Author: readingbyeugene

Karen Cheng on Discipline and Quitting

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

I profiled how Karen Cheng learned to dance in 365 days in an earlier post. She’s now published a super piece on trying and learning that it’s okay to quit:

Try everything. Be curious, ask questions. Let yourself be pulled in weird and interesting directions. Let your friends drag you to that thing you’re not so sure about. Go to a real bookstore. Sign up for an art class, a cycling class, an improv class. Bring a friend. When your friend bails, show up to class anyway.

I’ve tried a lot of things–and quit just about as many. Piano. Guitar. Singing. Cello. My band. My job at Microsoft. Juggling. Card tricks. Unicycling. Programming. Tae Kwon Do. Judo. Swimming. Origami.

Dancing was just another thing I tried. It stuck because I loved it the most.

Think about your job or hobby. Are you doing it because you really, truly love it? Or because it’s what you’ve always known?

What if you can’t afford to quit?

Okay, so you can quit your hobby. But what if you can’t afford to quit your job?

I felt that way at my old job. Two years into working at Microsoft Excel, I realized I was in the wrong career. I didn’t want to project manage anymore–I wanted to be a designer. But I had no design skills, and I didn’t want to go back to school. Going $100,000 in debt was not feasible, and three years is too long to wait for your dream.

So I taught myself–every day I would do my day job in record time and rush home to learn design. I hacked together my piecemeal design education in six months. I did not feel ready but I started the job search anyway. I was a lot less experienced than others, so I had to get creative to set myself apart. After getting rejected a few times, I got the job as Exec’s designer.

This is really great advice. I recommend reading the entire post and checking all the links.

###

Also see: Cal Newport’s advice on not necessarily doing what you love.

Is It Possible to Get Too Much Exercise?

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Is it possible that there is an upper limit to how much exercise the body can take? The answer seems to be yes:

For some time, exercise scientists, as well as a few highly committed exercisers and their spouses, have wondered if there might be an upper limit to the amount of exertion that is healthy, especially for the human heart. While the evidence is overwhelming that exercise improves heart health in most people and reduces the risk of developing or dying of heart disease, there have been intimations that people can do too much. A 2011 study of male, lifelong, competitive endurance athletes aged 50 or older, for instance, found that they had more fibrosis — meaning scarring — in their heart muscle than men of the same age who were active but not competitive athletes.

Now the latest Vasaloppet study and a separate study of rats running the equivalent of several rodent marathons that was published this month in The Journal of the American College of Cardiology are likely to further the debate about possible upper limits to safe exercise. Providing some counterbalance, though, is another animal study, published this month in PLoS One, that suggests that even if strenuous prolonged exercise increases the chances of some arrhythmias, it may lessen the chance of suffering fatal heart problems.

I’m not training for an ultra-endurance event anytime soon…

How to Make a Walmart Cashier’s Life Easier

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

A reader writes to Consumerist and provides some tips on what NOT to do as you’re checking out at your local Wal-Mart:

1. Talking on your cell phone while checking out. Doing it until you get to me is fine, but when you reach us, please be polite and tell the person on the other end of the phone to either hang on, or that you’ll call them back. We don’t demand a lot from our customers, but respect IS one thing we would all like.

One other thing regarding this–regular customers aren’t the only ones doing this. Some of the other associates have also been guilty of it–and have even complained about the customers doing the same thing! I have also had a regular customer who has one of those ear pieces where she would carry on a conversation with the person on the other end the entire time I was checking her out–and she didn’t even bother acknowledging me!

2. Please don’t bathe in perfume or other smelly stuff. For some of us, only a huge wind in the other direction will keep us from getting headaches from this–and it isn’t likely to happen inside a store. A little bit definitely goes a long way!

3.Please do not dress (or in this case, undress) like you are at home. That butt crack when you bend over is not exactly becoming. Neither is the large rip in your pants that shows you are not wearing underwear. Eeeww!

4. PLEASE save the electric carts for those who truly need them! We do not have an unlimited supply and there are people who really can’t move very far without one. If you can walk to the car–or across the store–without difficulty, you probably don’t need a cart. (One example: There is one customer who will come in through Lawn & Garden, walk from there–to the front of the store with no sign of a limp–and get an electric cart. When he is finished, he brings it back, plugs it in and walks back through the store to Lawn & Garden–with no limp!)

I didn’t know about the resolution if an item has been rang up twice:

If we have done something wrong like ringing something up twice, believe us when we say we can’t correct it AFTER you have paid. You will have to go to the service desk. Be pleasant and understanding. It may be the end of the day and we may have had a rough day.

The advice can apply to any retail store, obviously.

