superfreakonomics

STEVEN LEVITT and STEPHEN DUBNER

simple ideas and interesting facts they don’t teach you in school

From Chapter 5, what do Al Gore and Mount Pinatubo have in common?

These days there is essentially a consensus among climate scientists that the earth’s temperature has been rising over the long term and, increasingly, agreement that human activity has played an important role. “[W]e are now so abusing the Earth,” writes James Lovelock, the renowned environmental scientist, “that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in fifty-five million years ago, and if it does most of us, and our descendants, will die.”

But the ways humans affect the climate aren’t always as obvious as they seem. It is generally believed, for instance, that cars and trucks and airplanes contribute an ungodly share of green house gases. This has recently led many right-minded people to buy a Prius or other hybrid car. But every time a Prius owner drives to the grocery store, she may be canceling out its emission- reducing benefit, at least if she shops in the meat section.

How so? Because cows — as well as sheep and other cud- chewing animals called ruminants — are wicked polluters. Their exhalation and flatulence and belching and manure emit methane, which by one common measure is about twenty- five times more potent as a green house gas than the carbon dioxide released by cars (and, by the way, humans). The world’s ruminants are responsible for about 50 percent more greenhouse gases than the entire transportation sector.

Even the “locavore” movement, which encourages people to eat locally grown food, doesn’t help in this regard. A recent study by two Carnegie Mellon researchers, Christopher Weber and H. Scott Matthews, found that buying locally produced food actually increases greenhouse-gas emissions. Why?

More than 80 percent of the emissions associated with food are in the production phase, and big farms are far more efficient than small farms. Transportation represents only 11 percent of food emissions, with delivery from producer to retailer representing only 4 percent. The best way to help, Weber and Matthews suggest, is to subtly change your diet. “Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable- based diet achieves more greenhouse- gas reduction than buying all locally sourced food,” they write.

You could also switch from eating beef to eating kangaroo — because kangaroo farts, as fate would have it, don’t contain methane. But just imagine the marketing campaign that would be needed to get Americans to take up ‘roo-burgers. And think how hard the cattle ranchers would lobby Washington to ban kangaroo meat. Fortunately, a team of Australian scientists is attacking this problem from the opposite direction, trying to replicate the digestive bacteria in kangaroos’ stomachs so it can be transplanted to cows.

An incredibly simple dilemma lies at the heart of global warming. Economists fondly call it an externality.

What’s an externality? It’s what happens when someone takes an action but someone else, without agreeing, pays some or all the costs of that action. An externality is an economic version of taxation without representation.

If you happen to live downwind from a fertilizer factory, the ammonium stench is an externality. When your neighbors throw a big party (and don’t have the courtesy to invite you), their ruckus is an externality. Secondhand cigarette smoke is an externality, as is the stray gunshot one drug dealer meant for another that instead hit a child on the playground.

The green house gases thought to be responsible for global warming are primarily externalities. When you have a bonfire in your backyard, you’re not just toasting marshmallows. You’re also emitting gases that, in a tiny way, help to heat the whole planet. Every time you get behind the wheel of a car, or eat a hamburger, or fly in an airplane, you are generating some by- products you’re not paying for.

source: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/Books/superfreakonomics-read-excerpt/story?id=8848071

bright shiny morning

JAMES FREY

a fictional tale of lives in Los Angeles City

The Young Couple

They can see the glow a hundred miles away it’s night and they’re on an empty desert highway. They’ve been driving for two days. They grew up in a small town in Ohio they have known each other their entire lives, they have always been together in some way, even when they were too young to know what it was or what it meant, they were together. They’re nineteen now. They left when he came to pick her up for the movies, they went to the movies every Friday night. She liked romantic comedies and he liked action films, sometimes they saw cartoons. They started the weekly outing when they were fourteen.

Screaming, he could hear her screaming as he pulled into the driveway. He ran into the house her mother was dragging her along the floor by her hair. Clumps of it were missing. There were scratches on her face. There were bruises on her neck. He pulled her away and when her mother tried to stop him he hit her mother, she tried again he hit her mother harder. Mother stopped trying.

He picked her up and carried her to his truck, a reliable old American pickup with a mattress in the back and a camper shell over the bed. He set her in the passengers seat carefully set her and he covered her with his jacket. She was sobbing bleeding it wasn’t the first time it would be the last. He got into the driver’s seat, started the engine, pulled out as he pulled out Mother came to the door with a hammer and watched them drive away, didn’t move, didn’t say a word, just stood in the door holding a hammer, her daughter’s blood beneath her fingernails, her daughter’s hair still caught in her clothes and hands.

They lived in a small town in an eastern state it was nowhere anywhere everywhere, a small American town full of alcohol, abuse and religion. He worked in an auto-body shop and she worked as a clerk at a gas station and they were going to get married and buy a house and try to be better people than their parents. They had dreams but they called them dreams because they were unrelated to reality, they were a distant unknown, an impossibility, they would never come true.

He went back to his parents’ house they were in a bar down the street. He locked the doors of the truck and kissed her and told her she would be fine and he walked into the house. He went to the bathroom and got aspirin and Band-Aids, he went into his room and pulled a video game case from out of the drawer. The case held every cent he had $2,100 he had saved for their wedding. He took it out and put it in his pocket he grabbed some clothes and he walked out. He got in the truck she had stopped crying. She looked at him and she spoke.

What are we doing?

We’re leaving.

Where we going?

California.

We can’t just up and go to California.

Yes, we can.

We can’t just walk away from our lives.

We don’t have lives here. We’re just stuck. We’ll end up like everyone else, drunk and mean and miserable.

What’ll we do?

Figure it out.

We’re just gonna leave and go to California and figure it out?

Yeah, that’s what we’re gonna do.

She laughed, wiped away her tears.

This is crazy.

