MosesWrites

Ice Cream Makes us Smarter

​Whenever I meet with a new group of people—students especially, or colleagues or participants in a seminar—I always ask them to share three things about themselves: first, their name, then something relevant to the occasion—perhaps their year in school, their job, or their hometown—and lastly, and most importantly, I inquire about their favorite flavor of ice cream.

Why?

Because I firmly believe that ice cream makes us smarter.

Chocolate, matcha, dark chocolate with raspberry swirls, cookies and cream, strawberry, mango, depending on culture and curiosity you’ll hear all sorts of flavors.

Occasionally, too, and wonderfully, someone will reply, vanilla. Maligned in the vernacular as plain, boring, or ordinary, it couldn’t be farther from such denigration. If the moment allows, I’ll reflect on vanilla’s extraordinary origins, on extraordinarily interesting places like Madagascar, where many an orchard will have its stamen harvested and dried and soaked in alcohol to make this most intense and complex of flavors. Truly great vanilla sets the standard for all else.

If ice cream enlightens, language can often mislead, just as perniciously as the perils of self-esteem when we, too, feel plain, boring, or ordinary. Yet within and beyond us, a world of possibility awaits, in whatever directions we may find ourselves called.

A skeptic will ask: Chris, what sort of romantic, naïve, illogical ice cream intelligence have you conjured?

I reply: if you look at a map of Cambridge, Massachusetts, and draw a line linking two of the greatest institutions of higher learning, MIT and Harvard, smack dab in the middle (or nearly so) you’ll find Toscanini’s Ice Cream, heralded by the New York Times as the best in the world. What else can explain the brilliance that emanates from these two esteemed schools?

Terrible tautology, I know, yet that’s the point: inspiration can arise anywhere, and it needn’t be tasty, but all the better if a sweet treat has pride of place.

Ice cream has variety and history, one entangled with industrialization and the imperial exploitation of tropical places, stretching from the early modern origins of our love affair with sugar to the invention of refrigeration that allowed for mass production and distribution. Sweetness and Power, to borrow the title of great historical anthropologist Sidney Mintz’s book, and less innocence than we might like given how delightful a frozen bite can be on a warm summer afternoon, or curled up under a blanket while watching a movie, or really any time at all.

Yet by way of introductions, I’m less interested in a reflection on the distant past and rather more eager to invite meditation on taste and preference, on the formation of identity and the building of connections in the present and future.

I come by my love of ice cream honestly. Family lore has it that my grandfather would eat it by the pint as a young boy, and I can’t ever remember his freezer not having had at least three or four half gallons at any one time. Even as a child of the Great Depression, and while he would of course seek out sales and clip coupons, my grandfather—much more about him in the essays that follow—would never scrimp on ice cream. No meal could end without at least a scoop.

Even when, at six or seven years old, I developed issues with lactose, I still couldn’t resist, and I simply cut back on portions to continue enjoying the many temptations that spring from dessert menus or roadside stands. In doing so, I learned that quality rather than quantity fulfills; as the towering culinary legend Julia Child quotes Oscar Wilde, “everything in moderation… including moderation.”

From elementary school through PhD program, ice cream has been a constant study aid. Honestly, without Bent Spoon in Princeton I don’t think I could have managed to cope with the pressures of elite academia, or to have celebrated properly many moments of joy. Another great university, and another amazing ice cream shop: it can’t be a coincidence after all.

What do I mean by smarter? Certainly not the privilege and power that accrues from the Ivy League, though many brilliant minds populate such ivory towers.

With smarter, I want to explore how we know ourselves and the world and, above all, how we share and create and inspire, with kindness and enthusiasm, how we can carry the many heavy burdens of life with greater ease, and how we can envision greater possibilities for goodness than we might currently have the capacity to instantiate.

Ice cream flavors offer a starting point for stories, and I believe fully that stories are all that we have. Narrative makes knowledge out of the otherwise arbitrary signs and symbols of language, and through narrative we gain understanding. Often imperfect, riddled with biases and unconscious errors, yet nonetheless, stories are all we have: to makes sense of our minds and bodies, whether in art or science, music or math, history or haiku, we have stories and stories alone.

