What Makes a Great Album Cover

by Molly Tuttle

When I met Simone Rubi in 1999, she was living in Oakland, Calif., a singer in a popular band and working as a graphic designer for ESPRIT. Simone immediately won me over with her delight and appreciation for the design of the simple things in life -- a redwood tree, a tiny mushroom, a perfect wave, hand-knit slippers -- and her ability to ignite others with her enthusiasm and heartfelt propaganda. Over the past decade, I have observed with a smile as I've watched my friend travel the world, arriving in each town like a magnetic Pied Piper, luring together musicians and artists to participate in her never-ending lifestyle of artistic collaboration and celebration of good times.

Simone Rubi. Photo by Mary Rozzi

In 2007, Simone designed the cover for Feist's Grammy-nominated masterpiece, "The Reminder."

For me, this is one of the greatest album covers of all time. In the same spirit of Joni Mitchell's cover for "Ladies of the Canyon," the image captures the spirit of a woman at a particular point in her life, without hitting you over the head with a glamorous beauty shot. The elegant silhouette (shot by Mary Rozzi), the hand-crafted typeface, the sparse yet perfectly executed use of color. The sum of all those parts is one single image that visually exudes the soul of the brilliant collection of songs on the album.

Joni Mitchell's cover art for "Ladies of the Canyon"

Over the past few years since "The Reminder" was released, I have noticed other album covers having a similar feel and I can't help thinking that other designers have been influenced by the work of these inspired ladies. See below.

Read more:

via:

Save vs. Save As

by  Jonah Lehrer

My episodic memory stinks. All my birthday parties are a blur of cake and presents. I’m notorious within my family for confusing the events of my own childhood with those of my siblings. I’m like the anti-Proust.

And yet, I have this one cinematic memory from high-school. I’m sitting at a Friday night football game (which, somewhat mysteriously, has come to resemble the Texas set of Friday Night Lights), watching the North Hollywood Huskies lose yet another game. I’m up in the last row of the bleachers with a bunch of friends, laughing, gossiping, dishing on AP tests. You know, the usual banter of freaks and geeks. But here is the crucial detail: In my autobiographical memory, we are all drinking from those slender glass bottles of Coca-Cola (the vintage kind), enjoying our swigs of sugary caffeine. Although I can’t remember much else about the night, I can vividly remember those sodas: the feel of the drink, the tang of the cola, the constant need to suppress burps.

It’s an admittedly odd detail for an otherwise logo free scene, as if Coke had paid for product placement in my brain. What makes it even more puzzling is that I know it didn’t happen, that there is no way we could have been drinking soda from glass bottles. Why not? Because the school banned glass containers. Unless I was willing to brazenly break the rules — and I was way too nerdy for that — I would have almost certainly been guzzling Coke from a big white styrofoam container, purchased for a dollar from the concession stand. It’s a less romantic image, for sure.

So where did this sentimental scene starring soda come from? My guess is a Coca-Cola ad, one of those lavishly produced clips in which the entire town is at the big football game and everyone is clean cut, good looking and holding a tasty Coke product. (You can find these stirring clips on YouTube.) The soda maker has long focused on such ads, in which the marketing message is less about the virtues of the product (who cares if Coke tastes better than Pepsi?) and more about associating the drink with a set of intensely pleasurable memories.

A new study, published in The Journal of Consumer Research, helps explain both the success of this marketing strategy and my flawed nostalgia for Coke. It turns out that vivid commercials are incredibly good at tricking the hippocampus (a center of long-term memory in the brain) into believing that the scene we just watched on television actually happened. And it happened to us.

