Fogy

nix 2a

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 00:33:36 +0900

Jean Chatzky with Arielle McGowen

Money 911: Your Most Pressing Money Questions Answered, Your Money Emergencies Solved

Harper 2010

Pamela Mitchell

The 10 Laws of Career Reinvention: Essential Survival Skills for Any Economy

Dutton 2010

nix 1e

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 16:08:42 +0900

Daniel H. Pink

Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us

Riverhead Books 2009

. . . it starts with acknowledging that atheism, like God, is a complex word. No one has explained this better than Sherwin Wine, who saw atheism as divided into a number of intellectual categories:

The are different kinds of atheism. The most popular kind is “ontological” atheism, a firm denial that there is any creator or manager of the universe. There is “ethical” atheism, a firm conviction that, even if there is a creator/manager of the world, he does not run things in accordance with the human moral agenda, rewarding the good and punishing the wicked. There is “existential” atheism, a nervy assertion that even if there is a God, he has no authority to be the boss of my life. There is “agnostic” atheism, a cautious denial that claims that God’s existence can be neither proved nor disproved; this type of atheist ends up with behavior no different from that of the ontological atheist. There is “ignostic” atheism, another cautious denial, which claims that the word “God” is so confusing that it is meaningless; this belief, again, translates into the same behavior as the ontological atheist. There is “pragmatic” atheism, which regards God as irrelevant to ethical and successful living, and which views all discussion about God as a waste of time.

Wine’s point is that most nonreligious people are atheists in one or another of these senses, even if they are pantheists or Reconstructionists or choose to call themselves agnostics or whatever else. But none of these terms has anything to do with what we do believe. We must not shy away from atheism as part of our identity—part we share with Spinoza, Dewey, Dawkins, Oprah, and millions more. But when God can mean anything we want it to, not believing in God is not a very important assertion. What is truly important is to assert, loudly and boldly, that we have a dramatically different way of understanding the world and human values.

Greg M. Epstein

Good Without God: What a Billion Nonreligious People Do Believe

William Morrow 2009

>noise<

Heart, Straight On

Sade, Soldier of Love

Mirko Guida, Storie Di Tutti I Giorni

Gypsy Kings, Queda Te Aqui

Paco Peña, Rumbeando la Milonga

Dusty Springfield, The Windmills of Your Mind

Nina Simone, Tomorrow Is My Turn

nix 1d

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 07:13:20 +0900

. . . if the public is truly less concerned with privacy questions and more interested in trading data for, say, a subsidized service, or is more interested in the trivial, as the late scholar Neil Postman believed, then privacy will be the least of our issues. A former student of Marshall McLuhan’s, Postman taught at NYU for more than four decades and authored a variety of important books, the best-known of which was Amusing Ourselves to Death. In that book he argued that the real threat was not the one described in 1984 but one contained in an earlier book, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.

Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think. . . . Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism.

This much is certain: neither concerns over privacy nor the issues raised by Postman have slowed the ascendance of smart phones.

Ken Auletta

Googled: The End of the World as We Know It

The Penguin Press 2009

Dale Robyn Siegel

The New Rules for Mortgages

Alpha Books 2009

nix 1c

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 02:41:41 +0900

Pamela Redmond Satran

How Not to Act Old: 185 Ways to Pass for Phat, Sick, Hot, Dope, Awesome, or at Least Not Totally Lame

Harper 2009

Mary Buffet and David Clark

Warren Buffett’s Management Secrets: Proven Tools for Personal and Business Success

Scribner 2009

Len Fisher

The Perfect Swarm: The Science of Complexity in Everyday Life

Basic Books 2009

nix 1b

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 15:28:28 +0900

Fairy tales are true in one respect. Before you get to the story’s end, bad things and hard choices are lived through. In a way I’d come to my happily ever after ending, but unlike fairy tales, in real life there’s no ending, happy or otherwise. Your story, like your life, goes on.