Staying’s crazy. Leaving’s smart. I don’t want to waste our life.

Our?

Yeah.

She smiled.

He pulled out turned west and started driving towards the glow it was thousands of miles away, he started driving towards the glow.

source: http://www.james-frey.com/bright-shiny-morning/the-young-couple/

how to think like a great graphic designer

DEBBIE MILLMAN

a peek into the minds of the great designers, the mind is what makes the designer.

The first time I saw James Victore, he was wearing a gorilla suit. And no, he wasn’t trick-or-treating. He was headlining a talk for the New York chapter of the AIGA, the professional association for design. Titled “Mad As Hell,” the presentation was classic Victore: brash, brilliant, and unbridled. Victore didn’t focus on his impressive client roster or his singular talent, but rather crafted a presentation that discussed the designer as a master communicator who had an obligation to inspire social change. The second time I saw Victore, he was speaking at an event, along with Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, for students involved in an AIGA mentorship program. Unfettered by conventional norms, James addressed the students with raw honesty, enthusiasm, and quite a few expletives. In fact, I remember that one AIGA staffer kept track of the number of times James used the word “fuck,” as she planned an exit strategy from her job. She needn’t have worried. Not only did the students give Victore a standing ovation, they spent hours after the event clamoring for the signed posters he was giving out. James is a master designer with a kind, generous, and engaging spirit. The day we met, he picked me up on his motorcycle for a trip to his studio. We spent the rest of the afternoon talking about the responsibility of designers in today’s world, creative freedom, and his parent’s dashed hopes that he would have become a nurse.

Okay, just to get us started, tell me about your very first creative memory.
Have you ever read My Name is Asher Levy?

No.
It’s great. In the book My Name is Asher Levy, the author’s dad is a rabbi. His father’s father was a rabbi. His grandfather was a rabbi. He’s supposed to be a rabbi. But he sees.

What does he see?
As a young child, the author starts seeing perspective and shadows, and he explains that shift in this book. He becomes an artist. He explains how he was born to be an artist. He explains the process. I saw this happen with my son Luca when he was about three. We were in the kitchen, where there was a lamp overhead, and I could see him moving his head; I explicitly remember the white table and the white milk and watching him realize that as you move, your perspective changes. When I read My Name is Asher Levy, I realized the same thing. I remember that. And I tell everybody, anybody who asks, I was born to do this job. I was born to be a designer. This is my dharma.

How did you describe what it is you wanted to do when you grew up?
I was raised on a military base. There was no real option of being an artist. You couldn’t be an artist or a writer because people just didn’t do that. I came from a small town in upstate New York. I remember coming out of high school and people saying, “Well, I hear there’s good money in nursing. You should go into nursing.”

James Victore, R.N.
Yes! I thought it was ludicrous, but I still didn’t know that I could be a designer for a living. Nevertheless, I drew constantly. I was always making up wordplays and bad puns and creating new lyrics for songs. I’d make up lyrics to Led Zeppelin songs that I didn’t understand. The only person I know in the business who thinks like this is Emily Oberman. She and I both thrive on word association. We get triggered—bzzzzzz—and off we go to find all these other associations. And that’s how I work. That’s what I do with my job.

Do you remember the moment you made the decision to become a designer?
Well, when I first got out of high school, I didn’t get into any of my universities of choice because my grades weren’t good enough.

What were you intending to study?
Engineering or physics. I became a physics major at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. I did horribly, and I was asked not to come back for a second semester.

You were kicked out?
Yes, I was kicked out. So I went to work for my father. He had a ski shop. I also waited tables. And I slept in my car. I was crying a lot. It was like, “What the fuck?” Then my dad gave me a card from someone who came by the ski shop. He was from a design and advertising agency. This was something I’d never heard of. So I put some drawings in a folder, and I went to the guy and he was like, “Yeah, okay. We need some help.” He had a tiny little advertising agency, and they made menus and fliers for dry cleaners. That’s what they did. But he recognized something in me. Through him, I got the idea to apply to art school. So I applied to RISD, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Pratt, SVA, and Cooper Union. The only school I didn’t get into was Cooper Union. I made the decision to go to SVA primarily because I wanted to go to New York City: The city of vision, the city of light. That was where I wanted to be. I left with 350 bucks in my pocket, and I showed up at school. But when I was there, I questioned whether or not I belonged there. I couldn’t help but think that I was not like these people around me.

Why weren’t you like them?
I just felt that I didn’t belong. I was living in the YMCA on 34th street. My classes weren’t that interesting, and I was supposed to be studying art and design in New York—and I just wasn’t that interested. So I dropped out.

What did you do then?
I had one instructor in my second year, the graphic designer Paul Bacon. He gave me a D. But when I dropped out of school, I went to his office and said that I’d like to apprentice. I didn’t even know what it meant, but I wanted to apprentice with him. He looked at me and put his pen down and told me that no one had ever asked him that before. Then he agreed to let me do it. I learned a huge lesson at that moment: You have got to ask. I got that apprenticeship because no one else had ever asked. So I started hanging out in Paul’s studio, looking over his shoulder. I’d get there in the morning and sweep; I didn’t really have any jobs. And then I’d hang out. When a desk became available, I tried to do some “real” design. Three months after I dropped out of SVA, I had put together a portfolio with three fake book jackets. I started showing my portfolio, and I got hired right off the bat. I’ve been working ever since.

What do you do when you have a client that gives you negative feedback?
We are professionals. We don’t care about negative feedback.