Read more:

via:

Falling Comet

by  Michael Hall

In the last desperate months of his life, he would come into the restaurant at all hours of the day and take a seat, sometimes at the counter and other times in one of the back booths. He was always alone. He wore a scruffy ball cap, and behind his large, square glasses there was something odd about his eyes. They didn’t always move together. Barbara Billnitzer, one of the waitresses, would bring him a menu and ask how he was doing. “Just fine,” he’d say, and they would chat about the traffic and the weather, which was always warm in South Texas, even in January. He’d order coffee—black—and sometimes a sandwich, maybe turkey with mayo. Then he’d light up a Pall Mall and look out the window or stare off into space. Soon he was lost in thought, looking like any other 55-year-old man passing the time in a Sambo’s on Tyler Street in downtown Harlingen. He had moved there with his family five years before, in 1976. It was a perfect place for a guy who wanted to get away from it all. And he had a lot to get away from. Twenty-five years before, just about everyone in the Western world had known his face. In fact, for a period of time in the mid-fifties, he had been the most popular entertainer on the planet. He had sold tens of millions of rec­ords. He had caused riots. He had headlined shows with a young opening act named Elvis Presley and had inspired John Lennon to pick up the guitar. He had changed the world.

After ten minutes or so Billnitzer would bring him his food. But usually he was thinking about something, so he ignored it. After a while, though, he’d start to shift in his seat and look around. And then he’d start to hum. Billnitzer, refilling his coffee cup, knew the tune—everybody knew that tune. It was “(We’re Gonna) Rock Around the Clock,” the best-selling rock song of all time. She smiled, because she knew what he was doing. He was giving people around him clues. He wanted people to hear him and say, “You’re Bill Haley, aren’t you?”

But they rarely did. His ball cap covered his famous spit curl, and his glasses covered much of his face. So eventually he would turn to the person next to him or even rise and walk over to a nearby table. The patrons would look up at the tall stranger looming over them. “You know who I am?” he’d ask. “I’m Bill Haley.” Then he’d take off the cap and they’d see the curl, and he’d pull out his driver’s license and they’d see his name. Sure enough, there it was: William John Clifton Haley.

He wouldn’t say much beyond that. Some of the customers tried to get to know him, asking simple coffee shop questions such as “How are you doing?” But Haley didn’t seem to be listening. He’d respond in a rambling fashion. Maybe he’d talk about a show he’d done in London back in the sixties or about Rudy Pompilli, his longtime sax player and best friend, who’d died in 1976. He missed Rudy.

Haley appreciated the company in Sambo’s—one time he left a $100 tip for a quiet waitress who could barely speak English. But usually he slipped out without saying a word of goodbye. And though he was mostly a genial customer, he could be volatile. “Once,” remembers Billnitzer, “our busboy Woody said something to him like, ‘Hey, Mr. Haley, how are you?’ and Bill got real upset, threw down his money, and stomped out.”

Haley would get in his Lincoln Continental and drive off. Sometimes he went to the Hop Shop, a bar on South Seventh Street, or Richard’s, a restaurant and bar on south Highway 77, to drink. He liked Scotch—Johnnie Walker Red was his brand. Sometimes he’d drink too much and get back in his car. Occasionally the police, who knew him well, would stop him and take him to jail. If he made it home, he’d stumble to the little pool house out back while his wife and three children slept in the main house. He’d pick up the phone and start calling people he knew from long ago: ex-wives, sons, producers, promoters, band members. He’d tell stories. He’d cry. He’d ramble. Then he’d hang up and call someone else. He felt so isolated out in that room, millions of miles from his past.

Read more:

Less Than Zero

by  Roger D. Hodge

The most telling characteristics of a society are often those that pass unnoticed. No one pays much attention to interns, for instance, yet the simple fact that at any given time hundreds of thousands of jobs are being performed for little or no pay is surely an important development in our political economy. Perhaps it says something about the value we place on work. According to Ross Perlin, the author of Intern Nation, the rise of this relatively new employment category, which is taken for granted by everyone from the antiunion governor of Wisconsin to the managers of Barack Obama’s reelection campaign, is a clear indication of the decline of labor rights in the United States.

