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MIKE: Let me talk a little bit about the genesis of, Lives on the Boundary, this book that mixes personal vignette, personal story, personal history, with, oh, my gosh, educational, history, and educational theory, and learning theory, and psychology, and sociology, and all of that. Here's what happened. This was quite a while back and I at the time was writing a lot of poetry. Some of it was OK and some of it was not so good. But as I got a little bit better at it, the poems were more and more about my family history. These immigrant Italians coming to this country, and settling in the rust belt, the kind of work they did. Some of it-- some of these poems were like prose poem, sort of, sketches of my old neighborhood growing up in South LA. And I was also, at that time, doing a lot of reading. I was in a doctoral program and I was doing a lot a reading in cognitive psychology. Learning a lot about memory, and attention, and information processing, the way we solve problems, creativity, all of this sort of thing. And I loved both of these strands of my life. And I was writing school papers and then eventually starting to write some articles for publication, drawing on this cognitive psychology and educational theory work. So, here I was, this sort of two track writer, right. You know, there were these poems, and these sketches, and these vignettes, and there was this stuff on cognition, and language, and learning, and education. One day I just started to think, I started to wonder, is there any way to combine these kinds of writing. And I took a big piece of butcher paper and I pasted onto it a couple of these poems and these sketches about my old neighborhood. So, these were memories. And then I cut-- I photocopied these excerpts from a cognitive psychology textbook on memory, on the cognitive processes of memory. And I put these things on a single piece of paper. And I asked myself, is there any way that these two very different kinds of writing, about memory, could come together. And that then led me down the road of trying to write a book in which memory, personal history, accounts of schooling, vignette, dialogue, scenes from playgrounds, scenes from neighborhoods could oscillate back and forth with discussion of memory and development in childhood and intelligence. And through this, to create a kind of hybrid text that both tells a story but also make some claims and tries to, in fact, make some counter arguments about the way we tend to think about intelligence and achievement.