There are some designers who would say, “Do it my way or bye-bye.”
No. No, no, no, no. This is what we do for a living. The unspoken part of what we do is compromise. Clients don’t just come to me and say, “James Victore, he’s the auteur, we’ll let him do what he wants.” I have very little of that. And the funny thing is when I was a young Turk and trying to push my elbows out as wide as possible, I had the opportunity. I knew a guy in town, Pierre Bernard. I knew of his reputation, so I searched him out and arranged to meet him. He is an amazing French designer from Grapus, a design collective that broke up in 1989. He spent an afternoon with me, which was unheard of, since I was a nobody. As I was showing him my work—a greeting card I was doing at the time for a publisher—I bragged that I had an amazing client who gave me complete creative freedom. He looked at my work and said, “Sometimes complete creative freedom is not a good thing.” That was excellent. I don’t really want complete creative freedom. A lot of people look at my work and think I must have complete freedom, but that’s not what I do. Saul Steinberg couldn’t entertain the idea of working for a client. Paul Rand could. He needed a client. He needed “The Job.” When I worked for The New York Times for a short stint, I called Saul Steinberg to do a project, and he said to me, “Let me get this correct. You want me to illustrate somebody else’s idea? It seems there are two artists on this project.”

Do you consider your work to be good?
I consider my work good. I enjoy doing it, which helps a lot. Unfortunately, I get a lot of feedback, constantly, from people who write me about my work. But I know when I’m “giving one from column A, one from column B.” Overall, I think my work is pretty good, but I don’t think it’s great.

What do you mean by “giving one from column A and one from column B”?
The rule here is there are jobs you do for “god,” and there are jobs you do for money. I try to approach everything as a “god job”—lowercase g. At the beginning of a project, I ask, “What are we going to do, and how are we going to do it? How are we going to make a person fall in love?” And when we start getting questionable feedback about what we’ve done, we have to realize it’s not always possible to do the god job. That’s when I know we just have to get it done and get paid.

How do you know when something you’ve designed is great?
I don’t. Quite frankly, I don’t. Sometimes I think something is awesome, and everyone else thinks it’s crap.

How confident are you in your own judgment or assessment of things?
Less and less as time goes on. Less and less. I’m wrong a lot more than I think. And that’s why I have other people to check me, like my wife, Laura, and my son. As I progress and get older, I want my world to get bigger and bigger and bigger, not smaller and smaller and smaller. But I find that it takes constant effort. I’m not a good judge of my work or other people’s. Especially other people’s!

What do you worry about in your life?
Professionally, I don’t really have any worries. Any. I like what I do. But I am worried about what the state of the profession will be in the future. I’m worried about the state of the world. My concern now is to make a little bit of money. And for the first time in my life, I feel guilty about it.

Why do you feel guilty about it?
In regard to the state of the world. Laura is currently reading Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In the book, when [Jacob] Marley’s Ghost comes to Scrooge, Scrooge says, “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob!” “Business!” cries the Ghost. “Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business. Charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business.” This is what I worry about. I like what I do, and I seem to have a reputation for altruism and telling the truth; but at the same time, all that work I do for free. Or I pay for it with my own money. And now I’m worried about making a living for my family. And this bothers me because I don’t know how to do both. And I want a hot rod!

I was just reading about Nan Kempner and her desire to have nice things.
I remember Tibor used to say, “I want to take taxis.”

You mentioned that you were worried about the future of the design business?
The business as I know it. The Internet is changing things in the same way that the invention of ink on paper did. And there is this wonderful, funny question that people like to ask all the time: “Are posters dead?” It’s like asking Twyla Tharp, “Is dance dead?” People try to reorganize and rename things and change them and qualify and quantify them. I just want the spirit of design to remain. I feel now the way Tibor did: People have not fucked with the printed page as much as we still can. I want those opportunities. But I think those opportunities get fewer and fewer. And there’s too many of us. But there aren’t not enough crackpots and artists in the business—they’re all MBAs.

Who do you think right now is an artist in the business?
Any of the designers who are 50 and older. They were around before computers. They were working with their hands. Most younger designers don’t do that.

You work both on the computer and with your hands. Are you equally comfortable with both mediums?
No, I’m dreadful on the computer.

How do you know when a project is done, aside from a deadline?
I asked Pat Duniho that question, because he could draw like a motherfucker. It was beautiful. I asked him how he knew when he was done. And he said, “Well, you have a big piece of paper like this. And you start in the middle and you fill it out and when you reach the edge of the paper, you’re done.”
Knowing when you’re done is essential. That is where most people falter. I think we’re so in love with the fact that we can do this thing called design, and when we get the opportunity, we just want to do it so much! Especially when you get pro bono opportunities. The not-for-profit stuff is the shit because it’s our opportunity to go off and get really creative.

But knowing when you’re done is hard.
The thing that’s great about this profession—and doing it well—is that it’s like medicine. Doctors can see a patient get sick and die, or they can help them get better. We can do that with our business, to a certain extent. You know you’ve done a good job when you can see positive change. That is the most awesome feeling in the world.

You mentioned that a lot of people write and tell you how much they’ve been impacted by your work. What do you think touches people so profoundly?
I don’t know. I got a message from someone this morning telling me he liked the way I told the truth.

How do you think you tell the truth?
I think I either get the opportunity, or I go looking for it. Sometimes I have to go digging for it. There are surface, veneer solutions to design problems, and that’s appropriate if you’re talking bullshit. But to get to the truth, you have to push everything aside. Everything—and then get down to that one perfect little gem.

How do you know when it’s a gem?
I talk to my students about that all the time. It’s about whittling. It’s about taking something and whittling and whittling and getting it sharp and perfect. Then you’ve got something.

Do those things come instantly after all the whittling away?
No, a lot of the time it comes as a surprise. It’s hard work. It’s the time when I’m sitting at the table, and I’ve been working on something for hours and hours and I come up with something and I make myself laugh. That’s what I do. And I’ll ask Laura to come and look at it. And she’ll either say, “That’s funny,” or she says it’s funny and she laughs. When she does that, I know I’m good as gold.

