Amy Lindgren

The holidays already? Or, as the Grinch might say, “Again??”

Luckily, the Grinch isn’t writing my column today, so I can share the joy of books that might give you a lift over the dark days of winter. These aren’t specifically about jobs or careers; rather, they’re a short, curated group of books I’ve found interesting or helpful this year.

Maybe you’ll find one here to keep your spirits bright as we start our journey back to sunny days:

“There’s Nothing Like This: The strategic genius of Taylor Swift,” by Kevin Evers, Harvard Business Review Press, 2025. Here’s a book I didn’t expect to enjoy. I’m not a very musical person and I’m hard-pressed to whip up excitement about pop stars and cultural icons. So reading about Taylor Swift’s path to success? Um.

What sold me on cracking the cover was the credibility of the author, Kevin Evers, a senior editor at Harvard Business Review. That, and a quick scan of the 32 pages of end-notes, which convinced me this wasn’t an elaborate fandoration tome.

As a business writer and editor, Evers approaches Swift’s story from a perspective that is rarely presented with any depth. Where others dismiss Swift as lucky or gifted, Evers delves into the strategic mindset she has displayed in her 20 years of “overnight” success.

The results of his research are integrated into a storytelling style of writing that makes the pages fly by. A good choice for business-minded readers who appreciate a different model of success and for the fans who crave a different look at their idol.

“Master Your Mindset: Live a meaningful life,” by Michael Pilarczyk, Wiley, 2025. Some days it’s barely feasible for me to master my morning routine, much less my mindset – and the problem feels like it’s worsening. Our lives are so complex on every level, it feels inevitable that our minds would be pinging around like a pinball.

Author Pilarczyk knows this from both personal experience and from his profession as a “teacher in self-development, awareness and personal success.” We all know it, too, but somehow the solutions can be elusive.

I think that’s why I like this book so much – Pilarczyk acknowledges the problem but doesn’t stop there. He’s less interested in naming outside causes for our distraction and more committed to helping others find individual solutions.

Although this is not a huge book, neither is it a quick read. To get the bigger benefit of your own self-reflection and insight, you’ll want to approach the chapters with perhaps your phone turned off or the office door closed. With that head start, you’ll be able to focus on the questions he poses about the beliefs and values that shape your daily choices. There’s a lot here, but even the small takeaways are worth the effort.

“The Portable MFA in Creative Writing,” by the New York Writers Workshop, Writer’s Digest Books, 2006. Raise your hand if you’ve ever considered writing short stories or penning your memoir. One way to scratch that itch is through classes, or even a Master of Fine Arts degree (MFA).

For those not inclined to invest so much time or money, this book offers a different option: Learn about different aspects of creative writing from masters of the craft. Each of the book’s five disciplines – fiction, personal essay and memoir, magazine writing, poetry and playwriting – is given 60 or more pages of attention that includes exercises, examples and resources for further information.

It’s a terrific way to immerse yourself in key areas of creative writing while also refining your own skills. Although this is an older volume, the content is solid. If you’re craving more up-to-date websites and resources, pair this book with something newer in your favorite writing discipline.

“A Quaker Book of Wisdom: Life lessons in simplicity, service, and common sense,” by Robert Lawrence Smith, William Morrow & Co., 1998. You don’t need to attend Quaker meetings or be descended from nine generations of Quakers, as this author does and is, in order to absorb the deep wisdom of this classic book.

Using chapter titles such as “Silence,” “Conscience,” “Family” and “Business,” Smith presents relatable stories of his own journey smoothly blended with snippets of Quaker history and thought-provoking challenges for the reader.

Smith’s writing serves up dozens of memorable lines, ready for quotation. I’ll give him the last word in this review of books for winter reading:

“Every time we punch a time clock, write a paycheck, or use a credit card, we have an opportunity to let our life speak. What do we want to say?”

Amy Lindgren owns a career consulting firm in St. Paul. She can be reached at alindgren@prototypecareerservice.com.

By STEPHEN WADE

TOKYO (AP) — I speak decent Spanish, picked up working several decades ago as a news and sports reporter in Spain, Mexico and Argentina.

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Now I report from Tokyo. After seven years, I still can’t grasp Japanese. My weekly language classes have taught me humility more than anything else.

Ayaka Ono, my current Japanese teacher, estimates she’s tutored about 600 students over 15 years. They’ve been mostly between 20 and 50. I’m more than a decade beyond her eldest.

