Copying Works: How Samsung’s Decision to Mimic Apple Paid Off in Spades

In the fall of 2008, just a year after it released the iPhone, Apple became the most profitable phone maker in the world. The milestone wasn’t much remarked upon by the press. At the time, Apple was still selling only a tiny number of phones compared to its rivals, and it wasn’t clear that it could ever become a global juggernaut in the phone business.

Still, because rivals couldn’t match Apple’s average sales price and profit margins, they were falling behind. In the fourth quarter of 2008, Nokia, which had long been the phone industry’s profit leader, sold 113 million devices worldwide, about 15 million of them smartphones. It made about $1.2 billion in profit on all those phones. That same quarter, Apple sold just 4 million iPhones. But that single device earned Apple a profit of $1.3 billion.

These numbers—which Asymco’s Horace Dediu has helpfully archived here—provide the backstory to an industry in panic. If you were a phone maker watching the iPhone’s sudden rise in 2008, you had to make a quick decision. A storm was blasting through your business and your survival depended on how you reacted.

One option was to do nothing. A lot of firms opted for this path—Nokia and RIM, for instance, seem to have decided that the iPhone was a blip, a cultish device that would never reach mass appeal, so why bother taking it on?

Another option was to try to leapfrog Apple. You could spend many months, maybe even years, working on devices that aimed not just to match the iPhone’s innovations, but to beat them. This was Palm’s idea. Belatedly, it’s what Microsoft began to do, too.

Then there was a third choice. You could just copy Apple. You could borrow the iPhone’s key ideas, make a half-hearted attempt to dress them up in your own brand, and bake them all into your product line-up.

On Friday, a federal jury decided that Samsung was guilty of doing just that. But you don’t need this decision, nor any of the damning internal documents uncovered during the patent case, to realize this. Just look at the devices Samsung released in response to the iPhone—for instance, the 2010 Galaxy S, pictured above. If that’s not copying, the term has no meaning.

It’s tempting, after such a sweeping verdict in Apple’s favor, to conclude that Samsung’s decision to mimic the iPhone was a terrible mistake. The firm will now be on the hook for at least $1 billion in damages, and the judge could triple that amount. Samsung will likely face sales injunctions on many of its products, and will be forced to quickly design around Apple’s patents in its current and upcoming devices, if not to pay a steep licensing fee. Other companies that took inspiration from Apple—including Motorola, HTC and, at the top of the chain, Google—will also be stung by this decision.

But if you study what’s happened in the mobile industry since 2007, a different moral emerges. It goes like this: Copying works.

by Farhad Manjoo, PandoDaily |  Read more:

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I am in a state of shock

In 1961, a professor of English wrote to author Flannery O'Connor and asked her, on behalf of his students, to explain "A Good Man is Hard to Find" — a short story of hers that his class had recently been studying, and for which they were struggling to find an acceptable interpretation. He wrote, in part:

"We have debated at length several possible interpretations, none of which fully satisfies us. In general we believe that the appearance of the Misfit is not 'real' in the same sense that the incidents of the first half of the story are real. Bailey, we believe, imagines the appearance of the Misfit, whose activities have been called to his attention on the night before the trip and again during the stopover at the roadside restaurant. Bailey, we further believe, identifies himself with the Misfit and so plays two roles in the imaginary last half of the story. But we cannot, after great effort, determine the point at which reality fades into illusion or reverie. Does the accident literally occur, or is it part of Bailey's dream? Please believe me when I say we are not seeking an easy way out of our difficulty. We admire your story and have examined it with great care, but we are not convinced that we are missing something important which you intended us to grasp. We will all be very grateful if you comment on the interpretation which I have outlined above and if you will give us further comments about your intention in writing 'A Good Man is Hard to Find.'"O'Connor was unimpressed, and responded as follows.

(Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor, via Patrick Robbins; Image: Flannery O'Connor, via.)

28 March 61

The interpretation of your ninety students and three teachers is fantastic and about as far from my intentions as it could get to be. If it were a legitimate interpretation, the story would be little more than a trick and its interest would be simply for abnormal psychology. I am not interested in abnormal psychology.