Why Twitter Parody Accounts Should Stay Anonymous

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

I completely agree with Matt Buchanan’s piece in The New Yorker:

Parody accounts are, oddly, one of Twitter’s most distinguishing features. Anyone can have virtually any username on the service, as opposed to Facebook and Google Plus, which require users to display their real names. While fake Twitter accounts are sometimes created in an attempt to deceive, they’re just as often meant to be humorous, and have become a routine reaction to practically every news event, a fact lamented by Alex Pareene in The New Republic. Most fake Twitter accounts are, in fact, unfunny; some are in poor taste, like the fake Tsarnaev brother accounts that emerged almost immediately after the two were identified as suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing. But at their best, they ascend to “the highest cultural rung” of “the making-fun-of-others department,” as Louis Menand wrote of parody in the magazine in 2010. “Part of the enjoyment people take in parody is the enjoyment of feeling intelligent,” Menand noted. “Not everyone gets the joke.” The highly self-selected audience necessary for parody presents itself automatically on Twitter, which allows its users to choose exactly whom to follow.

 So why does the unmasking ultimately happen? Buchanan concludes:

Yet Twitter also constantly undermines the parody it creates. The primary currency of social media is fame, and it is fame that drives the authors of popular parody accounts to uncloak themselves, destroying the account in the process. If fame is all the authors of parody accounts care about, as @MayorEmanuel wrote in one of his last tweets, “it’s pretty clear that the party’s over.”

Do you have a favorite parody account on Twitter? I am a fan of @TheTweetOfGod and Lord Voldemort.

Tony Conigliaro: The Bartender with a Lab Coat

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

Something I want to learn is to mix good (or just decent, to start) cocktails. In “The Bartender with a Lab Coat,” The New York Times profiles Tony Conigliaro and his skills in concocting signature cocktails:

It is here that he, along with a team of four technicians and a revolving door of mixology interns, works his alchemy, mixing herbs and spices, perfumes and flavors, fruits and vegetables and even tree bark and rocks.

Concocting one of his signature cocktails is a process that requires not just a sophisticated palate but also patience. It is not abnormal for a recipe to take him up to two years to release, as the ingredients must be replicable to his standards before it goes to any of his three London locations (he also has a bar at the Zetter Townhouse and is responsible for all cocktails served at a new restaurant, the Grain Store).

“I like to tell a story through flavors and creating bespoke ingredients,” he said, describing how he reinvented the Prairie Oyster, a concoction Sally Bowles, Liza Minnelli’s character in the film “Cabaret,” consumed every morning.

Another drink, the Rose, came from a perfume project in which Mr. Conigliaro wanted to “recreate the experience of sipping a glass of Champagne while walking in an English summer garden.” The drink’s secret is a sugar cube containing rose essence; the cube reacts with the Champagne bubbles, propelling the aroma through the cocktail.

Mr. Conigliaro recently released a book titled The Cocktail Lab on this art/craft, and The Times summarizes:

Highly produced with colorful photos of enticing-sounding drinks with names like Blush, Luna, Oh Gosh and the Wink, the book also offers classic cocktails with a twist, from a white truffle martini to a marshmallow milkshake. But some recipes require more time than talent (a Vintage Manhattan mixture has to age for a minimum of six months in a cool, dark place) while others seem strictly for professionals — the famous Prairie Oyster being one example, as making it requires a centrifuge, a half-sphere silicone mold, some vege-gel, orange food dye and soy lecithin.

I’ve placed The Cocktail Lab: Unraveling the Mysteries of Flavor and Aroma in Drink, with Recipes on my to-read list for 2013.

On Living, Reading without a Sense of Smell

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Rebecca Steinitz is anosmic: she is unable to discern various smells. In a beautiful essay published in The Millions, she writes:

I don’t know what my husband’s shirt smells like. If he died, I wouldn’t think to sleep in it so I could feel that he was with me.
I don’t know what a baby’s head smells like – not my babies, not anyone else’s babies. I couldn’t pick my babies out of a crowd with my eyes closed, and I don’t miss that baby smell when I hug my growing children.
I don’t know the smell of feet, chalk, lilacs, gardenias, sour milk, rain, new cars, Chanel No. 5, Old Spice, greasepaint, or napalm.

I learned smells from books, which made me think they were fictional. I believed that Wilbur’s barn smelled of hay, manure, the perspiration of tired horses, and the sweet breath of patient cows, and that the salty brown smell of frying ham made Almanzo even hungrier. But when real people said That stinks, or I can smell the sea from here, or I can’t stand the smell of cilantro, I thought they were faking. I assumed that, like me, they knew from books that there were smells and things were supposed to have them. Unlike me, I decided, they were willing to pretend those smells existed beyond the page. As I try to write out this logic, it seems tortuous, but it wasn’t something I ever questioned; it was something I knew. I could not smell the things I read in books, so it was impossible that anyone else could, which meant they must be making it up.

She wonders:

Are my memories lesser for lack of olfactory reminders? Does the diminution of my fifth sense altogether diminish my ability to engage with the sensory realm?

The way Rebecca ties it back to books at the of the essay is magical. Highly recommend reading.

###

(hat tip: Steve Silberman)

To Steal a Mockingbird: Harper Lee’s Lawsuit

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird (the only book she’s written), has an outstanding lawsuit. The lawsuit charges that in 2007 her agent, Samuel Pinkus, duped the 80-year-old Lee into assigning him the copyright to To Kill a Mockingbird and took away the royalties.