Is it about being funny, or is it about making a connection to something that might not have been done before?
Yes, it’s definitely finding another way to say something. It’s about realizing that you have kept something in your mental files forever, and now you’re going to take it out.

Do you think that it takes a special type of mentality to love your work?
I don’t think so. I think it takes a special type of mentality to not get uptight about my work, a special type of mentality to have a sense of humor about it.

I’ve read that people believe that in your work, you’re able to communicate what other people are afraid to say. Is that something that you’ve consciously worked on being able to do?
No. I’m just inappropriate. That’s who I am. I have a foul mouth, and I like off-color jokes—but I’m not a boorish, Shakespeare’s Richard kind of character.

How would you describe yourself?
I like to think that I’m strong and quick to judge. But at the same time—similar to when I am talking to my son—I am extremely stern, but full of love.

How content are you?
Not. Never have been, never will be. I don’t think it’s possible—unfortunately. It’s something I want.

Do you think that’s what fuels you?
Yes. I wake up in the morning knowing I’ve got to start at 5 or 5:30. I’ve got to get downstairs, I’ve got to get working. I’ve got to sit on the couch and start studying, or I’ve got to go run. And I don’t do that because it’s naturally in me. I do it because I have to force myself to do it, because I know that if I don’t, I’ll be a wreck.

What do you mean by that?
I push myself really hard. I live by lists. I have today’s lists, I have my short-term list, I have my long-term list. It makes me immeasurably happy when I cross something off one of my lists.

Are you a control freak?
I have to be. I think we all have to be in this business. I try not to show it in my work, but I think I am. Definitely.

If you didn’t push yourself so hard, what would happen?
I don’t know. I don’t know. Probably nothing. I just like doing it. It makes me feel like I’m progressing. It makes me feel like I’m getting things done. If I could include “brush teeth,” it would be on the list. But it’s not. Sometimes I recognize that I’m not doing something on the list because of fear; and I see that in myself and I’m like, “Nope. Do it. Do it. Do it.”

Do you consider yourself to be afraid of a lot of things?
Yes. I’m afraid of everything. I am. But I do them anyway. This is my dharma. This is what I was meant to do. I just want to do a good job.

source: http://www.graphicdefine.org/issue4/thinklikeadesigner

the handbook of style: a man’s guide to looking good

ESQUIRE MAGAZINE EDITOR

there’s more than t-shirt and jeans in a man’s wardrobe.

The Esquire magazine editors are releasing a book called “The Handbook Of Style : A Man’s Guide To Looking Good” on January 2009.

Don’t think the book is another way to tell Men what and how to look good. Nick Sullivan, Esquire’s fashion director said, while opinions do matter and everyone  sure have their own, the book is most importantly a guide in dressing and the primer elements in Men’s fashion and styling.

You’ll find important advice on everything from what cuts of suits fits specifically for you, the right trousers for your built, travel tips, grooming guidelines and more.

Other helpful tips & tricks from Esquire’s The Handbook of Style:

-Know your neck size.  You should be able to fit one finger between your collar and your neck when your shirt is fully buttoned.

-A tie’s stripes should always be bolder than a shirt’s.

-It’s ok to not wear socks in summer, but only if you give your sweaty shoes a break every other day.

-An invitation saying ‘black-tie optional’ implies you can choose between black tie and a suit, but it really means black tie.

-Know the nuances of khaki pants – don’t roll up the cuffs to your calves like clamdiggers unless you are actually digging for clams.

-Never put eyewear, your cell phone, an ink pen, or a bulging key chain in your pants pockets.

-There are three proper ways to tie your shoes: straight laced, crisscross, and over-under.

-A wallet is for credit cards only – cash goes in a money clip in your front pocket.

-Your eyeglasses should contrast, not mimic, the shape of your face.

-The five terms your barber will understand are thinned out, layered, choppy, razored, and texturized.

-It is acceptable to wear your jeans five to ten times between washings but fewer if they get visibly dirty or baggy at the knee.

THE HANDBOOK OF STYLE not only shares the how’s but the why’s as well. The book has 240 pages, priced for $14.95 in the US market, and $15.95 in Canada.  “The Handbook Of Style : A Man’s Guide To Looking Good” is published by Hearst Books and will be out on January 2009.

source: http://www.splendicity.com/sheknowsbest/esquires-the-handbook-of-style/

it’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be

PAUL ARDEN

advices on how to succeed in life by an advertising guru.

With its half visual, half text design, this book is a captivating digest of inspiration.   Arden’s message is about framing your perspective in a positive light and setting your aspirations extraordinarily high.   He teaches readers that they don’t have to become a cog in a wheel and that ambition and determination can have monumental results.  Plus, he’s entertaining.  His subtitle notes “The world’s bestselling book by Paul Arden”… because at the time, it was his only book.

For context, Arden spent the majority of his life at the top of the ad world as the creative director at Saatchi & Saatchi.  His unique outlook helped define many of the largest ad campaigns that we recognize today.

Each page of text includes visual imagery and a bullet point takeaway.  The text is colorful, concise and bold.  This format is far more suited to the way that the internet has conditioned younger generations to read.  The end result is that Arden created a book that you leave on your coffee table and pick up any time you want to think big or dream your path to the next level.

source: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/afterword/archive/2009/09/17/the-unread-jeremy-gutsche-on-paul-arden-s-quot-it-s-not-how-good-you-are-it-s-how-good-you-want-to-be-quot.aspx

whatever you think, think the opposite

PAUL ARDEN

wisdom from a great ad man

There have been many books written on good business practice. All eminently sensible. All based on logic, common sense and good manners. It is essential if you want to be a supermarket manager. But for those wishing to break new ground, it is not enough. Logic and common sense have a habit of leading us to the same conclusions. If you are going to make your mark on the world you have to start thinking differently. To think differently, you have to think illogically. “Whatever You Think Think, The Opposite” looks at life the wrong way in a bid to explain the benefits of making wrong decisions…

source: http://www.gogeometry.com/brain/think_opposite_paul_arden.html

the best of roald dahl

ROALD DAHL

wit, imagination, humour at its best.