There is a change of tension from the first part of the story to the second where the Misfit enters, but this is no lessening of reality. This story is, of course, not meant to be realistic in the sense that it portrays the everyday doings of people in Georgia. It is stylized and its conventions are comic even though its meaning is serious.

Bailey’s only importance is as the Grandmother’s boy and the driver of the car. It is the Grandmother who first recognized the Misfit and who is most concerned with him throughout. The story is a duel of sorts between the Grandmother and her superficial beliefs and the Misfit’s more profoundly felt involvement with Christ’s action which set the world off balance for him.

The meaning of a story should go on expanding for the reader the more he thinks about it, but meaning cannot be captured in an interpretation. If teachers are in the habit of approaching a story as if it were a research problem for which any answer is believable so long as it is not obvious, then I think students will never learn to enjoy fiction. Too much interpretation is certainly worse than too little, and where feeling for a story is absent, theory will not supply it.

My tone is not meant to be obnoxious. I am in a state of shock.

Flannery O'Connor

via: Letters of Note

IKEA's New Catalogs: Less Pine, More Pixels

Almhult, Sweden—That couch catching your eye in the 2013 edition of IKEA's new catalog may not be a couch at all.

It is likely the entire living room was created by a graphic artist. In fact, much of the furniture and settings in the 324-page catalog are simply a collection of pixels and polygons arranged on a computer.

The Swedish furniture giant has for decades spent more than two-thirds of its marketing budget building and furnishing living quarters, which are typically portrayed with a sparse, fastidious fashion sensibility and lighted with impeccable precision.

But the privately-held company's quest to curb costs and boost productivity has it mothballing some of this real-world production. It is instead turning to 3-D graphics to fill its pages.

This year 12% of IKEA's content for the Web, catalog and brochures were rendered virtually; that number will increase to 25% next year.

In all, IKEA plans to publish 208 million catalogs this year, more than double the amount of Bibles expected to be produced. And it will create 62 different versions in 43 countries.

"It's a clever way to save money," Anneli Sjogren, head of photography at IKEA, said during a recent interview at the company's sprawling photo studio in this sleepy southern town. "We don't have to throw away kitchens in the Dumpster after the photo shoot."

Instead, sets for entire rooms—spanning kitchens to bathrooms to porches—can be mocked up and created on a computer screen without the help of a single camera. (...)

Putting together a catalog is a massive task, taking about 10 months from concept to finished product. Until late in the last decade IKEA relied entirely on its sprawling photo studio here. The studio is one of the largest in Europe, covering 94,000 square feet—about a third the size of an IKEA store—and employs 285 photographers, carpenters, interior designers and other people working full time on photo shoots.

IKEA's 3-D team is housed in the same building. Faced with a shortage of people capable of doing this work, the company is collaborating with photo schools to teach computer design skills. It is also retraining photographers to better create a scene without a camera. The company said it is retaining all photographers, carpenters and set designers and reapplying their skills to the 3-D environment.

"With real photography you're constrained by the four walls," Ms. Sjogren said, noting the company is running out of room in its studio. "A kitchen has to be built in a week or two and then torn down the following week to make room for a bedroom shoot…everything has to run like clockwork."

A kitchen shot for potential U.S. buyers might have darker colors. "Now let's say we want to sell that kitchen in Japan," she added. "Japanese people, like Scandinavians, like lighter hues of wood than Americans."

Instead of rebuilding the kitchen, IKEA can easily change the color and the background. "And we can still use the same basil plant on the counter. In 3-D, the basil plant never wilts," she said.

by Jens Hansegard, WSJ | Read more:
Illustration: IKEA

Scott Waters. Domestic Violence Series.
http://scottwaters.ca/index.html
via:

Louise Hoffsten

[ed. Whoa. I don't think I'll ever listen to this old Willie Dixon/Muddy Waters tune again without thinking of this version.]

