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About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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This wasn’t at all the book I was expecting when I ordered it, but ended up being much more satisfying. I thought it was going to be some tract on how and why the brain feels happiness, and what we can do to make ourselves happier. Instead Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, explains how the brain functions, and then shows why we consistently make the same types of mistakes in trying to find happiness.
Gilbert’s main thesis is that the reason we have so much trouble making ourselves happy is that we are taking action on behalf of a future version of ourselves. It turns out we are _terrible_ at predicting what that future self is going to want. Our brain has evolved with blind spots and shortcuts that make it impossible for us to predict the future, even our own future. Yet it leaves us believing in our predictions, unable to recognize those limitations.
One thing that made me happy was a chapter on “the Blind Spot of the Mind’s Eye”. Gilbert shows that our brains do not store all the raw details of our experience in memory - it stores a small set of key features. When recalling the experience, “our brains quickly reweave the tapestry by fabricating - not by actually retrieving - the bulk of the information that we experience as a memory” (he cites Daniel Schacter’s book Searching for Memory). This reweaving is very sensitive to the conditions of recall - it’s easy to influence how the reweaving takes place. Gilbert cites one study where subjects were shown a set of slides depicting a car accident where the car failed to yield at a yield sign. Half of the subjects were asked “Did another car pass the red car while it was stopped at the stop sign?”, and then were asked to select the slide they’d seen between one with the car at a yield sign and one at a stop sign. 80% of the subjects that had been asked the question pointed at the slide with the stop sign (90% of the control group answered correctly). It makes you wonder about eyewitness testimony, doesn’t it?
Another thing our brain is poor at is projecting into the future. Gilbert uses the analogy of looking at things that are far away - they are small, smooth, and lacking in detail. When we project more than a few days into the future, our brains see events with the same lack of details, but without the developed filters to remind us that the details are missing. So we imagine only fuzzy good things for the future event, and then when the day arrives, we are confronted with messy reality.
Our brain also does some sneaky stuff when we project how we will feel in the future. The analogy Gilbert uses is that when we imagine something (say, a penguin), we don’t get confused and actually start thinking there’s a penguin in the room with us. Our brains are well-trained to override our imagination with reality, and we know which is which. But when we project how we will feel in response to an imagined event, our present feelings will override our projected feelings without any such awareness of the override mechanism. The brain’s “Reality First” policy “that makes it difficult to imagine penguins when we are looking at ostriches also makes it difficult to imagine lust when we are feeling disgust, affection when we are feeling anger, or hunger when we are feeling full.” We project that we will feel in the future the same way we are feeling now.
I’ve definitely confronted this one in my personal experience. After a long day at work, I might get home and not want to do anything. If I haven’t made plans, I’ll sit at home and mope because I can’t think of anything I want to do. If I’ve made plans, though, I’ll go out and have fun - my brain was tricking me into thinking that nothing would make me feel good because I wasn’t feeling good at the time. So I particularly liked this insight because it gives me more ammunition to get myself moving when I’m feeling mopey in the future.
One last section that I really liked in the book was discussing how the brain exploits ambiguity to get the best possible result. “We ask whether facts allow us to believe our favored conclusions and whether they compel us to believe our disfavored conclusions. Not surprisingly, disfavored conclusions have a much tougher time meeting this more rigorous standard of proof.” Our brains focus on the aspects of our experience that make us happy. For instance, he cites one study where he asked a group of people to define what “talented” means. “Talented” is a fuzzy word, so it’s not surprising that there were a variety of definitions offered. Also not surprising is that each person defined “talented” in a way that included them as somebody that was “talented”. Exploit that ambiguity!
Gilbert says we can think of this as a
“psychological immune system that defends the mind against unhappiness in much the same way that the physical immune system defends the body against illness… A healthy psychological immune system strikes a balance that allows us to feel good enough to cope with our situation but bad enough to do something about it… We need to be defended - not defenseless or defensive - and thus our minds naturally look for the best view of things while simultaneously insisting that those views stick reasonably closely to the facts.
This immune system kicks into gear when we have intensely unhappy feelings. We find ways to believe that we’re better off now that we’ve been dumped or lost our jobs, but not when we stub our toes or get in the wrong line at the grocery store. “The paradoxical consequence of this fact is that it is sometimes more difficult to achieve a positive view of a bad experience than of a very bad experience.”
