Philipp Meyer:

In 2005 I began a third novel, American Rust, about the way that our circumstances, whether poor or wealthy, can so completely shape our morality and our way of looking at things. I was fascinated by the lost generation in America - the people whose towns and hopes have been wiped out by outsourcing - people for whom the American Dream has ceased to be relevant. As Steinbeck did in The Grapes of Wrath, I wanted to show the inner lives, for better and worse, of the new lost generation. I wanted readers to think about exactly what it means to be human. What is at the core of us? Where do our morals come from? What differentiates us from the other animals on earth? What measures do we use to define our friends and family and how far are we willing to go to protect them?

Of course these are questions for broader society, not just literature. Maybe it’s only in crises like this that we get shaken up enough to ask ourselves those larger questions - who are we, what is important to us, how should we define our humanity. The answers we choose will determine the sort of world we live in for the coming decades.

American excess: A Wall Street trader tells all

Ashby Jones on a story by Karen Sloan:

When we write about lawyers and unhappiness, we typically have a specific kind of unhappiness in mind. It’s more a restlessness than a deep despair, more a malaise or vague sense of dissatisfaction than an outright sadness. Whenever we write about this (which we and others tend to do with a certain amount of glibness), we do so with an unspoken assumption — that this category of unhappiness is entirely fixable — especially for big firm lawyers, what with their smarts and connections and hard-earned degrees. It’s just a matter of finding a new job or going part time or leaving the law altogether. Happiness exists just around the corner, it’s just a matter of figuring out how to get there.

But the unhappiness discussed in a National Law Journal story out today strikes an entirely different chord.

In Down Times, Depression Taking Hold Among More Lawyers

Roger Dobson:

All too often, creativity goes hand in hand with mental illness. Now we're starting to understand why.

Creative minds: the links between mental illness and creativity

John Siracusa:

Long before my art lessons stopped around age sixteen, I knew I would never be a professional artist. Partly, this was just a milder incarnation of other children's realizations that they would never be, say, Major League Baseball players. But the real turning point for me came with the onset of puberty and its accompanying compulsive self-analysis. I realized that I owed what success I had as an artist not to any specific art-related aptitude, but rather to a more general and completely orthogonal skill.

Drawing what you actually see—that is, drawing the plastic bull that's in front of you rather than the simplified, idealized image of a bull that's in your head—is something that does not come naturally to most people, let alone children. At its root, my gift was not the ability to draw what I saw. Rather, it was the ability to look at what I had drawn thus far and understand what was wrong with it.

From the archive:

It is ironic: people don’t notice that noticing is important!

Hypercritical

Larry Brilliant:

Why are more new viruses with pandemic potential jumping from their traditional animal hosts to humans now? If I had to choose a single word answer it would be: "modernity." If I had two more words, I would add "human irresponsibility."

Two from the archive:

The grace of wildness changes somehow when it becomes familiar.

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

A dialogue between Dyson and Brand:

Dyson: If you mean balancing the permanent against the ephemeral, it's very important that we adapt to the world on the long-time scale as well as the short-time scale. Ethics are the art of doing that. You must have principles that you're willing to die for.

Brand: Do you have a list of these principles?

Dyson: No. You'll never get everybody to agree about any particular code of ethics.

Brand: In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

The Age of Pandemics

Stuart Jeffries:

Exclamation marks used to be frowned upon. Now look what's happened! We use them all the time! Hurrah!!! But what is it about the age of email that gets people so over-excited?

See also, Tom Bissell, on DFW:

In the autumn of 2005, an e-mail message with the unpromising subject header “Thought you’d like this!!!” landed in my in-box. The sender, a family friend, was an incurable forwarder of two-year-old John Kerry jokes, alerts for non­existent computer viruses and poetry about strangers who turn out to be Jesus. This latest offering contained not the expected link to a YouTube video of yawning kittens but several dozen paragraphs of unsigned, chaotically formatted text. It bore this title: “Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address — May 21, 2005.” Before I had reached the end of the first paragraph I believed I could identify the author. A quick search verified it: The commencement speaker for Kenyon College’s graduating class of 2005 was, indeed, David Foster Wallace.

The joy of exclamation marks!

Mary Pilon:

As the financial markets continue their wildest ride in decades, many once-frantic floor traders find themselves all dressed up in mesh-backed jackets with less work to do. Some say they're flat-out bored.

Alan Valdes, a trader with Hilliard Lyons, says he's put on 10 pounds in the past year because "I don't have to run around the floor anymore."

Carolyn Johnson:

We are most human when we feel dull. Lolling around in a state of restlessness is one of life's greatest luxuries.

Troy McClure:

Don't let the name throw you Jimmy. It's not really a floor, it's more of a steel grating that allows material to sluice through so it can be collected and exported.

From the archive:

The looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

The Big Bored: NYSE Traders Look for Diversions as Life Slows on Floor

David Brooks finally got around to watching Elizabeth Gilbert's TED talk.

We, of course, live in a scientific age, and modern research pierces hocus-pocus. In the view that is now dominant, even Mozart’s early abilities were not the product of some innate spiritual gift. His early compositions were nothing special. They were pastiches of other people’s work. Mozart was a good musician at an early age, but he would not stand out among today’s top child-performers.

What Mozart had, we now believe, was the same thing Tiger Woods had — the ability to focus for long periods of time and a father intent on improving his skills. Mozart played a lot of piano at a very young age, so he got his 10,000 hours of practice in early and then he built from there.

Richard Sennett:

It takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a skilled carpenter or musician -- but what makes a true master?

Back to Brooks:

The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance.

Dan Soltzberg:

It is ironic: people don’t notice that noticing is important!

Genius - The Modern View

Sue Halpern:

We have certain expectations for the fabulously wealthy.

Warren Buffett's frugality is part of what marketers would call his brand identity. His apparent personal disregard for the money he so excessively accumulates reinforces his credibility: he's not greedy, he's just good at what he does.

Buffett, it is safe to say, has a different relationship to money than you and me. For us it's a means to an end. For him, it's a vocation. He is called to it. If it's for anything, it's for getting more of. The man is a collector. He just happens to collect dollars.

It's as if success is a corollary of obscenity: you know it when you see it.

And "seeing" may be the most crucial variable of all.

Margaret Atwood:

What we owe and how we pay is a feature of all human societies, and profoundly shapes our shared values and our cultures.

From last year's best-of:'

In our unending search for panaceas, we believe that happiness and "success" -- which, loosely translated, means money -- are the things to strive for. People are constantly surprised that, even though they have acquired material things, discontent still gnaws.

Dan Soltzberg:

It is ironic: people don’t notice that noticing is important!

Making It

Malcolm Gladwell:

The team was made up mostly of twelve-year-olds, and twelve-year-olds, he knew from experience, did not respond well to shouting. He would conduct business on the basketball court, he decided, the same way he conducted business at his software firm. He would speak calmly and softly, and convince the girls of the wisdom of his approach with appeals to reason and common sense.

It was as if there were a kind of conspiracy in the basketball world about the way the game ought to be played ...

David can beat Goliath by substituting effort for ability—and substituting effort for ability turns out to be a winning formula for underdogs in all walks of life, including little blond-haired girls on the basketball court.

Michael Lopp:

You should pick a fight, because bright people often yell at each other.

Paul Graham:

Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

Gladwell, from last October:

Genius, in the popular conception, is inextricably tied up with precocity—doing something truly creative, we’re inclined to think, requires the freshness and exuberance and energy of youth.

Nir Rosen, in Rolling Stone:

"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."

Annals of Innovation: How David Beats Goliath