Ben Casnocha: The Blog

Book Review and Essay: Create Your Own Economy and Internet Info Culture

I have ~4,000 word essay up at the American Enterprise Institute reviewing Tyler Cowen's new book Create Your Own Economy and presenting my perspective on the ongoing debates around internet information culture, whether we are more distracted, whether bits from blogs cohere into knowledge, the importance of un-focus to creativity, and related issues. It is also the most detailed explanation yet of how I think about my information diet at a high level.

Do read the whole thing.

On the intellectual and emotional stimulation we experience by assembling a custom stream of bits:

Cowen refers to this process as the “daily self-assembly of synthetic experiences.” My inputs appear a chaotic jumble of scattered information but to me they touch all my interest points. When I consume them as a blend, I see all-important connections between the different intellectual narratives I follow -- a business idea (entrepreneurship) in the airplane space (travel), for example. Because building the blend is a social exercise real communities and friendships form around certain topics my social life and intellectual life intersect more intensely than before. And I engage in ongoing self-discovery by reflecting upon my interests, finding new bits to add to my stream, and thinking about how it all fits together.

Cowen maintains that these benefits enhance your internal mental existence; how you order information in your head and how you use this information to conceive of your identity and life aspirations affects your internal well-being. Because a personal blend reflects a diverse set of media (think hyper-specific niche news outlets in lieu of a nightly news broadcast that everyone watches on one of three networks), and because each person constructs their own stories to link their inputs together, the benefits are unique to the individual. They are also invisible. It is impossible to see what stories someone is crafting internally to make sense of their stream; it is impossible to appreciate the personal coherence of it.

On self-education in the era of the web:

Within my online information diet, it is exhilarating to follow narratives, read the latest controversy (seasteading, anyone?), add my own two cents to the debate, and stitch together all that I have learned. Self-education has gone from being like a loner sitting in a bar sparsely populated with hazily attractive women to being in the center of a packed, rocking night club where the women are wearing mini-skirts and the guys’ shirts open up several buttons down. As Cowen puts it, “The emotional power of our blends is potent, and they make work, and learning, a lot more fun.” When a topic gets filtered through a two-way, fast-moving, personal bit stream, it commands my attention in a way the static, one-way, black-and-white version of the topic never could.

On whether we're turning our brains into mush by our online info consumption habits:

The draconian bottom line for these people is as follows. The human brain is a famously plastic organ: how we use it shapes what it can do and what it becomes. If we spend all our mental cycles getting quick hits from blogs and our BlackBerries, our brains will optimize around this deployment of attention. Reading complicated books will become a hell of a chore and enduring long stretches of reflective solitude will become nearly unbearable. The bastions of intellectual culture are preparing to weep.

In praise of un-focus:

The glorification of “focus” is the second problem with the criticisms of bit-consumption and technology use in general. While some amount of focus is necessary, it is not the case that sitting alone in a quiet white walled room with no beeps or buzzes is the ultimate day-to-day environment for deep, creative thinking. Sam Anderson in New York Magazine summarized research that says un-focus is actually an important part of creativity—random meanderings and conversations can trigger important creative insights. Excessive conscious attention on one particular point can come at the cost of the free-associative brainstorms that just might lead to the next big thing. A University of Amsterdam study showed participants who were distracted from making a decision, and forced to consciously focus on something else, devoted valuable unconscious thought to the issue and ultimately made a better decision when they returned to the task.

To my knowledge this is the first published review of Cowen's book. A few additional footnotes:

1. It is more about autism than my review would suggest. The book opens and closes with exploring the autistic cognitive style, and it comes up in almost every chapter in-between.

2. The autistic cognitive style description personally resonated with me. I collect and organize information to an intense degree. I have tagged and labeled almost 6,000 web pages. A lifelong goal has been to take a bar code scanner and scan all the books my family owns and put them into a database. And I synthesize diverse bits of information faster than most.

3. I make a claim that is more negative than Cowen: that many people have not and will not read the great books, and for many people on many topics it's the bits or nothing. We both arrive in praise of bits but I get there in part via a more cynical path. I'm not sure if Cowen agrees with me here but I do think it's this truth which makes his positive vision work.

(Thanks to Kevin Arnovitz, Arnold Kling, Jesse Berrett, Cal Newport, David Casnocha, and Stan James for offering feedback on this piece, and my editor Nick Schulz.)

What I've Been Reading

Recent reading:

1. The Gift of Fear: And Other Survival Strategies that Protect Us From Violence by Gavin de Becker.

De Becker is a legend in the field of security and violence prevention. Hollywood stars hire him to assess threats. Companies hire him to train employees on when to trust your gut if and when you feel danger. The title of the book refers to de Becker's claim that "true gift is a fear, unwarranted fear is a curse." What matters is being able to tell the difference.

This is a book written for women; most of the examples have to do with male predators looking to rob, rape, or otherwise take advantage of a woman who didn't listen to her "uh-oh" alarm. The lessons, though, are universal and I found this a valuable resource.

Methods criminals use to take advantage of victims:

• Forced Teaming: They use the word "we" and create a "we're in the same boat" mentality.
  
• Charm and Niceness: The smile is the typical disguise used to mask emotions. Unsolicited niceness.
• Too Many Details: When people lie they imbue their stories with too many details; lots of specificity where truth sayers would not include any.
• Typecasting: A slight neg: "You're probably too snobbish to talk to the likes of me." Something that's easily rebutted -- but the predator is just looking for a response.
• The Unsolicited Promise: "I'll just put this stuff down and go. I promise." Unsolicited promises are almost always of questionable motive.

Read into dark humor. Dark humor contains a truth that we often don't want to talk about or feel embarrassed about.

A caller who wants to discharge anger over the telephone by using violent imagery ("You'll all be blown to bits") or who is agitated and aggressive, is not behaving like a real bomber.

If someone tries to extort you, say "I don't understand what you're getting at" until the extortionist states his demands very clearly. When they have to be explicit they sometimes abandon the bad idea altogether. If someone says, "You'll be sorry" or "Don't mess with me" respond, "What do you mean by that?"

2. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America by Daniel Boorstin

Some good stuff on the phenomenon of celebrity -- "being known for your well-knownness" -- but overall I didn't find much here that engaged me. My favorite paragraph:

The tourist seldom likes the authentic (to him often unintelligible) product of the foreign culture; he prefers his own provincial expectations. The French chanteuse singing English with a French accent seems more charmingly French than one who simply sings in French. The American tourist in Japan looks less for what is Japanese than for what is Japanesey.

A funny dialogue:

Admiring friend: "My, that's a beautiful baby you have there!"

Mother: "Oh, that's nothing -- you should see his photograph!"

