Making the hard call - and starting a new book project
Hallo folks, and welcome, new readers,
This week’s issue:
Make the hard call.
How do big things get done?
UC Press Spring Sale - and HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY for $17.97!
Events: AMA (Ask Me Anything) on Reddit, Weds 28 May
HUMANS in the world: videos, podcasts
Make the hard call
“Not everyone is cut out to be a bridge officer. … I don’t think it’s for you.”
Thus spoke Commander William Riker to Counsellor Deanna Troi in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation (Season 7, episode 16. “Thine Own Self.”). Troi had decided to study for the bridge officers’ test. She wanted to stretch herself by qualifying as a commander - extra pip on collar! And she could then take turns in The Big Chair usually warmed by Captain Jean-Luc Picard (memorably played by Sir Patrick Stewart) - the chair from which you got to say “make it so.”
Command training found Troi languishing in simulator jail: a holographic replica of the engineering deck on the USS Enterprise. Here, a pretend engine disaster was unfolding. Crew members buzzed around following Troi’s orders. And, three times, she failed to stop the ship from exploding. Despite passing every other command qualification requirement from first contact procedures to diplomatic law, she was not ready for command.
Post-morteming in her cabin later, Troi poured over engine schematics. But then Riker appeared, bearing bad news. He didn’t think Troi was cut out for command. Not only had she had failed the engineering qualification repeatedly, but she showed no sign that she could pass it. Riker couldn’t risk having her in command of the Enterprise: “My first duty is to the ship.”
But Troi didn’t give up - instead, she had an idea. Off she scuttled to the holodeck to re-start the simulation. This time round, something had severed a conduit in the bowels of the ship en route to the ominous-sounding anti-matter storage deck. The conduit was repairable - at a price. Someone would need to crawl over there to fix it - and they would not survive the radiation. In order to save the ship, Troi would have to send a crew member to their death.
She’d tried everything else. This was the only way.
And, as it turned out, that was the answer to the test. She had to be able to make the hard call. That was what it took to command a starship.
I re-watched this episode recently and it played in my mind like a map for writing and life strategy for the next few years. I have to make the hard calls: to sacrifice some things in order to attend to what matters most. The trick is to get outside myself just enough to be able to notice what those calls are, and how to call them. To be my own Commander Riker.
How do big things get done?
How can we make time, save energy, and allocate bandwidth for long projects with many moving parts? On one level, this has been THE driving work-strategy question for me for years. Now that HUMANS is out in the world and the book tour is done, I need an answer for figuring out a new workflow. I’m balancing book promotion from the comfort of my armchair with hammering out what my next book will be about - and dealing with eleventy-million mundanities and mountains on the errand front.
I’m currently reading two books that look at the micro and the macro of planning and doing:
Bent Flyvbjerg and Dan Gardner. How Big Things Get Done: The Surprising Factors that Determine the Fate of Every Project from Home Renovations to Space Exploration, and Everything In Between (2023).
This book has the most over-promising title, but it’s a fun read that takes you through mega-projects that worked and ones that didn’t. The most memorable takeaway so far? To ask yourself: what’s your lego? What are some solid building-blocks of actions and outputs that you can repeat until the big thing emerges from the worktable?
Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World (2025).
You might say that this book is a blueprint for devising the lego: how to think of everything you do as a little experiment so that whether or not it works, you still have results: you have the results of that experiment. You now know whether or not you can (ahem) write a newsletter after dinner in the summer without slumping onto the keyboard like a hummingbird in torpor.
UC Press Spring sale
Until 31 May, folks in the US and Canada receive a 40% discount from the University of California Press when ordering directly from the press and using the promo code MAY40 at the checkout on that website. Visit the UC Press website for terms of their Spring Sale.
HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY is just US$ 17.97 until May 31st!
Events: AMA on r/AskHistorians on Reddit
The AskHistorians subreddit on the Reddit online news and discussion platform will host a live AMA (Ask Me Anything) event with me on Wednesday 28 May. Between 9-11am and 12-2pm Eastern Time, I shall be answering live questions about the history of monsters generally, but especially about monster-making in the Western tradition, and about HUMANS and its making.
The announcement appears under Upcoming Events on the AskHistorians "About" page where the text-based, asynchronous event will take place.
The AMA thread will be posted a couple of hours before the start. Anyone with a free Reddit account can start asking questions there immediately. Answers will appear during the “live” hours, occasionally for another day, and intermittently for a while after that.
HUMANS in the world: videos, podcasts
Videos
For scholars who work on the history and culture of the Americas before about 1850, there’s no better place to hang out in the US that the John Carter Brown Library in Providence, RI. There are enough books, maps, and manuscripts to keep a nerd busy for a hundred lifetimes. I had the pleasure of holding a fellowship there a couple of times, so I was delighted when HUMANS: A MONSTROUS HISTORY was featured in the JCB Reads online fireside book chat series. I talked about the book with Karin Wulf, director of the library and history professor at Brown University. The recording is here. Other videos are available on my website.
Podcasts
My Peculiar Book Club YouTube show is now also available as a podcast episode! Here it is on Apple and Spotify.
You can also find me on www.surekhadavies.org,
BlueSky (@drsurekhadavies.bsky.social),
and Instagram/Threads (@surekhadavies).