If we wish to learn, if smartness has some value, then I think stories should take center stages in the ways we live our lives, the ways we teach and study, and the ways we engage with one another. Of course, since we’ve nothing else, stories already have made us who we are, amongst friends and foes, yet too often without a level of honesty, sophistication, and self-reflection that might unlock a greater potential.

Like the air we breathe, we take stories for granted, even if we enjoy them in a cinema, in artwork and equations, in every living day we have on this earth. Like the air we breathe, stories can bare pollution or illness, toxic distortions of truth—which is necessarily and essentially a matter of degree—or they can fill us with lifeforce; stories can calm our anxiety, or they can fuel our exertion to the greatest heights of achievement. But so often, as Orhan Pamuk, the brilliant novelist and Nobel Laureate in Literature shares, “To write well is to allow the reader to say, ‘I was going to say the same thing myself, but I couldn’t allow myself to be that childish.’” (Other Colors, p. 8)

To write well, to teach well, to live well, and, I would add, to imagine, to discover, to invent.

The innate imperative that children have to tell stories from their earliest abilities with language points the way, yet this imperative so frequently and so sadly gets squandered and twisted into the boredom of education, or stripped of originality out of fear of judgement, or stifled by the infinite pressures of social conformity writ large.

Of course, and ultimately, the plots are few: love and heartbreak, adventure and triumph, death and despair, war and peace, the exalted and the ordinary.

We’ve not travelled all that far since our ape-like ancestors began to utter their ideas out loud, so the art of storytelling must do all the more, carrying forth new juxtapositions and re-enlivening old emotions, detailing familiar circumstances in unfamiliar ways, tickling our hearts and provoking our passions and inviting our tears all over again.

The uniqueness of our own stories also helps to subvert the insidious recourse to comparison and rank which undermines our capacity for self-confidence and joy. No one’s choice of ice cream flavor is better or worse than anyone else’s. Even if you don’t like ice cream at all, that’s no problem. A vegan cookie or raspberry sorbet or whatever suits your fancy, there can’t be a care in the world when it comes to taste, if genuinely understood and desired by your whole self, without harm to another. To start down the road of comparison makes for the recursive retrenchment of unhelpful descriptors, enabling our misguided obsessions with beauty, strength, wealth, intelligence and the like. There will always be someone sexier, faster, richer, and smarter than you, because simply by conceptualizing that question, you’ve already ceded the ground on which you ought to stake our own worth. Plus, all such concepts and categories vary widely by time and place, and one culture’s Don Juan is another’s dud. A sprinter won’t win a marathon and a marathon runner’s pace will seem glacial versus the gold medalist in a hundred-meter dash.

As I’ve had the good fortune to realize while studying amongst so many brilliant people—and know as well while playing with young children—the real joy of genius cannot be arranged in some facile pecking order.

Indeed, whether Galileo in his cosmos or Picasso at his canvas, whether Curie amidst her atoms or Morrison in her elegiac prose, brilliance takes shape as a story, in the act of articulation, sometimes even with the potential to transform entirely our understanding of the world. Stories have brought revolutions, they have legitimized terror, they have enslaved millions, they have brought hope to the hopeless.

I can’t claim ice cream has done all that, but I do know that all the luminaries who have ever lived have had something to fuel their genius.

For me, and with much humbler ambitions, I hope that sharing your favorite flavor of ice cream offers an invitation to start exploring your unique and individual experiences of this world, an invitation to transform the mundane into the magical.

First, taste. Too often we seek refuge in notions that we hope have some essential reality, to ground ourselves amongst the travails of our existence. Gender, culture, and class all inform who we are, yet even to the extent that they may be deterministic, we ought not to surrender ourselves so easily.

Identity does not come from adjectives, but rather takes shape through experience, however inequitable or unjust, however privileged or undeserved those experiences may be. As Simone de Beauvoir says so eloquently in her masterwork The Second Sex, “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman.”

However limited and imperfect, only we have the power to make and unmake, and any constraints on that power begin and end with the stories we tell, with our translation of sensory perception—how we’ve seen, heard, tasted, smelled, felt, and remembered—both tactile and emotional—into narrative.

This translation compels us to accept that most of what we wish to claim as knowledge, in the final analysis, has nothing to do with any Truth, capital T, but with taste, with personal preference: standpoint and sense, comparison, and competing value systems. As I once heard the great philosopher Donald Davidson remark, “you believe far more than you know.” Ninety-nine percent of what I see and hear, of what others say and do, involves interpretation and judgment, not fact.