Laurell K. Hamilton

Divine Misdemeanors

Ballatine Books 2009

Every day I listened to those who had gambled, won, and then lost. But for me there was only one voice that was consistently right. And that voice lived in a somewhat luxurious cave on Cape Code. Suddenly I realized something: in spirit, I was very much like my father. By inclination I was not a true perma-bear, but I was nonetheless a bear. Or perhaps I was a vulture; that’s a slightly different breed, but much the same, one of God’s creatures that can smell death when it’s in the air.

Lawrence G. McDonald with Patrick Robinson

A Colossal Failure of Common Sense: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Lehman Brothers

Crown Business 2009

daddy’s girl

nix 1a

Sat, 02 Jan 2010 03:19:46 +0900

Literally for Figuratively. “The stream was literally alive with fish.” “His eloquence literally swept the audience from its feet.” It is bad enough to exaggerate, but to affirm the truth of the exaggeration is intolerable.

Nonliteral uses of literally show up in Dryden (1687) and in Pope (1708), who wrote, “Every day with me is literally another yesterday for it is exactly the same.” This intensifying use of literally passed unnoticed by critics; it was the 19^th-century hyperbolic use of the term—especially with nonliteral images, as in Dickens’s “he had literally feasted his eyes”—that drove the 20^th-century mavens mad.

In 1903, the L volume of the OED appeared, with a usage note on literally: “Now often improperly used to indicate that some conventional metaphorical or hyperbolical phrase is to be taken in the strongest admissible sense.” According to MWDEU, the quotation that prompted the note was from actress Fanny Kemble in 1863: “For the last four years . . . I literally coined money.” The hyperbolic usage is not, says MWDEU, “a mistake for figuratively,” a natural extension of the intensive use; it isn’t wrong, but “hyperbole requires a care in handling” if it’s not to sound ludicrous.

Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the OED, made the same point in a 2005 Slate magazine article. A blanket condemnation of literally, he said, would be as extreme as banning the unreal really that Meg uses in Little Women: “It’s been such a dismal day I’m really dying for some amusement.” The point is to avoid silly writing, not to avoid literally.

That’s the consensus of the American Heritage Dictionary, too. In the latest survey, 66 percent of the AHD usage panel accepted the intensive literally (“They had literally no help”); 37 percent allowed literally with a “dead metaphor” (“literally out of his mind”); but only 23 percent approved “literally swallowing the country’s youth.” So lovers of literally need to watch their step, figuratively speaking.

Jane Freeman

Ambrose Bierce’s Wright It Right: The Celebrated Cynic’s Language Peeves Deciphered, Appraised, and Annotated for 21^st-Century Readers

Walker & Company 2009

Dean Koontz

Breathless

Bantam Books 2009

Hope is confidence.

In the Western world the notion of hope has two different connotations. There is hope in the spiritual sense of the term, the belief in the salvation of humanity through the redemption from sin. But there is also the secular meaning of the term. Hope is trust in one’s identity, in one’s ability to interact positively with the world.

Dominique Moïsi
The Geopolitics of Emotion: How Cultures of Fear, Humiliation, and Hope Are Reshaping the World

Doubleday 2009

twenty10

nix 12d

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 03:50:57 +0900

Immigration is Americanization. They are two faces of the same disruptive system of economic relations that is supplanting traditional European ones. In an age of public atonement and rhetorical squeamishness, it has often not been possible to lament or condemn immigration, or the policies that summoned immigrations en masse. But it is possible to say that Europe’s decision to welcome millions of foreigners was made at a time when it was not of sound mind and body, in a political landscape drawn up by Hitler and Stalin, and as the ward of a country—the United States—whose interests coincide less with those of Europe now that the age of Hitler and Stalin has passed.

Enoch Powell (again), who was, not coincidentally, the most doggedly anti-American European politician of his time, warned in 1968, “With the lapse of a generation or so we shall at last have succeeded—to the benefit of nobody—in reproducing ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’ the haunting tragedy of the United States.” In the early 1990s, the Lombard League (later the Northern League) handed out leaflets in Italy reading, “If you like a multiracial society so much, you can move to New York.”

