Yesterday, 6:00 am: In a dark house with a sleeping family, unable to rest myself, I’m working on a proposal to the National Science Foundation.<\/p>\n
8:30 am: The Metro train is jammed because everyone is large in their winter coats. It’s too tight for newspapers, so people stare vacantly at one another.<\/p>\n
9:30 am: In a conference room on K Street, overlooking a square with trees that are sugared by the season’s first snow. Bright light streams through the huge panes. Eight people sit around a large conference table talking about the appropriate “message” for a nonpartisan political campaign. The short speeches begin with self-deprecating jokes, but everyone seems fundamentally self-assured and experienced.<\/p>\n
11:30 am: In another conference room, 6.5 miles northeast of K Street. This one is windowless and crowded. The walls are decorated with binders. We are going over the budget of a nonprofit organization. The institution itself is prospering, but the broader trends–lots of kids to serve, impending cuts in federal spending–make us sober.<\/p>\n
4:00 pm: In our front yard with our 6-year-old, building a foot-high “snowman” out of powdery snow as the clear sky turns dark blue behind a lattice of tree limbs. Venus and a slender moon appear over the roofs; commuters crunch home.<\/p>\n
10:00 pm: Back to the NSF proposal and email, but there’s time for cookie and tea with my wife and teenager and then a few pages of Orhan Pamuk’s My Name is Red<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Yesterday, 6:00 am: In a dark house with a sleeping family, unable to rest myself, I’m working on a proposal to the National Science Foundation. 8:30 am: The Metro train is jammed because everyone is large in their winter coats. It’s too tight for newspapers, so people stare vacantly at one another. 9:30 am: In […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4858","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4858","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4858"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4858\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4858"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4858"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/peterlevine.ws\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4858"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}