The Best of Roald Dahl is a collection of 25 of Roald Dahl’s short stories. The first edition was published 1978.

one of the stories:

Mrs Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat

The narrator describes men in America as victims of scheming women and divorce, slaves forced to work in order to send payments to their ex-wives. These sorry men in middle age are able to console one another, usually in bars, by telling made-up stories about how a man gets the better of his unfaithful wife. These stories are by and large “fatuous” and “fruity”, the narrator says, except for one “superior” story which is also true: “Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat”. He then proceeds to tell the story.

Mrs. Bixby and her husband, a dentist, live in a flat. Mrs. Bixby finds her husband very dull, and she has a secret boyfriend called the Colonel whom she sees once a month, while claiming to visit her aunt.

Returning on the train from one such visit, Mrs. Bixby opens a surprise present from the Colonel: a bluish-black, lustrous, and quite extravagant mink coat. The Colonel’s accompanying letter informs Mrs. Bixby that the coat is a parting gift, as he must break off their relationship. He suggests that she tell her husband that the mink coat was a Christmas present from her aunt. Mrs. Bixby knows that her aunt is far too poor to be given credit for the purchase of the coat. Yet she is intent on keeping it.

On arrival she goes to a nearby pawn-broker, and pawns the coat for $50. The pawn-broker gives her a pawn ticket, which she declines to mark with any kind of name, or description. The ticket does, however, guarantee the possessor the right to claim the coat at any time. At home, she tells her husband that she found the pawn ticket in the taxi. After they speculate about what the pawned item could be, Mr. Bixby decides it would be best if he redeemed the ticket himself, in spite of his wife’s pleas that she be allowed to go.

The next day, Mr. Bixby goes alone to the pawn shop with the ticket to claim the item for which it was issued. Mrs. Bixby excitedly rushes to her husband’s office after he calls her to tell her he’s claimed it. Just before she opens her eyes to see it, he says “Real mink!” She then opens her eyes to find it is indeed mink — but that it is merely a small stole, and not her coat. Mr. Bixby informs her that he will be coming home late that night, and that since he spent $50 redeeming the ticket, that he will not be able to buy Mrs. Bixby a Christmas present.

Mrs. Bixby is initially angry at the pawn-broker, thinking that he cheated her and kept the coat. But as Mrs. Bixby leaves her husband’s office a few moments later, Miss Pulteney, the secretary-assistant, walks proudly out of the office, wearing the black mink coat that the Colonel gave to Mrs. Bixby. It is implied that Mr. Bixby is having an affair with Miss Pulteney and decided to give her the coat — substituting a tacky fur neckpiece for his wife instead.

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mrs._Bixby_and_the_Colonel%27s_Coat

outliers

MALCOLM GLADWELL

the accumulation of advantages is a important key to success.

What is Outliers about?

1. What is an outlier?

“Outlier” is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August where the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I’m interested in people who are outliers—in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.

2. Why did you write Outliers?

I write books when I find myself returning again and again, in my mind, to the same themes. I wrote Tipping Point because I was fascinated by the sudden drop in crime in New York City—and that fascination grew to an interest in the whole idea of epidemics and epidemic processes. I wrote Blink because I began to get obsessed, in the same way, with the way that all of us seem to make up our minds about other people in an instant—without really doing any real thinking. In the case of Outliers, the book grew out a frustration I found myself having with the way we explain the careers of really successful people. You know how you hear someone say of Bill Gates or some rock star or some other outlier—”they’re really smart,” or “they’re really ambitious?’ Well, I know lots of people who are really smart and really ambitious, and they aren’t worth 60 billion dollars. It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude—and there was an opportunity to dig down and come up with a better set of explanations.

3. In what way are our explanations of success “crude?”

That’s a bit of a puzzle because we certainly don’t lack for interest in the subject. If you go to the bookstore, you can find a hundred success manuals, or biographies of famous people, or self-help books that promise to outline the six keys to great achievement. (Or is it seven?) So we should be pretty sophisticated on the topic. What I came to realize in writing Outliers, though, is that we’ve been far too focused on the individual—on describing the characteristics and habits and personality traits of those who get furthest ahead in the world. And that’s the problem, because in order to understand the outlier I think you have to look around them—at their culture and community and family and generation. We’ve been looking at tall trees, and I think we should have been looking at the forest.

4. Can you give some examples?

Sure. For example, one of the chapters looks at the fact that a surprising number of the most powerful and successful corporate lawyers in New York City have almost the exact same biography: they are Jewish men, born in the Bronx or Brooklyn in the mid-1930’s to immigrant parents who worked in the garment industry. Now, you can call that a coincidence. Or you can ask—as I do—what is about being Jewish and being part of the generation born in the Depression and having parents who worked in the garment business that might have something to do with turning someone into a really, really successful lawyer? And the answer is that you can learn a huge amount about why someone reaches the top of that profession by asking those questions.

5. Doesn’t that make it sound like success is something outside of an individual’s control?

I don’t mean to go that far. But I do think that we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with. Outliers opens, for example, by examining why a hugely disproportionate number of professional hockey and soccer players are born in January, February and March. I’m not going to spoil things for you by giving you the answer. But the point is that very best hockey players are people who are talented and work hard but who also benefit from the weird and largely unexamined and peculiar ways in which their world is organized. I actually have a lot of fun with birthdates in Outliers. Did you know that there’s a magic year to be born if you want to be a software entrepreneur? And another magic year to be born if you want to be really rich? In fact, one nine year stretch turns out to have produced more Outliers than any other period in history. It’s remarkable how many patterns you can find in the lives of successful people, when you look closely.