How Facebook Design Tricks People Into Trading Away Privacy

On TechCrunch, Avi Charkham provides an excellent side-by-side comparison of an older Facebook design and the latest one, showing how the service has moved to minimize the extent to which its users are notified of the privacy "choices" they make when they interact with the service. The Facebook rubric is that people don't value their privacy ("privacy is dead, get over it,") and we can tell that because they demonstrate it by using Facebook. But really, Facebook is designed to minimize your understanding of the privacy trades you're making and your ability to make those trades intelligently.

All privacy offers on FB are take-it-or-leave-it: you give up all your privacy to play Angry Birds, or you don't play Angry Birds. There's no "give up some of your privacy to play Angry Birds" offer, or "here's a game that's 95% as fun as Angry Birds but requires that you only yield up the most trivial facts of your life to play it" that we can test the market against.

Charkham's five examples from the visual interface design are very good evidence that FB isn't a harbinger of the death of privacy; rather, it's a tribute to the power of deceptive hard-sell tactics to get people to make privacy trade-offs they wouldn't make in a fair deal.

#3: The Tiny Hidden Info Symbol Trick 

In the old Design Facebook presented a detailed explanation about the “basic” information you’re about to expose to the apps you’re adding. In the new design they decided to hide that info. If you pay careful attention you’ll see a tiny little “?” symbol and if you hover over it you’ll discover that this app is about to gain access to your name, profile pic, Facebook user ID, gender, networks, list of friends and any piece of info you’ve made public on Facebook. Quite a lot of info for a 20×10 pixel tiny hidden info symbol don’t you think?!

Of course, the interface is only a small part of the tactics used to manipulate privacy decisions on FB. More insidious and likely more effective is the use of the proprietary algorithms to apply intermittent social reward for disclosure, driving users to greater and greater disclosures -- something well documented in The Filter Bubble, Eli Pariser's 2011 book on the subject.

5 Design Tricks Facebook Uses To Affect Your Privacy Decisions (via Hacker News)

by Cory Doctorow, Boing Boing 

Hysterical Literature

The black-and-white video begins with a woman sitting at a table with a book in front of her. She looks into the camera and states her name, the name of the book, and begins to read. It seems she’s overwhelmed by the words — there’s a slight twitch, a smirk, a straightening of the back, a desperate breath in — and she struggles to continue reading.

Eventually you realize there is more to this scene than it at first seems — maybe when you notice the ever-so-slight buzzing sound in the background, or maybe not until the moans begin. Either way, before the end of the video there is the unmistakable appearance of an orgasm. But you never see just what has produced it: Is there someone or something under that table? Was it just the words that produced those paroxysms of pleasure?

This is the setup of art photographer Clayton Cubitt’s new video series, “Hysterical Literature.” So far, there have been two installments: one starring porn performer Stoya reading “Necrophilia Variations” by Supervert, the other featuring a woman identified simply as Alicia reading Walt Whitman’s sensual “Leaves of Grass.”But frankly, they could read their grocery lists and I’d still hang on their every word, every breath, every squirming movement during their vulnerable, resistant build to orgasm.

I talked to Cubitt, also known as Siege, by email about his fascinating new project, the line between high and low art, and authentic portraiture in the age of self-branding.

by Tracy Clark-Flory, Salon | Read more:

The New Art of Underbragging

If you're unusually insightful and perceptive, like me, you may have noticed that boastfulness is increasingly socially acceptable these days. Perhaps this helps explain the unhinged gusto with which Usain Bolt declared himself a living legend last week at the Olympics: in a world where every other Facebook status update is a veiled act of self-aggrandisement, the only way to make an impact with your bragging is to push it to the limit. The more everyday kind of bragging – the mock-shy mention of your latest professional achievement, the smartphone photographs of your current holiday idyll, the drive-by name-dropping – is the fuel that powers social media.

Laughing at others' clunky efforts at self-promotion used to be a strictly annual pleasure, confined to the opening of round-robin Christmas letters; now it's a daily chore. This is why, speaking for myself, I try not to add to the problem by engaging in too much boastfulness in public forums. But then I have often been complimented on my restraint – once, indeed, by a rather prominent celebrity, whose name I probably ought not to mention here.

