Here I am, with my gal Cleo, in the airport lounge. I am reclining on a fake chaise longue, underneath a palm-ish plant, gazing at … a bunch of Qantas and Cathay and BA planes being loaded. My flight is delayed and I’ve suddenly got too much time–not usually a problem I encounter in my [...]
Entries Tagged as ‘Life’
December 2, 2008
From Casanova to Cleo
Well, this is frustrating, but it does happen when you write a book. Sometimes you go down one path in your research before discovering that it’s a dead end.
Then you have a choice: You can somehow finagle it into your book and hope that it works. Journalists do that a lot, because they don’t like [...]
November 26, 2008
Peaking early or climbing slowly
Back to the bibliography for my book. Today: David Galenson, “Old Masters and Young Geniuses.”
Folks, this is an important book. Notice I did not say “riveting” or “thrilling” or “entertaining”. It’s short and academic, not for the beach. But let me say it again: It’s important.
Galenson has looked into the life cycles of creative types. [...]
November 24, 2008
The web’s paparazzi culture
They did another podcast with me, this time about my piece in The World in 2009, which is The Economist’s annual thought-leader issue.
We did this on Skype. She was in London, I was in California. My voice sounds strangely metallic and a bit choppy.
The topic, though, has nothing to do with my book. Instead, we’re [...]
November 21, 2008
The minds of liberals and conservatives
The biggest mistake in psychology is to think that the mind at birth is a blank slate. Instead, “the first draft” has already been written, and will now get revised by experience.
So says Jonathan Haidt, a psychologist whose book I reviewed here, in this TED talk. (I can’t embed TED videos, unfortunately.)
In particular, whether you’re [...]
November 10, 2008
Postscript on McCain
Read David Grann in The New Yorker on what I consider an epic, a Greek, a heart-rending tragedy: the transformation, under pressure, of a great man, John McCain.
This is a man who was once “more at peace when he was losing” and who, above all, was afraid only of one thing: losing his honor.
Thinking in [...]
November 3, 2008
The father of biography
Let’s get back to the bibliography for my book.
Right now–while we’re still dealing with the ancient sources–I’m going through the texts in chronological order. And after Polybius and Livy, that brings me to Plutarch.
You recall that Herodotus was the father of history. Well, Plutarch must be the father of biography. Like Herodotus, Thucydides and Polybius, [...]
October 31, 2008
I’m crushed: Only 3 out of 5
As you know by now, I’m a humor snob. So I’m gutted to discover, after taking the New Yorker’s test for advanced readers, that I only scored three out of five. Being a Yoga snob as well, the last one threw me off. But even with that allowance, I’d only be four out of five. [...]
October 21, 2008
My bibliography
A while ago, I promised Baltimore Bookworm to start blogging the bibliography for my book, and I haven’t gotten around to it yet. Baltimore Bookworm, I haven’t forgotten. Starting at once, I’ll drip out the books and academic papers I’ve been reading and plan to read.
The rest of you: Please feel free to infer my [...]
October 15, 2008
Uncle Lulu
That guy with the cigar on this West German stamp from 1987 is my great-uncle, Ludwig Erhard, or “Onkel Lulu” in our family.
Why is he on this blog?
Well, I’ve been posting a lot about writing and language and style recently, all of which of course has a lot to do with the writing of my [...]
October 9, 2008
A bit more on Amy Tan
Well, I’m still researching Amy Tan–and I’m still being deliberately coy about exactly which aspect of her life will make it into my book–and I keep coming across all these other interesting things she has said.
From the same interview as in the previous post, here she is talking about success and failure, making them sound [...]
October 6, 2008
Our election, Napoleon, and that map again
Remember that famous and superb map of the impostor success that I wrote about the other day? Well, it depicted Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, and how it went from triumph to disaster, which is one of the twin themes I explore in my book. There is a famous picture of Napoleon’s retreat. And now The [...]
September 23, 2008
Churchill on well-disguised impostors
My book is about Kipling’s notion that success and failure, or triumph and disaster, can be impostors. That does not mean, of course, that all triumphs and all disasters are always impostors. But to say that wittily, we really need ole Winston.
Churchill, as it happens, lived a life that in many ways illustrates Kipling’s impostors, [...]
September 16, 2008
Pyrrhic victories
You’ve heard of Pyrrhic Victories, which are defeats disguised as triumphs–in other words, Kipling-esque impostors of the sort that I will be describing in my book. But do you know why they are called that?
It’s thanks to Pyrrhus, who is well worth five minutes of your time.
Pyrrhus was the ancient world’s equivalent of a dumb [...]
