. Nadal against Wawrinka. The lefty hitting the big topspin who tortured so many one-handers, against Wawrinka, the king of the one-handed backhand. Perhaps the best backhand of this century and of the last one too.

On the last point of the match, Nadal came running to the net. He approached Wawrinka’s backhand as he always does. Attack the backhand. And Wawrinka hit a ripper, tons of topspin, that landed right at Nadal’s feet. Nadal missed the half volley into the net.

They went up to shake hands. Two right hands meeting. The shield was never a shield. It was a reverse hammer.

After the winter, after Paris, Bercy, Nikolas and I had to move indoors to play tennis until the spring. We would play on the indoor courts at ten at night, when all the regulars had finished their work on the court. I remember vividly standing there practicing my one-handed backhand. Me as a righty. Him as a lefty. Hitting one after the other. Mirror images of each other.

Then came Kamille. Nine years younger than Kiara. Six years younger than Nikolas. We taught her the two-hander and she was young and she hit it well. Then at twelve she began to do something funny. She began to separate her hands. At some point she said it just doesn’t feel right to me, can I try with one hand.

I said sure. But you have to realize it isn’t going to be really good for about four or five years. That’s a long time.

She looked at me and said okay. She didn’t seem to mind.

So we set her off with the one hand. She sliced quite a bit and her slice was good. It kept her in the point. She could lob and she had a lot of touch. The topspin was harder. It took longer to develop. The coordination of a one-hander requires several body parts. It is not the easiest coordination. But we kept at it and eventually she mastered it and developed a very nice one-handed topspin backhand.

In the entire time she played, tournaments and high school tennis, from about the age of ten to the age of eighteen, we saw one other girl play with a one-handed backhand.

One.

People would come up and tell me she’ll never get a college scholarship playing with one hand. I said maybe. Perhaps they were right. In the end it wasn’t about her getting a scholarship for playing college tennis. It was about her choice, and about us following it to the end.

I still remember one day Kamille was playing a match and the girl started to come into the net. Kamille unloaded on a backhand down the line. It was explosive. Her coach looked over and said “now that’s a backhand.”

When I asked Kamille about it, she said oh, that was too crazy. A wild shot.

I thought, interesting. That’s exactly why I love it.

Recently there have been storm clouds on the horizon.

Google, the ability to search information quickly. Coursera, the ability to deliver information at a distance. Zoom, the ability to teach at a distance and meet at a distance without having to be physically in the same place. And AI, the ability to outsource our thinking. Each one of those has been a threat to the university.

The world got swept up by Coursera. Everyone thought this would be the end of the university. When people can take a class at Stanford online, why go to Stanford? It didn’t turn out that way. Universities continued, and they all taught classes as they had before. Then Covid came and everything went online. What had been a cute footnote back in the day of Skype became a way of life. Convenient, efficient, but also isolating and lonely.

Then AI. The writing and thinking machine. A tool better than Grammarly, better than Excel, better than R. That now people think threatens the university once more.

It’s already been happening for fifteen years.

About fifteen years ago, I realized that every time I would give a take-home exam to graduate students, I would get back the same exact answer. Students have been trained really well. It was the era of Google. They could search information quickly. Get that information, synthesize it, put it together, and produce a response. What then became the task was to get around that. To get around the search for information. I’ve written a bit about this when I reflect on the fact that Minerva University started this trend in 2012. They began to ask what we should learn at all. If information is a search away, the question is no longer what to know. The question is what is worth knowing. And so with Google, I feel like we were already there. The ability to access information quickly, synthesize it, and produce text. Although it was the person’s own text, it was no longer the text that I felt had been produced before Google search appeared.

So I adapted. I asked my graduate classes to work on papers, to work on projects. I shifted this approach into my undergraduate electives. It worked beautifully. We wrote at least two papers that ended up being published.

But now with AI, even that bar may be too low. In my undergrad classes, the larger lecture types, I’ve essentially gone to reflections, in-class exams by hand, Scantrons for multiple-choice questions and handwritten answers for open questions. I should call that what it is. A retreat. In the large lectures I could not find a way through, so I went backwards.

But we can’t pretend there is no AI. It has a function in the modern classroom. So this semester, in my graduate seminar on cognitive neuroscience, we’re going to deal with it head on. We will use What Is Intelligence?, by Blaise Agüera y Arcas. He is a vice president at Google. That is not lost on me.

We will also use Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, the textbook I’ve used by Mark Johnson for the last ten years. In our class I will ask, and I will work, using AI to help determine how our interests align with this course and with the readings. We will use AI to brainstorm, to help us bring our thinking into line, and to query AI about how well it can do in terms of helping us write something that I hope will be a publishable piece.

How many pieces? What shape will it take? I don’t know. I’ve done this over and over again, and every time I’m surprised by what comes out when you take lots of different people and put them together.

This semester our class will be on cognitive neuroscience. It will ask what I’ve always asked, which is how does the brain relate to thinking and how does our thinking relate to the brain. But this time we’ll do it from the vantage point of considering how AI works. Our class will be on understanding intelligence, but to do that we will actually use artificial intelligence as a tool.

What I’ll learn, what will come out, I’m not sure exactly yet. But I’m very curious to see what happens when we fully embrace AI in a graduate-level seminar, when we query it and use it openly.

For the past twenty-six years of this century, it feels like one innovation after another has transformed and changed the way I teach. Each one has reduced the number of repetitive tasks. Each one has pushed the human element further forward. I no longer treat students as a repository of information. I treat them as producers of information, and as producers of their own learning. That has been the adaptation.

Despite all these changes, there’s one thing that remains. There’s still something magical about putting humans together in the quest for new knowledge. That is the buzz of the new year. That still excites me.

One difference mattered more than the rest. In one house the TV was on a lot. In the other there was no TV.

I was about nine years old. My dad and my stepmother Yolanda had moved to graduate student housing. One day the TV broke. My dad said what if we just didn’t buy a new one. Yolanda, surprisingly, went along.

My mom lived in Oakland. She loved TV and still does. The TV would run Jeopardy. Wheel of Fortune. On Saturdays, Love Boat and Fantasy Island. Every kind of show she loved. The Rockford Files. McCloud.

My dad had a theory about this. He always said TV was the perfect medium for modern society. You had friends who came over once a week for an hour or half an hour. You would laugh with them and cry with them. Their lives became your lives. But then you just turned them off. You didn’t have to help them when they were sick or worry about an accident. That meant you were free to work more efficiently. It was essentially the industrialization of friendship and relationships. It filled the gaps for a mom who worked as a school teacher, was a writer on the side, and still found time to care for me.

At my dad’s house it was completely different. I played outside with my friends. There was always music and conversation at home. Graduate student housing was very safe. Most kids spent their afternoons and well into the evenings out playing with others.

Oakland was not as safe and so many times we retreated indoors when it got dark. The TV filled the time and space. It may even have protected me from spending too much time outside.

When I went to high school I moved to Santa Monica with my dad and Yolanda and my brother Luciano. We still didn’t have a TV. I spent the entirety of high school, at least during the school years when I lived there, without one.

I never felt deprived.

The memories of the social richness of that time are so vivid and so real. Sometimes I had an existential problem. A girl I liked and didn’t know how to talk to. My dad and I would spend hours spread out over several days, sometimes even weeks, going back and forth, plotting how I might get her attention. And once I did, what it all meant.

Today I realize I was raised the way tech executives now raise their children. Decades before they did it. My dad got there by accident. The TV broke. Then he got there by conviction.

The New York Times ran an article the other day noting that the children of those who work in the tech industry are often deprived of the very thing the tech industry produces. Social media. Software. Computers. They don’t even watch that much TV. Their parents want them to be children. Other reporters have argued the ban is overstated, that most tech executives send their children to well-funded public schools where screens are very much allowed. But Peter Thiel’s ninety minutes a week is on the record.

My dad, in his own way, already understood that we were entering a world of informational abundance. What I call today the informational singularity. Cable TV gave way to the internet and then to social media and now to AI. Our informational consumption has gone from sparse periods of gluttony to ensure survival to excess through unmoderated consumption. Just like it did for food.

The funniest thing would happen when people asked him if he had seen a certain show or watched a certain event on TV. He would let people know that he didn’t have a TV. Most people’s face would just turn pale, as if they were embarrassed. They would then immediately blurt out “well, we mostly watch PBS.”

The tech executives see it too. Although I wonder whether the tech executives’ intentions are not similar to the PBS watching populations of years past. Everyone watched TV but professed not to. Maybe the tech sector does a similar thing with social media and smart phones. Regardless, they recognize the problem.

I am writing this helped by a tool built by one of the companies I am describing.

I suspect that very soon the courts will see it too. Slowly but surely, social media, AI, the internet, video games will start to get restricted little by little, in the way that cigarettes were.

In this future that I imagine, the courts will do the work, with help from lawyers motivated by lucrative settlements. The public good arrives as a byproduct. The return of our human interactions. Not all at once and not for everyone.

Cigarettes are the right precedent for that part too. Smoking fell. It fell furthest and fastest among people with money and more slowly with everyone else. Nobody legislated thinness. Thinness sorted by who could afford it and it still does. Today GLP-1s may be achieving what legislation did in a previous generation.

Today a childhood without screens is a luxury. It requires a place where children can play freely out of harm’s way.

My dad’s theory ran its course. TV industrialized friendship. AI industrializes the father on the sofa, helping work out a teenager’s problems

My hope is that in fifty years an adult my age will once again remember how it is to spend an entire hour talking to his dad about how to get a girl’s attention.

And then several more hours figuring it out what it meant, when he finally did.

I sat down with the fragments and started moving them around.

That’s the part nobody talks about. How to stitch together disparate ideas. A dozen fragments floating around without any idea how to make them cohere into something anyone would understand. I try one as the opening and it slowly fades. I try another and the whole thing morphs into something visible. Suddenly the shape I couldn’t imagine an hour earlier becomes obvious.

I move them with the model. I say what I think this is, it says back what it thinks I said, and the gap between those two is the work. Output becomes input, which changes the output, which changes the input and so on. The loop needs something on the other end of it. A blank page never answered me once. It just stared at me.

Laura Zarrow has published a piece on the Generative AI Studio at Wharton, and Ethan Mollick shared it. Zarrow is a former art school dean who now runs the labs there, and she built the Studio with Chris Callison-Burch, a computer scientist at Penn. Her argument is that generative AI is a creative medium, and that a medium gets taught the way art schools have always taught one. The studio. The critique. The charrette.

I read it and recognized my own week. To me writing with AI feels like painting.

She arrived there from decades inside art schools, with the vocabulary and the institutional weight. I arrived at the same three practices alone, from dictation, running a workflow I couldn’t put a name to. It is so odd to me that I am reluctant to tell people how I “work” these days.

Convergence from opposite directions isn’t a coincidence. It’s evidence the structure is about something real.

The floor and the ceiling

Zarrow’s critique isn’t quality control. Its purpose is to build discernment. And she’s direct about the failure mode. A room of peers produces varied input, and also groupthink, distraction, and the reinforcement of shared weakness. Someone has to weigh in critically. The instructor isn’t optional.

I’ve had one reader like that for years. I would always get an honest answer.

Ferenc Bunta is a colleague. We’ve published together. He reads what I write and tells me what’s true about it, which is a different service from telling me whether he liked it. He’ll point out the flaws quickly and then I go back to work. Sometimes a few days pass and I finally resolve it. Sometimes it takes longer.

AI will read a draft on demand. It finds the weak transition, the unearned claim, the paragraph doing two jobs, at eleven at night when no colleague is awake. But notice what all of those are. Local comparisons. It can see that one sentence is weaker than the ones around it because that judgment lives inside the draft.

It’s the floor. Not because it’s stupid. Because it has no vantage point outside the middle.

Ferenc is the ceiling. He can tell me a piece is competent and not worth publishing, which is a verdict AI cannot reach. He knows which of my moves are earned and which have become habits I’m now performing. The model is a reader. It isn’t the one who weighs in.

Nobody protected it

I don’t work from outlines. I never have. Instead I would produce text that meandered in different directions, and it often appeared like a mess without much meaning. For one stretch, that was not a defect.

I trained with Elizabeth Bates, and her lab was a studio, though nobody in it would have used the word. We asked big questions. The method came after the question, whichever method the question needed, and if that meant three of them and a theory borrowed from a completely different field, fine.

One time she told me I had a three-body problem, a nonlinear interaction that arose from manipulating three different variables. Once things got too complex we could no longer predict them easily. Just like we cannot predict the movement of three bodies in space without modeling it. Nothing about it was programmatic. Nothing about it was incremental.