6. What’s the most surprising pattern you uncovered in the book?

It’s probably the chapter nearly the end of Outliers where I talk about plane crashes. How good a pilot is, it turns out, has a lot to do with where that pilot is from—that is, the culture he or she was raised in. I was actually stunned by how strong the connection is between culture and crashes, and it’s something that I would never have dreamed was true, in a million years.

7. Wait. Does this mean that there are some airlines that I should avoid?

Yes. Although, as I point out in Outliers, by acknowledging the role that culture plays in piloting, some of the most unsafe airlines have actually begun to clean up their act.

8. In Tipping Point, you had an entire chapter on suicide. In Blink, you ended the book with a long chapter on the Diallo shooting—and now plane crashes. Do you have a macabre side?

Yes! I’m a frustrated thriller writer! But seriously, there’s a good reason for that. I think that we learn more from extreme circumstances than anything else; disasters tell us something about the way we think and behave that we can’t learn from ordinary life. That’s the premise of Outliers. It’s those who lie outside ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.

9. How does this book compare to Blink and The Tipping Point?

It’s different, in the sense that it’s much more focused on people and their stories. The subtitle—”The Story of Success”—is supposed to signal that. A lot of the book is an attempt to describe the lives of successful people, but to tell their stories in a different way than we’re used to. I have a chapter that deals, in part, with explaining the extraordinary success of Bill Gates. But I’m not interested in anything that happened to him past the age of about 17. Or I have a chapter explaining why Asian schoolchildren are so good at math. But it’s focused almost entirely on what the grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great grandparents of those schoolchildren did for a living. You’ll meet more people in Outliers than in my previous two books.

10. What was your most memorable experience in researching Outliers?

There were so many! I’ll never forget the time I spent with Chris Langan, who might be the smartest man in the world. I’ve never been able to feel someone’s intellect before, the way I could with him. It was an intimidating experience, but also profoundly heartbreaking—as I hope becomes apparent in “The Trouble with Geniuses” chapter. I also went to south China and hung out in rice paddies, and went to this weird little town in eastern Pennsylvania where no one ever has a heart attack, and deciphered aircraft “black box” recorders with crash investigators. I should warn all potential readers that once you get interested in the world of plane crashes, it becomes very hard to tear yourself away. I’m still obsessed.

11. What do you want people to take away from Outliers?

I think this is the way in which Outliers is a lot like Blink and Tipping Point. They are all attempts to make us think about the world a little differently. The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It’s because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That’s an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.

12. I noticed that the book is dedicated to “Daisy.” Who is she?

Daisy is my grandmother. She was a remarkable woman, who was responsible for my mother’s success—for the fact that my mother was able to get out of the little rural village in Jamaica where she grew up, get a University education in England and ultimately meet and marry my father. The last chapter of Outliers is an attempt to understand how Daisy was able to make that happen—using all the lessons learned over the course of the book. I’ve never written something quite this personal before. I hope readers find her story as moving as I did.

source: http://www.gladwell.com/outliers/index.html

chuck klosterman iv: a decade of curious people and dangerous Ideas

CHUCK KLOSTERMAN

stars are human beings too and other weird facts.

“Can I tell you something weird?” he asked. This probably isn’t a valid question, because one can never say no to such an inquiry. But this is what he asked me.

“Of course,” I said in response. “Always.”

“Okay, well…great. That’s great.”

He collected his thoughts for fourteen seconds.

“Something is happening to me,” he said. “I keep thinking about something that happened to me a long time ago. Years ago. Like, this thing happened to me in eighth fucking grade. This is a situation I hadn’t even thought about for probably ten or fifteen years. But then I saw a documentary that reexamined the Challenger explosion, and this particular event had happened around that same time. And what’s disturbing is that — now — I find myself thinking about this particular afternoon constantly. I have dreams about it. Every time I get drunk or stoned, I inevitably find myself sitting in a dark room, replaying the sequence of the events in my mind, over and over again. And the details I remember from this 1986 afternoon are unfathomably intense. Nothing is missing and nothing is muddled. And I’m starting to believe — and this, I suppose, is the weird part — that maybe this day was the most important day of my entire life, and that everything significant about my personality was created on this one particular afternoon. I’m starting to suspect that this memory is not merely about a certain day of my life; this memory is about the day, if you get my meaning.”

“I think I do,” I said. “Obviously, I’m intrigued.”

“I thought you would be,” he replied. “In fact, that’s why I specifically wanted to talk to you about this problem. Because the story itself isn’t amazing. It’s not like my best friend died on this particular day. It’s not like a wolf showed up at my school and mauled a bunch of teachers. It’s not a sad story, and it’s not even a funny story. It’s about a junior-high basketball game.”

“A junior-high basketball game.”

“Yes.”

“The most important day in your life was a junior-high basketball game.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re realizing this now, as a thirty-three-year-old chemical engineer with two children.”

“Yes.”

I attempted to arch my eyebrows to suggest skepticism, but the sentiment did not translate.

“Obviously, this story isn’t really about basketball,” he said. “I suppose it’s kind of about basketball, because I was playing a basketball game on this particular afternoon. However, I have a feeling that the game itself is secondary.”

“It always is,” I said.

“Exactly. So, here’s the situation: when I was in eighth grade, our basketball team was kind of terrible. You only play a ten-game schedule when you’re in eighth grade, and we lost four of our first six games, a few of them by wide margins. I was probably the best player on the team, and I sucked. We were bad. We knew we were bad. And on the specific afternoon I’m recalling, we were playing the Fairmount Pheasants. We had played Fairmount in the first game of the year, and they beat us by twenty-two points. Fairmount only had three hundred people in their whole goddamn town, but they had the best eighth-grade basketball team in rural southeast North Dakota that winter.”