It’s also triggered when the suffering is inescapable. For instance, we will accept far worse behavior in our families than we would with our friends, because we can’t choose our family. The immune system kicks in because “it is only when we cannot change the experience that we look for ways to change our view of the experience“.
I’ve now covered a total of about 10 pages out of this 260 page book. There’s lots of great stuff in here. I’m fascinated by the brain (I even split off and populated a new cognition category recently), and I’ve speculated before on some of the ways in which our brains fill in the blanks so these sorts of findings fascinate me. The brain is a complex thing, and reading a book like this which provides scientific backing to several of my wacky theories is gratifying.
However, it’s not a self-help book. It’s not going to teach you how to be happy. But it does provide an understanding of how the brain works and the things it’s doing beneath the surface. Knowing those tendencies can help one consciously compensate for them, like realizing that nothing will sound like fun when I’m feeling depressed so I have to just make myself go out. Because one of the things that makes us happy according to the book is feeling a sense of control, this book will make you happier by understanding your brain better and thus giving you more control over how it feels.
Subtitled “What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work”, this book addresses the question of managing knowledge workers who are more independent than ever before. The authors study how a dramatic troupe puts together a performance for ideas on how to assemble talented and creative free agents into a coherent effort.
In the industrial age, people were given assigned roles and were told to behave like automatons, repeatedly reproducing the same movements, which led to the rise of Taylorism. But in the world of the Creative Class, such notions are no longer applicable. If a worker is a free agent that can choose where to be employed, treating them like a robot is sure to drive them away. Also, in a world where the pace of change is increasing, doing the same thing repeatedly is a recipe for failure.
To find a suitable analog for a free agent world, Austin and Devin turned to the world of the theater, where the entire team is thrown together on a per-production basis. Each team member has their special talents that they bring to the production. And no production is the same. Even when the same production with the same cast and crew is repeated on consecutive nights, the performances vary - the crowd is different, one actor may be in a different mood, the understudy may be needed, etc. Theater has had to incorporate change.
Austin and Devin see the process of art as being one of iterations, of trying different things to find out what works. Rather than try to replicate exactly what happened last time, artful making seeks to reconceive during each iteration, incorporating what was learned in previous iterations but trying something new each time. Whether it’s the weeks of rehearsal time needed for a play, or the dozens of sketches an artist does before the painting, or the different drafts a writer throws away before the final novel, iterations are key to finding the artful way through. To achieve “Artful Making” therefore requires reducing the cost of iterations in business, a point also made in the book Experimentation Matters.
Another key component of “Artful Making” is taking advantage of the specific resources available. As the authors point out, the goal of putting on a play is not to follow the script exactly because “the script is a wholly inadequate specification, lacking sufficient detail to control the rehearsal process the way plans and specifications control industrial processes.” The script is just a starting point, and it’s up to the company to adapt it to the actors, to the theater space, to the lighting and sound available, etc. This requires iterations and experimentation, trying to find out what works and what doesn’t. A scene may have been played one way in previous productions, but it doesn’t work with the actors in this production, so a new way of conceiving the scene must be found.
Directing a production is different than managing an industrial-era process, according to the authors. In Frederick Taylor’s world, the authors describe management as “Tell them what to do; fire them if they don’t do it.” But in a rapidly changing world, the workers may know more than the managers about what they should be doing - “Forcing workers to comply with preconceptions often hinders the overall making process.” So the manager/director needs to find a way to focus and harness the talents of their crew without restricting them from discovering innovative solutions.
One analogy I particularly liked illustrated different conceptions of control.
Lee borrowed a pen from a student, gripped it tightly in his hand, and waved that hand in the air. “See this pen?” he said. “I’m controlling it.” He swooped it around like a fighter plane. “It’s doing exactly what I want it to do.” Then he held the pen out in front of him. “Now look; I’m going to control it some more.” And he dropped the pen. It fell to the floor and bounced. He picked it up and repeated the gesture. The pen bounced again, quite differently. “See that? It did what I wanted it to, each time.” (attributed to acting teacher Milton Katselas)
I love this because I think it strikes to the essence of how to manage a diverse group of talents. Micro-managing somebody who’s an expert in their field is stupid because then you’ll only get out what you put in, so you might as well not even have the expert. But if you give them an environment that drives their actions, you can benefit from their expertise while still moving towards your goals.