Architecture schools found this in the nineteenth century and built a schedule around it, with blocks of time and rules about when the tools come out. Science never built the schedule. It left the practice to the person. Bates had it, so the lab had it, and when she was gone it went with her.

I hadn’t felt that in a long time. I feel it again now.

Sequence is useful late and lethal early

In Zarrow’s one-day charrette, the divergence stage is deliberately analog. Paper, post-its, whiteboards. Each student alone, generating as many rough ideas as possible, none prejudged. The build tools stay shut until a later stage, after the teams form and pick an idea worth planning.

Mine stays deliberately oral. I talk before I type.

A spoken fragment has no position in a document. It isn’t paragraph two. It has no neighbors and no transition to earn. The moment an idea lands in a text file it acquires a position, and the position starts making decisions I never agreed to.

I’ve called this the linearization tax, the cost of converting thought that runs in parallel into prose that runs in a line. The conversion is paid for in variation. Impose order too soon and the ideas that would have gone somewhere strange get filed under a heading and quietly die there.

That’s why the two stages have to stay apart. Divergence generates the variation, and it has to be cheap, solitary, and unjudged, or you get five ideas instead of fifty. The critique applies the pressure that cuts and trims it down. Run them at the same time and you get neither.

Here’s the hard part, and it’s why nobody does this on purpose. Divergence is a hallway. No line item, no phase, no metric, nothing to report at the end of it. You cannot draft a hallway. Zarrow scheduled one anyway, in discrete blocks, on an eight-hour clock, with the build tools locked in the drawer.

The asymmetry

One thing makes all of this necessary rather than merely nice.

Every writing tool since the typewriter has stripped away some difficulty, some obstacle, and every time, people mistook the friction for the skill. White-out was not craft. I’ve made that argument myself.

This time the friction was doing something.

Oil paint has never handed anyone a mediocre but passable painting. Neither has a cello at eight in the morning. Every traditional medium resists you, and the resistance is the teacher.

AI hands you adequate on the first try. Zarrow’s students hit this almost immediately. They put a request in and got back, in her words, “the most average version of whatever they asked for.” Fluent. Structured. Finished-looking. Wrong in ways that take training to see. They had to be taught to push past it. That instruction isn’t a footnote in the curriculum. It’s the curriculum.

The middle is where the model lives. That’s the same fact from both directions: it can find the soft sentence, and it can never tell you the whole thing is soft.

Every other medium resists you into competence. This one flatters you into adequacy.

Which is why someone has to supply the resistance. The art schools have a name for that. The crit.

The oldest is a priest who lost his faith when his wife was pinned against a tree in an accident. We only learn this midway through, in a flashback: he’s speaking to her, knowing these are the last words he’ll ever use with her, comforting her, and then she’s gone in front of his eyes.

The middle brother was a great baseball player with a promising future. He swung too big. The same swing gave him home run records and strikeout records, and at some point it stopped connecting at all. He went from a great hitter to what you’d call a choker, unable to perform under duress.

The youngest is the most frail. Asthma so severe that without medicine he could asphyxiate.

Those wounds run in parallel with the invasion, the signs appearing on the planet, the aliens arriving. The crucial scene comes near the end. The alien is in the house holding the youngest brother, and it sprays poison into his face. The boy goes limp.

He lives. His lungs were closed. The asthma that nearly killed him is the thing the poison couldn’t get past.

The middle brother takes the bat off the wall. The swing that was too big to control is big enough to knock the alien down for good.

The oldest brother sees his youngest alive and his faith comes back.

Nothing was cured. Each brother is saved through the thing that broke him. The environment moved.

Shyamalan says it was placed there. Graham’s whole speech is that there are no coincidences. I’m not sure I believe that. I only know it fit.

Some people have called AI an alien invading our cognitive world. But what if the aliens revealed something about humans we hadn’t seen before.

I started as a math major. As an undergraduate I followed my love of language to Brazil and stayed an extra year past the exchange. What I found there was how two languages, in my case three, sit in a brain. Cognitive psychology saw thought as frozen water, clean crystals under a microscope. I had experienced it as water. Gas, liquid, solid, moving between them. Frozen was just one state.

We are not simple chemical equations. I knew that from my own experience in 1989. It took the field about twenty years to catch up.

As an assistant professor, they wanted me publishing in particular journals, all cognition, all experimental psychology. Brain science was deemed phrenology. That’s what experimental cognitive psychologists called fMRI work. What did the brain have to do with cognition, with the mind?

For the longest time I found it difficult to keep to the routine, linear, monotonous work the late twentieth century held up to all of us.

Today AI arrives as the invader. A threat to our thinking, our critical ability to adjudicate between competing ideas. It’s a threat to a system that valued linear thinking, sequential drilling, the same task over and over as if it were 1910 and the state of knowledge were so much smaller than it is now.

For me it has been relief. Thirty years of converting a mind that moves in parallel into prose that moves in a line, and the conversion cost was the work. Now it isn’t. What I think is what comes out.

But here is what I can’t resolve. Maybe I’m lucky I had to work through all that drudgery before getting here. The corridor I hated may be the thing that built the judgment I’m using now. If that’s true, then the environment that liberates me strands whoever comes next, because it removes the very drudgery that made me ready for it.

An environment moving is not automatically a rescue. Morgan’s lungs closed at the right moment. They could have closed at the wrong one.

I don’t know which of those this is. I only know it fits me, and that it never fit before.

I agree that AI companies are mining books, scanning them, putting them online. I agree that AI can plagiarize. It can take other people’s ideas and make them your own without credit. I agree that it represents a danger for certain populations who may be vulnerable to being accused of writing too well, whereas others, more privileged ones, may not be accused of that. I agree that it has a homogenized form of writing.

But there is one small assumption this whole line of reasoning makes. It is that people have the resources to write their own words.

Maybe this comes at a point in my career when I have already written so many that I don’t have any doubt about what my words sound like. AI has given me an opportunity to write in three other languages I speak. Two of them I did not regularly write in until the advent of AI. One of them I have some spoken proficiency in and no written proficiency at all.

Is this my writing? Yes and no. They are my ideas. Sometimes it is just plain translation.

The banning of AI in writing presupposes that writing was always somebody’s to own. Ownership can only come to those who have the luxury to write their own words. Those luxuries include the time to learn the ins and outs of writing. They include the resources to fund the books, the infrastructure, and the other intellectual pieces that need to come together to write at that quality.

In elite spaces, students have spent many years in enriched environments, sometimes with the help of private tutors. A colleague of mine who earned a PhD in mathematics and now teaches at a major research institution talks about his work as a graduate student. To make extra money and supplement his low stipend, he spent time tutoring the children of the wealthy in wealthy neighborhoods. Those children had access to resources that were not theirs.

The numbers back this up. Holding SAT scores constant, children from the top one percent are far more likely to be admitted to elite colleges than the average applicant. Children from the top tenth of a percent are more than twice as likely. Much of that advantage comes through legacy preference and recruited athletics. One in six students at those schools comes from a family in the top one percent.

The advantage does not stop at admission. My own work on faculty hiring shows that placement follows something like a gravitational pull. A small share of institutions produces the overwhelming majority of the professoriate. Prestige compounds the way capital compounds. Who trained you, and who your advisor knew, shapes where you land.

Saying your words are your words does not mean they are not. But it presupposes individual agency over institutional and environmental privilege.

Another colleague told me about a student who handed in very poorly written first drafts. Almost incomprehensible. But the final paper was always beautifully written, and it received a very high mark. Somewhere between an incomprehensible draft and a beautiful final paper, something happened.

Those were not that person’s own words either. AI only makes that mechanism more visible. It has always been there. What AI changes is that now everyone has access to the resource.

A recent study by Chetty and his colleagues tries to get at the root of some of these differences. Controlling for test scores, they found that those from the richest families receive higher ratings on their teacher and guidance counselor recommendations. The academic ratings hardly change across the income distribution. The non-academic ones do. When the researchers take out the advantage of those better evaluations, those at the top lose their advantage.

This becomes a story not about rich and poor. It becomes a story about the middle class that gets lost. As some students have put it, the best thing is to be completely poor and do extremely well in school, which is very unusual, or to be very, very rich and do well in school, which is also unusual. If you are middle class and you do well in school, it is almost impossible to get into these universities.

The letters written by counselors and teachers favor certain people. In public schools the letters get sent. Rarely are there any calls. With that many letters to write, they are not as ebullient as the ones from private schools.

What we see again is context and environment creating a network in which certain people stand out. That network is based, to a great extent and indirectly, on income level. The notion of individual achievement, of individual words, becomes difficult to make congruent with the scenario.

Or someone has extreme talent, a God-given gift to write well, to synthesize information, to be hyper productive. There are those as well. If one can be at the apex of all those forces, harness them, and use them to produce their own words, so be it. I don’t think there is anything wrong with that.

But for the rest of us who don’t have access to all those resources, the human, economic, and intellectual resources to write our own words and compete on a level playing field, it looks like another argument in favor of the well resourced.

There is a scene in The Aviator. Howard Hughes, played by Leonardo DiCaprio, is sitting at dinner with the Hepburns. They are querying him about his work as a mechanic. He snaps back that he is more than a mechanic. He has to think about money. He has to think about how his industries will remain solvent. Mrs. Hepburn says they don’t care about money in that house. Hughes answers, “You don’t care about money because you’ve always had it.”

The luxury of not writing with AI can be held by those who have the resources. Those who can fill in the gaps with humans. Talented, hard-working, well trained. For the rest of us, how else would we keep up?

I have written this essay interactively using Claude. I have seen AI produce huge amounts of text very quickly, in a very fluent manner. I have also resisted simply increasing the output, writing more than I used to. I found that I can dictate. I can edit. Claude has obliged me by pushing back on the soft spots. Once the essay is complete I put it into Claude Code, where I get a second layer of criticism.

These are my words. I have dictated them and asked AI to clean up the grammar. I am okay with that. Even if they are AI assisted, the thoughts and what went into them came out of a process I did iteratively to produce this essay. These words are just as much mine as anybody else’s. If I had a different situation I might do it differently. Banning AI, to me, is not the way to go.

So I have no such blanket statement.

This semester I am teaching a class in which I fully embrace AI with graduate students. The same students who have to teach a full load in our department starting in their third year. The ones who have to work to bring students from less privileged backgrounds up to the level of a college graduate. They are at a university where 45 percent of students are first-generation and 40 percent receive Pell Grants. Across the eight Ivy League schools, that second figure is 18.5 percent.

How do I use AI? That is an interesting question. It is part sounding board, part editor, part co-writer. It produces flavorless text. Smooth like butter, but without any other seasonings or food around it.

I have learned over the past year and a half to make it my own. I dictate, as I am doing right now. Then I spin out a draft. Then I edit the draft. Sometimes I let it sit in my computer and don’t do anything with it. Other times I revisit it many months later. Sometimes the ideas come out straight and beautiful from the beginning. Sometimes they are garbled and AI doesn’t help me.

That is what I hope to teach my students this semester. To actually interact with AI in class. To watch it write huge pieces of text and then decide whether any of it has value.

That will end up being our question. Not whether we write with AI, because we can write a lot. Is what we are writing worth it?

In my undergraduate classes, I ask students to do their work by hand. The exams are written on real pieces of paper. Multiple choice and short answer, all of it written by hand. Old school. In my elective classes, I ask them to write their answers on paper. I use reflections in class. I tell them I would rather have three sentences written by them than five pages written perfectly. I want to know what they are writing.

So it is not that I don’t think there is a place for people to write their own words. There is. That place is the classroom, all the way up to the undergraduate level.

The real question is the graduate level, and the lab. Can we afford to have people write their own words there? That presupposes the human infrastructure is identical across labs. We know it is not.

AI is here to stay. It will become part of our workflow. Rather than keeping our words our own, written the way they were before AI, the question becomes how we live with AI and still keep our own words.

References

Chetty, R., Deming, D. J., & Friedman, J. N. (2026). Diversifying society’s leaders? The determinants and causal effects of admission to highly selective private colleges. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 141(1), 51–145. https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaf050

Hernandez, A. E. (2026). Gravitational inequality in academia: A call to reimagine institutional influence. Frontiers in Education, 11, 1800413. https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1800413

That was 2019. Just last year, all those problems disappeared. Now I could read for content. The same authors, same submissions, same topics, but the grammatical errors were virtually gone from every person submitting. Didn’t matter where they submitted from. It was progress. I could evaluate the science. I could evaluate the content, not the style, not the agreement errors.