Definitions of what exactly constitutes an internship vary widely. Are interns trainees, temps, apprentices, servants? Since the rules are vague or at least unenforced, employers simply fill in the blank with whatever tasks need doing, and interns often end up stuffing envelopes, fetching coffee, answering the phone, or collecting the boss’s dry cleaning. Not all their work is trivial, of course, and some internships offer useful training, but it is safe to say that vast numbers of interns are condemned to performing the mundane, vaguely humiliating chores that are the necessary if despised conditions of life in the white-collar world of work to which so many young people aspire. Far from providing an educational benefit or vocational training, internships have simply become, for many businesses, a convenient means of minimizing labor costs.

The College Employment Research Institute estimates that 75 percent of college students do at least one internship before graduation. The summer and part-time jobs that once occupied our otherwise idle youth have gone the way of the typewriter; nowadays, interns are everywhere, in publishing, merchandising, insurance, finance, consulting, law, engineering, and the defense industry. It seems that most large corporations pay their interns, but the number of unpaid jobs in the economy is booming. A recent article in Fortune magazine suggests that working for free might even be the “new normal,” a “wave of the future in human resources.” Based on his reporting, Perlin estimates that one to two million Americans work as interns every year, though he suspects that this number might be on the low end. Most interns are students or recent graduates, and large numbers, perhaps 50 percent overall, work for free. Worse, many actually pay tuition for the privilege of working, as a result of the common misconception on the part of both universities and employers that the bestowal of academic credit somehow nullifies the strictures of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) of 1938, which prohibits uncompensated labor except under carefully defined circumstances. Academic programs, both undergraduate and graduate, have increasingly adopted the internship as a degree requirement. Such requirements foster an economy of scarcity among the most prestigious internship programs, which like everything else in our capitalist democracy increasingly resemble commodities. Highly coveted internships at places like Vogue magazine have recently been auctioned off for as much as $42,500; Perlin notes the irony that this obscene sum was raised for the benefit of the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. Apparently, no one was troubled by the contradiction.

Read more:

That Which Does Not Kill Me Makes Me Stranger

by  Daniel Coyle

Jure Robic, the Slovene soldier who might be the world’s best ultra-endurance athlete, lives in a small fifth-floor apartment near the railroad tracks in the town of Koroska Bela. By nature and vocation, Robic is a sober-minded person, but when he appears at his doorway, he is smiling. Not a standard-issue smile, but a wild and fidgety grin, as if he were trying to contain some huge and mysterious secret.

Robic catches himself, strides inside and proceeds to lead a swift tour of his spare, well-kept apartment. Here is his kitchen. Here is his bike. Here are his wife, Petra, and year-old son, Nal. Here, on the coffee table, are whiskey, Jägermeister, bread, chocolate, prosciutto and an inky, vegetable-based soft drink he calls Communist Coca-Cola, left over from the old days. And here, outside the window, veiled by the nightly ice fog, stand the Alps and the Austrian border. Robic shows everything, then settles onto the couch. It’s only then that the smile reappears, more nervous this time, as he pulls out a DVD and prepares to reveal the unique talent that sets him apart from the rest of the world: his insanity.

Tonight, Robic’s insanity exists only in digitally recorded form, but the rest of the time it swirls moodily around him, his personal batch of ice fog. Citizens of Slovenia, a tiny, sports-happy country that was part of the former Yugoslavia until 1991, might glow with beatific pride at the success of their ski jumpers and handballers, but they tend to become a touch unsettled when discussing Robic, who for the past two years has dominated ultracycling’s hardest, longest races. They are proud of their man, certainly, and the way he can ride thousands of miles with barely a rest. But they’re also a little, well, concerned. Friends and colleagues tend to sidle together out of Robic’s earshot and whisper in urgent, hospital-corridor tones.

‘‘He pushes himself into madness,’’ says Tomaz Kovsca, a journalist for Slovene television. ‘‘He pushes too far.’’ Rajko Petek, a 35-year-old fellow soldier and friend who is on Robic’s support crew, says: ‘‘What Jure does is frightening. Sometimes during races he gets off his bike and walks toward us in the follow car, very angry.’’