Such an acceptance doesn’t come easily, and such uncertainty unsettles us in the profoundest of ways. No one wants to be so unmoored, so untethered from the sort of knowledge that ensures survival. That food nourishes, that love begets future generations, that the sun rises in the east: we crave self-evident truths even if they offer pyric hope. We want to take cover under absolutes, to order our world with fundamental laws and irrefutable proofs. Yet what might be helpful in engineering or algorithms, even in domains where rules function at their best, there too we must take a breath and realize that only perception follows us to the end. All the more so, given our fraught existence, we must cherish the choices we have and avoid the perils of distortion and disinformation that corrupt our capacity to share in joy, that nurture crass prejudice rather than creative potential.

Education then involves a boundless paradox. We want to teach, to equip students with tools that will empower them throughout their lives, and to live in a world full of capable people who unlock their greatest capacities. But the sort of confidence fueled by the mastery of established knowledge often stymies us before we get started with the most essential work of stories. Yes, we should grapple with Calculus and Confucius, we should understand the intricacies of the many epistemologies we have inherited, yet unless we can make them our own, unless we dare to step beyond what we’ve been given, any essence of smartness will elude us. As Ralph Waldo Emerson implores in his brilliant essay “Self-Reliance,” “[t]here is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till. The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried.”

From an ice cream flavor introduction, I hope we can start to step back and discover a greater confidence in how we make our way in the world—“new in nature”—and to displace the envy that Emerson decries, to obviate ignorance in greater measure. One day we may crave burnt caramel, another long for honey lavender. One day we may want to hide in a closet and to eat greedily by ourselves, another to celebrate with new friends. In either or any case, the essential act will be to explain what we need, what we feel, what we wish for—to mingle vulnerability and vision in a story.

Likewise, as we take stock of our tastes, we better understand their origins and interconnections. What about strawberry makes us smile? What degree of tartness satisfies our tongue? Rather than innate qualities—because indeed your favorite chocolate may be too creamy or too bitter for me, or even one day to the next I might favor something chunky over something smooth—or even with molecular analyses and biological processes—the formation of preference takes shape through a web of divergent and intersubjective experiences. I remember the intense sharpness of mint mingled with creamy coolness in an incredible gelato not only as the discovery of a truly original combination but also as a refraction of the relationship I had with the person with whom I shared that dinner, of the similarly, unexpectedly smooth and sharp contours of friendship. I remember my aversion to the rum raisin my grandmother loved so much because, as a small child, the bitterness of alcohol sent me running, and only later in life, as my own palate matured, could I return to discover for myself what makes it such an intriguing taste.

With ice cream, as with everything, we must open ourselves to the scrutiny and struggle of competing preferences, of revisitation and reflection. No story can be told or read the same way twice, so rather than sacrifice possibility in the quest for stability—whether in identity or social order—we must expand our comfort in grappling with an uncertainty that enables more honest engagement with our own shape-shifting consciousness, and those of others. If we keep at it with stories, the strength of our ever-evolving selves will afford all the order we need, interwoven as always with others’.

The order of stories, too, will compel us to greater discernment of quality, an essential skill and capacity for judgment that has waned with the advent of mass production and endless duplication, of the near-infinite proliferation of media. We seek the best, yet more often we end up chasing our own tails instead of unfurling our lives through new experiences: in doing so we subjugate ourselves to false hopes. We ignore the very real suffering and subjugation of others, justified through convoluted conclusions that we’ve somehow earned our greater portion. Perhaps we’ve worked hard, but unless the rising tide has lifted all boats, our own elevation has come at an inexcusable cost. Ice cream can enrich and inspire as we expand and refine our tastes, yet it can also enable gluttony and greed: even quality itself can’t become the end but rather must always remain a starting point for further improvement and greater creative good work, because quality doesn’t exist absent experience. Even objects must be used, worn, made through movement, touched, tasted, made present through interaction.

In the final analysis, it is not the institutionalization of power and prestige at places like Harvard and MIT, but rather the endless shuttling back and forth, the midpoint and mean, the inflection and connection that takes place at Toscanini’s, the gooey, sticky, constantly and newly created joy, that makes us smarter.