That’s why I think the great flattening is also the great rising. The discussion today has become that AI is eliminating people’s voices, that it’s creating a certain form of writing, and that writing will flatten the voice of English speakers when they write. It will kill the variability. Killing the variability is terrible if you’re a very, very well-versed writer, because variability is what gives it the interesting flavor. On the other hand, that variability also results in someone like me hearing nails on a chalkboard because of agreement errors, diction problems, or prose that’s overly formal when it could be more informally written, or overly informal when it could be formally written.

Those problems today are gone. So the great flattening is also the great rising. It’s not just that you’ve now made everybody sound the same. It’s that you’ve taken the writers at the lowest point and you’ve made them better.

Tom Byer calls this starting small. Fundamental manipulation of the ball is the key to soccer, to football. If you make the worst players better, the better players will get even better. You must start from the bottom.

AI for writing, for the non-native speaker, is doing the same thing. It’s making the worst writers better. Not just better: functional. And in that functionality, they gain access. In that access, I read for content, not for form. That is not a flattening. That is the great rising.

The net was at regular height. Two on two. The ball had to stay in the air and it could touch anything except an arm. Before each point one of them crouched and patted a little mound of sand into a T — a tee, built by hand, rebuilt every single time — and kicked the serve off the top of it. The rest was headers, chests, thighs, the outside of a foot. A ball coming down out of the sun and a man turning his shoulder into it so it came off his chest going where he wanted.

Hands are the one thing barred, so the whole body has to become a receiving surface. The only place hands are allowed is that mound of sand, which is why it gets rebuilt by hand before every point. A ball falling out of the sun has to be read early and met with a part of the body that has no fingers to fix the error. Thirty years of that builds a different nervous system than thirty years of cones.

On one setup a player went up into a full overhead kick. Pelé’s kick, the one everybody has seen a thousand times and almost nobody attempts. He got all of it. It hit the net.

Nobody was watching. No coach, no parent, no scout, no bracket. A man in his thirties on a public court on a weekday went up for the hardest thing in the sport, missed in front of everyone, and his partner laughed at him. They rebuilt the tee and played the next point.

I stood there a lot longer than I meant to.

I lived in São Paulo for two years in college — an exchange year, then a gap year before graduation that I spent becoming so fluent that people thought I was Brazilian. That was thirty-seven years ago. I went back this summer for a conference and we ended up in Leblon. Leblon is the wealthiest neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro. Ocean on one side and apartments on the other that are priced in dollars.

They were playing futevôlei in the sand.

That part keeps circling around in my mind. If I had seen this in a favela, or on a dirt lot, I would have stored it where everyone stores it — under poverty, under improvisation, under the romance we have built about deprivation producing genius. And that would have told me the mechanism was a lack of money. These were people who could afford anything. They were in the sand because that is what you do.

When I lived there I played a lot of tennis. Brazilians admire tennis. There is a tennis playing culture. But it was never confused with football. Where tennis leads to admiration, football leads to love.

I didn’t understand the size of that difference until a World Cup came on. My host told me, flatly, as practical information I might need, that he would not be able to do anything during a match. Not wouldn’t. Couldn’t.

Football barely registered back then in the US. Thirty-seven years later things have changed.

I have spent those thirty-seven years in a country that decided the best way to excel in football was to put it up for sale.

American families now spend an estimated $40 billion a year on youth sports. The average family paid $1,016 for one child’s primary sport in 2024, up forty-six percent in five years. That money has built an apparatus — clubs, leagues, academies, showcases, ranking platforms. It is the most heavily capitalized youth development system in the history of youth sport. The United States produces players, good ones, and will produce more — the claim isn’t that nothing works. The claim is that none of that money buys the sand court, and no instrument anywhere in the apparatus would report the absence.

Daniel Pulido, who runs a youth club in Merced and has thought about this more carefully than almost anyone writing about it, published a long piece on what an affordable American system should look like. He opens it beautifully. Before the bills, before the licenses, before the regional centers, he says, I need to begin somewhere much smaller. A living room. A hallway. A backyard. A parent. A ball.

He is right about nearly all of what follows — right that fields are scarce, right that a scholarship nobody knows how to ask for is not a scholarship. But look at the shape of it. The living room gets a few hundred words. The infrastructure fund gets a full section with matching formulas and a three-phase rollout. At the end there is a public dashboard tracking fifteen things: family cost, travel distance, free field hours, missed school, whether children remain in the game.

Every one is worth measuring. Not one can tell you whether anybody loves it.

There is nothing to write about a hallway. You cannot draft a hallway — no eligible uses, no phases, no line item, no metric — so a man who knows perfectly well that the hallway is where this starts watches the vocabulary carry his own essay away from it.

Tom Byer found the same thing from the other end, and it cost almost nothing. Sixteen years coaching other people’s children in Japan, and then he watched his own. At an Adidas event, signing little promotional replica balls, he noticed that the small balls fit children’s feet and the real ones didn’t. So he put small balls around the house. His son Kaito, at sixteen months, was rolling the ball and pulling it back. Byer’s line is that you don’t need to be a professional coach, you just need to be a parent. He quotes Neymar, who said it better than anyone: Brazilians don’t fall in love with football, they fall in love with the ball.

What Byer did next is the part that matters. He didn’t build facilities. He got a segment on morning television that ran for more than a decade, a column in a soccer magazine, and a manga that reached something over a million copies. He did not build Japanese soccer by himself and would be the first to say so. But measured against $40 billion, what he did barely registers as spending at all. And what it bought was not infrastructure. It was attention — a change in what an ordinary parent believed a ball in the house was for.

I started playing tennis at sixteen.

Tennis was not my home sport. There was no home sport. I played because my friends played — on the playground, on the street after school, in the park on weekends. I played all the American sports and none of them belonged to my family. Then summers in Mexico, where at first I was just trying to keep up with the kids who had spent the whole year playing fútbol. Eventually I came to tennis, because tennis was what my uncles played, and what they would play with me.

So when my own children arrived I had no inherited thing to hand them. I had to build one.

It started slowly, with Kiara and Nikolas. When Kamille was about four I began taking all three out together, trading off, switching to the soft balls for her. Two or three times a week after school, the three of them alternating with me. Kamille kept playing.

We paid for some private lessons and a few camps. I absorbed everything I could from the internet, including my good friend Tomaz Mencinger and his Feel Tennis approach. I armed myself with tips and tricks and hauled paraphernalia to the court. A small ball I cut open with a string through it so she could feel the fluidity of her serve. A second net that stood above the real one so she had to serve high over it. An aerobics step she jumped over to learn to use her legs. My uncle in Mexico — an actual coach — fed me even more. Have her lift her front foot on the forehand so the ball doesn’t go long when she attacks.

I became a de facto coach. We spent almost nothing on private instruction.

I should say plainly that I had an uncle, friends who were coaches, and my own curiosity about how skills develop. But most of all I loved tennis, still do. Not everyone has the combination of love and knowledge. Those are often unevenly distributed — not the ball, not the court, not the hour after school. That is the real inequality in all of this, and it is also the cheapest thing in the world to fix, which is exactly what Byer proved and what nobody funds.

She played high school tennis and USTA tournaments and I drove her to them. What I had to learn, and it took a while, was to cheer no matter what. Once she missed a ball badly, terribly, and turned to look at me. I clapped and tightened my fist. She reluctantly did the same. The point of this was to see how good she could get. How much she could grow on the court and off.

American children leave sports at around thirteen. Asked afterward what they liked least about playing, the most common answer they give is the feeling that they weren’t good enough. Bad coaching comes second. Think about it for a minute. The worst part of the whole experience was a verdict about themselves — one they carried around while they were still playing — and a child can only arrive at that verdict inside something that has been ranking her since she was seven. Nobody in the sand at Leblon is good enough or not good enough. A grown man misses an overhead kick and his partner laughs at him.

Growing up I hit a one-handed backhand. Nikolas switched to one hand at thirteen. Kamille switched at eleven, because two hands never felt right to her, and then she practiced it like crazy until it was genuinely good. She kept it even though no other girl in her draws hit one. Most of the boys didn’t either. People admired the shot. They told her it was beautiful.

My Daughter Kamille Hitting the Most Beautiful Shot in Tennis (June 10, 2021)

But the two-hander is the shot of the moment, and more than one person told me she would never get a college scholarship hitting the way she hit. She got a scholarship. Not for tennis.

There is no dashboard in American youth sports that would ever credit the tennis for it. Fifteen indicators, and the one thing ten years on a court actually produced is not among them and could not be. She wasn’t out there to generate a yield. She was learning to persist at something difficult and find her way through at the moment when it seems impossible.

The culture in our house turned into point by point. It is still there, and it long ago stopped being about tennis. When one of my children has something to work out — at school, at work, some professional thing that has gotten large and shapeless — I tell them to find the problem, keep it small, solve that one. You cannot control anything past it. Worrying about the rest just burns time you needed.

Kamille absorbed it more than the other two. She was trained to it from four years old. She starts every day with a plan and then she simply follows it, and there is no energy and no time wasted.

That is culture. The culture of the home and the culture of the court, and no seam between them. It is where excellence in sport actually lives — as a fiber of a person, not a commodity. It is how you do more with less: you invest at the smallest possible scale and collect at the largest. A cut-open ball on a string. A four-year-old. A step stool.

I watched her win a match one summer in Houston with the heat index nearing 110. Who knows how hot it was on the court. All I know is she kept finding a small piece of grass with shade during changeovers.

Afterward I asked her how she had done it. She shrugged.

I didn’t explain it to her. I told her she won, and I pointed at her heart.

I was born in Berkeley. Both of my parents went to UC Berkeley, and so did I. My doctorate came from UC San Diego and my first faculty job was at UC Santa Barbara. For me the University of California was not one option among several. It was simply what a public university was.

Houston taught me otherwise. Conversations here ran on grant dollars. Where you published mattered less, and journals were not sorted into good and bad in the way I had absorbed without ever being told. Nothing about this was wrong. It was another set of rules, and running into it made me realize I had spent four decades inside a bubble without noticing the walls.

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My doctoral advisor, Elizabeth Bates, used to complain that the students she wanted at UC San Diego were also getting into programs on the east coast, higher up the hierarchy, and that when both offers arrived they usually went east. For years I heard this as ordinary academic griping. It took me much longer to understand that she was describing a structure.

That structure is now well documented. Aaron Clauset, Daniel Larremore and their colleagues mapped where faculty actually come from, and in 2022 K. Hunter Wapman and coauthors published a census of roughly a quarter million tenure-track placements across 366 doctoral-granting institutions. A small group of programs supplies the large majority of tenure-track faculty in the United States. The rest of the system, several hundred institutions training tens of thousands of doctoral students, divides what remains.

What struck me was the shape of the drop. Moving down the rankings does not cost a program a proportional slice of placement. Near the top it costs vastly more than proportional. The falloff behaves less like a slope and more like a cliff edge.

Once you see that, the ladder image stops working. Ladders can be climbed. What the data describe is closer to a gravitational field, in which a few very massive institutions bend the trajectories of careers and ideas around them. Flows of students, citations and funding scale with institutional mass and fall off with distance. This is the argument I make in a paper published this month in Frontiers in Education, where I propose treating academic prestige with the same gravity equations economists use to model trade and migration between countries. The point of writing it that way is that a gravitational law makes numerical predictions. It can be fit to real hiring data, and it can be shown to be wrong.

The people inside that field are not a cross-section of the country. Faculty are roughly twenty-five times more likely than the general population to have a parent with a doctorate, and at the most selective institutions the concentration runs higher. I have known colleagues who, after moving inward, quietly stopped mentioning where they did their undergraduate work.

In 2017 Christiane Spitzmueller, a colleague in my department, invited me to join the ADVANCE center at Houston, which works to advance women faculty and women faculty of color. I attended those meetings for two years. The same puzzle surfaced repeatedly. The NSF data showed no shortage of diverse doctorates. Almost none of them were arriving, including here at a Hispanic-serving institution with every reason to want them.

Christiane read this as resistance, an institutional problem that could be addressed by changing how committees behaved. I argued that it was structural, that search committees do not treat all doctorates as equivalent and that the pool of doctorates from the massive institutions looks demographically different from the pool below them. We went back and forth for two years.