4. The Book of Other People by Zadie Smith

Collection of fictional character portraits by various contributing writers. Only so-so, but I enjoyed this paragraph from one of the sketches:

This is reminiscent of all the dutiful grandchildren and great-grandchildren lingering over deathbeds with digital recorders, or else manically pursuing their ancestors through the online genealogy sites at three in the morning, so very eager to reconstitute the lives and thoughts of dead and soon-to-be-dead men, though they may regularly screen the phone calls of their own mothers. I am of that generation. I will do anything for my family except see them.

And my favorite sentence:

Sleep came like the lightest rain. He felt it on his skin, something like a mist, numbing his legs, his arms.

Here's my review of Smith's On Beauty, which I loved.

5. Conversation: A History of a Declining Art by Stephen Miller. Very disappointing. A hodge podge of historical examples which cohere into nothing. My favorite sentences:

Why are mindlessly good-natured persons popular? Because they pose no threat to anyone's self-esteem. Many people are envious of those whose conversation is superior to their own.

6. A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future by Daniel Pink

I'm a big Dan Pink fan. This is his older book which hails the right brain in the "conceptual age." I'm sympathetic to his argument and found much value in the various resources and tips he scatters throughout the book. I recommend it particularly to highly analytical people.

"Before giving birth to anything physical, ask yourself if you have created an original idea, an original concept, if there is any real value in what you disseminate." - Karim Rashid

Never say “I could have done that” because you didn’t. - Karim Rashid

As Alan Kay, a Hewlett-Packard executive and co-founder of Xerox PARC, puts it: “Scratch the surface in a typical boardroom and we’re all just cavemen with briefcases, hungry for a wise person to tell us stories.” Storytelling. Storytelling. Storytelling.

“A large part of self-understanding is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense of our lives.” - George Lakoff

The “Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup Theory of Innovation”: sometimes the most powerful ideas come from simply combining two existing ideas nobody else ever thought to unite.

“Many writers are notorious eavesdroppers,” Epel writes, citing, among others, F. Scott Fitzgerald, who kept a notebook in which he recorded “overheard conversations.”

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Here are all my posts on books. Here are my all-time favorite books in an Amazon store.

Book Notes: Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters

The book Why Beautiful People Have More Daughters by Alan Miller and Satoshi Kanazawa is a nice introductory guide to evolutionary psychology, very much in the spirit of Robert Wright's The Moral Animal.

Evolutionary psychology sees "human nature...as the sum of evolved psychological mechanisms." It is a useful tool for explaining why we do what we do. Romantics might find depressing the cold-bloodedness of it all -- it's not about you it's about what your genes want to spread far and wide. Romantic or not, it's an important field to understand, even casually, and since Wright and now Miller/Kanazawa make it so accessible, there's no excuse not to.

Below are my favorite excerpts from the book, copied from my Kindle and thus all direct quotes. In my notes you'll find their answers to questions like:

• Why the liberation of homosexuals may contribute to the end of homosexuality
• Why men find large breasts of women attractive
• Why parents kill their own children
• Why men steal more than women
• Why older siblings tend to do what their parents do
• Why women are more religious than men

GENERAL / BACKGROUND

The naturalistic fallacy is the leap from is to ought—that is, the tendency to believe that what is natural is good; that what is, ought to be. The moralistic fallacy would be, “Because everybody ought to be treated equally, there are no innate genetic differences between people.”

You may believe that your personal preferences for an ideal mate are truly personal and individual, not shared by other people. The basic message of evolutionary psychology is that, contrary to what you may have thought, your preferences and desires for your ideal mate are strongly shaped by the forces of evolution. Ultimately, it’s not what you want that matters; it’s what your genes want in order to assist their goal of spreading themselves as much and as far as possible.

There are only two legitimate criteria by which you may evaluate scientific ideas and theories: logic and evidence.

Stereotypes are observations about the empirical world, not behavioral prescriptions. One may not infer how to treat people from empirical observations about them. Stereo-types tell us what groups of people tend to be or do in general; they do not tell us how we ought to treat them. Once again, there is no place for “ought” in science.

Our preference for sweets and fats is an example of an evolved psychological mechanism. Throughout most of human evolutionary history, getting enough calories was a serious problem; malnutrition and starvation were common. In this environment, those who, for reasons of random genetic mutation, had a “taste” for sweets and fats, which contain higher calories, were better off physically than those who did not have such a taste. Those who had a sweet tooth therefore lived longer, led healthier lives, and produced more healthy offspring than those who did not. They in turn passed on their (genetically influenced) taste to their offspring, over many thousands of generations.

The Savanna Principle states that the human brain has difficulty comprehending and dealing with entities and situations that did not exist in the ancestral environment. The Savanna Principle suggests that we continue to have (currently maladaptive) preferences for sweets and fats, and as a result become obese, because our brain cannot readily comprehend the supermarkets, the abundance of food in general, and indeed agriculture, none of which existed in the ancestral environment.

MALE VS. FEMALE SEXUAL JEALOUSY AND CUCKOLDRY

Men can never be certain that they are the father of their mates’ offspring, while females are always certain of their maternity. In other words, the possibility of unwittingly raising children who are not genetically their own exists only for men.

According to one estimate, about 13–20 percent of children in the contemporary United States and 9–17 percent in contemporary Germany are not the genetic offspring of the man whose name appears on the child’s birth certificate.

For this reason, men have a strong evolutionary reason to be sexually jealous, while women, whose maternity is always certain, do not.

Men become jealous of their mates’ sexual infidelity with other men, underlying their reproductive concern for cuckoldry. In contrast, women become jealous of their mates’ emotional involvement with other women, because emotional involvement often leads to diversion of their mates’ resources from them and their children to their romantic rivals.

Male sexual jealousy is another evolved psychological mechanism that hasn’t quite caught up to modern times. It solved the adaptive problem of reproduction in the ancestral environment by allowing men who possessed it to maximize paternity certainty and minimize the possibility of cuckoldry. Sexual jealousy was therefore adaptive in the ancestral environment. However, sex and reproduction are often separated in the modern environment; many episodes of sex do not lead to reproduction. There is an abundance of reliable methods of birth control in industrial societies, and many women use the contraceptive pill. For these women, sexual infidelity does not lead to childbirth, and their mates will not have to waste their resources on someone else’s children.

WOMEN'S ATTRACTIVENESS

One accurate indicator of health is physical attractiveness, and this is the reason why men like beautiful women. Another good indicator of health is hair. Healthy people (men and women) have lustrous, shiny hair, whereas the hair of sickly people loses its luster. During illness, a body needs to sequester all available nutrients (like iron and protein) to fight the illness. Since hair is not essential to survival (compared to, say, bone marrow), hair is the first place to which a body turns to collect the necessary nutrients. Thus, a person’s poor health first shows up in the condition of the hair.

Marlowe makes the simple observation that larger, and hence heavier, breasts sag more conspicuously with age than do smaller breasts. Thus, it is much easier for men to judge a woman’s age (and her reproductive value) by sight if she has larger breasts than if she has smaller breasts, which do not change as much with age.