To get that benefit requires creating a secure environment for experimentation. This means reducing the cost of iterations so that your team can try different things without fear of failure. Failure’s a misnomer in this case, because iterations that don’t work inform the reconception of the next iteration. The only failure is when an iteration doesn’t teach the team anything new.
Furthermore, the team needs to know that they can push the edge and not get punished. True innovation requires trying new ideas, stretching oneself past the point of comfortable ruts, and that requires management that supports such experimentation.
One last benefit of iterations is that it prepares the team for unexpected changes. Industrial replication processes are brittle because if anything changes from the expected inputs, then the worker doesn’t know how to react - they have not been prepared. In “artful making”, the team has been experimenting continuously through different iterations. They may already have tried something that will work in the new changed environment, and even if they haven’t, they can adapt and improvise because change has been part of their process. The iterations have laid the foundation for them to react at a higher level, where they aren’t thinking about how to just do the task, but how to achieve the greater goal of the ensemble.
Iterate more. Create the environment and the focus, but give up control to your team. It seems like it would mean chaos and no hope of making deadlines, but theater companies regularly get their productions on stage on time with a success rate far higher than most technology teams. Ideo’s process has similar elements, and they’re regularly recognized as one of the most innovative companies. I think it’s only a matter of time before such management techniques become ubiquitous. We’ll have to see.
It looks like I haven’t done a fiction review for most of the past year, so this will be a chance to collect everything I’ve read but wouldn’t admit to reading when I was supposed to be studying 
Intuition, by Allegra Goodman
This sounded interesting after reading the Economist review, so I picked it up at a used book store last fall. I can’t remember most of the details now, but what I really liked was the depiction of the human side of science. We have this myth of science that heroic scientists march into the laboratory and come out with unquestionable objective results, and it’s just not how things work. By placing this work in the maelstrom of funding and politics and personality conflicts, Goodman shows how murky and fuzzy scientific results can be.
High Fidelity, by Nick Hornby
No idea when I picked this one up. It’s possible I borrowed it, but I have no idea who from if so. I was curious if the book would be as good as the movie. The answer was, not so much. John Cusack elevates everything he’s in.
Love Monkey, by Kyle Smith
I really liked the TV show based on this book, and a friend recommended it to me since I’m living in New York now, so I picked it up used this spring. Tolerably amusing tale of the exploits of a single guy in New York. I couldn’t decide if I should be taking notes or not.
Con Ed, by Matthew Klein
Geek Mafia, by Rick Dakan
Picked these up after seeing them recommended by Seth Godin. Both are fast-paced caper stories, which I adore. And both are set in the Bay Area, so it was fun keeping track of all the places I’ve been. Quick but enjoyable reads - as Seth says, great beach reading.
Repairman Jack series, by F. Paul Wilson
I heard about this series from David Hines, who I think is the same David Hines who used to post great reviews of Buffy the Vampire Slayer on alt.tv.buffy-v-slayer. Anyway, it sounded interesting, I was on vacation in March, wandered into a bookstore, and picked up one. So far I’ve read The Tomb, Legacies, and Conspiracies. They’re tolerably entertaining, but pulpy mindless entertainment. I like the character of Repairman Jack - he seems like a toned-down version of Burke from Andrew Vachss - but the plots aren’t that involving and the other characters are paper-thin. The books have very little re-readability value so I probably won’t buy any more of them. But they were entertaining enough that I’ll probably read the rest if I can find them in the library.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower, by Stephen Chbosky
I picked this up at the used bookstore purely because of the title, as a wallflower myself. Only after picking it up did I notice the author. Chbosky was the writer and director of one of my favorite independent films ever, The Four Corners of Nowhere, which nobody has ever seen unless they happened to watch the Sundance Channel during the few months in 1996 when they were broadcasting this movie (I still have it on videotape and recently copied it to DVD).
Anyway, this is a coming-of-age story of a withdrawn high school freshman. It’s written as a series of letters, and so the writing style is intentionally poor to match a freshman’s writing, which gets a bit annoying at times (think Flowers for Algernon). But the story is decent, and it’s touching to watch the kid try to figure out who he is.
This was recommended to me by a friend as a great book on becoming a leader and manager.
The book reminds me of How to Win Friends and Influence People in that the advice is deceptively simple. If I had read this book even five years ago, I think I would have dismissed it as being simplistic and obvious. For instance, Weinberg describes problem-solving leadership as consisting of “understanding the problem”, “managing the flow of ideas”, and “maintaining quality”, which seem like completely generic management strategies. But with experience at several companies and with the examples that Weinberg uses, I can see how breakdowns in these areas will hamstring any project before it even starts. This is an example of how my greater experience lets me find the value in different perspectives.