Technology is partly to blame: with so many more channels through which to manipulate one's public image, it's not especially surprising that we are tempted to present ourselves as positively as possible. The filters of social media make things worse. A network such as Twitter is designed precisely to connect you with exactly the kinds of people who don't mind your boasts, while those who might keep you in check won't follow you in the first place: your audience thus serves as an army of enablers, applauding your self-applause. Writing recently in Slate, the literary critic Jacob Silverman complained that this self-reinforcing niceness was damaging his trade, by dissuading people from criticising books they disliked. "It's not only shallow, it's untrue," he wrote, "and it's having a chilling effect on literary culture."

But, as the Wall Street Journal noted this week, in a worried piece headlined Are We All Braggarts Now?, the causes may be economic, too. In the most competitive job market in recent memory, the pressure to portray yourself as better than everyone else is intense. Predictably, there's neuroscientific evidence to undergird all this: self-disclosure activates the same brain regions as eating or sex, according to research by Harvard neuroscientists published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, though you can bet they mentioned it on their Facebook pages too.

And as bragging grows ubiquitous, it evolves, the better to penetrate the defences of those who would otherwise be too embarrassed to engage in it. Hence the "humblebrag", that staple of Twitter-boasting that deploys self-deprecation in order surreptitiously to draw attention to the bragger's brilliance or privilege. Here's Cheryl Cole: "How can I still be nervous about red carpets after 10 years. Eeek!" And a classic from George Bush's former press secretary Ari Fleischer: "They just announced my flight at LaGuardia is number 15 for takeoff. I miss Air Force One!!"

By now, though, even the humblebrag is growing easy to spot, thereby defeating its purpose, and so it is giving way to a new mutation, spotted and named by blogger Jen Doll: the "underbrag".

by Oliver Burkeman, The Guardian |  Read more:

Photograph: McClatchy-Tribune/Getty Images

The Best Book Reviews Money Can Buy

Reviews by ordinary people have become an essential mechanism for selling almost anything online; they are used for resorts, dermatologists, neighborhood restaurants, high-fashion boutiques, churches, parks, astrologers and healers — not to mention products like garbage pails, tweezers, spa slippers and cases for tablet computers. In many situations, these reviews are supplanting the marketing department, the press agent, advertisements, word of mouth and the professional critique.

But not just any kind of review will do. They have to be somewhere between enthusiastic and ecstatic.

“The wheels of online commerce run on positive reviews,” said Bing Liu, a data-mining expert at the University of Illinois, Chicago, whose 2008 research showed that 60 percent of the millions of product reviews on Amazon are five stars and an additional 20 percent are four stars. “But almost no one wants to write five-star reviews, so many of them have to be created.”

Consumer reviews are powerful because, unlike old-style advertising and marketing, they offer the illusion of truth. They purport to be testimonials of real people, even though some are bought and sold just like everything else on the commercial Internet.

Mr. Liu estimates that about one-third of all consumer reviews on the Internet are fake. Yet it is all but impossible to tell when reviews were written by the marketers or retailers (or by the authors themselves under pseudonyms), by customers (who might get a deal from a merchant for giving a good score) or by a hired third-party service.

The Federal Trade Commission has issued guidelines stating that all online endorsements need to make clear when there is a financial relationship, but enforcement has been minimal and there has been a lot of confusion in the blogosphere over how this affects traditional book reviews.

The tale of GettingBookReviews.com, which commissioned 4,531 reviews in its brief existence, is a story of a vast but hidden corner of the Internet, where Potemkin villages bursting with ardor arise overnight. At the same time, it shows how the book world is being transformed by the surging popularity of electronic self-publishing.

For decades a largely stagnant industry controlled from New York, book publishing is fragmenting and changing at high speed. Twenty percent of Amazon’s top-selling e-books are self-published. They do not get to the top without adulation, lots and lots of it.

by David Streitfeld, NY Times |  Read more:

Photo: Nick Oxford

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Nicolas de Staël [+]
Abstract Figure
mk107 1954 Oil painting 60x81cm  here

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Neil Armstrong (August 1930 - August 2012)

[ed. Of all the people I've admired in my life, Neil Armstrong would rank near the top of that list. Not only for what he accomplished, but for how he handled the fame that came with it. Imagine being the first (and perhaps last) representative of all mankind.]

