Combustible Control
🎆 The Invisible Work of Crisis 🎆
“A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices.” -William James
We need to talk about Wexner and Epstein.
Deep breaths.
In case you’ve missed it: Leslie Wexner, one of the most prominent Jewish philanthropists in North America and the namesake of a leadership fellowship for many Jewish professionals and lay leaders, has spent years in the news because of his association with Jeffrey Epstein, the notorious sex offender whose damage continues to reverberate.1
As always, my purpose at Moneyball Judaism is not to litigate the case. The focus right now needs to remain on the numerous victims who need their day in court and a transparent investigation that reveals the extent of Epstein’s crimes.
But this newsletter is for leaders, and I am assuming that most of you are reading the headlines and hearing the rumors, and asking yourself, “How would I handle this situation?” And that’s important, because one day, whether you want to or not, you will. While that critical incident will vary in size or degree, the reflective leader will get prepared.
Which brings us to this week’s big idea.
Cognitive Control
Two things I know when I face moments like this:
I will not make everyone happy.
I will make mistakes.
That’s a bitter pill to swallow. But it needs to be swallowed, nonetheless. And I wish my younger self had internalized it sooner.
But under these circumstances, what does it mean to be “successful” in dealing with this kind of challenge? Don’t get fired?
Sure, self-preservation is a reasonable desire. But “don’t get fired” is a very, very low bar for success. So if we want to lead better in charged situations, we need to think more about cognitive control.
The International Encyclopedia of Social & Behavioral Sciences defines cognitive control as “the ability to direct mental function and behavior in accord with internally represented intentions or goals.”2 In other words, when the pressure rises, can you focus on what’s most important?
The intellectual roots of cognitive control date back to William James in The Principles of Psychology, where James distinguishes between “passive attention” and “voluntary attention.”3 Passive attention is when something grabs you—a loud sound, a flashing light. In contrast, voluntary attention is “always derived,”4 meaning we are choosing to pay attention. And sometimes, we need to stay disciplined and keep paying attention to one thing when other, less important things want our attention. Children are governed by passive attention. Maturity means successful organizing of attention.
In modern terms, we often equate cognitive control with the better-known term “executive function.” Neuroscientist David Badre notes they overlap but aren’t identical. Executive function refers to a set of skills.5 In contrast, Badre argues that cognitive control requires a “control-systems framework,”6 coordinating skills to move from our current state to a goal-consistent state- especially when competing impulses pull at us.
That’s leadership in crisis.
When I’ve faced situations where my identity and my role were impossible to disentangle, the hardest task wasn’t deciding what I believed. It was regulating my attention—recognizing when my reactions were driven by ego, fear, or loyalty rather than by the responsibilities of my role.
Wexner is hardly the only Jewish philanthropist connected to Epstein. But because his foundation’s programs shape professional and lay leadership, many of the people most affected by these revelations are leaders themselves.
Which makes the question unavoidable: can you control your attention when everything around you feels combustible?
Shift
Knowing that cognitive control matters is not new.
The harder question is how.
That’s where Ethan Kross’s new book, Shift, is helpful.
Kross focuses specifically on the cognitive control of emotion. He asks us to imagine emotional capture—the feeling that there is a “puppet master lurking inside us, yanking the strings.”7 As I’ve written before: do we have emotions, or do our emotions have us?
Kross reframes the issue:
“Emotions aren’t good or bad; they are just information.”8
That claim does two important things.
First, it rejects the easy opposition between emotion and reason. As Kross argues, how we think shapes what we feel—and what we feel shapes how we think.9 They are interdependent. Second, it distinguishes emotions from feelings. Feelings are the conscious experience of an emotional state—the signal, not the whole system. Like a fever, they tell you something is happening. They are data.10
The goal, then, is not suppression. It is shifting: learning from an emotion and, when necessary, moving from one state to another. If emotions are information, they should be processed—not obeyed.11
Maybe you’re navigating a Wexner/Epstein-type dilemma right now. Maybe you’re just watching and wondering what you would do. I can’t tell you the right answer.
But I can tell you this: you will face a moment when your attention is hijacked—by outrage, loyalty, fear, or fatigue. And in that moment, the most important leadership work will be invisible to most people.
Sometimes you don’t control the situation.
But you can prepare for how you will think when it arrives.
And sometimes, that preparation is the only leverage you have.
The Voices In Your Head
90 Seconds
The average number of seconds in a GZERO’s Puppet Regime, a hilarious Instagram account that imagines heads of state as heads of felt to help explain world events.
What I Read This Week
What is Claude?: Big week in articles on artificial intelligence, dear readers. First, there is a piece about Anthropic’s Claude, and what this powerful system “is.” In the meantime, Casey Newton writes a piece about Moltbook, what it means when bots have a social network. Finally, there are articles in The Economist and The Atlantic on the future of white-collar jobs in an AI world, and a chart from Torsten Slok about AI may be holding up much of the world economy.
Real Knafeh and the Article of Pickling: Since my culinary palate is not adventurous, I miss out on opportunities to use food to bridge cultural divides. But if you are cooler than I, take a culinary journey with Haaretz to Nazareth (and consider doing it for real).
Melissa Hortman’s Story: Political assassinations solve nothing for nobody, and it’s easy to forget the story of Melissa Hortman, Minnesota’s speaker of the house, who was murdered with her husband in June 2025. Thankfully, Rolling Stone wrote this powerful piece so that we don’t forget.
Reconsidering Rational Choice Theory: In the meantime, our friend Barry Schwartz just wrote a terrific piece in Behavioral Scientist about whether or not rational choice theory should be considered the highest standard for good decision making.
Misunderstanding Dissociative Identity Disorder: One of the most dangerous things about the impact of mental health on society is how we can develop a set of assumptions about what it means when a person “has” a particular condition. This piece in The New York Times Magazine takes a look at dissociative identity disorder, sometimes called (inaccurately) “multiple personality disorder,” one of the most misunderstood conditions in psychiatry.
In full disclosure, I am a recipient of the Wexner Field Fellowship. I won’t be sharing any information about discussions that are taking place within or adjacent to the Wexner Family Foundation, and I have never met Leslie Wexner.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid. 14-15.
Ibid., 12.
Ibid., 13.
Ibid., 26.