She was right about a great deal. Resistance is real, committees do behave badly, and the interventions ADVANCE built have measurable effects on the searches they touch. But the structural account explains something that resistance alone does not, which is why so much money accomplished so little. If prestige is doing the sorting before any committee convenes, then a program that improves committee behavior at one institution is working downstream of the mechanism that produced the applicant pool. The intervention succeeds on its own terms and leaves the distribution intact.

This is not a problem unique to universities, and that is why I keep returning to it. Any field with a steep prestige gradient reproduces itself the same way. Law firms, hospitals, orchestras, newsrooms, venture capital. Each has spent the last decade funding programs that operate at the point of hiring, and each has discovered that the composition of the candidate pool barely moves. The pool was shaped years earlier by who got admitted where, and admission at the core draws heavily from the core.

I want to be careful here. Mapping a structure is not dismantling it. The gravitational framework I have proposed is a way of asking which interventions would actually shift the flows and by how much, rather than declaring in advance which ones matter. Some historical cases suggest it can be done. Postwar federal research funding lifted UC San Diego, UC Irvine and Stony Brook from almost nothing to international standing within a generation. Germany’s Excellence Initiative deliberately built new centers of mass outside its traditional axis. None of these made the landscape flat. All of them measurably moved it.

There is a fact about gravitational systems worth holding onto. They look immovable, and in the short run they are. But the motion of everything in the system depends on the distribution of mass, and mass can be added in new places. Small changes in where it sits produce large changes in what moves and where.

Twenty-three years ago I mistook my own bubble for the shape of the world. I would rather we mistook the current arrangement for something permanent for a shorter time than that.

Read the paper →

Hernandez AE (2026). Gravitational inequality in academia: a call to reimagine institutional influence. Frontiers in Education 11:1800413. doi:10.3389/feduc.2026.1800413.

Sources:

Wapman KH, Zhang S, Clauset A, Larremore DB (2022). Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention. Nature 610, 120–127. doi:10.1038/s41586-022-05222-x

Clauset A, Arbesman S, Larremore DB (2015). Systematic inequality and hierarchy in faculty hiring networks. Science Advances 1(1), e1400005. doi:10.1126/sciadv.1400005

So I went up and did what I often do in bookstores. I looked around to see if there might be a book I should read. The idea was that the shelves would speak to me, that something would pop out. It doesn’t always happen that way. Sometimes I look through all the shelves and nothing pops out. But this time I get to a shelf and what pops out is a book so many people have read, but I haven’t: Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, by Robert M. Pirsig.

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I open it up, read the first couple of lines, and realize this may be the book I should read. He’s just telling us about a ride down a hot highway, and I think: I need to do more of that. Pure description. As if I were doing something, noticing something. Not telling something.

Many years ago Tomaz Mencinger told me that I didn’t know anything when I was playing tennis. I didn’t understand what he meant. What do you mean, I don’t know anything? What he meant, when he explained it, was that I didn’t know what was going to happen. My mind wanted to predict the future, but the only way to play tennis was point by point. Once a point was over, it was time to let go and go to the next one.

Over time, as I began to stop thinking and start just playing, I realized there was a certain rhythm to my breathing, a certain feeling where I could focus and just play point by point in a much calmer mental way. Even though my body was moving so fast, I tried to keep my mind calm and quiet. And then sometimes things would just happen. A ball would hit the net and bounce on the other side. A cloud would come by and cover the sun that was bothering me when I served. One time a bunch of moths were all over the court. My opponent was irritated as hell by them, but I imagined the moths were my friends, that they were helping me, protecting me, guiding me in this match.

In the protection of the tennis court, the worst that can happen is you lose. You miss a ball. Something doesn’t go your way. You shake hands and you go home.

Today, as I was walking, I just let things happen, and I stumbled onto a bookstore, and I stumbled onto a book I first heard about in high school. It was already almost ten years old at that point. Now, many years later, I just stumbled onto it again in a bookstore with very few English books at all.

In the protection of a small quaint city center bookstore, the worst that can happen is that I leave uninspired. I say bonsoir to the staff and walk on my way.

Today was not that day.

I’ll let you know what I missed all those years, once I get through it. If you’ve read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, I’d love to hear your thoughts. No spoilers, please.

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Byer’s claim is that football starts at home, before five, with a ball on the floor. He is right. But the same thing that makes a footballer makes a lot of other athletes — and once you see that, a strange fact about American sport stops being strange.

American women win. They win the World Cup. They win Olympic basketball, gold after gold. They win tennis majors while American men haven’t won one in over twenty years. Three different sports, one country, one gender running the table.

Everyone reaches for Title IX. They should, partway. Title IX gave American girls fields and scholarships and a college system no other country has. That’s real. It explains a lot.

It might even explain the winning. No other country funds women’s college soccer and basketball the way we do. So our women often play a thinner international field. Our men play the whole planet. Give one group a head start and an easier draw and of course they win. You don’t need footwork to explain a medal count.

But a medal count is not the thing I can’t explain. The thing I can’t explain is why the same girls carry across sports that share nothing on the surface. A soccer kid turns into a tennis player. A thin field doesn’t do that. A scholarship doesn’t do that. Something underneath does.

Here is what I think is happening.

The short version, if you were here last week: American girls play soccer. Four, five, six, and nobody funnels them out. It’s the default girls’ sport, and it happens to be the one that lays the base — the lower body, close to the ground, working before a coach shows up. The boys get pulled the other way, early. Football and baseball. Overhead sports, throwing sports, the kind that reward a kid for building the second floor before the first is set.

So the girls get the thing Byer spent thirty years trying to give away. The boys skip it. Both almost by accident.

Watch what falls out of that.

Iva Jovic grew up in Torrance playing mostly soccer, picked up a racket late, and took apart a grass-court specialist at Wimbledon at eighteen. Asked how, she talked about footwork — the loading and unloading, how low you have to be, the small steps. She said every young tennis player should play soccer first.

The US women’s national team has four World Cups. The men have none, and it isn’t close.

And then there is Caitlin Clark. She started soccer at five, on co-ed teams, and was usually the best player out there, boy or girl. She played club soccer, made all-state as a freshman, then walked away from it for basketball. Ask her where the shooting range comes from and she doesn’t talk about her arms. She told 60 Minutes she was a soccer player growing up and that’s where she thinks the leg strength came from. She credits soccer with her foot speed too, and with reading angles — passing to where a teammate is going instead of where they are.

Listen to what those two are actually describing. A tennis player crediting her feet. A basketball player crediting her legs. Neither one is talking about the part of the game you watch.

Tennis almost breaks the argument, and I want to say so out loud. American women have owned the majors since the men went dry in 2003. But say American women in tennis and mostly you are saying Serena and Venus. And the Williams sisters are not a soccer story. One sport, early, all in. A father with a plan and a public court in Compton. That is the opposite of a broad base, and it made two of the greatest players who ever lived.

So specialize early. It works.

It works when the talent comes once in a generation and someone builds a whole world around it. Most kids don’t get that world, and most who try it stall on the second floor. The base is the other road. Slower, surer, and it doesn’t need a father with a plan. It needs a ball on the floor and time. The Williams sisters built the base on purpose. The soccer girls got it for free. Same floor, laid two different ways.

Same country. Same coaching money. Same courts and fields. The difference is which ball was on the floor when the child was closest to the ground — and who got moved off it too soon.

None of this is proof. It’s one lens laid over a set of facts that keep pointing the same way. But if Byer is right that the base is set early and set low, then the country that accidentally leaves its girls on the base the longest should produce the athletes who transfer the best.

It does.

I study how skill gets built in the brain for a living. The pattern is always the same. A body learns to organize itself around its own center of gravity before it learns anything clever out at the edges — trunk before reach, balance before touch. The base goes in first, low and early, before the fancy work. And the window for it is early. Earlier than the first coach.

Miss the window and you don’t lose the skill. You lose the floor it was going to stand on.

This is not a soccer fact. A first language goes in the same way, low and early, under everything, before anybody teaches a rule. Music too. Soccer is just the one you can watch on a Saturday morning.

I told you last time I was a boy who felt a step slow, and only later got told my footwork was good. I had it backwards my whole life. I thought the footwork came late. It came early. I just didn’t use it until late.

The boys skipped the base. The girls stayed on it.

That’s the whole difference.

Byer didn’t know about Piaget. He discovered it on his own by reading about every single great football nation and how they all played football. They did it improvisationally from a very young age, before the age of five. All great football players started playing informally before the age of five.

Last week, at the beginning of the tournament, weeks before we knew who the finalists would be, Tom Byer had already predicted that the eventual champion would come from a nation that had already won the World Cup. He turned out to be right. All four semifinalists were former champions.

The match for the World Cup final involved two former champions, but that wasn’t the biggest story. The real irony is that Spain and Argentina are also producers of champions across multiple sports. They’ve produced excellent tennis players, excellent basketball players, and, of course, excellent football players.

And the second irony is that Tom Byer is only half right.

When we look at women’s sports, we see a very different angle. American women dominate in football, in basketball, and in tennis.

The question is why?

As I looked at Byer’s research and spoke to him about it more, I realized that he hadn’t discovered just the key to football. He discovered the key to coordinated sensorimotor movement in sport. Learning to move with the ball with your feet at a very early age could be like an accelerant. With the base in place, a young child can learn to coordinate their lower body when they’re closest to the ground. This early foundation allows their upper body to develop later. It’s almost as if you were developing a preliteracy before fully reading.

And that is where the answer sits.

American girls play football. They start at four, five, six. Nobody funnels them anywhere else. American boys get American football, and baseball. Those are overhead sports. Upper body sports. Throwing and catching sports.

Throwing and catching come later. They layer on top. You cannot throw well without legs and a core underneath the throw. So a child who specializes overhead at six is building the second story before the first story is solid.

None of this is about culture, exactly. Culture does not teach a child to coordinate. It only decides which ball is lying on the floor during the years when the coordinating happens. The window is developmental. What goes in the window is not.

Hakeem Olajuwon grew up in Lagos playing soccer. Fullback first, then goalkeeper. He did not pick up a basketball until he was fifteen.

According to Dream: The Life and Legacy of Hakeem Olajuwon, he told a teammate named Kevin McKenna he could kick a basketball over his head and off the backboard. McKenna said no way. Olajuwon pointed to the other end of the court. Then he did a bicycle kick and sent the ball seventy-five feet. Crazy, McKenna said. The Rockets were furious. Don’t you ever do that again.

He was six foot ten and 255 pounds and it looked like a freak of nature. It was not. It was a childhood, still sitting in his legs, twenty years after he left it in the street in Lagos. It never left because it never had to. Nobody gave him that. Somebody just gave him a ball when he was small.

In 1994, the year he won his first ring, he said that all his fakes in basketball came from soccer. Body movement. Footwork. He used one more word.

Foundation.

The Dream Shake is a soccer feint performed at seven feet.

Two weeks ago at Wimbledon, an eighteen year old American named Iva Jović took apart Tatjana Maria, a grass court specialist, 6-1, 6-2. Jović grew up in Torrance, playing mostly soccer. She did not start putting real hours into tennis until she was twelve. Her coach at the USTA says her strokes were nothing special back then. What he noticed was how she paid attention.

She never played on grass growing up. Her record on it is 14-2. She had listed it as her favorite surface on the tour website before she had won a single tour-level match on it.

A reporter asked her how. She said she played soccer as a kid, for her local team in LA, and then she said this. If it was her way, every young player going into tennis would play soccer. She called it one of the closest crossovers from a footwork perspective, and then described it: the loading and unloading, how low you have to be, the small steps, the quick changes of direction.

Neither of them is evidence in the way a study is evidence. They are two people describing themselves, which is the least reliable thing a person can describe. A man in Houston in 1994 and a girl in London in 2026. Different sports, different continents, different bodies, thirty-two years apart. Neither had a theory to defend. They reached for the same word anyway.

Sampras won Wimbledon seven times. He won the US Open five times. He won the Australian. He never won the French. Not once.

Everyone says that was a surface problem, and everyone is probably right. I keep wondering if it was a base problem.

I was not very good at sports as a young child. I played kickball at school. But I spent summers in Mexico, and my uncle loved playing football in the street. I dove in reluctantly and always felt a step behind everyone else.

Back in the US I played basketball and touch football at recess, or after school, for fun. Eventually baseball. Then tennis, at sixteen, which is late.

For the longest time I was deemed to be slow.

Then sometime in my late twenties, and later, people began to comment on my footwork. They said it was very good.

I always wondered why.

