The Internet has destroyed human civilization! America’s greatest writer finally weighs in “When, in the course of human events, mankind is free but everywhere he is in chains, let us pause for a moment to think about the fact that the Internet has destroyed human civilization. And by human civilization, I mean writers; and by writers, I mean ‘writers I know,’ and by writers I know, I mean ‘writers I know who I have slept with,’ and by writers I have slept with, I mean, ‘writers who I want to sleep with.’ I believe it was Henry James (or, as he was known in France, Henri Jacques) who wrote, ‘without the humanities, the Princess Cassimassima would have suffered from an excessively monochromatic pulchitrude.’ Where have all the essays gone? I put down my quill, which I always use when writing criticism of importance, lean back in my chair, and sigh. That’s why I write with a pen. “Roger!” My beleaguered manservant Roger pokes his head into my turret-study. “Sir?” I tear my sheet of writing from my typewriter and hand it to him. “Read this,” I say. He reads it, briefly. “Roger!”
Ultimate Guide to Goal Hacking: 5 Scientifically Proven Methods to Accomplish Anything **This post summarizes months of research on what goal setting methods actually work, and a new project I am starting to help everyone use these techniques in an easy and fun way** Which of your big goals have been on the to-do list forever? So often it’s those goals that matter to us most that seem just out of reach. If we want something really bad AND know the steps required to attain it, why do we still fail to do so? The answer is simple: we haven’t been using the right tools. Behavioral scientists have been trying to figure out our psychological relationship with goals for decades, and they’ve come up with some very actionable conclusions. It’s been proven that you can quadruple your chances of success with the goal hacks listed below (in order of least to most powerful). 1) Write it down The simple act of physically writing down what you want to achieve significantly raises your chances of success. One study contacted thousands of people who needed flu shots. 2) Track it Track your goal.
The supreme weirdness of Miranda July: How her debut novel gives “effortless” new meaning The narrator of Miranda July’s debut novel, “The First Bad Man” is a strange, ostensibly mousy middle-aged woman named Cheryl. Cheryl works at a nonprofit that teaches self-defense to women. She attends “color therapy” for a chronic globus hystericus (lump in the throat). And that’s just the first half. The novel is festooned with many additional weirdnesses, for example, that Cheryl’s primary color therapist is involved in a long-running S&M-type role play with her other color therapist, who pretends to be his receptionist a few days out of the year. The word “effortless” is typically employed as a compliment, but there is something about July’s work that calls for a slightly more pejorative reading of the word. Like other of July’s projects that I have watched or read about, “The First Bad Man” is often goofy to the point of surrealism, and yet refuses to concede its own goofiness: “The penises were getting more abstract and unlikely—I couldn’t rein them in.
8 Ways to Get a Morning Headstart Lose an hour in the morning, and you will be all day hunting for it. - Richard WhatelyTweet Getting up early every day to start the day off right has a huge effect on the rest of our day. Unfortunately we can not always completely trust our morning selves, especially if we are lying in a warm cozy bed and there is no immediate pressure to get up (Or we can delude ourselves with pressing ‘snooze’.) To combat this, a healthy and balanced morning routine works wonders, and especially doing it for 30 days to make it a habit. A morning routine sets the tone for the whole day to come. Just remember, keep it simple but stay disciplined! 1. A good morning routine actually starts the day before. 2. After waking, don’t immediately jump out of bed. 3. Most of us forget that we spent hours in magical worlds while dreaming. 4. Every animal stretches immediately upon waking. A great, quick and easy way to stretch your whole body are the Five Tibetan Rites. 5. 6. 7. 8.
David Cronenberg on The Metamorphosis From the original cover of Kafka’s Die Verwandlung, 1915. I woke up one morning recently to discover that I was a seventy-year-old man. Is this different from what happens to Gregor Samsa in The Metamorphosis? He wakes up to find that he’s become a near-human-sized beetle (probably of the scarab family, if his household’s charwoman is to be believed), and not a particularly robust specimen at that. Is Gregor’s transformation a death sentence or, in some way, a fatal diagnosis? Jeff Goldblum in Cronenberg’s The Fly, 1986. When The Fly was released in 1986, there was much conjecture that the disease that Brundle had brought on himself was a metaphor for AIDS. Langelaan’s story, first published in Playboy magazine in 1957, falls firmly within the genre of science fiction, with all the mechanics and reasonings of its scientist hero carefully, if fancifully, constructed (two used telephone booths are involved). There is none of this in The Metamorphosis.
15 Big Life Insights I Wish I Knew at 18 One of the most popular posts of all time on HE is my 50 Life Secrets and Tips. However when I look back on that post, I see a fairly shallow and conventional list of recommendations. It shows me of how much I’ve grown in the years since it was published. This is the list that comes to mind now. 1) True pleasure and results come from mastery In this internet age, there are many of Jack of all trades: people who know a bit about MANY things, but have not mastered any one thing. The solution: “Take up one idea. 2) The best practices are those you discover for yourself The downside of having so much information available online is that it’s easy to get lost in spiral of trying out other people’s methods while never attempting to create on of your own. Instead, try a method that you think would feel good for you. 3) Reality is highly subjective Even science is subjective. 1) Accept the seemingly absurd views of others as a logical result of them looking through an entirely different lens.