Neil Armstrong, the Moon’s Mystery Man

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100 Riffs (A Brief History of Rock and Roll)

h/t 3 Quarks

Jean-François Jonvelle
Untitled 1983

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Fingertips

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The Demise of the Car

Like other dying industries of the past century, the global auto industry has entered decline after having fully embedded itself in the political complex. Regardless of political leaning, federal governments from Europe, to Japan, to the United States have and will continue to do everything possible to save the industry.

US automakers received their first bailout in late 2008 from the Bush Administration. The bailouts continued in the Obama Administration. (Both presidencies that could hardly be more dissimilar, but were united in their assumption of an enduring future for cars). For Republicans — a party that claims to adhere to free-market principles — releasing a first payment of over $13 billion to the industry was a classic foxhole-conversion in the midst of the financial crisis. For Democrats — a party that claims to be concerned with climate change, the environment, and public transport — the enormous financial support to the industry was only one part of the current administration’s continued embrace of the auto-highway complex.

More broadly, however, global governments are captured by sunk-cost decision making as the past 60-70 years of highway infrastructure investment is now a legacy just too painful to leave behind. Interestingly, whether citizens and governments want to face this reality or not, features of the oil economy are already going away as infrastructure is increasingly stranded. Moreover, there are cultural shifts now coming into play as young people are no longer buying cars – in the first instance because they can’t afford them, and in the second instance because it’s increasingly no longer necessary to own a car to be part of one’s group. See this piece from Atlantic Cities:

Young People Aren’t Buying Cars Because They’re Buying Smart Phones Instead

Youth culture was once car culture. Teens cruised their Thunderbirds to the local drive-in, Springsteen fantasized about racing down Thunder Road, and Ferris Bueller staged a jailbreak from the ‘burbs in a red Ferrari. Cars were Friday night. Cars were Hollywood. Yet these days, they can’t even compete with an iPhone – or so car makers, and the people who analyze them for a living, seem to fear. As Bloomberg reported this morning, many in the auto industry “are concerned that financially pressed young people who connect online instead of in person could hold down peak demand by 2 million units each year.” In other words, Generation Y may be happy to give up their wheels as long as they have the web. And in the long term, that could mean Americans will buy just 15 million cars and trucks each year, instead of around 17 million.

If future car sales in the US will be limited by the loss of 2 million purchases just from young people alone, then the US can hardly expect to return to even 15 million car and truck sales per year. US sales have only recovered to 14 million. (And that looks very much like the peak for the reflationary 2009-2012 period)

Indeed, the migration from suburbs back to the cities, the resurrection of rail, and the fact that oil will never be cheap again puts economies – and culture – on a newly defined path to other forms of transport and other ways of working. (...)

Obsolete Infrastructure

For half a century, the auto-highway complex has been a conduit for political power, and myriad players have self-interested reasons to maintain the system. However, the contraction of motorized transport in the West – a natural outcome of high oil prices and debt saturation – will gain further strength as various states (or countries) simply run out of money to build new roads.

As discussed in California: Bellwether for the Rest of America, the highway-rich landscape of the Golden State (for example) sucks up 90% of its transport budget. But California roads are now among the worst in the nation, costing drivers some of the highest on-road expenses merely as a result of poor surface conditions.

To the extent that states can no longer maintain roads to an adequate standard, infrastructure will become stranded.

We see the same related effects in US airport infrastructure as many regional airports have either seen a huge reduction in traffic or have shut down completely. (The US Postal Service and its current financial difficulties also reflect the emerging trend, as the USPS is obligated to deliver mail to remote locations even as postal revenues drop on the higher cost of – you guessed it – energy and gasoline.)

by Gregor McDonald, Gregor.us |  Read more:

Image via:

Are You Worth More Dead Than Alive?