He also emphasizes the difficulty of achieving a leadership orientation. My post about the attitude of management was inspired in large part by reading this book and the ideas that it evoked in me. He points out that to take a big step up in competence often involves taking a step backwards first, and if we’re too afraid of that step down, we can never advance.
I think I’ll be re-reading this book for many months. I haven’t done many of the self-assessment exercises as I was on an airplane while reading it, although I have started doing the 5-minute daily journal that he recommends. I may end up doing what a friend of a friend did with Dale Carnegie and re-read a chapter each day or week and try to apply those ideas to my life.
Even though I found this book valuable, I found it difficult going in spots because it made me question a lot of what I thought I knew. It certainly got me thinking about the larger issues associated with leadership. This is not a book for the arrogant (as my younger self was), as they will not be willing to do the critical self-assessment necessary to benefit from the lessons here. Heck, I’m still not sure I’m ready to benefit from this book. We’ll see how the next little bit plays out.
It’s been months since I’ve done book reviews, so I’ll just wrap up a bunch of quick summaries of things I’ve finished recently. Alas, I still have many books that I am about 100 pages into that I’m not sure when I’ll finish, not because I don’t find them interesting, but just because I don’t have the brainpower to read them right now.
Naked Economics, by Charles Wheelan
Subtitled “Undressing the Dismal Science”, this is a breezy overview of economics and why it matters from a correspondent of The Economist. It covered everything from unemployment rates to why the Federal Reserve matters in an accessible, easy-to-read way. I’d recommend it to anybody looking for an overview of macroeconomics, and how the tools of economists can be applied.
Fooled by Randomness, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
I’d been thinking about buying this book for a while before seeing it at the library. I like the main thesis that our brains don’t handle probability very well, and seek to ascribe stories and reasons where they may be none. For instance, he points out that if you have a million stock traders flipping coins to make decisions, some of them will experience phenomenal success and some of them abject failure, despite their decisions being made completely randomly. Yet because we hear about the success stories, we try to pick out their traits so that we can emulate them when it may have been no more than luck. There are a lot of good examples along that line, but it got a bit repetitive.
However, the book was inspiring in a completely different way. Taleb is not an academic or an author by trade. He’s a stock trader who had an idea that he felt needed wider dispersal, so he wrote a book on it and got it published. Admittedly, he did a lot of research and had expertise in the field of market trading to give him credibility, but he made it happen. Now I just need to find a field where I have credibility. Hrm.
The Discomfort Zone, by Jonathan Franzen
Despite widespread popular acclaim, I was not able to get through more than the first 50 pages of The Corrections the one time I picked it up from the library. So when I saw this short book of essays from Jonathan Franzen at the library, I figured I would give it a try to see if it enticed me into trying the bigger book, much like I did by first reading David Foster Wallace’s essays before tackling Infinite Jest. Alas, I was unimpressed by the essays - they were reasonably well-written, but didn’t have any defining characteristics, such as the dazzling wordplay of Wallace or the humor of David Sedaris. So I’ll move on to other authors.
Finding Serenity, ed. Glenn Yeffeth, Jane Espenson
I’m a sucker for overly intellectual analysis of pop culture, especially TV shows I like, as evidenced by my collection of Buffy books, so I figured I should give the Serenity one a try. There were some interesting takes on the series, but nothing really stuck with me. Mild distraction, at best.
I’ve liked Colson Whitehead’s previous work, including The Intuitionist (the title convinced me to pick up the book), and John Henry Days. His writing is just wonderfully sumptuous, so rich that I often have to re-read bits to appreciate the language.
A few years ago, he published this book, a set of essays reflecting on his home of New York City. Now that I’ve been here close to a year (!), it was interesting to read it and see how his impressions match my own experiences.
It’s great stuff. He’s got chapters on many common experiences at New York, from arriving on the bus at Port Authority, wandering down Broadway or through Central Park or Times Square, visiting Coney Island, or even the quotidian experiences of morning, rush hour, or rain.
On the very first page, he described when you are a New Yorker, and I’ve shared this observation with several people here, and they all go “Wow, that’s exactly right!” Here it is:
“No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet cafe plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.”
