I Could Never Sell

Take away improvement and self, and what’s left of self-improvement?

A friend urgently needs business advice.  I don’t know what to tell her. She’s a talented graphic artist with a great new idea.  She takes a picture of you and shows you, ten minutes later, just how you will look in five years. It’s astonishing.  People are just stunned.   I was.  I could only [...]

Slate has an article on Famous Movie Scenes of Women Giving Birth. The short version, if you’re pressed for time: Movies change, birth does not. The comments from readers are interesting.  As Taleb (The Black Swan) might say, they make everything mean too much.  For example: The thing I find astonishing is that the author [...]

How often have we complained that TV news, all news, prefers the story it can point a camera at? An old warehouse burns down in the night. Great footage! The cameramen love the haze in the air and the shine of oily water on pavement. They throw light so wildly against the black of night, [...]

An update to The Web Trap, a popular article here for many months: T’aint so. David Brooks in the New York Times: [Cass] Sunstein’s fear was that the Internet might lead to a more ghettoized, polarized and insular electorate. Those fears were supported by some other studies, and they certainly matched my own experience. Every [...]

There are no accidents. There are no accidents?  What would Taleb (The Black Swan) say to this?  My guess:  Chase down your own failings with that view, but not the success of others. TANA, let us call her.  There Are No Accidents.  Ask Tana about your failings.  Don’t ask her about the success of others. [...]

If  T-Shirts are to believed, Jung said Everything that irritates us about others can lead us to an understanding of ourselves. In the absence of the original German, may I suggest: What irritates me in others is not in them but in me, and opens a way into me, where I can find what is [...]

An aunt of mine (and one of her three daughters) could carry a grudge across decades, like Lawrence and his camels, crossing the anvil of the Nefud to Aqaba.  If you did not make the crossing with her, carry the grudge, fall upon the sleepers in a fury and slay them, then she had a [...]