“That’s tremendous,” I said.

“They had a power forward named Tyler RaGoose. He was the single most unstoppable Pheasant. He was wiry and swarthy and strong, and he almost had a mustache; every great eighth-grade basketball player almost has a mustache. The rumor was that he could dunk a volleyball and that he had already fucked two girls, one of whom was a sophomore. It seemed plausible. They also had a precocious, flashy seventh grader who played point guard — I think his name was Trevor Monroe. He was one of those kids who was just naturally good at everything: he played point guard in the winter, shortstop in the summer, and quarterback in the fall. I’m not sure if Fairmount had a golf course, but I assume he was the best chipper in town if they did. They had this guy named Kenwood Dotzenrod who always looked sleepy, but he could get fouled whenever he felt like it. That was his gift — he knew how to get fouled. Do you remember Adrian Dantley? That stoic dude who played for the Utah Jazz and the Detroit Pistons with a really powerful ass? Kenwood Dotzenrod was like a white, thirteen-year-old Adrian Dantley. It seemed like he shot twelve free throws every night. These were just perfect, flawless Pheasants. And it’s hard to understand how that happened, because — once those kids got into high school — Fairmount defined mediocrity. They were never better than a .500 club. But as junior-high kids, they were a potato sack full of wolverines. They were going to humiliate us, and everybody in my school seemed to know this.

“Because we were junior-high kids, the game started right after school. It was scheduled for 4:15 p.m. That school day was interminable. I was wearing a gray acrylic sweater and cargo pants, because our coach didn’t let us wear jeans on game days. It was a different era, I suppose — no rap music. I remember walking around the school in those idiotic cargo pants, eating corndogs at lunch, pretending to care about earth science, and just longing for 4:15. Because I had this irrefutable, unexplainable premonition that we were going to play great that day. I didn’t think we would necessarily win, because Fairmount was better and they had the mustache dude, and we were lazy, underfed losers. But I still had a vague sense that we would not humiliate ourselves. We would execute and hustle, and the game would be close. This feeling was almost spiritual. And I was not the kind of kid who looked on the bright side of anything; I was never optimistic about any element of my eighth-grade life. But something made me certain that good things were on the horizon. We started warming up for the game at 3:55, and I can recall standing in the lay-up line and looking at the Pheasants at the other end of the court. Half of their team had spiky rattail haircuts, which was the style of the time. It was a different era, I suppose — Don Johnson and David Lee Roth defined masculinity. The gym felt especially hot and especially dry. I couldn’t make myself sweat. I remember thinking, Our school needs a humidifier. Our cheerleaders weren’t even paying attention to us. They were probably looking at Tyler RaGoose’s potential mustache.”

“So did your team play well?” I asked. “Was your intuition correct?”

“Fuck, yeah,” he responded immediately. “We couldn’t have played any better than we did. I mean, remember: we were junior-high kids. We were just little guys — half our squad weighed less than one hundred pounds. I still didn’t have pubic hair. But we played like basketball geniuses. Fairmount scored on the first possession of the game, we scored on the second possession, and it just went back and forth like that for the entire first half. Nobody on either team seemed to miss. Do you recall when Villanova upset Georgetown in the 1985 NCAA championship game? It was like we were all possessed by the spirit of Villanova. This was unlike any junior-high game I’ve ever witnessed, before or since. It was better than half of the shit they show on ESPN2. That Trevor Monroe kid — this spiky-haired little elf who was maybe five feet tall — knocked down three twenty-one-foot jump shots in a row. My memories of this are all so goddamn vivid. It actually freaks me out, because I barely remember anything else from that winter; I barely remember anything else from that entire school year. But I somehow recall that the score was 35 to 33 in Fairmount’s favor with ten seconds left in the first half, and somebody from our team dribbled the ball off his own foot. Trevor Monroe rushed the rock up the court and threw a blind bounce pass to a kid named Billy Barnaby in the right corner; Barnaby was a 4.00 student, and he was probably the only fourteen-year-old boy in Fairmount who actively liked poetry. Girls felt safe around him — he looked like Topher Grace. I jumped in his direction, but Barnaby threw in a fadeaway jumper at the buzzer, pushing Fairmount’s halftime lead to four points. When the rock nestled in the net, Barnaby awkwardly clapped his hands and sprinted into the visitors’ locker room with one fist in the air. It was like he had just blown up a federal building with the White Panthers. It was intense.

“Now, the second half was more like a standard junior-high basketball game. There was less scoring, and we behaved like normal eighth graders. Players would fuck up on occasion. But every possession was still akin to the Bataan death march. I don’t think I have ever wanted anything as much as I wanted to win that game. I mean, what else in my life did I care about? I was fourteen. What else mattered to me? Nothing. There was nothing I cared about as much as playing basketball against other eighth graders. I had no perspective. I suppose I liked my bedroom, and I liked girls who owned Def Leppard cassettes, and I liked being Catholic. I liked eating gravy. But this game felt considerably more important than all of those things. If I were to play in a Super Bowl or the World Series tomorrow night, it wouldn’t feel as monumental as this event felt twenty years ago. I could not comprehend any valuable existence beyond this specific basketball game; my eighth-grade worldview was profoundly telescopic. I suspect this depth of emotion can only happen when you’re that particular age.”

“And I assume this realization is what you were referring to earlier,” I said. “I assume this realization is why that afternoon was the most important afternoon of your life: it was the cognition of your deepest desire.”