What do you do then?

Petek glances carefully at Robic, standing a few yards off. ‘‘We lock the doors,’’ he whispers.

Read more:

 

Building Blocks by Kumi Yamashita

Water-Fueled Cars

Japanese company Genepax presents its eco-friendly car that runs on nothing but water. The car has an energy generator that extracts hydrogen from water that is poured into the car’s tank. The generator then releases electrons that produce electric power to run the car.  The electric powered car can run on any type of water (you can even use tea and soda…etc).  The car can run for an hour at about 50 miles per hour  on just a liter of water; about 2 cans of soda worth.  Genepax, the company that invented the technology, aims to collaborate with Japanese manufacturers to mass produce it.

Unlike other electric cars, the Genepax car does not require that batteries be recharged and has no emission. The water electrical generator is located in the back of the car and when water is poured it is then broken down in order to create electricity to power the car. Imagine what such a generator could do to the oil industry, the nuclear plants and the electrical grid.

That story broke in 2008.  Today Japan is producing hydrogen fueled cars – the Honda FCX Clarity.  Combine the technology of Genepax with the technology of the Honda FCX Clarity and you have a full production vehicle that uses no gasoline.  No gasoline combustion means zero emissions.

In 2010, it is reported that there are a total of 50 FCX Clarity available for lease in the U.S with a target to have 200 available world-wide.



The Honda FCX Clarity fuel cell-electric vehicle has been chosen to be the pace car for the opening race of the 2011 IZOD IndyCar Series, from 25-27 March 2011.  This is the first-time a hydrogen-powered vehicle will pace an IZOD IndyCar Series race in the United States.

Propelled by an electric motor that runs on electricity generated in a fuel cell, the FCX Clarity’s only emission is water and its fuel efficiency is three times that of a similar-sized petrol-powered automobile. The FCX Clarity’s performance and acceleration are comparable to a 2.4-litre, 4-cylinder engine with an EPA certified range of 240 miles. The compact and powerful Honda V Flow Fuel Cell Stack allows for unprecedented spaciousness and a futuristically stylish, low-slung design and spacious interior.

Since the vehicle’s unveiling there were nearly 80,000 people around the world who expressed interest in owning a FCX Calrity.  80,000 people who won’t be buying any more gasoline once they take possession.

via:

Fourteen

by David Hajdu

Break out the guitar-shaped cake pans.

Today is Bob Dylan’s 70th birthday, an occasion that essayists, bloggers and magazine writers have been celebrating for weeks. Mr. Dylan surely deserves the attention, but he’s only one in a surprisingly large group of major pop-music artists born around the same time.

John Lennon would have turned 70 last October; Joan Baez had her 70th birthday in January; Paul Simon and George Clinton will reach 70 before the end of this year. Next year, the club of legendary pop septuagenarians will grow to include Paul McCartney, Aretha Franklin, Carole King, Brian Wilson and Lou Reed. Jimi Hendrix and Jerry Garcia would have also been 70 in 2012.

Perhaps this wave of 70th birthdays is mere coincidence. There are, after all, lots of notable people of all ages. But I suspect that the explanation for this striking cluster of musical talent lies in a critical fact of biography: all those artists turned 14 around 1955 and 1956, when rock ’n’ roll was first erupting. Those 14th birthdays were the truly historic ones.

Fourteen is a formative age, especially for people growing up in social contexts framed by pop culture. You’re in the ninth grade, confronting the tyrannies of sex and adulthood, struggling to figure out what kind of adult you’d like to be, and you turn to the cultural products most important in your day as sources of cool — the capital of young life.

“Fourteen is a sort of magic age for the development of musical tastes,” says Daniel J. Levitin, a professor of psychology and the director of the Laboratory for Music Perception, Cognition and Expertise at McGill University. “Pubertal growth hormones make everything we’re experiencing, including music, seem very important. We’re just reaching a point in our cognitive development when we’re developing our own tastes. And musical tastes become a badge of identity.”