It turns out that men prefer blonde hair for exactly the same reason that they prefer large breasts: both are accurate indicators of a woman’s age and thus reproductive value.

Men in cold climates did not have this option, because women (and men) bundled up in such environments. This is probably why blonde hair evolved in cold climates as an alternative means for women to advertise their youth.

Many people, both men and women, express dislike for extremely dark brown eyes.

To claim that girls and women want to look like blonde bombshells because of the billboards, movies, TV shows, music videos, and magazine advertisements makes as little sense as to claim that people become hungry because they are bombarded with images of food in the media. If only the media would stop inundating people with images of food, they would never be hungry! Women’s desire to be blonde preceded the media by centuries, if not millennia.

Men in general prefer women with long hair. (Signals health.)

MALE SEXUAL INTERESTS

Male high school teachers and college professors in the United States (but not their female colleagues) have a higher-than-expected rate of divorce and a lower-than-expected rate of remarriage, probably because they are constantly exposed to girls and women at the peak of their reproductive value.

Given their greater desire for sexual variety, it is understandable why men would consume more pornography and seek out sexual encounters with numerous women in pornographic photographs and videos,

Empirical data do demonstrate that handsome men have more extramarital affairs and are not as committed to their marriages, which many wives may consider undesirable. In this sense, handsome men make better lovers than husbands.

Of course, diamonds and flowers are beautiful, but they are beautiful precisely because they are expensive and lack intrinsic value, which is why it is mostly women who think flowers and diamonds are beautiful. Their beauty lies in their inherent uselessness; this is why Volvos and potatoes are not beautiful.

From this perspective, men strive to attain political power (as Bill Clinton did all his life, since his fateful encounter with John F. Kennedy at the White House in 1963), consciously or unconsciously, in order to have reproductive access to a larger number of women. In other words, reproductive access to women is the goal, political office is but one means. To ask why the President of the United States would have a sexual encounter with a young woman is like asking why someone who worked very hard to earn a large sum of money would then spend it. The purpose of earning money is to spend it. The purpose of becoming the President (or anything else men do) is to have a larger number of women with whom to mate.

PARENTAL RELATIONS AND KIDS

Developmental psychologists have known for nearly two decades that girls whose parents divorce early in their lives, particularly before the age of five, experience puberty earlier than their counterparts whose parents stay married.

Why would parents kill their own children? Daly and Wilson have two answers to this question. The first answer is that they don’t. Daly and Wilson discovered that what often passes as parents killing their children in police statistics is actually step fathers killing their stepchildren, who do not carry their genes. Biological parents very seldom kill their genetic children.

Parents' evolved psychological mechanisms therefore compel them to invest most efficiently, which usually means that they invest more in children who have the greatest prospect for reproductive success, at the cost of other children whose reproductive prospect is gloomier.

Women only steal what they need for them and their children to survive, whereas men steal to show off and gain status as well as resources. In other words, women steal less than men for exactly the same reason as they earn less than men.

In the United States, the strongest predictor of remarriage after divorce is sex (male vs. female): men typically remarry, women typically do not.

Couples who have at least one son face a significantly lower risk of divorce than couples who have only daughters. Why is this?

The hypothesis states that wealthy parents of high status have more sons, while poor parents of low status have more daughters.

Parents are far more likely to neglect, abuse, and kill their biological children who are deformed, handicapped, ill, or even physically unattractive and to shift their parental investment of their limited resources toward those children with more promising reproductive prospects. As uncomfortable as we may be with such a conclusion, the truth appears to be that parents do favor some of their children over others, even among their own genetic children, to say nothing about stepchildren to whom they are not genetically related, and they overwhelmingly favor those who are intelligent, beautiful, healthy, and sociable.

OTHER GENDER STUFF

Men who are less inclined toward crime and violence may express their competitiveness through their creative activities in order to attract mates.

careful statistical analyses show that the wife’s age almost entirely determines the likelihood of being a victim of spousal abuse and homicide.

Ask a group of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances (both men and women) to name five of their closest associates. Who are the people they talk to when they have something important to discuss? Chances are that women in your circles mention more family members among their closest associates, whereas men mention more coworkers and business associates in their personal networks.

The relationship between age and productivity among male jazz musicians, male painters, male writers, and male scientists, which might be called the “age-genius curve,” is essentially the same as the age-crime curve. Their productivity—the expressions of their genius—quickly peaks in early adulthood, and then just as quickly declines throughout adulthood. The age-genius curve among their female counterparts is much less pronounced and flatter; it does not peak or vary as much as a function of age.

chances are that many of your female friends would mention traveling as one of their hobbies, while very few of your young unmarried male friends would.

Empathizing is about spontaneously and naturally tuning in to the other person’s thoughts and feelings. A natural empathizer not only notices others’ feelings but also continually thinks about what the other person might be feeling, thinking, or intending.

The tendency to favor “ingroup” members at the cost of “outgroup” members is innate (although we can overcome it through socialization and conscious effort)

RELIGION

With only a couple of minor exceptions, women in all nations and regions are more religious than men.

Many recent evolutionary psychological theories on the origins of religious beliefs share the view that religion is not an adaptation in itself but a byproduct of other adaptations. In other words, these theories contend that religion itself did not evolve to solve an adaptive problem so that religious people can live longer and reproduce more successfully, but instead emerged as a byproduct of adaptations that evolved to solve unrelated adaptive problems.

Different theorists call this innate human tendency to commit false-positive errors rather than false-negative errors (and as a consequence be a bit paranoid) “animistic bias” or “the agency-detector mechanism.” These theorists argue that the evolutionary origins of religious beliefs in supernatural forces come from such an innate bias to commit false-positive errors rather than false-negative errors. The human brain, according to them, is biased to perceive intentional forces behind a wide range of natural physical phenomena, because the costs of committing false-negative errors are much greater than the costs of committing false-positive errors. It predisposes us to see the hand of God at work behind natural, physical phenomena whose exact causes are unknown.

It is an error-management strategy to minimize the total costs of errors by predisposing the human brain to commit more false-positive errors than false-negative errors when the former has less costly consequences than the latter.

If men are more risk-seeking than women, and if religion is an evolutionary means to minimize risk, then it naturally follows that women are more religious than men.

Not only are women more risk-averse and more religious than men, but more risk-averse men are more religious than more risk-seeking men, and more risk-averse women are more religious than more risk-seeking women.

What distinguishes Islam from other major world religions (Christianity and Judaism) is that it tolerates polygyny.

So polygyny increases competitive pressure on men, especially young men of low status, who are most likely to be left without reproductive opportunities when older men of high status marry polygynously.

Humans are instead born racist and ethnocentric, and learn through socialization and education not to act on such innate tendencies. Humans are innately ethnocentric because ethnocentrism—helping others of one’s group members at the cost of all others—was adaptive in the ancestral environment.