“No,” he said. “That’s not it. That’s not even close. The thing is, it started to look like this game was going to go into overtime. It was 48 to 48. Fairmount had the ball, and the semi-mustachioed RaGoose drove the baseline and scored with maybe twenty seconds remaining. We could not contain his machismo. So now we were behind, 50 to 48. Still, I believed we would somehow tie things up. I was certain we would score; for the whole game, we had always managed to score when we truly needed to score. But this time, we didn’t. We turned it over. We were trying to feed our post player, and the ball ricocheted off his paw. So now the Pheasants had the ball with a two-point lead, and I had to intentionally foul Kenwood Dotzenrod with five seconds remaining. It was the only way to stop the clock. It was an act of desperation. I was desperate. It was the most desperate thing I’ve ever done.”

“So…you lost,” I said. “And I gather that this must be one of those stories about dealing with heartache: this was when you realized that losing can be more meaningful than winning.”

“No,” he said. “We ended up winning this game. Kenwood Dotzenrod missed his free throw. He shot a line drive at the front of the iron and the ball bounced straight into my hands; I called time-out while I was catching it. Our coach designed a play that didn’t work, but that aforementioned post player — Cubby Jones, a semi-fundamentalist Christian who’s now a high-school math teacher — got fouled at midcourt with one second remaining. One of the lesser Pheasants stupidly went for the steal — remember, we were just eighth graders. We were all stupid. So now Cubby Jones had to make both of these free throws with one second on the clock, which is an insane amount of pressure to put on a fourteen-year-old named Cubby. But he rattled in the first shot and swished the second, and the game went into overtime. And — not to brag or anything, because this is just what happened — I ended up hitting a sixteen-foot jump shot at the buzzer at the end of OT. We won 56 to 54. It was the greatest night of my life, at least up to that point. So I suppose I am technically the hero of this particular anecdote.”

We both finished our beverages.

“Curious,” I said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m a little disappointed. This story is far more conventional than I anticipated. I would never have assumed that the biggest moment of your existence would be making a jump shot before you had pubic hair. To be frank, this is kind of a rip-off. You’ve made dozens of confessions that were far more consequential than this.”

“But I still haven’t told you the part that I remember most,” he said. “Winning the game, making the shot. . . I remember those things, yes. They made me happy at the time. They are positive memories. But the moment I remember more than any other — the moment that is more than just a nostalgic imprint — is the feeling that came after desperately fouling Kenwood Dotzenrod. Because when that happened, I was certain we had lost. Everything felt hopeless. It seemed unlikely that Kenwood would miss, implausible that we would get a reasonable opportunity to score if such a miss occurred, and impossible that such an opportunity would result in any degree of success. And I had invested so much energy into the previous twenty-three minutes and fifty-five seconds of this eighth-grade basketball game. I had — at some point, probably late in the third quarter — unconsciously decided that losing this game would be no different than being alone forever. It would be the same as being buried alive. Everything else became trivial. So when I desperately slapped Kenwood Dotzenrod on the wrist and I heard the referee’s whistle, I felt the life drain from my blood. My bones softened. I felt this…this…this kind of predepression. Like, I knew I couldn’t be depressed yet, because the game was still in progress. I still had to try to win, because that is what you do whenever you play any game. You try to win. You aren’t allowed to give up, even philosophically. I still had to pretend that those final five seconds had meaning, and I could not outwardly express fear or sadness or disappointment. But I instantly knew how terrible I would feel when I went to bed that evening. I could visualize my future sadness. And because I was an eighth-grader — because I had no fucking perspective on anything — I assumed this would bother me for the rest of my life. It seemed like something that would never go away. So I stood on the edge of the free-throw lane, tugging on the bottom of my shorts, vocally reminding my teammates to box out, mentally preparing myself for a sadness that would last forever.”

“Interesting,” I said. “It seems that you are describing how it feels to be doomed.”

“Yes!”

“And this sense of doom is why an eighth-grade basketball game remains the most important moment of your life?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Actually, yes.”

“But you weren’t doomed,” I said. “You won the game. That one guy, the white Adrian Dantley…what was his name again?”

“Kenwood Dotzenrod.”

“Right. Kenwood Dotzenrod did, in fact, miss. Your team did, in fact, get an opportunity to score, and Cubby Jones did, in fact, make his free throws. You were never doomed. And even if this scenario had ended differently — even if Kenwood Dotzenrod had made one of his free throws, or if Cubby had missed one of his — your adolescent sadness would have been fleeting. You would have been sad for a week, or a month, or maybe even a year. But those things fade. This is just something specific that you happen to remember, and — because you seem to be actively dwelling upon its alleged significance — you unconsciously re-create all the other details you’ve forgotten. That’s why it seems so vivid: you’re making it vivid, just by talking about it. I mean, come on: everybody has a basketball game they remember, or a girl they kissed during Pretty in Pink, or some alcoholic cousin who died in a hunting accident. Or whatever. You know what I mean? It all seems so arbitrary, and — at least in this case — completely backward. You’re disturbed about something meaningless that worked out exactly the way you wanted. It’s not just that I don’t understand what this metaphor signifies; I honestly don’t know if this story involves any metaphor at all. Where is the conflict? What is the problem? I mean, you said it yourself: technically, you are the hero of this story.”

“Yes,” he said in response. “Technically, I am. But isn’t that always the problem?”

source: http://www.diesel-ebooks.com/cgi-bin/chapter.pl?isbn=9780743284882

things i have learned in my life so far

STEFAN SAGMEISTER

truth in life experienced by stefan sagmeister, one of the great designer.

This book began as a list I made in my diary under the title Things I have learned in my life so far, which includes statements such as “Complaining is silly. Either act or forget” and “Trying to look good limits my life.”

With the support of our clients, my studio transformed these sentences into typographic works, from billboards in France to sign-toting inflatable monkeys on the streets of Scotland. The book consists of 15 unbound signatures in a laser-cut slipcase. Shuffling the sequence of the signatures will produce 15 different covers.

source: http://www.thingsihavelearnedinmylife.com/buy-book