Two great football nations played for the World Cup today. The story everyone will tell is that both of them had won it before. The story underneath is that both of them also make tennis players, and basketball players, and that they make them the same way they make football players, which is to say they do not make them at all. They just put a ball on the ground in front of a child who is already close to the ground, and they let the child figure it out before anybody shows up to teach.

Byer said football starts at home. He was right.

He just did not know how much else starts there too.

It looked like a bold call. It was closer to reading a map. The outcome was never as open as the bracket pretended.

Byer has spent his life arguing that football does not start at the academy. It starts at home. A father with a ball in the garden. A child who touches it a thousand times before anyone teaches a single drill. By the time formal coaching begins, the real work is already done.

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Cluster the conditions and they compound. Nations that win sit close to other nations that win. They share borders, rivalries, coaching networks, leagues that trade players and ideas across the same few time zones. Excellence gets challenged constantly, so it keeps sharpening. And underneath all of it the ball is already in the house, years before anyone puts on a uniform. Byer’s phrase for the whole loop is plain. Success creates more success.

Leave that law alone and it runs to its natural end. A handful of nations pull away and stay away. The bracket fills in before the tournament starts. That is not a scandal. It is what compounding does when nothing slows it down.

There is another league that ran on the same law and decided to brake it.

For decades the New Orleans Saints were so hopeless that their own fans came to games with paper bags over their heads. They called themselves the Aints. It was funny the way a thing is funny when the alternative is admitting it hurts.

The Saints were not just badly run. Under the economics of the NFL at the time, they were playing a game they had almost no way to win. The richer franchises stockpiled talent, won year after year, and left little oxygen for anyone else. The same compounding that stacks the World Cup semifinals was stacking the standings.

The danger was not that some teams lost. Teams are supposed to lose. The danger was that fans in half the cities stopped believing their team could ever win. When belief like that drains out of a league, the league is dying even while the scoreboard still lights up. Legitimacy goes before the revenue does.

So in 1994 the NFL did something leagues almost never do. It braked itself. A salary cap capped what any one team could spend on players, and revenue sharing spread the money the league earned across all of its franchises, strong and weak alike. The owners of the strongest teams voted for rules that cut into their own advantage.

The results are not a matter of opinion. Since the mid-eighties, and tightening after the cap, close to half of all NFL games have ended within a single score. In one recent season the average margin of victory fell to its lowest since 1932. The league did not get weaker. More teams got within reach of each other, which is a different and better thing.

Today every fan starts the season believing that with a few good decisions and a little luck, this could be the year. That belief is one of the most valuable things the league owns, and it was manufactured on purpose.

Now hold the two leagues side by side, because together they are a kind of experiment. Same sport in structure, elite team competition at the highest level. Same underlying law, success compounds. One variable changed: whether the league redistributes. The World Cup lets the law run free and gets dynasties you can name a year in advance. The NFL brakes the law and gets any given Sunday. The mechanism is identical. Only the rule is different, and the rule is what decides the fate.

Which means the thing we call dynasty is not destiny. It is a policy.

Then why doesn’t international football simply adopt a cap? Because football has no commissioner who can vote one into being. There is no single balance sheet, no shared contract, no room where the powerful can be outvoted in an afternoon. Football’s only real solvent is the one Byer has been prescribing for years. Put a ball in every home. Move the starting line into every garden so the early thousand touches stop being the privilege of a few footballing nations.

That is football’s version of revenue sharing, running the other way. The NFL leveled from the top, capping the strong. Byer levels from the bottom, lifting the base. And the bottom needs no commissioner. You cannot outvote the powerful in a sport with no room to vote in. You do not have to. Nobody needs permission to put a ball in a child’s house. That is why it is football’s only real solvent. It routes around the powerful instead of through them.

And it is not a wish. Byer already ran it once. A country that produced no one worth naming became, within a generation, a country that qualifies as a matter of course, because someone decided to move the starting line into its homes. Slow is not never. The floor can be raised on purpose. It already has been.

Which brings the whole thing down to a single child. Somewhere right now there is a kid with the touch, the instinct, the appetite, born in a country with no garden culture, no feeder leagues, no ball waiting in the house. His talent is real. Nothing in the laws of the game says it has to stay invisible. Nobody has decided to move the starting line into his home.

The talent does not vanish. It goes latent. That is the quiet cost of letting the law run free. Not that the wrong teams win, but that most of the talent never gets the conditions it needed to become visible at all.

Maximizing your strongest team is not the same as maximizing the game.

The NFL learned that and acted. Football knows it and mostly hasn’t. And it leaves the rest of us with a question that is easy to ask about sports and harder to keep sealed there.

How much of what we call greatness is the player, and how much is the accident of where they were born, and whether anyone had decided, before they ever arrived, that their talent would be allowed to form?

Tom Byer’s post: As I predicted before the World Cup even began

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The book details the way in which the systems surrounding scientific discovery work against innovation. The examples helped to make it clear that this is nothing new. From Louis Pasteur to Katalin Karikó, we can see lots of examples of how the system of influence, and more recently funding, works against innovation. Pasteur colluded to subvert many of his contemporaries’ discoveries. Karikó’s story is brilliantly detailed in her memoir, Breaking Through: My Life in Science. Kaplan weaves many different tales together in an astonishingly effective way.

In his last chapter, he discusses one particular solution that has recently gained traction: funding lotteries. He notes that most evaluations of proposals work against innovation because a few skeptics can easily sink a proposal. At NIH, where only the top 10% of numerically rated proposals are funded, investigators have increasingly become extremely conservative. Lotteries bypass this by eliminating proposals that are not competitive. The ones that remain are simply put into a huge bin and chosen randomly. This seems like a reasonable solution that I agree with.

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Kaplan also notes that older researchers often consume resources that could be better spent on more junior ones. There was one aspect of this approach that left me thinking. Some of the researchers who consume too many resources are simply entrenched figures whose best work is behind them. But others are of the prodigious type, and some are the opposite. In art, David Galenson found that some artists peak early, like Picasso. Others, like Cézanne, peak later. My guess is that a lottery system would reduce the advantage conferred by reputation and track record, and that this disproportionately helps the persistent late bloomer who never accumulates the record peer review wants. Age and innovative potential are not the same axis: some of those resource-consuming older researchers are precisely the Cézannes whose best work is still ahead of them. The strongest version of Kaplan’s point may not be about age at all but about footprint, the way a few resource-heavy labs become the dense gravitational core that absorbs the funding around them, a dynamic I have written about here: https://arturoh.substack.com/p/when-the-academic-galaxy-trembles; a lottery answers that too, since it strips the reputation premium that lets those labs keep winning. There is a real tension here: the lottery strips the reputation premium, which is what I want, but the same move strips the legitimate signal that some footprint reflects genuine execution capacity, and whether the competitive threshold can separate the two is a deeper issue that deserves a longer discussion of its own. Today’s environment biases against late bloomers like Katalin Karikó, whose decades of persistence I have written about here: https://arturoh.substack.com/p/just-hang-in-there-and-hope-for-the. Taking away resources from those who persist on a much harder problem is not a solution. Thus, in my view, a lottery is a much better solution.

Nevertheless, Kaplan’s book was interesting, and I highly recommend it for anyone interested in understanding why science often slows in its pursuit of novel solutions.

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Consciousness comes and goes

Halassa talked about the prefrontal cortex as something that can disengage from the world and generate its own thoughts, but can also decide which part of the world gets to come through. Knowledge is distributed all over the brain, and memories have to be loaded up into the frontal cortex to be worked on. And then the hard question arrives, the one that has been with us forever. Is any of that conscious, and can we even measure it? Consciousness is not easily measured.

The easiest way for me to think about consciousness is to think about what happens when I play tennis. I am consciously walking to the court, sitting down, getting my racket, walking out. Then the point starts, and something changes. The ball comes, I move to it, and it becomes fluid. Consciousness seems to come and go. When I am focused on the ball, my reactions are immediate and quick, and it feels like I am not thinking at all. Then the point ends, and I go back into reflection. I think about what I did wrong, what I should try differently, I say a few words to myself, and then I am back to reacting. That rhythm is easier to see on the court than out in the world, where there are so many more things happening between reacting and thinking.

Emotion is an interface

Halassa framed emotion, like consciousness, as an interface between the sensory and the motor. Not a thing the brain holds, but a layer that sits between what comes in and what goes out. Again, the court is the easiest place for me to feel this.

My friend Tomaz Mencinger says that when players meet before they play, they ping each other, almost to set up a hierarchy. The court is laden with emotional mapping. Certain emotions well up when you are about to serve. On an important point, on a second serve, you feel the tension, the nervousness, the anxiety, and your heart rate goes up. Many years ago I was playing a match. I had read about calming my mind and was working on it. I spent one whole match trying to calm my mind. I could feel my heart racing. There was another person across the net, there was the combat of it, there was the constant tracking of the ball and the moving and the doing. Calm your mind did nothing. What finally worked was going the other way. I regulated my breath, and the breath became what I used to regulate my mind. The interface does not open from above. You reach it from below, through the body.

Predicting the ball, not the outcome

Ana asked Michael about predictive processing, the idea that the brain acts like a big prediction machine. Were the different predictions the brain makes happening in parallel, or hierarchically, or both at once. On the court you can watch predictive processing working on several levels at the same time. There is the trajectory of the ball off the opponent’s racket, the spin, whether it is underspin that will float or topspin that will drop, whether it is moving to my right or left or over me. All of that has to be predicted in real time, and the systems that do it have been trained over years and hours. On top of that there is the in-between prediction, when the point ends and you think about where to serve next and what they might do.

But here is the part I keep coming back to, and I had to learn it the hard way, point by point, over years. I do not know what will happen on the next point. I can have intentions, but there is no such thing as a prediction that I am going to win this one or lose it. Many times I have been sure I would win, and I lost. Other times I was sure I would lose, and I won. There is no way to know before, and often, even after, I cannot explain why or how it happened. What we really have is intentionality. We try to predict based on rules, but we only know after the fact, and even then the explanation escapes us. The system predicts the movement. It does not predict the meaning.

I often ask people how often their minds have fooled them. How often has it made a prediction about the future that did not come true? Most people say, “all the time.” Then I ask them, “So why do you believe that your thoughts are true?” Our thoughts are just that, thoughts. Imagination takes the same form as true memory. Our minds can run away from us in a moment.

A more animal kind of consciousness

The conversation moved to comparative brains. The visual cortex of a rodent is more multipurpose than that of a primate, which is more specialized. The cortex of a turtle is more multipurpose still. The more general the brain, the more it does higher-level, integrative work at an earlier stage. This is exactly what I have started to realize when I play tennis, because playing well feels almost like a different state of consciousness.

Think about how I am interacting right now. I am thinking and writing. When I interact with others in a normal conversation, it goes back and forth, taking in what someone gives and giving it back. Watching a movie, driving around, running errands, reading, writing. Those all feel like ordinary conscious states. When I play tennis, consciousness becomes something more like an animal kind of way. Language quiets down. The prediction about the future quiets down. I focus on how I feel in the moment, how my body is behaving, how I am breathing, and it cycles through in an almost meditative state when I am playing well. Sometimes it is gritty, sometimes effortful, sometimes I am struggling, but it is always physical and visceral rather than cognitive and mental.

Later in their conversation Michael and Ana ask whether animal consciousness is really a constructive or accurate way to describe the brain. Probably, if you looked at my brain, it would not be that accurate. But that is how it feels, and the feeling and what is happening in my brain are two different things. This is where I diverge a bit from Halassa. As a scientist he believes we can reach objective truth. I think we can reach some objective truths, but how we experience them is very hard to objectify. Maybe consciousness is simply the last thing that will not be measured. Am I really acting in a more animal way when I play? What is that state? I do not fully know, and the not knowing is part of what makes it fascinating.

The burden of many layers

Evolution works by adding layers, and each brain evolved to solve its own lineage’s problems. A lizard’s brain makes no sense if you read it as a worse version of ours, because it was never solving our problem. That is why it is so hard to be human. We have so many layers, and we are not quite sure which one to use at which moment. Sometimes we react emotionally when we should have stayed calm. Sometimes we breathe fast when we should breathe slow. On the court you can see this plainly. You have to train yourself to act from different brain states, and it takes training precisely because so many options are available to us. Maybe that is the hardest part of being human. We are not sure which one to choose.

We are coalitions

Near the end Halassa described people as coalitions, collections of things rather than single unified selves, and he said that self-sabotage can come from the coalition working against itself. We are not yet sure what the nature of these coalitions is. In a way, tennis has been a type of therapy for me, because it lets me discover parts of myself that are not always visible or naturally available, and inside the constraints of the court I can watch the coalitions work together and work against each other.