“I find older students take tiny, tiny steps and then they fall back,” Ono-san — “san” is an honorific in Japanese to show respect — tells me. “They can’t focus as long. I teach something one minute and they forget the next.”

It’s well established that children have an easier time learning second languages. In recent years, scientists have studied whether being bilingual may help ward off the memory lapses and reduced mental sharpness that come with an aging brain. Much of the research on the potential benefit involved people who spoke two or more languages for most of their lives, not older adult learners.

“The science shows that managing two languages in your brain — over a lifetime — makes your brain more efficient, more resilient and more protected against cognitive decline,” said Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor emeritus at York University in Toronto who is credited with advancing the idea of a possible “bilingual advantage” in the late 1980s.

There’s good news for older adults like me: Attempting to acquire a new language is worthwhile, and not just because it makes reading a menu easier while traveling abroad. Bialystok, a cognitive neuroscientist, recommends studying a new language at any age, comparing the challenge to word puzzles and brain-training games that are promoted to slow the onset of dementia.

“Trying to learn a language late in life is a great idea, but understand it won’t make you bilingual and is probably too late to provide the protective effects of cognitive aging that come from early bilingualism,” she told The Associated Press. “However, learning a new language is a stimulating and engaging activity that uses all of your brain, so it is like a whole-body exercise.”

The latest research

A large study published by the science journal Nature Aging in November suggests that speaking multiple languages protects against more rapid brain aging, and that the effect increases with the number of languages.

The findings, based on research involving 87,149 healthy people ages 51 to 90, “underscore the key role of multilingualism in fostering healthier aging trajectories,” the authors wrote.

Researchers acknowledged the study’s limitations, including a sample population drawn only from 27 European countries with “diverse linguistic and sociopolitical contexts.”

Bialystok was not involved in the project but has researched second-language acquisition in children and adults, including whether being bilingual delays the progression of Alzheimer’s disease or aids in multi-tasking and problem-solving. She said the new study “ties all the pieces together.”

“Over the lifespan, people who have managed and used two languages end up with brains that are in better shape and more resilient,” she said.

Judith Kroll, a cognitive psychologist who heads the Bilingualism, Mind and Brain Lab at the University of California, Irvine, used the expressions “mental athletics” and “mental somersaults” to describe how the brain juggles more than one language.

She said there have been several efforts to examine language learning in older adults and the ramifications.

“I would say there are probably not enough studies to date to be absolutely definitive about this,” she told The AP. “But the evidence we have is very promising, suggesting both that older adults are certainly able to learn new languages and benefit from that learning.”

More studies are needed on whether language lessons help people in midlife and beyond maintain some cognitive abilities. Kroll compared the state of the field to the late 20th century, when the dominant thinking was that exposing infants and young children to two or more languages put them at a educational disadvantage.

“What we know now is the opposite,” she said.

Learning a language later in life

I visited Spain’s Mediterranean coast in the 1990s when I worked in Madrid. I was shocked by how many non-Spaniards there had lived in the country for years and could say only a few words in Spanish.

Now I get it. When I attempt Japanese, the reaction is often an incredulous, “And you’ve been here how long?”

I have workarounds to navigate my hostile linguistic environment. One is saying “itsumono.” It means “the same as always,” or “the usual.” It’s enough to order morning coffee at a neighborhood cafe or lunch at several regular stops.

As an aside, Japanese is one of the most difficult languages for English speakers to master, along with Arabic, Cantonese, Korean and Mandarin. Romance languages such as French, Italian or Spanish are easier.

My once-a-week class is grueling, and one hour is my limit. I use this analogy: my brain is a closet without enough empty hangers, and Japanese doesn’t go with anything in my wardrobe. The writing system is intimidating for an English speaker, the word order is flipped, and politeness is valued more than clarity.

During the 4 1/2 years I spent reporting from Rio de Janeiro, I got by with Portuñol — an improvised blend of Spanish and Portuguese — and the patience of Brazilians. There is no such halfway house for Japanese. You either speak it or you don’t.

I’ll never progress beyond preschool level in Japanese, but overloading my brain with lessons might work in the same way that my regular weight-training sessions help maintain physical strength.

Ono-san, my Japanese teacher, called language-learning apps “better than nothing.” Bialystok said technology can be a useful learning tool, “but progress of course requires using the language in real situations with other people.”