Read more:

image credit:

via:

Are Cemeteries Just For the Dead?

by  Connie Neumann

Dieter Pausch has formed a close connection with the departed over the past 25 years as caretaker of Munich's eastern graveyard. But the jovial Bavarian's job also includes taking care of the living.

The cemetery keeper ensures that plots and pathways are clean so the bereaved can lay their loved ones to rest with dignity. Moments like the solemn procession from the funeral parlor to the open grave are planned in exact detail. Pausch knows that these few minutes, though they have become routine for his colleagues and undertakers, are filled with grief for relatives. Before the bell rings and the ceremony begins, he has checked the route through the headstones, removing any potential obstacles, even the gardener's wheelbarrows.

"It is about our values, how we get along with one another," Pausch says.

But not all the cemetery's visitors see it that way. Supervisors are sometimes forced to interrupt funeral processions because a growing number of people there are more concerned with a long and healthy life than a final resting place. A growing number of Munich residents looking to escape crowded parks in favor of more tranquil landscapes have adopted the cemetery as part of their fitness route. Neon-clad runners, their ears stuffed with iPod earphones, sometimes appear, puffing and panting, in front of a solemn funeral procession. Such encounters usually happen in the morning during the first funeral of the day, or after offices have closed for the evening. The offenders are usually women, because "they are more figure conscious," Pausch says.

They jog through the rows of gravesites, along gravelled pathways, beneath the shade of the old trees. Thanks to its thick brick walls the graveyard is free of traffic noise and exhaust fumes. Exercise fans stretch their muscles on grave stones and marble angels. "Thoughtless," Pausch calls them, saying he is often tempted to reprimand them for the interruption. But he bites his tongue. "The service has already been spoiled enough already," he says.

Read more:

[ed.  This practice isn't confined to Europe;  my mother used to walk through the local cemetery every day for exercise, along with other walkers and joggers.  I doubt the deceased minded being a part of life.  Beyond the peace of place, cemeteries also stimulate reflection on how other lives were lived.  That said, activities not directly related to honoring he dead should always be respectful.]

 

images:  markk

Sushi Files: Hikari Mono: Kohada, Iwashi and Aji

If you are a Sushi newbie and have been aversed to fishy fish, then Hikarimono would probably be the last type of sushi you should try. Hikarimono literally means "Shiny things" in Japanese and refers to small pelagic fish which live in the water column near the surface of the ocean.  They often swim in schools and are forage feeders and their flesh is full of heart protecting Omega 3 fish  oils. This oil is what gives its flesh its soft and strong fishy flavour. In contrast, milder tasting, bottom feeding fish such as flounder and cod have very little fat the flesh as most of the oil is concentrated in the liver which is why we have Cod Liver Oil.  These small fish are shiny and blue in order to look like the shimmering water on the surface of the ocean so that they are camouflaged from predators like Tuna and Mackeral. They usually reproduce quickly and have short lifespans, so fish such as sardines are herrings are a great choice for those concerned about sustainability and the risk of mercury poisoning as they don't live long enough to accumulate mercury to a toxic level.

In general, the Hikarimono tend to have stronger fish flavour compared to the Shiromi-dane or white flesh fish and it is eaten precisely because of that.  Those people who are fond of fishy fish would usually love it but those like myself who are a little more averse to fishy fish might take a while to appreciate the taste.  While you may eat Shiromi-dane for its texture and subtle sweetness, many fish fanciers would usually want some Hikarimono towards the end of your sushi meal in order to enjoy the stronger flavour.  The exception being the Kohada which is sometimes eating at the beginning of the meal in order to see how good the chef's skills are.

There are several Hikari Mono that are commonly found in Singapore and they range in prices from the cheapest which are Iwashi (Sardine) and Aji (Horse Mackeral) to the more expensive Kohada (Gizzard Shad), Sayori and Saba (Chub Mackeral).