I have run little experiments. In some matches, I tried staying completely calm and not reacting. In others I would fire myself up, pump my fist, say something out loud when I won a point. What I have found is that sometimes the outcome is the same no matter what I do. So why waste the energy on anger or excitement if the match comes out the same in the end? The trick is to bring all of it together in the right way, so the coalition functions in my favor and helps me move through the world well. That, I think, is what my work on the court did for me. It made me aware of how these coalitions can work against each other, and that the real work is helping them work together.

I once had a moment that I tell people about often. I was at a match with my youngest daughter, Kamille, and a father came up to me and said, “look at your daughter, she looks so calm and collected.” I knew she was not. I knew from the inside that she was battling, that it was hard, but on the surface all you could see was control. That was her poker face. I told him she was suffering and simply not showing it. He started asking me questions, and when I said I was a psychology professor, he told me about his son. The boy practiced beautifully, better than the kids he lost to, but in matches his level dropped while theirs held steady, so the weaker practice players won. I told him the truth, which is almost impossible for a fifteen-year-old boy to accept. On the tennis court everything has to be in your favor. You have to harness all of it, be your biggest cheerleader, find a way to motivate yourself into the best state to play. That is the battle of tennis, and it is the battle of life. Be your biggest cheerleader, keep everything in your favor, and find ways to bring yourself into the best state you can.

The most human thing

Michael and Ana end on optimism, and I share it, though the part I trust is smaller and closer to the court. Coaches, therapists, and counselors do the work for many. They help people see that they are collections of things, and they help harmonize those coalitions so they function in whatever niche a person has to live in, so that people can actually achieve what they want to achieve. That harmonizing is not a small thing. It might be the most human thing there is.

I would go to switch lanes, and someone would honk at me. I could have blamed the driver. Come on. I am signaling, the car is right there, slow down and let me in. But I had been in Houston long enough to know people don’t do that. What had really changed was me. I could not pick up the moving car as well as I used to. By the time I went to switch lanes, it was already almost in my lane. Something that had always been quick in me had slowed down, and the slowing scared me.

I have spent my whole life trusting my eyes. As a boy I was not fast on my feet and I was not strong. What I could do was hit a baseball, because I could see it early. The other kids had the bodies. I had the eyes. So when my eyes began to slow I did not treat it as nothing. I am a cognitive psychologist. I spend a lot of time looking at data and asking whether a change is real or whether it is noise. This change felt real.

Then it spread. When I read, I could make out the letters fine, but when I went to write, it sometimes felt like I could not quite see them. I had never worn glasses in my life. And then came the part I really felt, which was driving at night. The exits would not resolve. As I came up on one it seemed to phase in and out, and it took me longer to find where the lane split, longer to read the sign, longer to know where the turn was. Even in daylight, coming up on a street, it took me a beat longer to be sure.

On the tennis court, though, I noticed nothing. My reactions felt as good as ever. I caught the trajectory of the ball, I got to my spots, I hit the way I always had. The speeds there are slower, the distances shorter, and I had hit a few million of those balls. So the change showed up first where the speeds were highest, on the road, and not yet where I was most practiced.

So I went to the optometrist. I told him I just don’t see as well as I used to, and I thought my vision was going bad. He put me through the tests. You definitely need reading glasses, he said, no doubt about that. But your distance vision is perfect. You’re twenty-fifteen. Better than most people half your age. You don’t have a vision problem.

When I walked out, I realized I had been blessed and cursed. When I was young I probably saw at twenty-ten. I could read signs from a mile away. My wife used to ask how I could possibly make that out. Now I had dropped to twenty-fifteen, which only meant I had finally joined everyone else. My eyes were still fine. The real change was in my speed, and I had felt that coming for a while.

Here is what I think had been happening. My reaction time had been slipping for twenty years, since my thirties, the way everyone’s does. But my eyes were so sharp that they covered for it. I could see the car early enough that I did not need to react fast. The acuity had been quietly paying for the speed. When the acuity dropped to merely very good, the bill came due, and for the first time I felt how slow I had become.

My colleague Andrea Stocco put words to it. He dropped a paper into my LinkedIn feed, and reading it reminded me of how speed and cognition change with age. It was a study he had written with Maarten van der Velde, Thomas Wilschut, and Hedderik van Rijn.

I was already primed to care, because age does not only take speed. It takes memory too, and I had been wondering whether speaking two languages builds a reserve against that. More words, more contexts, the constant balancing of one against the other. So a paper on memory landed on something I already had in my head.

What they did was simple to say. When we test memory, we usually boil it down to one number and compare it to a group average. But remembering is not one thing. It is several. Their method pulls a single performance into several separate pieces and measures each one on its own. One piece is how well you remember. Another is how fast the memory fades. And one of them is barely about memory at all. They call it non-retrieval time: the speed of taking the cue in and moving to answer. That piece is my eyes on the freeway. Pull the pieces apart, and you see what a single number hides. A person can remember as well as ever and still have gotten slower getting there. That was my eyes on the chart. As sharp as ever. Slower than before. We live like that all the time, trading speed for accuracy and accuracy for speed, one ability quietly paying for another.

The chart was a group test. One number, against everyone else. Sitting in my car on the freeway, I had been doing the opposite without knowing it: a study with one subject, run in real time, under pressure, by someone trained to tell signal from noise. The optometrist had the better machine. I had the better test.

It turns out the people who wrote the paper have built something out of it. The paper is the engine; the test is the car. Their lab, Precision Cognition Labs, made the Seattle-Groningen Memory Assessment, a memory test you can take again and again instead of once in a clinic. It does not sort you into a box. It follows how fast you, in particular, forget, and tracks that Speed of Forgetting over time. The example on their site is the index for a fifty-seven-year-old. Two years younger than me. It is the thing I had wanted from that eye chart, a test that watches one person change.

On the court, the loss took a few years more for me to notice. Then one day I hit a ball off the frame, something I almost never do. I started slowing my stroke down to get there early, making myself watch the ball all the way in, because if I trusted my eyes to find it the way they always had, I would miss it. In my book, Mastery, I called the part of us that does this without thinking the doer, the lower system that runs a practiced skill while we look away. The doer does not need to be fast. It already knows where the ball is going. It had carried my tennis for years after the road gave me up. But even the doer runs on what the eyes feed it, and at last the feed had thinned.

We always tell this story as loss. Loss of speed, loss of acuity, loss of memory, loss of language. And it is. But the part that amazes me is how long I did not notice, because the system kept covering for itself, one ability stepping in for another, until I was doing the same things a different way. My eyes carried my slow hands. My practice carried my eyes. Two languages may yet carry my memory. We call it loss because we are watching the pieces go. But the body does not fail. It finds another route. Isn’t that a gain, and not a loss?

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Reference: van der Velde, M., Wilschut, T., van Rijn, H., & Stocco, A. (2026). Idiographic memory modelling in ACT-R using alternating maximum likelihood estimation (Version 2) [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/xs28g_v2

The assessment built on this line of work is the Seattle-Groningen Memory Assessment (SGMA) from Precision Cognition Labs (precision-cognition.com).

I wrote about the other half of this a few days ago. Same discovery, a different part of the body — my tennis serve, and the one piece of it that had been switched off for forty years without my knowing. The Serve I Couldn’t See.

In my book Mastery, I gave the tennis serve its own chapter. I have spent the better part of forty years trying to figure mine out.

Last week I saw it for the first time.

I don’t mean on video. I’ve watched myself on video for years. I mean I had never seen the structure of it. Which parts of my body were doing the work, and which were just along for the ride. Last week my friend Joel Henry ran my serve through OptiSwing, the analysis engine he built, and handed me a number: 63 out of 100. Seven points from “advanced.”

For most of those forty years I thought I knew what was wrong. My back elbow was too low. I had decided this early and never let go of it. I tried everything to lift it, and all the lifting ever did was build a hitch into the motion. I spent years trying to file that hitch back out. It got better. It never left. My serve shifted like an automatic transmission that won’t quite catch the next gear as you accelerate, a little catch right where the smooth should be.

There was one exception. About fifteen years ago, for a single summer, I had the serve. I had started skipping the windup and beginning the motion already at the trophy pose, racket up, ball about to leave my hand. For a few months the pop came back. The serve was pure acceleration, effortless, the thing I had been chasing. Then it slipped away and I could not say why it had ever been there. A few months ago I tried the same trick, starting at the trophy again. Nothing. I could not get the summer back. It had felt like luck, and luck does not come when you call it.

Then the app showed me the thing I’d been missing the whole time.

My serve, it turns out, is almost all rotation. Shoulder rotation: 95. Rotational range: 96. Arm motion range: 100, the maximum. On paper, my upper body coils and unwinds like a professional’s. If power came only from turning, I’d be elite.

But power doesn’t come only from turning. In Mastery I describe the serve as a wave that starts at the feet and travels up through the torso, into the arm, and out through the hand into the racket. The pop you hear is the top of that wave. The legs are where it gets launched. And here is where the same scorecard turned honest. Knee drive: 52. Body twist: 53. Weight on the back foot: no. Trophy pose: low. Body lean at contact: low. Forward drive: low.

Read those together and the picture is brutal. My wave doesn’t start at the feet. It starts at the shoulders. Everything below the waist, the part that’s supposed to load first and fire first, is standing still. I’m generating a professional-grade turn on top of a base that never engages. The rotation isn’t elite despite the dead legs. It’s working overtime because of them. The coil is doing the legs’ job.

And the part that should cap the wave, the sudden outward snap at contact, can’t finish what it was never properly fed. Bend and snap: 34. Contact positioning: 42. These are the lowest numbers on the card, and they sit at the very end of the chain, downstream of everything that didn’t fire.

I generate everything I’ve got from a single segment of the body, and I leave the bottom of the wave switched off. I never knew. You can’t feel an absence. Nothing in my body says “the legs aren’t here.” It just feels like my serve. The only one I’ve ever had.

This is the part I wrote a whole chapter about and still couldn’t see in myself.

In Mastery, I argue that every complex skill is what my doctoral advisor Elizabeth Bates called “a new machine built out of old parts.” A tennis serve isn’t one thing you learn. It’s a stack of older things, a throwing motion, a knee bend, a weight transfer, a snap, assembled into something new. The chapter calls the serve the quintessential emergent function. I stitched my own serve together as a teenager out of the parts I already owned: the overhand throw from baseball, the footwork from basketball, the long throwing motion from football.

Now I can see exactly which parts I brought to the table. I brought the throw, the rotation, the range. All of it lives from the waist up, because that is where a throw lives. I never brought the legs into it. My serve is an honest record of the body I assembled it from. And of the pieces I never went back to add.

That is the part that got me. The scorecard isn’t really measuring my serve. It’s measuring my history. The order in which I picked up the pieces, the ones that fused and the ones that never did. And the thing about an emergent skill is that, from the inside, the assembly is invisible to the one who assembled it. It feels seamless. It feels like nature. It took an external eye to show me the seams. In this case the eye had a face. Two of them. Joel Henry, a former NASA engineer, built the engine that pulls a serve apart joint by joint and scores each piece against thousands of others. In about a year he taught a machine to see the parts, and then he pointed it at mine. His co-founder Yuer Gao, who studied cognitive science before she started OptiSwing, built the company around the idea that a swing is something you can take apart and read. They had to believe the serve was assembled before they could build a tool that finds the seams.

I find that I am not discouraged by the 63. The legs and the base are not gone. They were simply never invited in. They are old parts I already own, sitting in other movements I already make. A squat. A throw that starts from the ground. A jump. The work isn’t to fix a broken serve. It’s to finish assembling one.

But here is the catch with a scorecard. It hands you a column of numbers and leaves you alone with them. Knee drive 52. Body twist 53. Trophy pose low. I could read every one of them and still not know what to do with my body tomorrow morning. Forty years of trying taught me that working on the wrong number, the way I worked on my elbow, can make the whole machine worse. Numbers are a diagnosis. They are not a fix.

Joel gave me the fix in one sentence. He looked at the same card and told me I was building my lean from the wrong end.

Because I did have a lean. I knew a serve needed one, so I made one. I dropped my back shoulder to get it. The tilt looked right and did nothing, because a lowered back shoulder is just a lowered back shoulder. It asks the legs for nothing. What I needed was the opposite motion that produces the same shape. Raise the front shoulder, and the back one falls on its own. Same lean to the eye. A completely different machine underneath.