‘Do you see lights?” Ruben Robles asked his brother, Mark, in 2007. Bright, star-shaped and white, they flashed before Ruben’s eyes while he was driving, shopping at Costco, feeding the cats. Mark didn’t see anything, so Robles went to a doctor, who thought that the visions might be stress-induced. Robles ran a collection agency in Los Angeles, and the hours were long, the debtors argumentative. Several weeks later, Ruben began suffering seizures. He went to see another doctor, and this one ordered an M.R.I., which revealed a ghostly white orb on his left frontal lobe. The diagnosis was brain cancer. Only 36 years old, Ruben was told that he might not live to see his 38th birthday.

Horrified, Robles says he thought constantly about God. But his crisis was practical as well as existential. Over the next year and a half, surgeons operated on his brain three times, excising as much of the cancer as they safely could. The side effects of the operations left Robles barely able to walk and unable to speak more than a word or two at a time. He shuttered the collection agency. His wife left him, and Robles, needing daily help, squeezed into his mother’s Chihuahua-filled apartment. The medical bills were mounting, and Robles was worried: though he believed God would provide for him in the afterlife, what he desperately needed until then was money.

Ron Escobar, a close friend of Robles’s, went to Carole Fiedler, an insurance expert, for help. Fiedler saw that there was no vacation home or Google stock to unload. But Robles did have a life-insurance policy for half a million dollars. Life insurance is designed to benefit the living, a spouse or heirs, not those who perish. But Fiedler, who owns a firm called Innovative Settlements, knew that a life-insurance policy is an asset that can be resold to a friend or stranger just as a car, boat or house can. In a transaction known as a viatical settlement (for terminally ill patients) or a life settlement (for everyone else), the person selling his insurance gets an immediate cash payment. The buyer, in exchange, is named as the beneficiary and pays the premiums until the insured person dies. Life no longer afforded Robles a traditional way to make money, but to the right investor, Fiedler advised, his imminent death was worth a great deal.

Selling your life and selling a house have more in common than you’d think. The seller puts a listing on the market. Prospective buyers do research and get inspections; there are offers and counteroffers until the seller accepts a bid. The seller doesn’t literally peddle his own life, of course, but his life-insurance policy. The distinction is in many ways moot, however, as the sales value is inextricably linked to a cold-eyed estimation of how much longer the seller has to live. In the case of Robles’s policy, a life-settlement company in Georgia, Habersham Funding, expressed interest. Escobar shipped off six boxes’ worth of Robles’s medical records, thousands of pages in all, to Habersham. The firm, in turn, analyzed the records and also had them scrutinized by an external company specializing in life-expectancy analysis. Fiedler’s recollection is that the reports confirmed the grim prognosis and that Robles had less than two years left to live.

Fiedler, for her part, tried to convince Habersham that Robles was knocking on death’s door. The sooner Robles died, the fewer premiums the buyer would have to pay and the greater the potential value of his policy. “I would never lie, but my job is to make my clients look as bad as possible,” Fiedler says. Habersham opened its bidding at $250,000. “You’ve got to give us more money than that,” Fiedler recalls yelling during a phone negotiation. “This guy is really sick!” The company bumped its offer to $305,000. Fiedler accepted, and the stakes were set. The buyer’s profit would be the $500,000 insurance payout upon Robles’s death minus the $305,000 settlement and whatever the company had paid in premiums. Escobar, meanwhile, was hoping that his friend could beat the grim odds. “I told Ruben, ‘Look, they’re betting that you’re going to die,’ ” Escobar says. “ ‘You’re betting that you’ll live.’ ”

by James Vlahos, NY Times |  Read more:

hoto illustration by Katherine Wolkoff. Models: COACD; FunnyFace Today

My Boss Has Body Odour and I Have Sex with My Twin

In the late 17th century, a “panel of experts” answered reader queries submitted to the The Athenian Mercury, on topics ranging from literature to epistemology; the magazine’s spin-off, The Ladies Mercury, was devoted solely to advising “virgins, wives, or widows.” A hundred years later, the Ladies Monthly Museum, a periodical devoted to the “Amusement and Instruction” of polite females, would provide what’s probably the template for the contemporary advice column. Since then, “agony aunts” (and “uncles”) have become staples across media—print (Ann Landers, Dear Abby, Dan Savage), radio (Dr. Drew), online (Cary Tennis)—and the most distinctive voices among them have become iconic.