Kohada
This is one of those fish that the Japanese call a Shusse-uo which means that the fish is known by a different name at different stages of growth.  The baby kohada is called a shinko (<5cm) and they are more expensive than the Kohada and come into season in July.  When they reach 10 cm they are called Kohada and this is the usual size they serve for sushi.  Then it becomes a nakatsumi before it becomes known by its proper name, Konashiro which may be around 25cm long. On a side note, you will find that many of the fish are called by the names when they are best for sushi rather than their proper names as in the case of Kohada and Hamachi.  Kohada are plentiful around the waters of Japan and at the time when the Sushi culture first became popular in the Edo period, they were plentiful and cheap and at one stage even cheaper than rice.  So they are sold at every street corner and Kohada is to sushi what Kleenex is to tissue paper.

Even though the fish is called a gizzard shad, it really doesn't have an accurate English name.  The American gizzard shad, Dorosoma cepedianum, is a fish belonging to a  different family altogether but you can understand why they call this a Gizzard Shad as both of these fish have that distinctive long ray that sticks out of the dorsal fin like an antennae. 


Kohada, Gizzard Shad: Konosirus punctatus
Size:  Up to 30cm.  Kohada is best when they are 15cm

Seasonality: Shinko appear in July and grows into Kohada through winter

via:

Square

by E. B. Boyd

The new payment system that Square launched today is going to have a profound effect on how people pay for stuff in the real world—perhaps as profound as the iTunes store has had on the distribution and sale of digital media. And in the process, it will likely upend the entire payments industry.

The interesting thing, though, is that it turns out founder Jack Dorsey never really planned this. His initial goals were much more modest: help people who were cut out of the mainstream payments business accept credit cards. To that end, Square’s story holds some important lessons about how entrepreneurs trying to solve a simple problem can sometimes find themselves stumbling onto a huge opportunity.

Square’s origin story is well known: Dorsey’s former boss and good friend (and eventual co-founder) Jim McKelvey lost a sale for his hand-blown glass because he had no way of accepting credit cards. The problem was one many people had--the barriers to setting yourself up through conventional processes to accept credit card payments were too high for many people. So Dorsey set about seeing if he could create a better system.

The result was the Square reader, which launched a year ago and which allows just about anyone to set themselves up to take credit card payments. Even you. Planning a garage sale and want to enable people to pay for your gerbil cages and Shawn Cassidy LPs by credit card? No problem. Square's for you.

Read more:

via:

Media Matters

David Brock has spent the last decade apologizing to liberals for his role in creating the vast right-wing conspiracy. Now he’s trying something more ambitious and hoping it gains him the respect he craves from the White House.

by Jason Zengerle

There may be no greater testament to ­David Brock’s central role in the vast left-wing conspiracy than the lengths to which Rupert Murdoch will go to avoid him.

In November, a researcher at Media Matters for America, the liberal press-watchdog group that Brock founded seven years ago, noticed that the website ­Charitybuzz was auctioning a “friendly lunch” with Murdoch to benefit the Global Poverty Project. That one of Brock’s worker bees would be keeping tabs on the News Corp. chairman’s calendar should not be terribly surprising. At Media Matters’ headquarters in Washington, D.C., scores of headphone-wearing staffers spend their days (and nights) staring into their television screens and computer monitors, waiting for the latest bits of “conservative misinformation” to emerge from the Fox News Channel and other corners of the right-wing media landscape, all of which are saved on “the big TiVo”—270 terabytes’ worth of hard drive that store over 300,000 hours of TV shows—so that the offending clips can be uploaded to Media Matters’ website. Are you in need of a compendium of the “50 Worst Things Glenn Beck Said on Fox News”? Fear not, Media Matters’ site has one.

But in the past few months, the group has begun to do more than merely monitor Fox’s programming. “What happened after the Obama election, I think, is that Fox morphed into something that isn’t even recognizable as a form of media,” Brock recently told me. “It looks more like a political committee than what it looked like pre-Obama, which was essentially talk radio on television. It’s more dangerous now; it’s more lethal. And so as Fox has doubled down, we’ve doubled down.” In practice, that means no longer just pointing out inaccuracies. Instead, Media Matters is going on the offensive.