Europe is thus in a funny predicament. It is an increasingly anti-American continent facing dire problems to which the only proven solution is to become more like America. Because the United States shows, at least, that one can receive great masses of immigrants from all over the world and retain a culture that is still open, free, and Western. American society appears to many Europeans, whether they like the United States or not, as their continent’s consolation prize. It the kind of society Europe will have by default, if it musters the resolve (or makes the Faustian bargain) to keep its economy as free as the age’s straitened financial circumstances permit.

Of course, “America” as it exists in the European mind is, now as ever, two-third myth. Europeans believe America equals European culture plus entropy. Perhaps the most cherished European myth about the United States is that Americans make no particular claims for their culture (to the extent they even have one) and don’t particularly care whether newcomer hold on to theirs. This is quite wrong. America may be open in theory, but in practice it exerts Procrustean pressures on its immigrants to conform, and it is its pressures, not its openness, that have bound America’s diverse citizens together as one people. Yes, you can have a “hyphenated identity” if you insist on it—but you had better know which side of the hyphen your bread is buttered on.

Christopher Caldwell

Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West

Doubleday 2009

David Wessel

In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic

Crown Business 2009

I know how I survived. I do not know why.

That night and the next day, I do not cry. They say I am brave, but I am not. I am instead the recipient of a great mercy, because upon me was conferred a power of endurance, emotional and mental, that is far beyond my six years. It will remain with me until my name is changed, and will for the rest of my life seem unearned.

Dean Koontz

Relentless

Bantam Books 2009

pasiphaë 2009

survived thrived

nix 12c

Mon, 21 Dec 2009 04:01:05 +0900

Shooting the messenger is one of humanity’s sillier foibles, and it underlies a good slice of the opposition to evolution that I mentioned in the Introduction. ‘Teach children that they are animals, and they’ll behave like animals.’ Even if it were true that evolution, or the teaching of evolution, encouraged immortality, that would not imply that the theory of evolution was false. It is quite astonishing how many people cannot grasp this simple point of logic. The fallacy is so common it even has a name, the argumentum ad consequentiam — X is true (or false) because of how much I like (or dislike) its consequences.

Richard Dawkins

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution

Free Press 2009

Many investors rationally know they should turn a hard shoulder to near-term volatility and be tough—but emotions take over. They make active decisions to avoid near-term pain at the expense of longer-term returns. In behavioral finance, this is called myopic loss aversion—and it can cause costly errors. Passive isn’t easy—it’s hard. Few can stomach it.

Ken Fisher with Lara Hoffmans

How to Smell a Rat: The Five Signs of Financial Fraud

John Wiley & Sons 2009

. . . this is the tough part—undoing a couple of millennia of Western intellectual habits, notions that went all the way back to Aristotle’s idea that you could understand something only if you could break it apart and examine all the pieces.

Joshua Cooper Ramo

The Age of Unthinkable: Why the New World Disorder Constantly Surprises Us and What We Can Do About It

Little, Brown and Company 2009

nix 12b

Sun, 27 Dec 2009 03:40:24 +0900

Figure 1.1: A Girl becomes aware of herself as a girl. She is approximately five years old (maybe six, at the oldest seven). Note the mother instructing this girl that she must now wear a T-shirt while playing in the summertime with the boys on the block. Note the girl’s n*ked torso, her downward gaze onto an expanse of bare flesh punctuated by two flat n*pples. Outside the sun bears down, its heat insistent, but the afternoon breeze a familiar pleasure on this skin. Radiating lines from the girl’s face indicate a new source of heat: the first inkling of shame. But also—beneath, within, around that shame—something more complex, a deeper pleasure, the first inkling of power.