While I love so many of his observations throughout the book, I picked one almost at random to share as an example of what the book feels like. Check out his description of waiting for the subway:
“Look down the tunnel one more time and your behavior will describe a psychiatric disorder. It’s infectious. They take turns looking down into darkness and the platform is a clock: the more people standing dumb, the more time has passed since the last train. The people fall from above into hourglass dunes. Collect like seconds.
There’s a culture for platforms and a culture for between stations. On the platform there are strategies of where seats will appear when the doors open, of where you want to be when you get off, of how to outmaneuver these impromptu nemeses. So many variables, everyone’s a mathematician with an advanced degree. Wait. Those elephantine ears of hers. Does she know something he doesn’t, she’s moving closer to the edge, and then he hears the roar, too. The herd trembles, the lion approaches, instincts awaken. The jaws slide apart and the people step inside. Various sounds of gorging.”
This is a study of what makes ideas stick. They start it off by relating the kidney heist urban legend, a story that all of us have heard and can probably recount. Why has this story stuck in our memories so successfully? It has no advertising budget, nobody pushing it - it is a completely self-propagating meme. Companies would love to have an advertising scheme as successful as this urban legend. And Chip and Dan Heath set out to analyze how companies could do so.
They looked at different advertising campaigns, from the Jared diet at Subway to “Don’t Mess with Texas”, and tried to extract the common themes and elements that they saw. Their acronym for what makes an idea sticky is SUCCESs: Simple, Unexpected, Concrete, Credible, Emotional and Story. You have to have a core idea that can be expressed in a single sentence or phrase. If you can’t boil it down to something that simple, it will never stick. It has to be unexpected and surprising - our brains are “wired to remember the abnormal and outlandish because they break the routine patterns that we have learned”. It must be concrete, because humans each interpret abstractions differently - only by making an idea specific and concrete can you assure that it will be remembered and passed on unchanged. It must be credible - if it is not easily verifiable, it will be dismissed as outlandish. Emotions play a strong role in memory, so it’s not surprising that ideas that evoke emotions are more sticky. And my favorite topic, stories, make ideas sticky because we remember stories as exemplars of patterns that matter to us.
As an aside, my last post about stories and patterns captures many of these same ideas, as I tried to evaluate how to make a story stick with people. Dang! I really need to get organized about writing! Or at least come up with cute acronyms.
One of the thought-provoking things about this book was that it is possible to get people to pay attention to your idea even when they aren’t actively interested by using these principles. I often struggle with getting other people to change their behavior. Sometimes I give up and say “You can’t change somebody who doesn’t want to change”. But reading these stories inspired me to realize that if you frame your ideas correctly, sometimes you can change their minds even if they’re not looking to change.
For instance, one health organization was trying to convey how unhealthy movie popcorn popped in coconut oil was. It contained 37g of saturated fat, nearly double the recommended daily allowance. But movie-goers weren’t interested in statistics. So they did an ad where they said that the saturated fat content of the bag of popcorn “contains more artery-clogging fat than a bacon-and-eggs breakfast, a Big Mac and fries for lunch, and a steak dinner with all the trimmings - combined!” Illustrated with a picture of all of those meals together, the advertising campaign had a definitive impact.
Another idea that I really liked was the Curse of Knowledge:
Once we know something, we find it hard to imagine what it was like not to know it. Our knowledge has “cursed” us. And it becomes difficult for us to share our knowledge with others, because we can’t readily re-create our listeners’ state of mind.
This is something that I struggle with - I often assume other people can see the same connections that I do, so I don’t draw them out explicitly. At the same time, because I’m not an expert in most fields, I have a better chance of communicating to non-experts than do the true experts. Just being aware of the “Curse of Knowledge” gives me a chance to communicate better.
I liked this book a lot. It’s a quick read of a few hours, but there’s some good stuff in there, and lots of fun stories. Thumbs up.
On the plane ride to my parent’s place, I read the book Flock and Flow: Predicting and Managing Change in a Dynamic Marketplace, by Grant McCracken. I’ve been reading McCracken’s blog, titled This Blog Sits at the Intersection of Anthropology and Economics for a while and really enjoy his commentary on the process of ethnology and on the different layers present in the media around us. Sadly, the book itself wasn’t that great - the flows are basically the flows of ideas around us, and his flocks are basically the same idea as Geoffrey Moore’s adoption curve, where the enthusiasts and the early adopters try new technologies, creating a comfort level that paves the way for the majority of customers.