The Days Are Long, But The Years Are Short

My friend Gretchen Rubin, who created a very touching three minute video titled The Days Are Long, But the Years Are Short about riding the bus with her daughter (all parents should watch it), returns to this phrase in a recent post about the author Laura Ingalls Wilder.

She says happiness is listening to the Laura Ingalls Wilder books on audio CD with her four year old daughter. Here's the last page of Little House in the Big Woods, emphasis my own:

When the fiddle had stopped singing Laura called out softly, “What are days of auld lang syne, Pa?”

“They are the days of a long time ago, Laura,” Pa said. “Go to sleep, now.”

But Laura lay awake a little while, listening to Pa’s fiddle softly playing and to the lonely sound of the wind in the Big Woods. She looked at Pa sitting on the bench by the hearth, the firelight gleaming on his brown hair and beard and glistening on the honey-brown fiddle. She looked at Ma, gently rocking and knitting.

She thought to herself, “This is now.”

She was glad that the cosy house, and Pa and Ma and the firelight and the music, were now. They could not be forgotten, she thought, because now is now. It can never be a long time ago.

My Mom read all the Little House books to me growing up. My favorite is Farmer Boy which I've read several times.

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Here's Gretchen on why you should keep a one-sentence daily journal.

Book Notes: Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writer's Guide

Sometimes it's helpful to look to other fields and disciplines for insights you can apply to your own. Frans Johansson wrote a whole book called The Medici Effect on how to combine ideas from different fields.

I think businesspeople, for example, should study journalism to gain insights on how to conduct interviews (market research) and how to tell stories and create narratives (all marketing is storytelling).

I recently read the book Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writer's Guide. It is the assorted wisdom from many long form non-fiction writers. Below are my notes.

In my notes you'll find out the best question to ask when interviewing someone (it's the same question you should ask after a long lunch with a mentor), why Malcolm Gladwell writes 10,000 word profiles after spending only a few hours with the person, why to embrace your writerly quirkiness at the outset, and Robert Frost's golden rule of writing.

All are direct quotes from various writers.

Profile Writing

After I have edited a profile, it must pass a test before I consider it finished. I ask the writer to give the piece to a reader who knows nothing about the subject. That new reader must be able to answer two questions, each in one sentence. First: How would you characterize this person? Second: At the end of the piece, do you know whether or not you like the person?

Often, I can get what I need in the first few hours I spend with the subject. Anything more than that is unnecessary and could even be harmful. I write ten-thousand-word profiles of people with whom I’ve spent only a few hours. - Malcolm Gladwell

Psychologists talk a lot about the difference between samples and signatures. For example, you would need only about five seconds of a Beatles’ song to identify it. Their music has a signature. With a very small slice you can know something profound about it.

I write profiles about ideas because I’m deeply skeptical of the legitimacy of writing only about the person. Profiles need to be more sociological and much less psychological. Many profiles that are written about individuals ought to be about subcultures. The individual is a means to examine another world—the world in which that person lives. When we limit ourselves to the individual’s personality, we miss the opportunity to consider larger questions about society and subcultures. - Malcolm Gladwell

Reporting

The best question a reporter can ask a source: "At the end of the interview always ask, ‘Who else should I see?'"

While reporting, you must lose control so you can accumulate the facts. While writing, you must exert maniacal control over those facts. You begin by being laid-back and hanging out. Take the great inhale so that when you exhale, you will have among your notebooks that detail that conveys so much, so economically. Weave that detail into the warp and weft of your hard facts.

"Curiosity is a muscle. The more you use it, the more it can do."

Observation, the art of watching, is one of the most underrated elements of reporting, especially in newspaper journalism. The natural impulse is to ask questions. Sometimes that is wrong. It makes the reporter the focus of attention. Be humble. It honors the person you’re trying to observe.

Non-Fiction Writing in General

Start with your quirks—the idiosyncrasies, stubborn tics, and antisocial mannerisms that set you apart from others. To establish credibility, resist coming across as absolutely average. Who wants to read about the regular Joe? Many beginning essayists try so hard to be likable and nice, to fit in, that the reader—craving stronger stuff, a tone of authority—gets bored.

"A hen would fall asleep in her hand as she drew the hatchet back to chop its neck." - Great description

The book’s language had to suit the occasion. You don’t “hype up” in the wake of tragedy. You underwrite, letting the events speak for themselves. You treat everyone with respect.

Read good detective fiction. I don’t think anybody does narrative structure better than good detective writers.

I wanted to spend more time with people who were not necessarily newsworthy. I believed then—and I believe now even more—that the role of the nonfiction writer should be with private people whose lives represent a larger significance.

This is the type of nonfiction that I indulge in, hanging around people. You don’t necessarily interview them, but you become part of the atmosphere.

Using Quotes

That’s my first rule about including a subject’s exact words: Do it sparingly. Using fewer quotes makes me a more disciplined and thoughtful writer. It forces me to think harder about my job and take better control of the story.

The best quotes, of course, aren’t stand-alone quotes at all, but dialogue. I try to include dialogue even in stories about the city council. Dialogue is easier for people to read than straight narrative, because that’s how we listen to the world and how we communicate. Dialogue opens up a bit of space on the page, gives the story some breathing room.

Voice

The way you tell a story over dinner is true to who you are, whether that is deeply analytical or extremely witty. At such moments you aren’t self-conscious, and you aren’t thinking about your editor. You can’t invent a voice. And you can’t imitate someone else’s voice, though trying to can be a good exercise.

Voice is—as the word itself tells us—the way a writer talks. You are speaking to your readers.

Inspiration

Joseph Conrad, a prolific writer, said there are only two difficult things about writing: starting and not stopping.

Robert Frost said it best: “The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.”

Good writers are most often plain ol’ writers who go the extra mile and then a few more.

What I've Been Reading

1. State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America by Matt Weiland and Sean Wilsey (editors). This is a collection of original essays: one about each state in the United States, each written by a different heavyweight writer. William Vollman, Benjamin Kunkel, Jonathan Franzen, Joshua Ferris, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sarah Vowell, Dave Eggers, Rick Moody, Ha Jin, George Packer, to name just a handful of the boldfaces.

Overall I was disappointed. Taken together I feel I possess no greater panoramic understanding of America other than the well-hammered-in-by-now idea that this is a very diverse country. Individually, only a few of the essays struck a cord. The best essay is Lydia Millet's on Arizona. She explains her abrupt decision to move from New York City to Arizona cactus land. The last two paragraphs are lovely:

At night, the Milky Way streaks overhead; I can stand in the yard and gaze up at its soft infinitude as a mild breeze moves the branches of the palo verdes and bats flit through the warm air.

I know my presence here is no boon to the place. It would do far better without all of us -- without me, self-conscious and trying to walk softly, without my harder-living compatriots; without the ugly hubbub of all of us bringing our litter and noise and concrete to paradise. But I can't help myself. This, to me, is the closest I've ever come to the eternal and the sublime; this valley tells me that when it's time for me to die I don't need to be afraid. I can die happy, because the world is stunning and the sky will go on forever.

