Disco Divas, Quad Gods and the Moment I Almost Fell Off My Bike

What does a 16-year-old figure skater who once retired from the sport have to teach the rest of us about performing under pressure? Quite a lot, it turns out. When Alysa Liu returned to competitive skating after stepping away to figure out who she was outside of competition, something shifted. She skated her gold-medal-winning free skate to Donna Summer as if the judges weren't even there. Meanwhile, the heavily favored Ilia Malinin, skating in his debut Olympics under the weight of enormous expectation, fell. The difference between them was not talent. It was the ability to find joy in what you are doing and let that carry you through.

This edition marks four years since the publication of Tell Me More About That: Solving the Empathy Crisis One Conversation at a Time, and Rob is celebrating with a collection of things that have been on his mind lately. That includes a question worth sitting with about whether Christianity can exist without empathy, a memoir about inherited mental illness by an ABC News correspondent that Rob found both deeply personal and genuinely surprising, and a cookbook built for the practical reality of cooking for two without wasting half the ingredients.

And then there is the Peloton story. During his recovery from a broken kneecap, Rob returned to the bike for his 900th ride with his favorite instructor. With six minutes left in class, something happened that nearly knocked him right off the seat, and it had nothing to do with the workout.

In this edition of Reading Between the Lines, Rob reflects on four years of the book, what Olympic skating reveals about joy and pressure, the ongoing debate around toxic empathy, and a handful of things that have been feeding his mind and his kitchen lately.

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