Kareem Abdul-Jabbar
Basketball player and author
Barack Obama has shown us how to be a politician guided by intelligence, integrity, and compassion.
Which living person do you most admire, and why?
Question
What keeps you awake at night?
Daily life
Question
What most recently made you cry?
Identity & self
Question
What single thing would improve the quality of your life?
Daily life
Question
How close have you come to death?
Death & what remains
Question
Which moment embarrassed you most?
Failure & regret
Question
What is the worst job you have done?
Craft & work
Originally asked
The Guardian, to a different person each week, The Q&A
The Guardian's Q&A repeatedly uses this prompt, sometimes dropping 'living' while retaining the same comparative judgment.
You answer as yourself. Nobody on FLAPSS answers as anybody else.
My mum, for the way that she brought up her three children and managed to make her money work. She worked as a cleaner for all these families we went to church with. She would cycle there with my little sister on the back of her bike – we didn’t have a car. She had an amazing mind for planning and organising so that we got to do ballet, we went to Brownies.
The Q&A, The Guardian, 23 September 2023 source ↗
Others on this question
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Nadine Gordimer
South African writer
Nelson Mandela. The epitome of courage and intelligence.
Anne Robinson
English television presenter and journalist
Any mother with young children who is also doing a full-time job.
Barack Obama, for his humility and grace in the face of enormous difficulty.
More from Corinne Bailey Rae
View profile →All the big ones – climate change, safety for our children, money.
Listening to a song that my brother-in-law – the brother of Jason, my first husband – wrote, about how hard it was to live without his brother.
My mum looks after our kids all the time, but on the very few weeks she takes time off, doing it all is a big juggle. My mum is a combination of Mary Poppins and Angela Davis, so I’d clone her.
When my first husband died, because it felt like my life was over, and it was challenging to keep in life at the time.
I remember being a teenager and writing this romantic short story in the style of the Brontës on a computer and I didn’t realise that the person whose computer it was could just print it out. A group of boys had a couple of pages and they were all reading it.
I worked in a cafe, which I loved, but when it was quiet we had to scrape the fat out from between the tiles on the floor with a butter knife.
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