2. Oh, The Things I Know by Al Franken. This is a funny, light book of wisdom delivered by mocking the usual wisdom offered at commencement speeches among other places. Good as an audiobook on a long drive when you want something humorous and light -- this was what I was looking for when I listened to it.

3. Emergency by Neil Strauss. A survival guide in the event of nuclear attack, the demise of America as a country, or apocalypse in general. Except instead of just specific, tactical emergency preparedness advice we get a not-very-engaging narrative covering the author's attempt to become a citizen of another country. Special excerpts like how to survive a dog attack or break free from handcuffs reinforce the book's cheesy appeal to the Special Forces-wannabe inside every male under 35.

4. Transformations: Identity Construction in Contemporary Culture by Grant McCracken. This is an academic treatment of the idea of "re-invention" -- when a person seeks to transform his identity in some way. While certain tidbits grabbed me, overall I found it impenetrable.

Few favorite lines:

"The swift self is driven by two things: a brute curiosity that asks, "What is possible?" and a brute urge that asks, "Can I do it?"

"The signature of the Protestant self: the production of understatement where overstatement would have been forgiven."

Lionel Trilling called "sincerity" the "note-perfect performances of the social self and the careful observation of its roles, responsibilities, and obligations in the theater of social life."

Book Notes: Due Considerations by John Updike

John Updike's 2007 anthology of essays and criticism Due Considerations brings together the late writer's short-form contributions over the last 5-10 years. It's a masterful collection that shows off his breathtaking range.

I include the best quotes below (separated by line breaks) and the rest of the best below the fold. I recommend reading each for wisdom-content and/or gorgeousness of prose. Some of the sentences deserve to be savored. Can you beat the vividness of his late-night jazz club image below? Anything not in quotes is Updike; anything in quotes is the person cited.

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His writing does what writing should do: it refreshes our sense of the world.

The novel, traditionally a mirror held up to the Western bourgeoisie, to teach them how to shave, dress, and behave, has focused on adult moral choices and their consequences. Newer novelists...see childhood as the place where one invents the baggage -- totems, rituals, lessons to live by -- of a solitary one-person tribe.

The prose at spots feels dry and crabbed, detail after detail set down with the obligatory tight fit of tile-setting.

"Clean gay" are not the adjectives with which I would now characterize the prose, though there is considerable gaiety in the narration's swift onward flow, its sudden pools of rumination and opinionizing, its pleasure in its own inventions, the impish leaps in time that telegraph crucial plot developments so quickly we can scarcely believe our eyes, and the globe-spanning nimbleness and cosmic liftoff of it all.

So the novel becomes less an action than a disquisition, a wordy, wide-ranging array of voiced opinions, to which we settle like bleary customers in a late-night jazz club: the musicians are playing for themselves on the stand, there is a lot of excited, apparently hilarious talk at the surrounding tables, it is past time to go to bed, but, baby, it's cold outside, and a stupefied kind of happiness comes with just being here.

"Love works backward in time, like all secrets. It colors memory and first impressions, dull evenings and late sleepless nights. It makes them glow with heat, like coals taken for dead." - Andrew Sean Greer

Children assign too much importance to verbalization. Adults know more than they told. They know when they are loved.

"An imagined kiss is more easily controlled, more thoroughly enjoyed, and less cluttery than an actual kiss." - E.B. White

"Love...ever unsatisfied, lives always in the moment that is about to come." - Proust

Henry James recalled her cousin as "the very figure and image of a felt interest in life...the supreme case of a taste for life as life, as personal living, of an endlessly active and yet somehow a careless, an illusionless, a sublimely forewarned curiosity about it." [One could spend hours analyzing what it means to have a "taste for life as life."]

We Think We Know the Ones We Love

An intriguing and engaging first page to a novel:

We think we know the ones we love.

Our husbands, our wives. We know them -- we are them, sometimes; when separated at a party we find ourselves voicing their opinions, their taste in food or books, telling an anecdote that never happened to us but happened to them. We watch their tics of conversation, of driving and dressing, how they touch a sugar cube to their coffee and stare at it as it turns white to brown, then drop it, satisfied, into the cup. I watched my own husband do that every morning; I was a vigilant wife.

We think we know them. We think we love them. But what we love turns out to be a poor translation, a translation we ourselves have made, from a language we barely know. We try to get past it to the original, but we never can. We have seen it all. But what have we really understood?

One morning we awaken. Beside us, that familiar sleeping body in the bed: a new kind of stranger. For me, it came in 1953. That was when I stood in my house and saw a creature merely bewitched with my husband's face.

Perhaps you cannot see a marriage. Like those giant heavenly bodies invisible to the human eye, it can only be charted by its gravity, its pull on everything around it. That is how I think of it. That I must look at everything around it, all the hidden stories, the unseen parts, so that somewhere in the middle -- turning like a dark star -- it will reveal itself at last.

It's from The Story of a Marriage by Andrew Sean Greer. Set in 1950s San Francisco with plenty of local references, it's a short, tightly knit story of a couple whose marriage gets turned upside down after an unexpected visit from a long lost friend. The writing is solid throughout though never hits the lyrical highs of the first page. Recommended particularly for Bay Area folk, though others might be interested as well: Greer commands wide respect among the literati.

Book Review: To Hell With All That: Loving and Loathing Our Inner Housewife

Ambitious, career-driven women who also want to have kids face hard choices.

If you aggressively pursue a career, have kids, go back to work and install a nanny, you are forever wondering (in ways men do not) whether you shortchanged your kids. Yet by working outside the home -- "taking part in the commerce and traffic of the adult world" -- you develop an identity all your own, and offer your children a model of real-world success.

If you stop working and raise children, there's a sense that you're somehow letting down the feminist movement by not taking advantage of professional opportunities newly available to your generation. Your childhood professional dreams wither at the feet of your kid's soccer regimen. Yet as a full-time mom you experience the primal pleasure of bestowing motherly love every single day, providing great emotional lift to your child. And you can shamelessly embrace the idea that Martha Stewart has made a Truth but that old school feminists still deny: "that a successful, liberated woman can care deeply, meaningfully, spiritually about the precise state of her linen closet."

Yes, it's a tradeoff relevant only to affluent women (most have to work) but for these select women it's a deeply stressful issue.

Caitlin Flanagan has made the stress that comes from choosing to be a housewife -- loving and loathing our inner housewife, as the subtitle puts it -- the focal point of her recent writing. Her book is titled To Hell With All That and the paradox on the examination table is:

As women have achieved ever more power in the world -- power of a kind my mother and her friends from nursing school could never have imagined -- they have become increasingly attracted to the privileges and niceties of traditional womanhood.