Line Graph 8: The girl becomes (officially) a woman, and on this graph one can plot how her lovers accumulate. Line 1 spikes upward (number of lovers) but, surprisingly, line 2 (the sense of herself as a lovable creature) declines in parallel proportions. Line 3 (the loneliness factor) remains nearly constant. Experts call this phenomenon “Aphrodite’s Paradox.” Attempts to reverse this trend have thus far failed, but experiments are ongoing.

“Table of Figures” by Brenda Miller

The Best Creative Nonfiction Vol. 3 edited by Lee Gutkind

W. W. Norton & Company 2009

Ryu Murakami

Translated by Ralph F. McCarthy [1993]

Kodansha International 2005

Peter Firestein

Crisis of Character: Building Corporate Reputation in the Age of Skepticism

Union Square Press 2009

Though I knew I wasn’t a deep theological thinker, I sometimes wondered if crisis moments in my life hadn’t come down to two choices: be a bad Christian or die.

I’d chosen life every time.

Was I looking at this right? Was there another point of view that would enlighten me? I couldn’t think of anyone to ask. I tried to imagine the Methodist minister’s face if I asked him, “Would it be better to stab someone to keep yourself safe, or let them go on and kill you? Would it be better to break a vow I made in front of God, or refuse to break my friend’s hand to bits?” These were choices I had faced. Maybe I owed God a big debt. Or maybe I was protecting myself like he wanted me to. I just didn’t know, and I couldn’t think deep enough to figure out the Ultimate Right Answer.

Would the people I was serving laugh, if they knew what I was thinking? Would my anxiety over the state of my soul amuse them? Lots of them would probably tell me that all situations are covered in the Bible, and that if I read the Book more, I’d find my answers there.

That hadn’t worked for me so far, but I wasn’t giving up. I abandoned my circular thoughts and listened in on the people around me to give my brain a rest.

Charlaine Harris

Dead and Gone

Ace Books 2009

41 43

47 149 241

347 349 401 409 419

421 431 433 439 443 449 457

461 463 467 479 487 491 499 541 547 641 643

Douglass Preston with Mario Spezi

The Monster of Florence

Grand Central Publishing 2008

nix 12a

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 12:19:24 +0900

DREAM SONG 14
by John Berryman

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) “Ever so confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.” I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as Achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

nits-and-gnats of mediocrity

Lee Eisenberg
Shoptimism: Why the American Consumer Will Keep On Buying No Matter What
Free Press 2009

Dear F,
. . . You made me much stronger and wiser person than I used to be. You were tough but with a very soft heart. You always did back me up and supported me in different situations. I am very grateful to have had the chance to work with you.

If “Ought” were a person, Ought would not be a bartender or a good-hearted prostitute. Ought is not the kind of word you would want to hang out with on a Saturday night, or relax with at home for it would always be reminding you to take out the trash or fix the garage door.

If it were a Latin noun, Ought would be feminine, but more like a shrewish wife than a willing mistress. For Ought is judgmental—a nag, a scold. Even the sound of it is sharp; it comes up from the throat like a dagger and heads right for soft tissue, remembering the location of weak spots and raw nerves for many years.

Ought is neither a good-time girl nor a boom-time companion, but more like the I-told-you-so who hands you aspirin on Sunday morning, tells you what a fool you were, and warns you what will happen if you keep it up. “You get what you deserve,” she reminds you.

A man who lets himself be bossed around by Ought is no man at all, in our opinion. He is a dullard, a wimp, and a wuss—a logical, rational, reasonable lump. Thankfully, most men, most of the time, will not readily submit. Instead, they do not do what they ought to do, but what they want to do. Stirred up by mob sentiments or private desires, they make fools of themselves regularly. They cannot help themselves.

Of course, Ms. Ought is right; they get what they deserve. But sometimes it is worth it.

Modern economists no longer believe in Ought. They do not appreciate her moral tone and try to ignore her. To them, the economy is a giant machine with no soul, no heart . . . no right and no wrong. It is just a matter of finding the accelerator.

William Bonner and Addison Wiggins
Financial Reckoning Day Fallout: Surviving Today’s Global Depression
John Wiley & Sons 2009