do highly experienced professionals like nurses and anesthesiologists really need to be explicitly told that their role in a cardiac surgery is important? Do they really need to be informed that if they see the surgeon make a mistake, they might want to speak up? The answer, as Edmondson discovered, is a thundering yes. The value of those signals is not in their information but in the fact that they orient the team to the task and to one another. What seems like repetition is, in fact, navigation. Those signals added up in a way that you can hear in team members’ voices.
in the boardinghouse the justices were staying in, dislocating his shoulder and suffering a mild concussion. As he recovered, he wrote a sweet letter to Polly. “Old men”—Marshall was sixty-eight—“do not get over sprains and hurts quite as quickly as young ones.” He had, he went on, plenty of time on his hands as he recovered, which he spent recalling the episodes of their courtship, over forty years ago: “our little tiffs and makings up.… the lock of hair… all the thousand indescribable but deeply affecting instances of your affection or coldness which constituted for a time the happiness or misery of my life.” They could “never be lost while recollection remains.”
In his Life of Washington, Marshall had described the passage of the Fifth Amendment and its nine fellows. By the end of 1791, Congress had passed and the states had ratified ten amendments. The Ninth and Tenth were general statements about the division of rights and powers among the federal and state governments and the people. The First through the Eighth, by contrast, listed specific prohibitions—no establishment of religion or warrantless searches—and guarantees—freedom of the press, the right to keep and bear arms. The inclusion of this compendium, according to Marshall, had been a matter of political and emotional housekeeping. The “friends” of the government “were anxious to annex to the constitution those explanations and barriers against… possible encroachments… on the liberties of the people which had been loudly demanded, however unfounded… might be the fears by which those demands were suggested.” The Constitution as it left Philadelphia in 1787 was fine, but nervous folk feared imaginary dangers; to please them, Congress drew up the Bill of Rights.
the term executive skills comes from the neurosciences literature and refers to the brain-based skills that are required for humans to execute, or perform, tasks.
One trick almost every distiller I visited tried to play on me was to get me to stick my head into the vat during the final stages of fermentation, when the headspace—the volume of air above the liquid—is a cloud of CO2. Taking a whiff is like sticking a knitting needle up your nose. Too much of it, and you can pass out and fall right into the vat. Fun!)
As different spirits have evolved, they’ve taken on different setups. In Ireland, they use three pot stills to make whisky; in Scotland, it’s two. Clear, light, Puerto Rican rum uses a continuous still, but heavier, darker styles of rum generally use two or three pot stills chained together. Of French brandies, Armagnac is distilled only once in a copper pot still, but cognac twice. Eau de vie is double distilled in a copper pot; aquavit comes off a continuous still.
When the Black Death spread across Europe, from 1347 to 1350, physicians didn’t really have anything to make people feel better besides aqua vitae. So they used them. The French translated aqua vita into eau de vie, and the Dutch called it “burnt wine,” or brandewijn. Exported to England, that got corrupted to “brandy-wine,” and eventually just “brandy.” The Scots started making the stuff out of grains; in Gaelic, they called it “water of life,” usquebaugh, eventually corrupted to “whisky.” By the early 1400s, people were getting addicted to ethanol. Liquor had spread across the world.