The book is a series of essays. One's on the complicated relationship between mothers and the nanny -- the never-quite-resolved fear that your nanny knows your children better than you; that your child might even love your nanny more than you. So you at once love your nanny and are deeply grateful for her services but you also "possess a quietly burning antipathy" toward her. One essay's about feeling abandoned when her own mother began working again in the seventh grade. One's on the epidemic of sexless marriages. All convey Flanagan's genuine fascination with the "places women love and loathe: laundry rooms and nurseries, sunny kitchens and dark ones, the marriage bed."

Together, the collection gently advances Flanagan's positive view of traditional motherhood and homemaking. This will continue to infuriate her critics. A lot of feminists hate Flanagan. They hate the fact that she would suggest women have a more natural connection than men to the "shit work" that needs to get done around the house. They hate that she would speak warmly of division of labor within the family: one person earns money for the family's keep while the other provides the actual keep. Where the haters see flaws in Flanagan, I see a perspective -- traditionalism -- worth hearing even if it's politically incorrect in the modern feminist context.

To be sure, it's not a perspective informed by original journalism or the parsing of scientific literature on parenting / mothering. Instead, we get unsupported assertions about the glories of motherly love and the not-so-subtle implication that children of stay-at-home moms benefit accordingly, but there's no evidence presented to support this. Yes, motherly love is a beautiful and singular thing, but for the woman agonizing over whether to abandon a career for her children she would be better served with research-based insight on how her decision will impact the long-term prospects of her children, if at all. Also, if you're young and looking to Flanagan for resolution to the dilemma which I articulated at the outset of this post, you'll be disappointed. She doesn't really offer advice to young women who want it all: kids and career, guilt-free.

All books have shortcomings. Books that fail do so less because of an overwhelming number of shortcomings and more because it doesn't understand what its inevitable shortcomings are -- the book mis-understands the ground it is covering. Flanagan knows exactly who she is and what she is doing and that's why I'm sure she would be satisfied (not that she would care!) with my description of her book as a chatty, entertaining, often very funny, witty, but not altogether rigorous look at what it means to be a twenty-first century housewife, or a confused feminist, or a maybe-housewife.

I recommend this book to women and men alike, perhaps especially to men who want a straight scoop from a funny female guide who's not overly hostage to blah-blah-blah psychobabble. She is illuminating about heartstrings and marriage and child rearing and other wired female (and male) yearnings which cause all sorts of intractable dilemmas.

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Other choice sentences from Flanagan:

"Weddings today are often made comical or ghastly by their obvious overtones of strenuous social climbing."

"Like most contemporary writers on family life, Stephen Covey is mesmerized by the practice of sitting down to dinner, a custom he imbues with almost magical properties to bind and focus a family."

"Public events are central to what we tell ourselves and one another about how much we love our children: Look, I'm here! I stopped everything just to come."

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I've written about this topic over the years.

Here are other posts of mine on Caitlin Flanagan. Here's my book review of Female Chauvinist Pigs by Ariel Levy. Here's my post on motherhood vs. womanhood. Here's my post on progressive feminists and happiness. Here's my post about physical attractiveness and feminism. Here's where I call bullshit on strippers who say they feel "empowered" in a post-feminist way. Here's an old Ross Douthat post on two ways of looking at child-rearing; highly recommended. Here's where I quote Ross on why we shouldn't separate the sexual revolution and achievement of certain feminist goals with Joe Francis and a Duke frat on a Saturday night. Here are 29 bookmarks tagged "feminism." Here are 45 bookmarks tagged "gender."

Book Review: The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid is an outstanding novel: gripping and readable as a thriller, deeply affecting as a story of love, and politically provocative in its exploration of the post-9/11 American / Middle East scene.

In a cafe in Lahore, Pakistan, the main character Changez tells an American acquaintance his life story and it is by "overhearing" this second-person telling that we learn it, too. Changez goes to America at 18 to attend Princeton, moves to New York after college to work in finance, falls in love with an NYC high society young woman, Erica, and all in all seems destined to ride the American dream into adulthood. Then 9/11 happens, Erica in fact is still in love with her recently-deceased boyfriend, Pakistan/India tensions rattle Changez and implant doubts about his true allegiances...and his relationships with both Erica and America -- two things he thought he loved -- slowly unravel.

The book's length, at under 200 pages, is testament to Hamid's efficiency with words. Short, well-written novels are a real pleasure, and not just because they take less time to read: sparer novels leave space for your thoughts to echo, to quote the character Erica, and demand more of your imagination.

A compact text doesn't necessarily come at the exclusion of "random riffs on how life works" that as readers we tend to grant novelists. There's some unwritten pact between readers and novelists when it comes to this: keep us entertained and engaged and wondering and moving forward along an arc, and we'll indulge your only-kind-of-related theories on happiness, the nature of love, humor, etc. Hamid subtly makes such offerings throughout.

He distinguishes the feeling of being unsettled with the feeling of being nervous. He theorizes that successful professionals focus on work by wearing blinders that make irrelevant world events or personal emotional travails. He nails the roller-coaster that follows a break-up: the heat and choice words which cause it, the exhilarating sense of freedom that accompanies new singlehood, the medium-term backpedaling and regret and depression, and the long-term equanimity with which you look back on the whole journey. (Equanimity his protagonist never achieves, by the way, which I note for those still west of true north months after a break up.) Elsewhere, he shows how words delivered "without the core of conviction" are empty, even emptier than the same words never uttered.

On a syntax level, there are winning sentences and metaphors. When describing Erica's detachment at a cocktail party, he writes "remarks made by her companions would register only indirectly on her face, like the shadows of clouds gliding across the surface of a lake." Then there's a scene where sparks are starting to fly between Erica and Changez. Changez is talking about his homeland, Pakistan. Then: "I love it when you talk about where you come from," Erica said, slipping her arms through mine, "you become so alive." When a talented writer deploys italics, look twice: it means he had to rely on formatting to make a point that clever arrangement of words could not. "Alive" with emphasis captures the fact that if we're truly passionate about something we can't hide it; it also captures the awe of a woman discovering that her attraction to a man runs deeper than lust.

When I finished this novel yesterday, I stared out into the sea off the coast of Cartagena, Colombia. The water sparkled beneath a big blue tropical sky and dark skinned Afro-Carribbean women paced the sidewalk with fruit baskets balanced on their heads. Usually I would be anxious to get out and explore a new city or at least swim in the water, but instead I retreated inward, stayed put on the lounge chair, and began re-reading.

Thus this novel succeeded for me not just in the way all books must -- you have to hear the sound of the pages turning -- but in that transcendent sense that literary types always talk about. It transported me to a new place, one created jointly by the author and me, one that not even the wide, blue sky and bustling, Caribbean streets could compete with.

What I've Been Reading

1. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius. Some people swear by these Stoic teachings, but even me, a confessed lover of nuggets, could not fully engage with the long list of short aphoristic nugget-y blurbs. I'll try again later. I do want to better understand Stoicism.