Judith Miller's Comeback | Rolling Stone So I read disgraced former New York Times reporter Judith Miller's new book, The Story. It's awesome! She's really not kidding about a comeback. It might be the weirdest episode in journalism since "Kenneth, What Is the Frequency?" I'd say this will be a no-holds-barred review, but I promised myself I wouldn't compare this book to Mein Kampf for at least 500 words. Miller was renowned as a Times national-security reporter prior to 9/11, achieved stardom as the face of the pro-war propaganda effort prior to the Iraq invasion, and then became a household name all over the world once it was discovered she'd made the most impactful mistake the media business had ever seen. She is most infamous for a piece she co-wrote with Michael Gordon in September of 2002. After this piece was published, Bush administration officials like Dick Cheney and Condi Rice held up this story as evidence confirming what they were saying about Iraq's weapons capability. Gellman's take was published in May, 2003.
10 Reasons You'll Never Look at Sunsets the Same Way Again A thin blue line shoots across the horizon and that is the mark. You know the sun will eventually set underneath that line, but until then, the moment where it crosses that line, you are witness to one of the most beautiful sights in the Universe. Here are a few things these earthly wonders called sunsets have taught me over the years: 1) Everything Adds Beautiful pastel hues of orange and yellow shine bright around the sun, but as you expand your perspective the entire rainbow of colors is there. Soft baby blue and turquoise clouds float calmly through the open sky. A sunset is not a single color, and every new color adds beauty. 2) Change just is A sunset is when change is most evident. Change is neither good or bad – change is. 3) Your Experience is Unique Even if we are identical twins standing next to each other, we will not be looking at the same sunset. Every second you are adding to your own unique universe – make the next second matter. 4) There is Only Now 7) Light and Dark 8) Beauty
'I, the Jury' — Mickey Spillane's Hard-Boiled Debut It was simple. Pearl Harbor was bombed. Brooklyn-born, Jersey-bred Frank Morrison Spillane, aka Mickey, joined the Army Air Corps the day after. It was 1941 and he was 23 years old. Four years later, with the war having slammed shut, Spillane wanted to get married and buy a house. He was skilled in the scribbling department after knocking out stories for comic books in his spare time, so Spillane sat down to write a novel and earn a little down-payment scratch. When the book debuted in hardcover two years later, in 1947, it resonated so thoroughly with the cynicism and seethe of the postwar zeitgeist that all 6.5 million copies jumped off the shelves — in America alone. Doug Grad, a literary agent and former editor at HarperCollins, explains that while people at the time may have acknowledged shell shock, no one yet understood post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. “Don’t worry, I don’t underrate the cops. What he delivers is skin-crawly sex and unbridled violence. Still.
30 Challenges for 30 Days Did you know that it takes 30 days to form a new habit? The first few days are similar as to how you would imagine the birth of a new river. Full of enthusiasm it gushes forth, only to be met by strong obstacles. The path is not clear yet, and your surroundings don’t agree. Old habits urge you to stay the same. But you need to stay determined. So, take a moment to reflect on the question ‘Who do I want to be in 5 years?’ Check out this short TED talk first to get inspired: Now pick one or more challenges and stick with them! However, be cautioned, picking too many challenges at the same time can easily result in a failure of all of them. #1 Write a I-Like-This-About-You note/text/email each day for someone (Easy) This is the perfect way to let someone else know you care. #2 Talk to one stranger each day (Hard) This is a great one to cure approaching anxiety. #3 Take one picture each day (Hard) #4 Re-evaluate one long-held belief each day (Intermediate) Do you love yourself? We recommend:
David Foster Wallace’s importance of being earnest: Irony, Generation X and the sheer joy of language Today, we think of the 1920s as a golden age of American fiction. But to Edmund Wilson, looking back from the vantage point of 1944, the most striking thing about this modern generation, which he did more than any critic to foster, was its failure to reach full development. The best writers of the twenties, he wrote in “Thoughts on Being Bibliographed,” had either “died prematurely . . . leaving a sad sense of work uncompleted,” like F. Scott Fitzgerald, or “disconcertingly abandoned their own standards”—here the unnamed culprit is surely Ernest Hemingway, whom Wilson had helped to discover. To us, these are canonical names, predestined for Library of America cursive. So it is helpfully disconcerting to learn that, to Wilson, they seemed to have been canonized prematurely: “men of still-maturing abilities, on the verge of more important things, have suddenly turned up in the role of old masters with the best of their achievement behind them.” Except for David Foster Wallace.