Chris Ware has a four-page story/comic about how technology is pulling us further apart. I loved seeing the way it's integrated into the drawings - the mom sleeping with the iPhone charging right next to her, etc.

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Can't think of anything to write about? I'm sure that you're interesting; the problem probably lies in your process. - Start by reading more. When you read more you start to see the interconnections between what you are reading and what you've already read. You also tend to have a context and the ability to form opinions when your professors assign reading. If you go to the Claremont Colleges you can request any book in the world, for free, through Link+ or Interlibrary Loan. When I was in 5th grade we took a field trip to a retreat, but I spent the whole day reading. The cutest girl in the school came and sat right next to me and I kept on reading (books don't give you very good advice about what to do in those situations). In 6th grade we had to keep a reading chart and were supposed to read 100 pages in a quarter; I had about 2100 pages and that was counting only books I could remember reading and not counting the newspaper. Around 8th grade I started reading nonfiction and I've hardly read fiction since then. If you don't have time to read, either schedule time or quit your least favorite activity. Justine Musk says to develop a writer's intuition, you should read more. Reading is the best way to boost your vocabulary (and SAT verbal score), get a sense of how to write and spell. Phonics stink. - Keep track of every good idea that you have. When I'm away from my computer I use the notes app on my phone. Most of my ideas come right before bed, in the shower or in transit. I keep a Google Doc with possible post topics. If you're short on ideas ask other people what they've been thinking about lately instead of how their day's been going. Or like the above, start reading RSS of interesting people. Good ideas tend to snowball together. - Write every day. Writing every day is actually much easier than trying to write occasionally, and makes essay writing easier. When you write every day you're not worried that you have to write the greatest thing the world has ever seen, you can just write whatever you think will be interesting and wait for good ideas to bubble up. If you're staring at a blank screen, try outlining your post/essay and then following the script. Separating planning from process makes it way easier. - Get as much feedback as you can. Tell people that if you write something crappy, you want to know it. The best way to do this is to write for an audience, and the bigger the better. There, I just wrote 350 words in 20 minutes - more than a page. The truth is that you already do a lot of writing every day, on Facebook and Twitter and text messages and email. Ostensibly this post is about writing but it really applies to any area of life in which you'd like to improve.

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Researchers at Bath University studied over a thousand couples, and I'll let the BBC report the results:

They found that if the wife was five or more years older than her husband, they were more than three times as likely to divorce than if they were the same age. If the age gap is reversed, and the man is older than the woman, the odds of marital bliss are higher. Add in a better education for the woman - Beyonce has her high school diploma, unlike husband Jay-Z - and the chances of lasting happiness improve further.

Older men have higher status, more money, and more experience than younger men. Education as an important variable for lasting happiness suggests that when a man desires a woman with an education he's doing so for another reason than her looks. This comes after Justin Wolfers and Betsey Stevenson's research showing that inequality between women and men has decreased, but happiness of women has decreased, both absolutely and relative to men, since the 1970's. It's unfortunate that evolution is undermining equality in this fashion.

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The Seven Stories career exercise is probably one of the better ones I've heard as far as giving unsure people an idea of what they want, and a not terrible conversational gambit. This exercise is much better than a computer algorithm, or personality test. Here's how it goes: for four or five days, you write down a list of things that gave you a sense of accomplishment, at least twenty five or thirty, rank the top seven and then find common threads between them. This is supposed to give you a good idea of what career you want to enter (and heaven help you if the things you enjoy doing aren't things that the market pays lots of money for). This is another extension of the "do what you want, not what pays well" attitude that most college-bound young people share. I am not telling you what is on my list.

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David Rohde was a New York Times reporter kidnapped by the Taliban. Here's Rohde trying to argue for his release:

When I told them I was an innocent civilian who should be released, they responded that the United States had held and tortured Muslims in secret detention centers for years. Commanders said they themselves had been imprisoned, their families ignorant of their fate. Why, they asked, should they treat me differently?

If I was kidnapped by a woman-hating, suicide-bombing organization, I'd like to think I would be able to rebut most accusations and allegations my captives made. This one does not have an easy rebuttal.

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Mo Ibrahim's good idea is to reward African heads of state that govern well with a $5 million prize upon retirement, and $200K annually for the rest of their lives. I agree that the prize should be bigger, but it seems to me like giving the reward after retirement is a little too far away to really change a potential despot's behavior. Just as there have been a number of studies showing that the severity of a punishment doesn't really affect a criminal's behavior, but the chance of being caught does affect his behavior, the prospect of a far-away reward doesn't really seem likely to motivate an African leader's behavior. I propose the following changes. First, set up a bank account for every African leader, that they can't touch until they retire. Then credit the account when they do well for their countries and debit their account when their countries slide further into corruption. The Ibrahim Prize Foundation produces the Ibrahim Index, a comprehensive measure of every sub-Saharan African country's quality of governance. I say if a leader raises his country's score on the Ibrahim Index by 1 point, he should get $500K. This way the leaders know right away that they're earning positive money, even though they can't touch it until after they leave. I think the eventual amount of money given away will be about the same. After all, if Ibrahim is giving away money, that means leaders are earning the prize and that's a good thing. Is that such a tough idea? It's a huge improvement on the way the prize is currently set up. If you give everyone a bank account their incentive to do good rises dramatically. A large reward far in the future is just that, too far in the future. Between now and then a leader might die, get deposed or earn substantial amounts of money for screwing over his country. This form of bribery is also extraordinarily cheap compared to everything else we're doing, like aid. One problem is that a leader with $0 in his account could just let his country slide dramatically. But that isn't worse than the current situation, and we just start paying him for improvement once he gets the country back to where it was when he started.

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I keep things clean:

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First I write an article for the Forum explaining the controversy behind Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner's new book, SuperFreakonomics. Then I read this post on their blog today:

An overwhelming majority of the teachers surveyed associate “traditional” names with positive character traits and non-traditional names with weak performance and bad behavior. The name Kevin has particularly negative connotations; as one teacher wrote, “Kevin is not a name — it’s a diagnosis!”

I guess I am just reinforcing stereotypes.

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In this week's New Yorker, Dana Goodyear has a fascinating profile of James Cameron. The profile is a series of stories about Cameron with some life detail filled in; it leaves you with a very good picture of who Cameron is. Here's Cameron on the making of Terminator:

One night, he said, he dreamed of “a chrome skeleton emerging out of a fire.” Then he sketched the figure cut in half and crawling after a woman. He said, “I thought, That was cool. I’ve never seen that in a movie before.” Cameron came home and recruited Wisher and Frakes to help him with a storyline centered on the chrome skeleton he had begun to think of as the terminator. He analyzed the common traits of the ten most successful movies of all time: an average person in extraordinary jeopardy was a major trope. His story posited a future when much of Earth has been destroyed in a catastrophic nuclear war; out of the rubble, a race of machines rises up and tries to eliminate the few remaining human beings. To win the war for good, the machines send a cyborg terminator back in time, to 1984 Los Angeles, to kill the woman, Sarah Connor, a waitress at a burger joint who will later give birth to the leader of the human resistance.

Note that Cameron didn't try to reinvent the story; he found some new idea and fit it into a popular trope, in other words, he made a movie that people want to watch. Terminator was, of course, a big hit. I did not know that Schwarzenegger was initially going to be the good guy.

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