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- The Quick 10: 10 NaNoWriMo Books That Got PublishedYesterday
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If you’ve been following me over on Neatorama, you know that I spent most of November trying to throw a novel together for NaNoWriMo. And I did! Sort of. I mean, I got the 50,000 words. I’m not sure it qualifies as a novel yet. But I have hope – if these 10 people turned their NaNo novels into real, published pieces you can find at your local bookstore, maybe I can too.
1. Sara Gruen, Water for Elephants. She’s kind of the NaNo poster child. I read this book and absolutely loved it, by the way. It’s being made into a movie as we speak!
2. Lani Diane Rich – Time Off for Good Behavior and Maybe Baby.
3. Lisa Daily – The Dreamgirl Academy.
4. James R. Strickland – The Looking Glass.
5. - New Einstein on Colbert ReportYesterday
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Last month, during our “New Einsteins” series, one of the geniuses profiled was Harvard economics professor Roland Fryer. Several people wrote in to ask where they could learn more about his work. The answer, of course, is on Comedy Central. Fryer was recently on The Colbert Report. (See above, or if that’s not working for you, - Masterpieces: Ayn Rand’s Atlas ShruggedYesterday
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by Greg Barnhisel
It’s a novel! It’s a philosophy! It’s the instruction manual for a crazy cult! Atlas Shrugged could be all of those things. Then again, maybe it’s just about a little Russian girl who really hated growing up around Bolsheviks.
Ayn Rand was a woman who knew how to sell philosophy. As the founder of Objectivism—a belief in the power of the individual and “the virtue of selfishness”—Rand had something going for her that great thinkers like Aristotle and Kierkegaard didn’t: She got her start in Hollywood.
After immigrating to the United States from the Soviet Union in 1926, Rand managed to sign on with famed film producer-director Cecil B. DeMille as an extra in his movie The King of Kings. An aspiring screenwriter, she soon had the connections she needed to begin hawking her wares. By 1932, she’d sold her first screenplay and overseen the production of one of her plays. In other words, Ayn (pronounced “Eye-n,” not “Ann”) knew how to produce for a general audience—not just the intellectual elite. So when she delved into philosophy and began to formulate the ideas that would eventually become Objectivism, the resulting works (namely The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) read more like blockbuster melodramas than philosophy dissertations.The Rise of John Galt
- Lunchtime Quiz: So, Where’d You Go To College?Yesterday
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Because many of our high school readers are probably finishing up their college applications right now, let’s see if you can guess where some notable people earned their undergraduate degrees. Today’s focus is the media, because my TV was tuned to Morning Joe on MSNBC when I put this quiz together.
Take the Quiz: Where’d You Go To College?
[And if you’d like to give your alma mater a ringing endorsement in the comments, perhaps you’ll convince one of the aforementioned high school readers to apply.]
- How to Kill Your CommuteYesterday
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Awhile back, we wrote about a very cool website called Walkscore, a Google Maps mashup that tells you how walkable your neighborhood is, based on factors like your home’s distance from basic services, food, entertainment and other things. Now Walkscore has a sibling — a website called Optimal Home Location (not that catchy, granted, but true to its name), which is the perfect tool to use before you move somewhere in order to achieve maximum neighborhood walkability.
Even if your new neighborhood/life isn’t “walkable” per se, this tool should do much to guide your house-hunting, and at least reduce your commute, which is something we can all get behind. It works like this: you tell it where you and your family work and play — entering all the addresses of the places you regularly go — and its handy calculator will weight them all according to importance and frequency of travel, and find you a place to live more or less in the center of it all, where you can live using the least amount of gas (and just as important, travel time) possible.
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