2. Paradox of Choice: Why More is Less by Barry Schwartz. There are many reviews and summaries of this book on the web (including an entire Ted talk) so I'm not sure I'd recommend reading the whole book itself. Schwartz's argument -- that too much choice robs us of satisfaction -- is clearly presented and convincingly supported, even though it's a "problem" only the very fortunate seem to have. I found much of the book familiar, but if you haven't already dipped into happiness books or any of the recent slew of pop psychology books, Schwartz brings a lot of the research into one place.

3. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable by Nassim Taleb. Another book that's been well reviewed and summarized. I read Fooled by Randomness and loved it. I didn't love Black Swan, but this is probably because over-high expectations. It's a good book with important points about statistics, randomness, planning, and human nature. With the onset of the financial crisis, I'm sure Taleb has been dancing a jig. The book's weakness, to this reader who isn't qualified to assess the statistical arguments, is stylistic. He proudly resisted any editorship, and it shows. Also, he seems to enjoy his reputation for brashness so much that he hurls bitchy, pointless insults toward people like Richard Posner. All this notwithstanding, you should still read this book.

2. The Knack: How Street Smart Entrepreneurs Learn to Handle Whatever Comes Up by Norm Brodsky and Bo Burlingham. Brodsky and Burlingham have sterling reputations in the business journalism world, but I found nothing new in this grab bag of entrepreneurship tips and tricks. Like most business and entrepreneurship books: pass.

The best book I've been reading recently is John Updike, but that review deserves a separate post.

Book Review: I Will Teach You To Be Rich

Ramit Sethi's new book titled I Will Teach You To Be Rich launches today. I highly recommend it to anyone under age 30 as a kick-ass crash course on personal finance, or to parents who want to teach their kids about money.

In fact, I like it so much that I'm offering you a deal. If you buy the book by 11:59 PM Pacific Time on Tuesday March 24th and forward your Amazon receipt to ben@iwillteachyoutoberich.com, you will be invited to participate in an hour-long special conference call with Ramit and me where you can ask us anything.

The book tells you everything you need to know about how to manage your money. From credit cards to saving for a wedding, from stocks and bonds to savings accounts, it's all here. Unlike most books on money, I Will Teach You To Be Rich sings right along with the zest and humor you've come to expect from Ramit. The accompanying charts and boxes are helpful (and wonderfully rendered from a visual perspective) and the sprinkling of quotes (signed by real people, not "John D.") are frequent reminders that other people are taking control of their finances -- and so can you.

The book's only weakness is that it doesn't fully account for the global economic crisis. Ramit would argue that fundamentals are fundamentals when it comes to money. I largely agree, though it would have been lovely to have gotten a bit more on how the crisis came to be, why the S&P 500 hasn't returned its usual "long-term" return over the past 10 years, whether bank bailouts should affect one's selection of a bank, etc. But these are fast-changing and recent developments best followed in the blogosphere. For a foundational understanding of how a young person ought to think about personal finance both strategically and tactically, you need this book on your desk.

Of course, I'm a biased reviewer. I'm close to Ramit and have been talking to him about all aspects of this book for more than two years. But I don't recommend stuff I don't genuinely like. He's taught me a lot about money, just like I've taught him a lot about working out, how to muster the courage to talk to women, and the rules of basketball.

Bottom Line: Buy the book by Tuesday night and forward your receipt to ben@iwillteachyoutoberich.com and join Ramit and me for a private conference call on entrepreneurship, careers, and life!

Capacity of Spirit > Any Special Talents

D.T. Max has a 10,000 word essay in the latest New Yorker on the life of David Foster Wallace. It breaks new ground on several fronts. Most notably, interviews with his wife Karen Green and excerpts and detail on his third novel that he did not finish. Max suggests that Wallace's inability to complete novel #3 weighed on him to the point where he wondered whether the anti-depressants were hindering his creativity. This contributed to him going off Nardil, which was the beginning of the end.

Here's one quote along the way that jumped out at me:

In his final major interview, given to Le Nouvel Observateur in August, 2007, Wallace talked about various writers he admired—St. Paul, Rousseau, Dostoyevsky among them—and added “what are envied and coveted here seem to me to be qualities of human beings—capacities of spirit—rather than technical abilities or special talents.”

There's a lot of wisdom there. Someone's qualities as a human being mattering more than their technical ability or special talents.

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Here's another DFW quote from his interview with Larry McCaffery in 1993:

I’m not saying I’m able to work consistently out of the premise, but it seems like the big distinction between good art and so-so art lies somewhere in the art’s heart’s purpose, the agenda of the consciousness behind the text. It’s got something to do with love.

And here are all the articles I've read tagged David Foster Wallace.

Book Review: On Beauty by Zadie Smith

How to be original when writing about infidelity? It's been done so many times: stories of affairs, one-night cheats, deceit, confessions, broken love.

The plot line usually goes something like this. A man and a woman fall for each other. Love swells. Then love swoons. One party feels emotionally alienated. Or one party begins to lust after another, more attractive person. The cheat. The cheater at first finds thrill in the escapade but pretty quickly regrets acting out. He considers whether to come clean with her, but decides that would hurt her too much so keeps what happened to himself. The cheated-on inevitably finds out second-hand. The cheater begs for forgiveness. Sometimes she grants it, sometimes not. Usually we're left with ambiguity, such as the final airport scene in the movie Love Actually where the wife begrudgingly says to her arriving husband (who cheated on her), "It's good to see you." Does this mean she's taking him back?

Eventually, for the sake of his long-term sanity, the cheater deeply rationalizes the whole experience. "She let herself go physically," he might say, "I was no longer attracted to her." Or the cheating woman might say, "He was emotionally unavailable," the catch-all invocation from women everywhere, "I felt hurt." Yet the cheater never quite escapes his/her own moral failings, rationalization notwithstanding, and the cheated-on never quite gets over the emotional fraudulence of a person she deeply trusted.

When plotting this familiar arc, screenwriters and novelists, ever the moralizers, pass on lessons we've heard a million times. We are supposed to learn that acting on sexual impulse -- having emotionless sex -- doesn't offer lasting satisfaction, the insta-intimacy not worth a destroyed relationship. That hiding a misdeed from your partner never works, and in fact adds to the hurt. That a guilty conscience leaks internally -- you can never escape it, not when you look him deep in the eye and profess your monogamous love, not when you sit in the kitchen trying to eat cold pizza, alone.

We are taught these and other lessons over and over, but, apparently, we never learn them.

By taking on the infidelity storyline and thus the risk of irrelevance via an undifferentiated product, Zadie Smith in her third novel On Beauty shows herself a fearless novelist. In her story it's a married male professor who sleeps first with a colleague and then with a female student. Scandalous! But also cliché, like the boss who sleeps with the secretary. Piggybacking on built-in power dynamics is easy but doesn't win points for inventiveness.