But why do complete strangers seek advice from people they hardly know? And likewise, how do advice columnists—who are rarely psychologists or ethicists by training—justify their answers?

Hazlitt recently gathered four of our favourite columnists for a round of shoptalk on the ethics and challenges of the advice game. Cheryl Strayed, otherwise known as ‘Dear Sugar’ at The Rumpus, has published two books this year: the New York Times bestseller Wild, a heartrending memoir about her arduous solo trek along the Pacific Crest Trail in the wake of a marriage break-up and her mother’s death; and a collection of her ‘Dear Sugar’ columns titled Tiny Beautiful Things. Cary Tennis writes the ‘Since You Asked’ column at Salon, where his existential musings have offered comfort to readers since 2001. Emily Yoffe is Slate’s ‘Dear Prudence’, while her other writing has appeared in the New York Times and Esquire. Lynn Coady is a former advice columnist for The Globe and Mail and her novel, The Antagonist, was shortlisted for the 2011 Giller Prize.

Are there common threads or themes that you see over and over in the questions you get? Questions that seem to be real problems in a lot of people’s lives that they keep writing in about in variations?

Cheryl: Yes, a ton. There are a lot of people with broken hearts. And they’ll never get over so and so leaving them.

Emily: Yeah, I never run those because the answer is the same and it’s very boring. It’s just, “Move forward.” The guy I thought I’d kill myself over when I was 27 I can’t remember the name of now. There are some big general categories. One is cubicle land. The horrors of the farters, the breathers, the hummers, the eaters. I can only do a limited number of “My husband looks at porn.”

Lynn: With 'Group Therapy,' because of the nature of the column, I got a lot of emotional etiquette questions. It had a jury effect. A lot of people wrote in about some relationship they had, and both parties were hurt and insulted by something the other had done, and the over arching question was “Which one of us is the asshole here?”

Emily: Another thing I’ve learned from the column is write the damn thank you note! This feeling of “I haven’t been sufficiently acknowledged” is really deep. Read the Bible. Cain and Abel. What was that over? God liked this gift better than that gift. They seem trivial, but they’re big.

Cheryl: That’s funny. I hardly get etiquette or work-related stuff. I get a lot of sex and love questions. There are far more 28-year-old virgins out there then I ever would have imagined.

Emily: Don’t you want to put them together?

Cheryl: Introduce them to each other? Yeah. There are several questions from virgins that stump us. I’ve gotten questions from virgins that ask, “How do you get to the point where you have sex with someone else?” I don’t know how to explain that. I always had the opposite problem, like how do you get to a place where you don’t have sex with someone?It’s funny.

Emily: I agree. There’s something heartbreaking about that. I get a lot of “I’m 25, 27, 28. Everyone says I’m attractive. I have a good job, but no one from the opposite sex has ever touched me.” And you wonder. There are some people who miss the boat in high school and they think there’s some kind of magical thing that happened that they missed. And they get older and older and they’re heading toward becoming a 40-year-old virgin.

Cheryl: Well maybe that’s a part of it. They missed that moment where they were supposed to do that thing. And then now they’re on the other side of it and it becomes an issue. Cary, how have you answered this?

Cary: The introversion/extroversion thing is hard sometimes. Some people are deeply introverted and it’s hard to fathom. As my detractors will be happy to note, I don’t always provide answers. Sometimes I’m just writing a thing. I answer a lot of questions that are unanswerable, because I’m not really answering them. I’m like singing a song. I’m trying to say something comforting.

Emily: I think Cary gets to the heart of what makes each of our columns different. What you describe is very different from what I do. I’ve had people say, “I don’t know how you answered that.” I say I only answer the ones I think I can answer! People are looking at these columns for different things.

by Britt Harvey, Hazlitt |  Read more:

Illustration by Andrew Kolb