In the pages that follow, I’ve searched for myself in the stories of my own life, in imperfect memories, in grief that still haunts me, in uninhibited laughter that continually inspires me.

I appreciate that telling a story, enjoying the complexity of another’s recognition, entails vast privilege, and I don’t take that for granted for an instant. Whatever hardships I’ve born pale in comparison to the suffering of so many millions. Indeed, I’ve won the lottery of life: genetic good fortune, having been born in a time and place of relative peace, having loving parents and wonderful teachers and the best of friends. I have benefited, unwittingly, from the exploitation of others in a world that gives so many free passes to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed, able-bodied man who speaks English and who holds a US passport. I have shirked responsibilities that I ought to have assumed, I have acted with malice, I have taken far too much for granted. Yet I have tried in my own way to make sense of things, to create opportunities for others, and to envision the world not as a zero-sum game but rather as exuberant possibility. More than any time in human history, we have the resources to sustain an abundance of well-being, even to tackle the greatest threats of our own making, from climate catastrophe to epidemic disease. To sustain so much suffering, as we do, renders us in greater guilt than what any deity might be able to conjure.

I have tried, however imperfectly, to live my life to the fullest. Perhaps only because I endured tremendous loss at a young age, I’ve had to discover that my own needs and desires don’t often align with what others seek. I’ve had to run away to find myself, over and over again. I’ve had to make the same mistakes, over and over again, to find some inkling of clarity. I’ve had to realize that self-doubt will always and already counter confidence, and ought to be a necessary check on ego and ambition rather than an evil to be overcome by delusional notions of perpetual improvement. I’ve had to accept, too, that as much as I might hope my work as a teacher will enable others to do more, even my best efforts have profound limitations.

I’ve even had to realize that many may not share my irrational love for ice cream, yet I hope that if you’re still reading, you do seek something sweet and satisfying in the simplest and most playful of ways.

You can read this book from beginning to end or, I hope, pick up and leave off at any point. My stories follow a roughly chronological arc, from my childhood through the present, yet I must say in advance that they exclude far more than they include; I have not meant to write a meaningfully comprehensive memoir.  Instead, I start with my grandfather, and how I discovered a love for travel that continues to motivate me. I continue with a story about those who, in unlikely ways, shape who I am as a person, and allow me to broaden the ways I understand and act in the world. Then I share the onslaught of tragedy that shattered my existence from the age of thirteen, the passing of my grandmother, the compound fracture of my left elbow, and the sudden death of my father fifteen days later. After that, I reflect on how, faced with extraordinary pain, amplified by my mother’s second marriage, I ran away from home a few days after my eighteenth birthday, and survived my final year of high school dependent on the incredible generosity of others. Next, I recount my experiences in college, and how I ended up serving as Student Body President. I follow with my mother’s descent into dementia, and what it took to care for her in her final years. I share a more or less simultaneous story of my transformative time at St Paul’s School’s summer Advanced Studies Program, for New Hampshire public and parochial students between their eleventh and twelfth grade years. Also about the same time, I offer two stories from my years in graduate school at Princeton, one about working as a Resident Graduate Student, or fellow of an undergraduate college, which I enjoyed in the 2009-2010 academic year, and another that explores my academic interests and decision to veer away from a scholarly career. Closer to today, I envision four essays shaped by my time in Shanghai, China, where I have lived since 2013. The first paints with broad strokes what I discovered moving, rather unexpectedly, to a culture so tremendously different from my own. The second relates what I’ve learned by learning Chinese in my 40s. The third tries to put a finer point on my observations and experiences of the tremendous changes I’ve witnessed over the past twelve years. Finally, I consider a reflection on the United States, its past and current place in the world, informed both by my formal study of history and my personal perspectives on the present.

Rather than revelation, I hope my own stories, like ice cream flavors, offer an invitation. I hope that you can explore your own voice in new ways, that you will eschew AI for anything truly meaningful, and that you can feel more fully the power and potential of your own life. I hope that you can seek kindness, that you can be kinder to your own self, and to others, however great the challenge. I hope that, as with ice cream, you can revisit the tastes you love, and you can discover new ones. I hope that you can trust what you like and what you don’t, and that you can have a greater ability to explain why. I hope that in the example of my own, you’ll find more of your stories, and that you’ll share them with love.

 

July 2025