“If old folks try to learn a new language, you are not going to be very successful. You are not going to become bilingual,” Bialystok said. “But the experience of trying to learn the language is good for your brain. So what I say is this. What’s hard for your brain is good for your brain. And learning a language, especially in later life, is hard but good for your brain.”

Apparently, we are supposed to believe that the northeast corner of Grand Avenue and Victoria Street is blighted and therefore the developer wishing to build there is eligible for tax increment financing, or TIF. No, he isn’t. Neither the corner nor the buildings to be torn down are blighted. Determined blighted by whom, a developer who wants the taxpayers to help foot his bill?

TIF might make sense when a developer is willing to take a risk on a bullet-riddled vacant warehouse and turn it into something fantastic in a neighborhood with litter blown against the fence and weeds growing through the cratered sidewalks.

Grand and Victoria is not only desirable real estate, but it is one of the few corners left in St. Paul that actually mimics a successful urban location, safe, attractive, charming memories of yesteryear.

An outfit called Afton Park Development wants to create yet another apartment building there, along with retail space and some parking provisions. Go for it. Good luck. But leave us out if it. We are St. Paul taxpayers and we are tapped out, rode hard and put away wet.

Ramsey County approved an 8.25 percent property tax increase. The St. Paul school board, as though they actually have achievement to show us in exchange for their handout, approved a 14.9 percent increase in the tax levy, which includes the special extra tax that voters approved this fall. The city council approved a 5.3 percent increase in the tax levy.

And on top of all this, some developer wants tax increment financing to build in a location that doesn’t even remotely deserve the consideration.

As near as I can understand it, with counseling from my betters, TIF is a loan to the developer, but paid back by other taxpayers. The developer, Ari Parritz, wants a $2.95 million gift. It’s a damn gift! The funds borrowed from the city are paid back by taxpayers who forgo new property taxes from a TIF development for the term of the debt. I could be egregiously wrong, but it sounds to me that, for a time, unspecified, our property taxes pay the city back for the city’s gift to the developer who isn’t paying property taxes that could help lower ours.

(It occurs to me that it wouldn’t be so bad or that I might not even care at all, but I’m looking out the window and the wind is blowing snow around at about 400 mph and the streets will shortly be skating rinks.)

TIF loans – gifts, we should say – are most conventionally issued when a project might jump-start rejuvenation in a distressed area. So, who came up with the preposterous idea that Grand and Victoria is blighted?

“It’s (TIF funding) being used primarily for blight remediation and other qualified redevelopment costs,” Parritz told Fred Melo of the Pioneer Press. “The city already did their third-party blight study and it came back substandard on three buildings. Everything we’ve heard from the city council is supportive of redevelopment here, and an appropriate use of redevelopment TIF. It meets all statutory requirements.”

Nothing against Mr. Parritz. His wishing for TIF is perfectly on the up and up. It’s the game developers play. And the money involved is laughably pocket change compared to the billions of dollars taken from us in theft. But we’re St. Paul taxpayers, remember. We’re exhausted.

The new spread, not so incidentally, would account for the disappearance of Billy’s on Grand and the Victoria Crossing Mall. That corner certainly used to be livelier, but if you want blighted, let’s rent a bus and take a guided tour of downtown.

If the corner of Grand and Victoria is meeting the statutory definition of blighted, we are either in more serious trouble than we thought or we are not thinking outside the box. By the designation assigned to that corner, every household in St. Paul should be awarded a TIF loan. Why don’t we just give each other a little TIF here, a little TIF there?

The city is counting on us to be confused.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

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Pioneer Press staffers who cover the Vikings take a stab at predicting Sunday’s game against the Giants in New Jersey:

Dane Mizutani

Vikings 23, Giants 16: J.J. McCarthy has shown growth over the past couple of games while facing some struggling defenses on the other end. That trend will continue this weekend.

Jace Frederick

Vikings 17, Giants 13: Do I think JJ McCarthy will play well again? No idea. But pretty sure Brian Flores will make Jaxson Dart’s life miserable.

John Shipley

Vikings 29, Giants 17: It’s been 25 years since the Vikings rolled into the Meadowlands as favorites in the NFC Championship and lost 41-0. This won’t exactly serve as revenge, but it will help set an optimistic tone for next season.

Charley Walters

Vikings 21, Giants 20: This could be J.J. McCarthy’s fifth victory in nine starts if he performs the way he did in Dallas last week. Big game for the kid.

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