Smith, fortunately, doesn't just piggyback. Where she addresses infidelity -- from the sex scenes to the inner-monologue guilt to marital collapse -- it feels fresh more than formulaic. And this is a novel about much more than infidelity: it's about race (the husband is white, wife black), the liberal politics of academia, Britain and the U.S., art, and the private feuds of two contrasting families. All woven together masterfully.

She's most entertaining when she exposes a cerebral person's contact with real life. Brilliant professors innocent to the world as it actually is. The introverted professor's daughter who experiences "the daily miracle whereby interiority opens out and brings to bloom the million-petalled flower of being here, in the world, with other people." Or when the wife, cheated-on, mockingly consoles her professorial husband by saying how annoying it is when one's dick insults one's intellectual sensibilities; how an intricate, caring mind must also accommodate the recklessness of a penis.

It is impossible to read a story about family dynamics, love, the pretentiousness of academia, and relationships, without reflecting on where these things stand in your own life. So I imagine your enjoyment of this novel depends in part on the personal place you're coming from when you turn to page one. Still, I recommend this novel widely.

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Here's Zadie Smith's interview with Charlie Rose. It's worthwhile. She is very beautiful, very smart, and has an irresistible British accent. 33 years-old. At the end Rose says, "I'm smitten talking with you." Yep.

Book Notes: Ambition by Joseph Epstein

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend about a mutual acquaintance who I referred to as "a pretty ambitious guy." My friend responded, "Yes, he's nothing if not ambitious." The word "ambitious" hung in the air a bit, carrying a heavy, negative connotation.

To characterize someone as ambitious is not necessarily a compliment, unfortunately. There are certainly favorable aspects to the label -- energy, drive, an overarching desire to make the most of one's life. But ambition also bears less kind associations, too -- "that it is antisocial; that is is insatiable; that it is corrupting; that it leaves only victims...the ambitious view of life is forbiding and unforgiving. Its price is too high. It is inhuman in its demands; it is inhumane in its toll. If life is to be lived differently, if life is to be more spiritual, more tender-minded and large hearted, ambition, clearly, must go. Or so it is said." Those are Joseph Epstein's words.

What makes me squirm even more than the unattractive single-mindedness of stereotypically "ambitious" people is their relentless humorlessness. They take their ideas, goals, and life too seriously. I've blogged about being at once serious and self-mocking -- an optimal point too few go-getters achieve.

For these reasons I have never embraced the label while at the same time not denied it altogether. This would sadden Joseph Epstein. In his book Ambition: The Secret Passion, he mounts a spirited defense of ambition in the face of those who have given it a bad name. He calls ambition the fuel of achievement. He says that to deny a natural drive to achieve and do and push oneself is to deny the full experience of living. There's not so much a thesis here as much as various examples of how figures dead and alive have discovered, cultivated, and applied their ambition in a healthy, positive way. (And there are the examples of those who did not.)

What's fantastic about this book is the breadth of Epstein's examples. He samples literature, movies, philosophers, and others. He interweaves telling quotes on the sentence level -- it's the author with a strong grasp of his material who can find pithy, revealing quotes and display them mid-sentence, as opposed to slapping them generically at the top of chapters.

And then there's the writing. Epstein writes about ambition -- and success, money, high society, literature, and many other topics which don't quite cohere -- with characteristic flair. He is the "wittiest writer alive" according to the late Bill Buckley, and this book fulfills the praise: it's a pleasure to read if only to study the writing.

Here's the last paragraph of the book, which is excellent.

We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoch, or the country of our birth, or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die; nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death. But within all this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live: courageously or in cowardice, honorably or dishonorably, with purpose or in drift. We decide what is important and what is trivial in life. We decide that what makes us significant is either what we do or what do refuse to do. But no matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices and decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make. We decide. We choose. And as we decide and choose, so our lives formed. In the end, forming our own destiny is what ambition is about.

Below are various excerpts and favorite paragraphs, all Epstein excerpt for the italics which is me. They continue below the fold. As always with these excerpts I hand picked the best from a long book, so enjoy!

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Ambition is one of the Rorscach words: define it and you instantly reveal a great deal about yourself.

As drunks have done to alcohol, the single-minded have done to ambition -- given it a bad name.

In the modern world, and especially in America, a new distinction, a cruel twist, has been added: not to succeed means to fail. Leaving aside for a moment what it is that constitutes succeeding -- something that depends upon where one starts out from, what aspirations one sets for oneself, what league one chooses to play in -- the crux of this distinction is that it enters everyone in the race for success. The need to succeed, in other words, can also be viewed as the need to avoid failure. And as to which is greater, the hope of success or the fear of failure, this, in individual cases, does not always allow a clear answer.

Disraeli wrote that "our business in this world is not to succeed but to continue to fail, in good spirits," but the philosophical calm behind that remark could come from only one source -- years of success.

When a person asks himself what he wants out of life, he is asking a question that cuts to his soul. To answer it with candor and precision and realism about one's own limitations requires self-knowledge of the highest kind.

If it has any logic, human destiny, at its simplest level, is a compound of the qualities of an individual and of the spirit of the community in which that individual lives. "The community stagnates without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without the sympathy of the community," said William James.

Some people hold that we are, essentially, what we keep hidden about ourselves, our fears and secrets. Other people hold that, whatever our personal secrets and fears, we are what we do.

Where does ambition come from? Why for some does it burn within whereas others, as Epstein puts it, fail to feel the heat?

Is the key to success, as Hemingway once claimed it was key to being a good writer, having an unhappy childhood? Is ambition really as simple as a wish to make the most of one's abilities and thus to get the best the world has to offer? Does it arise from a consciousness of superior worth? Or is it instead really a more or less secret desire for revenge for humiliations received? A cover for fear of being discounted as a negligible person? A disguised cry for love and attention? Or the acting out of some other psychic scenario? Not known, nor soon likely to be.

"Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful. A man who gives a good account of himself is probably lying, since any life when viewed from inside is simply a series of defeats." - George Orwell

One cannot speak about winners and losers unless there is some rough agreement on fundamentals. But agreement on fundamentals is far from being had at this time in the U.S. How important is work in one's life? Is achievement more important than happiness? Are the two separable? Does one truly have an obligation to make the best use of one's gifts? What is the just reward for a life of effort, and is it commensurate with the effort? When such questions are even asked -- as they are, repeatedly, nowadays -- fundamentals are in dispute, and no scorecard exists to tell the winners from the losers.

Inside [high society life] can become phantasmagorical; one can become lost in the glitter, the elegance, the forests of family trees. If order can be the reigning virtue of life in the cage, monotony can be its vice. Much there is in life that is not countenanced in the cage; many experiences are sealed off to its occupants in a style of life where decency is more highly esteemed than courage and scandal more greatly dreaded than cancer. If the cage protects from the harshness of life outside its gilded confines, the price of its protection to its inhabitants is often innocence. "The innocence," as Edith Wharton remarked in The Age of Innocence, "that seals the mind against imagination and the heart against experience."