So I tried it. I reached my left hand up as if I were going for something on a shelf far above my head. And my body did the rest on its own. My back foot dug in to keep me from tipping backward. My knees bent to load the reach. My legs, the dead legs, the 52, came online without my asking, because the lifted shoulder gave them something to do.

I have seen hundreds of photographs of the top pros with the tossing hand stretched impossibly high. I always read it as style, as reach, as something they did up top. I never understood that this one lever was the thing that fires the whole base. Lift the front shoulder and the body has to drive up underneath it to hold the line. The legs were never missing. They were just waiting for the cue I never gave them.

A picture I took of Roger Federer with his front arm pointed way up to the sky.

One small change at the top. A butterfly flaps its wings over the Pacific and a storm comes ashore in the Gulf. I lifted a shoulder and my feet woke up.

Here is what undid me about it. My back elbow was never the problem. It rode low because I was dropping my back shoulder to fake the lean, and the low elbow was just that dropped shoulder showing up one joint down. I spent forty years trying to lift the elbow. Every fix I aimed at it made the hitch worse, because I was hauling on a part that was only telling the truth about a part above it. You cannot see your own assembly from the inside. It turns out you can also misread it for forty years and grind away at exactly the wrong piece.

And then I understood the summer. Fifteen years ago, when I skipped the windup and started at the trophy, I was not fixing anything. I was skipping the exact moment where I dropped the shoulder. The bad setup happened on the way up, and starting at the top meant I never made it. The serve was pure because I had cut the flaw out of the motion without knowing the flaw was there. That is why it felt like luck. I had no idea what I had removed, so I had no idea how to keep it.

And that is why it failed a few months ago. Fifteen more years of dropping that shoulder, and the habit had crept upstream. It now lives in the trophy pose itself. Starting at the top no longer skips it, because I carry it into the top with me. You cannot escape a flaw by jumping past it once the flaw has moved into the place you jump to.

That is the honest shape of what happened, and it is a good thing, not a knock. OptiSwing is built to be used alone, and it did the hard part alone. It saw the parts. It laid my serve out joint by joint and showed me, past forty years of guessing, exactly which pieces fired and which never did. No coach watching me for a season could have been that precise.

But a column of numbers is not yet a thing you can do with your body. Knee drive 52. Trophy pose low. True, and useless, until someone turns it into a motion. That step, from the number to the muscle, is its own skill, and this time a person took it. Joel looked at the same card I was staring at, said one sentence about building my lean from the wrong end, and the number became a body reaching for a high shelf.

That gap, between seeing the part and inhabiting it, is the whole subject of my book. Knowing a serve is assembled from old pieces is not the same as feeling where the next piece goes. For now, a human crosses that gap fastest. But nothing says it belongs to us forever. The same engine that learned to see the parts could learn to name the cue, to hand you not just the score but the reach. The day the app tells you to grab the high shelf on its own is the day the loop closes.

I tried the high shoulder for a few minutes. That is all it took to hear it. The pop of the cork coming off the strings, the sound I had been chasing since college. The one I found briefly 15 years ago. The one I had been chasing once again until today.

Forty years. I came to this serve to finally see it. I walked away able to hear it, and to feel it.

Curious what your own serve is hiding? OptiSwing, from Yuer Gao and Joel Henry, is at optiswing.com.

There’s a companion to this one. Same idea, but in the eyes instead of the arm — how very good vision spent twenty years quietly covering for hands that had gotten slow. 20/15, Very Good.

A la ciencia no le importa quién eres.

Der Wissenschaft ist es egal, wer du bist.

In the three sentences above you see the same argument in three languages. Only one of them is built from words a child would regularly use. It is not the English one.

The English line is the title of an essay by the psychologist Michael Inzlicht, published this spring. The argument of the title is a good one. He is defending a thing called universalism, the idea the sociologist Robert Merton came up with in 1942: judge the claim, not the claimant. Race, rank, gender, the school where you earned your degree should not count when someone weighs whether your work is right. A bright thought from a first-year undergraduate student should be weighed the same as one from a Nobel winner. And the weighing goes both ways. The student’s work must be open to the same hard questions, or the student is not yet being treated as a scientist at all.

Inzlicht is right to highlight this. He is also right to suggest that “don’t punch down,” the notion that the strong must not criticize the weak, can easily turn into something that hurts the people it means to guard. A junior scholar’s work insulated from criticism is not offering protection. It runs the risk of softly saying that her work is not worth the fight. He calls this infantilizing. That is the right word for it.

I am not going to say the essay is wrong. What struck me as odd was the way it made me feel. It wasn’t the content of what Inzlicht wrote. It was about the language he wrote it in.

—

The title, Science Doesn’t Care Who You Are, is made up of five words. Four of them are old Saxon words, the types of words English has used since before the Normans came: doesn’t, care, who, you, are. Only science is a Latin import. Now let’s compare that to the word Inzlicht uses for the same idea. Universalism. Five syllables, straight from Latin. More condensed, more abstract, a word reserved for those in an institution.

He put the old words on the door and the Latin word in the engine room. He did this, I am sure, without paying it much mind. He chose the plain words because plain words are more direct because of what happened in 1066.

After 1066, French was the language of the rulers for three hundred years. The castle was put on top of the field, giving English two names for the same thing. Ask and inquire. Help and assistance. Gut and intestine. Fight and altercation. The short words are things you say talking to people every day; the long words feel like the official language you use in a courtroom or in school.

This is the seam I keep writing about, and it runs straight through Inzlicht’s essay.

Watch which words go where. The things he wants you to remember and admire get the old words. A punch, a fight, sunlight over shadows are memorable phrases. So is “what professors are supposed to do.” Short and straightforward. The other things, the ones that create distrust, these get the castle words. The prohibition against critical engagement. Power dynamics. Marginalized. Institutional affiliation. Long Latin words. The words of the institution. Every time the argument delivers its punch it is in everyday language. When it tries to distance itself, it appears dressed in more elegant clothing.

He doesn’t say the critics have the weaker case. He just dresses them in it. The honest-sounding words are on one side and the bureaucratic-sounding words are on the other, and by the time you reach the paragraph where Merton finally appears, you already believe it. You weren’t being convinced. You were being dressed into agreement.

—

Now here is the part that made me uneasy, and I want to be careful, because it is not an accusation.

The plain style is a style of the powerless. The clerk learns the castle words to be let in the door. The kid at my university switches into Norman English to survive the seminar. That is the normal direction of travel: you reach up, into the borrowed words, to be taken seriously. Inzlicht does the opposite. He reaches down. He is a tenured professor, has many awards, a podcast with reach, a co-host who is one of the people the essay defends. In the real map of power he is the castle. And he writes in the voice of the field.

A man at the top, speaking in the register of the bottom, to argue that the top should not count.

I do not think he planned this. I think he chose the plain words because the plain words simply work. But the effect is real. “This is not about power,” said in the oldest, most homespun words the language owns, by a person who holds a great deal of it. The plain words are not a sign of deceit. They are a costume — sewn from the one cloth our culture has agreed to read as the absence of a costume: plainness itself.

That is why the essay feels, to me, sensible and wrong at the same time. The sensible part is the claim. Universalism is true. The wrong part is the wearing of it. You cannot stand in the castle, speak in the voice of the village, and have “judge the idea, not the rank” come out as a neutral remark. The choice of the village voice is itself a move about rank. It says: I am just a plain man, throwing a plain punch. And that, of the whole essay, is the one thing that is not quite true.

It is as if he dressed in jeans, a t-shirt and tennis shoes. A common everyday person who looks just like everyone else. And in these clothes, he fits in with a readership who sees him as a sensible equal, at least for a few words.

—

So I should say he is a lord in plain clothes and be done with it.

I cannot, and the reason matters.

The essay names its own power. Inzlicht writes a whole paragraph admitting that power is not a simple ladder, that a junior scholar with a big following may outweigh a senior one. He admits he has been too sharp before. He invites the reader to punch back. A man hiding his position does not narrate his position. So the honest charge is not that he hid. It is stranger than that. He named his power in the castle words, in the cool analytic paragraph, and he argued in the village words, and the village words are the ones the reader carries home. He confessed in Norman and convinced in Saxon. The seam let him do both in the same essay and feel, the whole time, like one honest man.

And I have to go further still, because the next thing is true and reflects back to the very writing I am producing right now, and that you are reading.

Look at what I have just done. I reached for register. For substrate, for Latinate, for the whole credentialed apparatus. And every time the argument got a bit more direct, I reached down, into the old words: lord, castle, plain clothes, field, village, the voice of the bottom. I did exactly what I am charging him with doing. I costumed my case. I caught a man sounding plain by sounding plain about it. There is a reading of this essay in which I am simply the second lord, calling the first one an impostor in fluent Norman while wearing, myself, a very well-made peasant shirt.

I tried on the t-shirt, the blue jeans, the tennis shoes. I found that I rather like how they look on me and how I feel when I wear them.

This is the part where I am supposed to resolve it. I am not going to, because I don’t think it resolves.

—

Try the second line. A la ciencia no le importa quién eres. Read it to a Spanish speaker and the argument arrives whole. Merton survives the crossing without a scratch. Nothing is lost in the claim. But something is lost in the staging, and the loss is the point. Spanish has a high layer and a low one, the learned word and the everyday word: escuchar and oír, adquirir and comprar, dialogar and hablar. A Mexican scholar reaching for universalismo over plain speech is making a recognizable move. But the gap is shallower. The learned layer is later Latin borrowed onto a base that was already Latin, near shades of one cloth, not a second tongue laid over a first. Yes, the Moors also tried to form their own seam when they ruled over Spain for several hundred years. There are a few loan words, almohada, albahaca, jirafa. Pillow, basil, and giraffe. They are everyday common objects, hispanicized to survive in an ocean of Latin words.

When you try to render punching down you find the trouble. Spanish has the idea in good native words. Cebarse con el débil, to feed on the weak. Ensañarse con quien tiene menos, to turn cruel on the one who has less. Both are fluent, both are old, neither is borrowed. But neither is a fist. In Spanish the cruelty has a name but no hand. The fight in English is a fist against a Norman noun, punch against universalism, the body against the institution. In Spanish universalismostands beside the native idiom as just another long word, cut from the same cloth in a slightly darker shade. The argument still stands. The costume drama is dimmed to candlelight, because Spanish has a closet with a few loan words, and even those hang close to the native ones.

That already tells you the staging is not the argument. A grown language can carry Merton with one register and lose very little on the way up. But Spanish only shows the staging is removable. German shows something worse. The picture of language underneath the staging was never a fact about language at all.

Here is the third line. Der Wissenschaft ist es egal, wer du bist. I learned German as an adult, years into a life already lived in Spanish, English, and Portuguese, and German is where I first saw the seam at all.

You cannot see it from inside English. From inside English the plain words simply feel like honesty. There is no seam visible, only truth and the absence of truth, and the plain words sit on the truth side and you never ask why. I never asked why. I read plainness as honesty for forty years and called that reading my own good judgment.

Then German. When German needs a word for science it does not borrow one. It builds Wissenschaft from its own parts: Wissen, to know, and -schaft, the ending that gives us -ship and -hood. The word means, root for root, something close to knowship. When German needs a word for universalism it builds Allgemeingültigkeit, general-holding-good-ness, out of the pieces a child used for everyday life. The abstract word and the plain word are cut from the same wood. And the first time I reached for an abstract idea in German and found it made of plain parts, I felt the floor of English move. Because it meant the thing I had always taken for the nature of language, that deep words are borrowed and grand and the plain words are home, was not the nature of language. It was the nature of English. It was 1066. German has a high register too, and borrowed words of its own, but they keep the sound of borrowing. When a German reaches for the Latin word you can hear him reach. A German Inzlicht could still dress one side up and one side down, but the dressing would show. In English the reach is silent, because the borrowed word stopped sounding borrowed nine hundred years ago, and a costume you cannot hear go on is the one that gets mistaken for skin.

That is the unmasking, and it is why I can see Inzlicht’s costume: not because I am cleverer than he is, but because I was made to stand for a while in a language that has no costumes of this kind, and from there I turned around and saw that English was wearing one. When I started learning German, I thought it was just for personal enrichment, to be able to communicate in a foreign land. Learning German was much more than that. It opened a door.

