- Recent
- Popular
- Tags (3)
- Subscribers (7)
- Sundown for California?Yesterday
-
"I believe the difference between the literature of California's past and the literature to come will be the difference of expectation. There are children growing up in California today who take it as a given that the 101 North, the 405 South, and the 10 East are unavailable after two in the afternoon."
- Richard Rodriguez's essay "Disappointment"
Joel Kotkin's cover story titled Sundown for California in The American magazine says: "The Golden State appears headed, if not for imminent disaster, then toward an unanticipated, maddening, and largely unnecessary mediocrity."
He marshals depressing data on slowing job growth (CA has third highest unemployment rate in the country), the collapse of the housing market (taken a drive around suburban Sacramento or Riverside recently?), and poverty rates in high-end cities like San Francisco which now lack a real middle-class. Out-migration statistics show residents are very aware of these problems: they're leaving. Read the whole thing.
- Pursue a Side Project in 2009Yesterday
-
My friend Josh Kaufman runs PersonalMBA.com, a great resource for those who want to improve their business knowledge via books. Today Josh issued a challenge to his readers to do a side project in 2009. I'm a huge fan of side projects (something you do alongside your full-time day job) and have a long article coming out soon on this topic. Here are Josh's guidelines:
- Treat it like an experiment. The best reason to take on a side project is that you’re curious about a certain topic and you want to learn more about it. There’s no need to freak out over “committing” to something - you’re being an adventurous explorer here, not committing yourself to years of drudgery. [BC: And it doesn't have to have anything to do with work. Take a risk and try something new on the side!]
- Make it positive. A project is some achievement you want to move towards, not something you want to move away from. Avoid phrasings like “I’m going to stop doing ________________”; use words like “I’m going to accomplish / create / build / improve ________________.”
- Make it immediate. A project is something you’re working on now, not something you “plan to work on” at some indeterminate point in the future. Avoid phrasings like “in ________________ months” or “someday I’d like to”; use words like
- How to Have Savantlike People Skills: Ask A Question About the Other PersonYesterday
-
The most amusing few sentences of this too-long but entertaining New Yorker profile of Arianna Huffington:
In the higher echelons of New York and Los Angeles society, merely asking a question about someone else is taken as evidence of savantlike people skills, but Huffington’s attempts at establishing intimacy can seem almost poignantly forced. “How do you recharge?” she will inquire of a relative stranger. “What is your favorite food?” Billy Kimball, the comedy writer, said, “She has that European woman’s gift of listening to you in a way that makes a person feel simultaneously fascinating and foolish. The person kind of fills in the end of the sentence, saying a little more than he necessarily wanted to.” - Emphasizing Disagreement of Degree Not KindYesterday
-
If you're arguing with someone you like / respect, and you disagree in degree not kind, emphasize that you are just at different points of the same spectrum. This goes a long way to keeping things positive.
For example, suppose a person says, "I believe you can never think about yourself too much -- introspection is very important."
A response emphasizing disagreement of degree not kind would first establish the extremes: "Well surely thinking about yourself every second of every hour of every day is too much, right?"
"Well, of course."
"OK. So we both agree in the extreme case. You just think a few hours a day of explicit reflection is worth it, where I think more than 20 minutes a day leads to narcissism."
Bottom Line: A great way to keep an argument cordial is to emphasize your disagreement of degree not kind (if this is so) and by establishing the extremes of the spectrum in a way you both agree. Find that point of agreement / common ground. Then note that you are simply at different points on the same spectrum.
- Quotes from Jonathan FranzenJanuary 6
-
A few weeks ago I re-read Jonathan Franzen's collection of essays titled How to Be Alone partly because I was feeling lonely at the time and partly because Franzen was best friends with David Foster Wallace and so it felt timely to think about Wallace through one of his influences.
I highly recommend this collection of essays especially if you're interested in issues of "self" and how literature / writing plays with that notion and the broader relevance of literature more generally. Franzen's prose reads effortlessly. He intersperses light thoughts with deeper philosophical ones. He's like Wallace in his interest in both the day-to-day absurdities of living life and the harder / impossible questions that some brave souls puzzle over. He's unlike Wallace in that he executes his writing in a comparatively conventional way -- linear sentences, no fracturing.
I've typed my favorite quotes and excerpts from the essays below. Some great lines. Enjoy.
"One of the great adaptive virtues of our brains...is out ability to forget almost everything that has ever happened to us.
"One of the basic features of the mind is its keenness to construct wholes out of fragmentary parts."
"Americans care about privacy mainly in the abstract."
"The curious thing about privacy...