“The truth is that the more responsible the media outlet, the more responsive they are to constructive criticism. But with a Sean Hannity, you can correct the same lie ten times and he’ll keep saying it, so you reach your limits with what you can do defensively,” Brock continued. “Now the idea is: What does it take to get the attention of people above the News Channel? What does it take to get the attention of Murdoch?”

Read more:

The Good Life

by Richard Norman

Modern philosophers have been understandably reluctant to pontificate about “the good life”. They have mostly taken the view that it is not the job of philosophers to tell other people how to live their lives. Tastes and preferences differ, people get a kick out of a great variety of things, and if your particular enthusiasm is for gardening, or running marathons, or playing computer games, or playing the financial markets, why should you take any notice of philosophers telling you that you ought to be doing something different?

Maybe there is a place for philosophical accounts of what the morally good life is like. Given the diversity of ways of life, any society, and any modern pluralistic society in particular, is bound to need moral rules which hold this diverse society together and enable people with different ideals and enthusiasms to live alongside one another – values of mutual respect and tolerance, of cooperation, of justice and honesty.

So, it might be said, there is room for substantive philosophical theories about the content of morality, but when it comes to competing pictures of the good life in that wider sense, philosophers are no better placed than anyone else and should refrain from imposing their own predilections on others. We could take a warning from Plato and Aristotle, who were held back by no such inhibitions, and who laboured as philosophers to convince the world that the best life is … the life of the philosopher! To which the appropriate response is “Well they would say that, wouldn’t they?”

Nevertheless, while acknowledging the diversity of tastes and temperaments, maybe we can say something in more general terms about what any human life would have to be like in order to be experienced as satisfying and fulfilling. Perhaps after all we can take a leaf out of Aristotle’s book. The good human life, he says, is the life of happiness – but that as it stands is an empty truism (and it’s even more of a truism in Greek, where the term translated as “happiness” is “eudaimonia”, which could also be translated as “well-being”). What we need, Aristotle says in the Ethics, is some more definite account of what eudaimonia consists in, what makes for a flourishing human life, and for that purpose we need to look at what is distinctive of human beings compared with other living things. I want to take that idea and turn it on its head. What are the distinctive ways in which human lives may fail to be satisfactory? Human beings don’t just suffer physical pain; they don’t just suffer from lack of food and shelter. They may suffer loneliness. They may be bored and frustrated. They may find their lives empty and meaningless. I don’t know whether we can confidently state that these kinds of experience and suffering are uniquely human, but in comparison with the experiences of most other living things they are distinctively human. Conversely, we can venture the general claim that any human being, whatever the particular activities which he or she may go in for, will need to live in a way which avoids or surmounts those sufferings and failings.

Read more:

image credit:

via:

The Edge

Nearly fifty percent of Americans can't come up with $2000. 

Nearly half of Americans are living in a state of "financial fragility," a new paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research reveals. To determine this statistic, researchers from the George Washington School of Business, Princeton University, and Harvard Business School asked survey participants whether they would be able to come up with $2,000 for an "unexpected expense in the next month." 22.2 percent predicted they would be "probably unable" and 27.9 percent said they'd certainly be unable to foot the unplanned bill. The hypothetical cost "reflects the order of magnitude of the cost of an unanticipated major car repair, a large co-payment on a medical expense, legal expenses, or a home repair." But, it was the participants' method of coping that really determined their fragility:

Taken together with those who would pawn their possessions, sell their home, or take out a payday loan, 25.7% of respondents who were asked about coping methods (equal to 18.6% of all respondents) would come up with the funds for an emergency by resorting to what might be seen as extreme measures,” the authors write. “Along with the 27.9% of respondents who report that they could certainly not cope with an emergency, this suggests that approximately 46.5% of all respondents are living very close to the financial edge.

 via: