Human Behavior

So a lawyer with a disability and a Catholic monk walk into a bar…

What would be considered a bar joke for some is actually a description of a night with a friend for me.

In an era where the only difference between American politics and a WWE match is the amount of spandex involved, the time is right for me to tell the story of why I have regular phone conversations with a Catholic deacon.

Thirty years ago, the most-prized wines in California—including Robert Mondavi Reserve Cabernet, Duckhorn Three Palms Merlot, Heitz Martha’s Vineyard Cabernet—sold for under $30. Opus One got attention with its shocking price of $50. Inflation since then has roughly doubled the value of money. But the cheapest of those famous wines now costs about four times as much. Heitz Martha’s Vineyard is now $200; Opus One is $225.

When he embarked on his freshman year at UC Berkeley in 2014, Esteban Vasquez was set to become the first in his family to graduate from college. A couple of months in, he was ready to drop out.

Bernie Peyton is profoundly dyslexic, and that made his early years growing up in New York City difficult. School was hellish: He struggled to read, he was bullied, and it was hard to make friends. Then when he was 9, his stepfather gave him a book that changed his life.

Peyton still has the book—a beautifully illustrated instruction manual on origami by Isao Honda that contains examples of various works pasted to the pages. He recently opened the volume in his Berkeley home, and thumbed through it reverently.

It is April 12, one day before the Golden State Warriors will barge into NBA history with their 73^rd victory of the season, and practice is winding down at the team’s downtown Oakland headquarters.

Stephen Curry lofts majestic three-point shots at one basket, as usual. Klay Thompson sharpens his silky-smooth release nearby. And on an adjacent court, backup point guard Shaun Livingston unleashes a stream of friendly trash talk in a spirited one-on-one game against…who, exactly?

For over 20 years—before 9/11 and Black Lives Matter and Trump’s wall-building scheme, before “white privilege” and “male privilege” were common phrases—Viet Thanh Nguyen was wrestling with questions of social justice and power. For years he dreamed of writing a novel that would explore these important concepts in a well-crafted, entertaining, even funny way. And that, in turn, would coax people to keep reading, even the parts that many Americans would like to ignore, and ultimately it would inspire them to look at themselves and the world with fresh eyes.