What’s interesting to me is that this same adoption mechanism has cropped up in a variety of different settings and used for different purposes. Here are a few from my own reading:
I’ve been futzing around with this idea for a couple days now and I can’t quite get the unified theory here, but you can see the general idea. For continued successful adaptation of an entity, whether it’s a person, a genome, a corporation or a society, you need elements that are going and trying new things all the time, but you also need elements that are preserving the successful changes so that they don’t need to re-tried by the next generation. Learn and latch.
What’s apparent from my own experience is that you need a balance between the two phases for things to work. A person that never tries anything new, that follows the same routine every day, is probably very comfortable, because they have found a routine that works for them and they have latched it so that nothing else can interfere with that routine. But they may also be trapped on a local maximum, and not even realize that their life could be much better if they made a few changes. And they are susceptible to disaster if their environment changes unexpectedly. On the other hand, a person that is always trying new things, and is never satisfied with what they have, is probably going to live an exhausting life as they keep on getting into the same scrapes over and over again in different forms.
Obviously, those are extreme cases for the sake of example, but the organizational equivalents are evident, and I’ve seen both. I’ve worked at a company which had a process and procedure for everything, where you always had to fill out forms to do anything, and where it was more important to follow the process than it was to be successful. In a world of continuing innovation, that company is struggling. I’ve also worked at startups where we made the same mistakes over and over again, where we refused to learn from the experience of others, and that was just as frustrating.
The ideal organization (or person or entity of any sort) has parts of their existence which are devoted to trying new experiences and new ways of doing things without worrying about how those new experiences will integrate with what they have. Then if some of the new experiences seem useful, they adopt those experiences and build them into their processes. Now that I think about it, this describes Bruno Latour’s idea of the Collective, where new elements ask for admittance to the Collective via spokespersons, and then the Collective has to decide whether to accept the new elements and reconfigure itself so as to integrate those new elements. Man, it really is all the same idea.
As I illustrated above, this adoption mechanism is everywhere once I started thinking about it (my professor, Art Langer, calls the same concept Responsive Organizational Dynamism) (if you want to go old school philosophy, what little I know of Hegel suggests that Thesis/Antithesis/Synthesis covers the same ground too). And by applying the ideas from one manifestation to others, there are some general principles that we can extract. One is that the situation is always changing, so you can’t stay static - an unchanging process, no matter how great it is, can not continue to remain successful in a dynamic world. Another is that there must be a way for you to adopt new things; for instance, McCracken discusses the various ways that the fashion, movie, music and restaurant industries handle adopting new ideas. And the last is that there must be a way to know what has been tried before and whether it worked or not; encoding or latching previous experiments keeps us from having to repeat them.
It makes me wonder if humans grew to dominate the planet because our communication skills allowed us to reduce the learn and latch cycle time from generations down to days (I think I read that idea someplace, but I can’t remember where now). I also think learn-and-latch provides a good general pattern to start working from. In my personal life, I need to think about how I try new opportunities and whether I can figure out how to integrate what I learn into my ongoing habits. In a company, it may be useful to review how the company incorporates new ideas into its culture, and what mechanisms it has in place to reinforce that process. Obviously, the details have to be tailored to each individual situation, but the general pattern is a strong one.
P.S. That last bit gets me thinking about the process of identifying general patterns and learning how to tailor them to one’s individual situation. Way too many people seem to follow specifics without understanding the gestalt that lies behind them. I tend to spend way too much time thinking about the underlying gestalt and not enough time figuring out how to extract practical applications. Hrm. Maybe this could be the project I suggested I needed in my last post.
I stopped by the library on Monday evening since I happened to be walking by, and walked out with four books. One of the books I picked up solely because of its title: The Futurist, by James P. Othmer. It’s smart and sassy with trenchant commentary on the modern world. Here’s the protagonist’s description of himself:
He sits alone in back seats and attempts candid conversations with drivers paid to accommodate. He gleans local lore from chatty bellhops, from Conde Nast Traveler. From the top steps of grand hotels he elicits profound sociological insights. From a part in the curtains of eighteenth-floor executive suites he absorbs geopolitical experience. He gets it with his healthy start breakfast from English-speaking room service waiters. From free newspapers dropped outside his door. From SpectraVision. Then he chronicles it, rolls it around in his head, and distills it down to anecdote, to conversation starter, to pithy one-liner, and finally he turns it into a highly proprietary, singularly respected worldly expertise that is utter and complete bullshit.