Four languages across one life, the last of them learned late, is not a sharper eye. It is a rarer one, and the rareness is a kind of fortune most people are never handed. It is its own seam, and I am as much inside it as I am inside English. I cannot climb out of it to show it to you clean. And here is the part that is not an escape. I came back. My life is in English. I am writing this in English. I saw the seam from outside and the seeing did not free me of it. It only means I now reach for the plain word knowing what the plain word does.

I don’t think Inzlicht knows what the words are doing for him. I cannot see into him to be sure. But I know my own side. I reach for the plain word, and I reach knowing what it does. That is the only difference between us, and it is not a difference in rank. Eyes open does not get me out of the costume. It just means I wear it knowing what it is. If Inzlicht doesn’t know, he still has the cover of not knowing. I have given that up, and the knowing keeps me in the seam exactly as deep as it keeps him.

—

So this is a verdict after all, though not the one the title promised. The body on the table is partly mine.

The argument is true. Inzlicht is honest. And the language he wrote it in, the same language I am writing this in, hands every speaker a choice of costume and then agrees, four words out of five, to call one of the costumes nakedness. There is no clean ground. Not for him. Not for me. The plain register carries a claim about who you are. The high register carries a different claim about who you are. An English speaker picks a side with every word, and the side he picks is loudest exactly when he believes he has stepped outside the fight.

Inzlicht did nothing wrong. He did something the language would not let him not do, most likely without seeing it, which is how almost everyone does it. That is the finding, and it is darker than catching a man in a lie. The seam caught a careful, honest, correct man, and it caught him by giving him, for free, the most persuasive thing an English argument can have: the sound of a plain man telling the plain truth.

I have stood outside English and looked back, and I have just told you so in the oldest, plainest words I could find, which means you will probably read it as honesty. You may be right. But you are reading the costume, the same as always. The only thing that has changed is that now you know it is one, and knowing it is not the same as getting out from under it. We are both under it together.

I’m often fascinated by the worldview he brings. He understands the US, and the things he finds revealing about it are often the same things he finds strange. He knows social systems, institutional systems, and how institutions decide who’s worth keeping, and his time inside all these different social and economic arrangements gives him a unique perspective.

He and I talk about the future of the university a lot. I’m always struck by how long his view runs, how well he knows history, and how naturally he folds that history into what’s happening now. Below is a short conversation we had around universities, in a Starbucks in our neighborhood.

What do you think is happening to Higher Ed in the US?

Fundamentally, businesses can only exist if they produce something (clothes, cereal, knowledge, unique skills) that is needed for which some entity is willing to offer something (money, trade goods, government support). After WWII, the US was the source of everything (money, labor, etc.), so companies like Kellog offered decent pay and a good, solid job to keep their labor force. It was also not as easy to ship things in, especially labor. Companies also had a long-term view. As global competition heated up and outsourcing became a thing, reducing costs outweighed keeping labor happy. Business view has also shifted to short-term payoff, so quarterly profits became far more important than long-term viability. During COVID lockdowns, there was another short phase of valuing labor, but that evaporated quickly.

Also after WWII, the GI bill ensured that universities were flush with customers and money. The mantra became “just go to college.” Any degree was the ticket to a good job and a virtual guarantee of a solid, middle-class life; the American Dream, or so the story went. The percentage of people 25 years or older with a college degree was 6.2% in 1950, 20.3% in 1990, and 37.9% in 2022.

The supply of college degrees was low in 1950 and the demand was high. College enrollment exploded and so did majors. For-profit schools became more common. Building frenzy became common. Money for research increased. Times were good. Alas, nothing lasts forever. We have reached a point where college degrees – while still in demand – are not as valuable as they used to be, especially for majors in low demand or where there is an oversupply.

You mentioned to me that you were a bank teller. Tell me more about your thoughts on that.

When I was a bank teller, I think I was one of the last ones to get a part-time job with benefits. And I remember one woman who’d been there her whole working life. She spent her entire career at the bank as a teller. Didn’t make a boatload of money, but made enough to be middle class, and had a good retirement. That all ended in 1996. It started earlier in business, and it percolated into academia.

Kellogg was the same way. People got a retirement plan. GM was the same. Part of the problem is these companies didn’t adapt to changing times. They waited too long, until it hit the fan, and then they had to act aggressively. GM shipped most of their operations to other countries. Banks shifted to hourly employees only. That’s because they waited too long, because leadership didn’t make the choice they should have. Plus they always looked at quarterly profits.

So whose fault is it?

Everybody’s. The employees didn’t realize it either. When GM workers were making over a hundred thousand dollars on the assembly line in the eighties, that was never a long-term plan. It was unsustainable. The cars would have cost a million dollars. Who could buy those cars? There’s always this war between making profits and keeping people happy.

How does that apply to universities?

Universities work very slowly. The modern university let the postwar narrative take hold, this idea of shared governance. But it never was shared governance. They thought they had to please employees because there were so few of them and they were hard to get. Now that there are a lot of PhDs, relatively speaking, departments can get away with hiring adjuncts. Back in the thirties and fifties there were no adjuncts, unless someone wanted to be one. A few fields, speech pathology, nursing, still need a more rewarding system to keep people. But at the end of the day it’s supply and demand.

So the PhD is the new master’s?

It’s the new bachelor’s. Not the new master’s. More people have master’s degrees (13.2%) than there had bachelor’s in 1950 (6.2%). So, the master’s doesn’t hold as much value as it used to, unless it’s a professional master’s, speech pathology, maybe an MBA. The bachelor’s is the new high school diploma. But it’s shifting back a little. If people stop going to college in those numbers, the bachelor’s will have more value again. If ten percent of the population has bachelor’s degrees, it’s valuable. You can’t beat supply and demand.

So the problem is that it became college for all.

No; college should be available to all, so that is not the problem. The problem is that industrializing degree production inevitably leads to loss of value of those degrees. Put differently, when everybody’s a millionaire, nobody’s a millionaire. Somebody we know, who came to the US from Cuba once said, if you get paid the same for making two pairs of shoes versus ten, eventually, everyone will make two pairs. College degrees got inflated. It’s as simple as that. They still have value, but not the value they used to have. And fewer and fewer businesses demand a college degree.

So you see this as a rebalancing.

Yes. Clearly. It’s a contraction, but it’s because it was a bubble. The college bubble burst. There’s still a need for college degrees, but they have to be reimagined for new realities like AI. Today’s student wants more practical delivery. You could get a certificate, sign up for a course.

And in a weird way the technical school leads us back to the old university. How’s that?

As there are fewer majors, there’s still a need for high-level degrees. But because there are fewer of them, and more people get technical degrees, the value of the philosophy degree, the degrees like that, goes way up. When there’s a supply shortage, the value goes up. So there’s a rebound. It won’t get back to the peak. Peak university is over, but the fundamentals are still there, and they are strong.

So where are we headed, and what’s stopping us from getting there?

I am optimistic over the long-term viability of universities, and the irony is that we may be heading back to an era of focusing on education, knowledge, and the value of the degree for a purpose. If we dig deep into our academic culture and also listened to what our current students need, we will find the seeds of our success. During the peak, universities often promoted themselves as a smörgåsbord for high school graduates hungry for the “college experience”; a buffet of full-spectrum entertainment, athletics, lifestyle, research institute, and ticket to a cushy future with a big paycheck. Recent estimates show that about 30-40% of recent college graduates find full-time jobs in their field of study. At the same time, there is demand in areas where colleges are not offering courses and majors. Granted, colleges are much more than trade schools, and I am not suggesting we turn into trade schools. But perhaps the case of Sears - a once mighty and omnipresent retailer where you could even buy a house - should serve as a cautionary tale. Sears had everything going for them: the customer base, the infrastructure, the brand, the distribution network, the logistics, and even an electronic database. Alas, Sears failed to meet the challenges of the day, and instead of adapting, they hunkered down, failed to digitize, they cut, and disinvested, which made the once illustrious company spiral into oblivion. I doubt universities will go down that path, but the sooner we adapt to our new realities, the quicker our academic renaissance will occur, which fills me with cautious optimism for the future of institutions of higher education.

It has been almost twenty years since my father died. Ten years ago I remembered him, and today what remains is the memory of that memory. For all of you who still have your fathers in the flesh — cherish them. And for those of us who are left with memories, it is important to know that a father’s love transcends time and distance, resting in a small corner of our hearts.

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In 2016, I boarded a plane in Frankfurt bound for Los Angeles. Getting on that plane felt like going home. I had lived in Santa Monica with my father, my stepmother Yolanda, and my three siblings for several years, and now I was returning — this time in passing, on my way to a professional meeting in Irvine.

I left the gray March sky of Germany, and when I arrived at LAX I realized I was somewhere else entirely. The strong sun, the warm breeze — they seemed unreal, as if someone had put me inside a film where everything was a different color.

The drive to Irvine brought back beautiful memories. I headed down the 405 freeway, the one that runs from the San Fernando Valley to the edge of Los Angeles County, where the city meets the next county over, Orange County. At 17 I was almost ready to get my driver’s license. I had passed every test my father put me through. Now it would be my turn to drive all the way to Irvine on the 405, one of the busiest freeways in the country. That night was no exception. The cars flowed like fish. Sometimes we reached higher speeds, where everything seemed to be going smoothly. And then my father would point: “Do you see the lights in the distance? When you see them change from white to red, that means they’re braking. In a few minutes we’ll have to brake too. So start slowing down.” A few minutes later we were crawling, and then I brought the car to a stop. I have never forgotten it. To this day I feel the flow of traffic like a living organism that sometimes inhales, holds its breath, before exhaling.

We arrived in Irvine, at a reception for Chicano professors and professionals. A few years earlier, Yolanda and I had gone with my father to see E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. We both came out crying. My father told us: that film isn’t about an extraterrestrial. It’s about the minority that comes from east Los Angeles and arrives at UCLA. It’s fine for him to visit — they enjoy having him around — but in the end he has to go home.

But minorities had made California their home. That night, a tribute was being held for Tomás Rivera, writer, scholar, and chancellor of the University of California at Riverside. Person after person came to the front of the room. Francisco Alarcón presented, a poet who read in English and in Spanish — poems about the struggle of the farmworker against American capital. Tomás Rivera thanked everyone. Everyone was celebrating, and everyone had a few too many, my father included.

When the celebration ended, it was time to head back. We got on the freeway and my father took his usual place — the supervisor’s seat. But that night something changed. It wasn’t long before his eyes began to close, little by little, from the late hour and the sedating effect of the alcohol. The moment came when I saw him asleep and calm, sometimes opening his eyes to confirm we were still on the freeway, then drifting back to the deep sleep he had found. The night was quiet and the traffic that had swallowed us hours before gave way to a calm, half-empty freeway. I was driving alone. The supervisor was asleep. Without a word, something had changed between us.

The feeling of that March of 2016 was strange. Ten years had already passed since he died. Los Angeles didn’t seem the same to me. The warm light of the Southern California sun lit up everything around me, but it no longer felt the same. It was like seeing a loved one who had become a ghost — it seems to be the person, you hear their voice, you see their face, but they are no longer alive. You know it is an illusion. Los Angeles had become a ghost city. The absence of everything I had lived so many years before saturated every passing car.

On the way back from Irvine, I stopped before reaching the hotel. I couldn’t pass that close without doing it.

I went to the cemetery where my father was buried.

There, with a view of the Pacific, the light shimmered over the ocean and the trees swayed slowly. I remembered everything that had happened with him. His death, so sudden, so unexpected. I prayed for a moment and said quietly: Dad, will my dreams ever come true?

He answered me right away: “You always get what you want.”

How could he have had such confidence in me? His voice had carried me through my moments of greatest doubt, when you think something is impossible. And then it would come true.

My father already knew.

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What I know is this: my father never stopped asking me about my work, never stopped getting excited about what I was studying. He said it was the work of the future — studying the brain and how it manages several languages at once.

In his own work, he had traced the connection between the medieval Spanish Romance and the Mexican corrido. As a graduate student at Berkeley he had studied the jarchas — short Arabic poems — and had learned Arabic in order to read them. He and I talked about science fiction, about the future, about space — that place where his humanities and my science met without asking anyone’s permission.

There in the cemetery I was able to remember, for a moment, all the love he had given me. Today, ten years later, I remember that memory with even more tenderness. I think of all the ways his ideas, his sayings, and his love accompany me.

That is what I inherited. Not a mandate. Not a designated lane. But the instinct to follow curiosity wherever it leads, to cross the borders others see as walls, to find the deep structure beneath the surface.

My father’s dreams did not fit in a single language, or a single discipline, or a single corner of academia, or a single corner of the world.

Neither do mine.