In “To Steal a Mockingbird?” Mark Seal unveils the details of the lawsuit for Vanity Fair:

Filed in New York District Court, the suit names Pinkus, his wife, former TV-news writer Leigh Ann Winick, and Gerald Posner, a Miami-based attorney and investigative journalist with a questionable reputation, as defendants. It claims that Pinkus “engaged in a scheme to dupe Harper Lee, then 80-years-old with declining hearing and eye sight, into assigning her valuable TKAM [To Kill a Mockingbird] copyright to [Pinkus’s company] for no consideration,” and then created shell companies and bank accounts to which the book’s royalties were funneled. (The defendants are not accused of stealing her royalties.)

As the emerging scandal rocked the publishing world, I flew to Monroeville and stood in its former county courthouse, now a museum devoted to the town’s two literary sensations, Harper Lee and Truman Capote, who were childhood neighbors and lifelong friends. Upstairs in the museum is the courtroom where Lee’s father, Amasa Coleman “A. C.” Lee, tried his cases, and where Harper, as a child, and the character Scout in her novel, watched adoringly from the balcony. Lee thinly disguised Monroeville in the book as Maycomb, “a tired old town…. There was no hurry, for there was nowhere to go, nothing to buy and no money to buy it with.” She gave her father the name Atticus Finch.

This is a huge lawsuit because To Kill a Mockingbird, 53 years after first publication, still sells some 750,000 copies a year, according to HarperCollins, the publisher. In one typical six-month period alone, ending December 2009, Harper Lee earned $1,688,064.68 in royalties. I read the novel in 9th grade (but never re-read it), and it’s still one of my favorite all-time books.

Read the entire story here.

Atlanta is the Worst Metropolitan City in America for Upward Mobility

readingbyeugene 1 Comment

A troubling new report summarizes the trends for upward mobility in the United States, and is summarized in The New York Times. Atlanta is the largest metropolitan city with the worst upward mobility, both for the black and white population in the city:

The study — based on millions of anonymous earnings records and being released this week by a team of top academic economists — is the first with enough data to compare upward mobility across metropolitan areas. These comparisons provide some of the most powerful evidence so far about the factors that seem to drive people’s chances of rising beyond the station of their birth, including education, family structure and the economic layout of metropolitan areas.

Climbing the income ladder occurs less often in the Southeast and industrial Midwest, the data shows, with the odds notably low in Atlanta, Charlotte, Memphis, Raleigh, Indianapolis, Cincinnati and Columbus. By contrast, some of the highest rates occur in the Northeast, Great Plains and West, including in New York, Boston, Salt Lake City, Pittsburgh, Seattle and large swaths of California and Minnesota.

Income mobility was also higher in areas with more two-parent households, better elementary schools and high schools, and more civic engagement, including membership in religious and community groups.

Regions with larger black populations had lower upward-mobility rates. But the researchers’ analysis suggested that this was not primarily because of their race. Both white and black residents of Atlanta have low upward mobility, for instance.

The authors emphasize that their data allowed them to identify only correlation, not causation. Other economists said that future studies will be important for sorting through the patterns in this new data.

Still, earlier studies have already found that education and family structure have a large effect on the chances that children escape poverty. Other researchers, including the political scientist Robert D. Putnam, author of “Bowling Alone,” have previously argued that social connections play an important role in a community’s success. Income mobility has become one of the hottest topics in economics, as both liberals and conservatives have grown worried about diminished opportunities following more than a decade of disappointing economic growth. After years of focusing more on inequality at a moment in time, economists have more recently turned their attention to people’s paths over their lifetimes.

A child who grows up in a family making $50,000 annually (42nd percentile ) is likely to end up, on average, in the 43rd percentile of income at working age of 30. Click through the article and play with the data set in the middle of the article to see how your city compares.

How Hewlett-Packard Has Revived the Silk Road

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

Few people know this, but I used to live along the historic Silk Road.

This famous 4,000 mile route connected Asia and Europe for many centuries, before fading in importance in the 1400s. Now, the giant corporation Hewlett-Packard has revived the route as a faster, overland alternative to shipping electronics from China to Europe versus doing so by sea. The New York Times goes along for the ride via photos and brief videos in this fantastic photo/video essay:

silk_road2

silk_road1

See the rest here.

Philip Roth on Getting People Wrong

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

This week, I had a deep, liberating, and humbling conversation with someone whose intentions I got completely wrong. The signals, signs, body language: I’ve misread everything.

And so: I am reminded of this quote from Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, on getting people wrong. It’s one of my all-time favorite quotes:

You get them wrong before you meet them: you get them wrong while you’re with them and then you get home to tell somebody else about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception. And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and takes on a significance that is ludicrous, so ill equipped are we all to envision one another’s interior workings and invisible aims? Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact remains that getting people right is not what living is all about anyway. It’s getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong again. That’s how we know we are alive: we’re wrong. Maybe the best thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go along for the ride.

So, thank you, Mr. Roth for this reminder. I am wrong because I am alive. I am alive, and so I’m wrong.