I really enjoyed the book, having finished it in a couple days. Othmer is apparently a former ad executive and you can tell he’s enjoying dishing out all the cynicism that he had to keep bottled up in front of his clients for years. Each chapter has a paragraph summary of former achievements of the protagonist, e.g. “He once spoke before the graduates of a Bible college in Virginia about the future of God and one week later delivered the keynote address to the Adult Video Distributors Conference in Vegas about the future of porn, and received standing ovations at both.”
The plot is a bit weak, but the ride was enjoyable, and I’d recommend it. I may even pick up a copy for myself if I ever see it at a used book store. Maybe I can use it as a guide in my on-and-off quest for pundithood.
P.S. I’ve been really enjoying this reading for fun concept. I recently read Twelve Sharp, by Janet Evanovich, the latest Stephanie Plum mystery which I borrowed from the library at 7pm on Monday and had finished reading by 10pm. Fun and frothy just like always.
I also got a couple paperbacks from the $1 rack at a used bookstore a couple weeks ago, which I then read in a few days. One was The First Immortal, by James Halperin, which I picked up because I liked The Truth Machine. This one details a near future projection of how somebody in the next few generations achieves immortality - the protagonist of the book takes advantage of cryonics to freeze himself and is resurrected with nanotech biotech genetic engineering gobbledybook. The other was Knight Moves, by Walter Jon Williams. I know of Williams through the Wild Cards series, but his solo work has been pretty nondescript. Still, it’s hard to go wrong for a dollar.
I should really think about finishing books for a while. I think I’ve got something like eight books which I have started in the past few months but haven’t finished.
P.P.S. My computer’s back up. I think I even recovered most of the files from my old hard drive that I wanted. I may be missing a few, but I probably won’t notice for a year or two.
A couple weeks ago I broke down and actually did some non-class, non-Economist reading. Crazy, eh? It was a weekend where I didn’t feel up to socializing, but didn’t feel up to homework either. So I looked for something light in my book pile, and this is what I read.
Bobos in Paradise, by David Brooks
I’d meant to read this book for a while, but never got around to it. I saw it in the Strand for $5, so I picked it up. It’s the “comic sociology” of the rise of bourgeois bohemians. For decades, the two cultural forces of bourgeois and bohemians had been battling, culminating in the culture wars of the sixties. But as we entered the nineties, the two cultural forces had merged. “WASPy upscale suburbs were suddenly dotted with arty coffeehouses where people drank little European coffees and listened to alternative music. Meanwhile, the bohemian downtown neighborhoods were packed with multimillion-dollar lofts and those upscale gardening stores where you can buy a faux-authentic trowel for $35.99.”
Brooks takes a look at the two cultures throughout history (or at least since the Industrial Revolution, which really defined them) and how we’ve gotten to this point, with chapters discussing the ways in which the mix of cultures has permeated all aspects of society, including:
I don’t feel like the book had much in the way of deep insight, but it was a pleasant quick tour of a culture of which I’m probably a member.
Sperm Are from Men, Eggs Are from Women: The Real Reason Men And Women Are Different, by Joe Quirk
Joe Quirk wrote a novel called The Ultimate Rush a few years ago. I’m not sure how I found it, but I really enjoyed it. It’s basically Snow Crash set in modern-day San Francisco, but it’s loads of fun. I actually ran into him at a Future Salon at one point, and asked him what his next book was going to be. And he said it was going to be a non-fiction book on evolutionary biology. And I was like, um?
But here it is. I’ve had my eye out for it for a while, but picked it up in the half-off section at The Strand. Another quick, fun read. Quirk is not a scientist, just an interested amateur, but he takes the ideas of evolutionary biology and relates them back to common questions of sexuality in chapters such as “Female Promiscuity Controls the Size of Your Testicles”, “Male Promiscuity Decides Your Height”, “Why Women Are Coy, Men Clueless”, “Why Your Clitoris Is Hard To Find”, etc. It’s pretty entertaining for him to relate the penis to a peacock tail. I’d heard many of these ideas in bits and pieces, but Quirk’s a good writer, and it’s fun to have them all in one place. It does make for a depressing read in places, as he draws (sometimes tenuous) connections between a lot of really stupid sexual behaviors and evolutionary biology. I’d recommend it as a quick read from the library if you want to become even more cynical about dating.
