Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming ‘Wow! What a Ride!’
—Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway
Most years, the Super Bowl is our country’s best-watched TV event. Yet while Super Bowl parties are usually excellent fun – the magical combination of great ads and seven-layer dip – a lot of people attending don’t seem to care about, or pay much attention to, the actual football itself.
In years past, especially when I was in film, I often heard from family and friends in the lead-up to the Oscars – another big TV event. They were competing in Oscar prediction pools, and looking for insider advice. Many of them didn’t care much about the outcome of the Oscars inherently, hadn’t even seen all of the movies in contention. But, just by staking positions on the winners (as often as not solely for bragging rights, rather than with money on the line), they inevitably seemed to be more excited about, and better engaged in, the award show itself.
So, this year, at my brother David’s annual Super Bowl party, we’re trying the same thing. We’ve put together a list of 25 bets – about the game itself and the hoopla surrounding it – and are having all the attendees take their best guess on each. Here, too, there’s no money hinging on it, though we’re trying to round up a crown or trophy we can use, a la the Stanley Cup: whoever gets the most answers right will keep it until they have to defend the title at next year’s Super Bowl.
If my theory is correct, that should keep everyone engaged and enjoying much more than they otherwise might.
Here are our questions:
In case you want to try the same thing yourself, here’s a printable PDF of the 25 questions. If you try it out, email me and let me know how it works!
Punxsutawney Phil: incompetent or evil?
More on fighting Trump: former congressional staffers on best practices for making Congress listen.
While I'm working, I try to avoid multitasking, because a decade of research has shown that human brains suck at it.
But during relatively large swaths of my days, I end up doing non-work, low-brain-intensity tasks: I spend cumulative hours walking my dogs, riding the subway, shopping for groceries, cooking dinner. And through all of that, I usually listen to audio from my iPhone.
For the first half of the day, it's audiobooks. I tend to read non-fiction with my eyeballs, and listen to fiction with my ears; between the two, I can easily cruise through a book or more each week.
But from lunch on, I primarily listen to podcasts. Alongside a couple of news-aggregating daily emails, and an occasional jaunt through Twitter, it’s how I get nearly all of my world news and analysis. And it’s my primary channel for finding interesting new people, ideas, books, films, and more.
A number of friends and family members have mentioned that they, too, want to take up more podcast listening; but with literally hundreds of thousands of podcasts on iTunes, it’s often hard to know where to start.
To that end, here’s what I listen to regularly. My own interests vary pretty widely, so your mileage may vary. It’s also worth noting that the current list veers more heavily towards politics and policy than it did a year ago, now that we live in the land of Trump. But, regardless of your interests, I think these are all at least worth a single episode test-listen; in my experience, after just a couple of minutes, you’ll be able to decide whether each warrants further listening/subscribing or not.
I’m a big fan of the Overcast app, which I find far easier to wrangle than iOS’s built-in Podcasts app. So, rather than link the below Podcasts to their iTunes pages, I’d suggest you download Overcast, and just enter the below names into its search engine (the plus sign at the top right of the app) to find them instead.
I listen to pretty much every episode of these shows:
These are more hit-or-miss for me, though I listen to a good number of their episodes:
And, finally, here are some newly-discovered shows that I think are likely to be good, but I can’t yet really vouch for:
It’s pretty extraordinary that all of this content is available free online in today’s world. Take advantage of that, and give these shows a listen yourself.
Given the crazy prices in NYC stores, I do most of my shopping online. Amazon Prime, in particular, has been a lifesaver, as something like a bag of dog food costs about 50% less there than it does at the PetCo in my neighborhood.
But when shopping on Amazon, I’ll often find several vendors selling the same thing at different prices, so I spend a fair amount of time searching around the site to make sure I’m getting the best deals.
Similarly, when I’m buying from any other site, before I check out, I Google around for potential coupon codes, then try them out on my cart. Though that, too, takes a bit of time, I can often save 10-15%, and I’m cheap enough for that to justify the effort.
Over the weekend, however, I discovered Honey, a great Chrome extension that does both of those things automatically. Now, I can save minutes and save money.
On Amazon, Honey will mark a given item as the best-priced version of that product, or link you across to a cheaper iteration of the same thing.
And, elsewhere (say, JCrew, PsPrint, or Intuit), it will test out coupon codes for you behind the scenes at checkout, automatically entering the one that gives you the largest discount.
It’s a small tool, but one that (especially if you shop mostly online) can add up to big savings. Try Honey, and save some time and money yourself.
Californian dreams and their winner-takes-all industries.
With February just around the corner, we’re about to hit The Big Resolutioner Fall-Off in gyms the world over. Statistics show that, after a month, more than 50% of people have already given up on their New Year’s resolutions, and by the first week in February, gym attendance drops precipitously from its January peak to the lower leves seen through the balance of the year.
Obviously, people give up on their resolutions – and their fitness resolutions in particular – for a slew of reasons. In most cases, however, there’s a single, over-arching cause: after a month of full-bore effort, most people don’t feel like they’re getting results that justify the effort.
Sure, there are more or less effective ways to improve your fitness. But body recomposition (losing fat and gaining muscle) is slow going in even the best of circumstances; research by the CDC and others has shown that people who sustain weight loss (rather than just yo-yoing back up) are those that lose about a pound a week. And as most people who take up exercise again after a break initially add muscle as well as losing fat, it’s pretty common to see scale weight only drop a pound or two over the course of a first month, even with strong, consistent effort.
When most people set goals (like New Year’s resolutions), they think in terms of results: “I want x to happen by time y.” For project goals – starting a company, buying a home, etc. – that makes sense, as you can then break those goals down into a series of sub-goals along the way, and chart your progress by seeing how well you knock off those projects. But losing weight (like, say, learning a language) is more of a process goal; it doesn’t break down well into smaller goals, but is instead just about doing the same thing, consistently, for an extended period of time. Worse, process goals rarely achieve linear results; instead, progress usually fluctuates up and down, like prices on the stock market, even while the overall trend moves in the right direction over time.
So evaluating process goals by their short-term results is a fast track to feeling demoralized and giving up. Instead, people who succeed tend to be those who make the process itself the goal: they evaluate their success not based on how much weight they lose, but on the percentage of their weekly meals they eat according to plan, or the number of times they work out in a given week. The always-insightful Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) talks about this as the difference between ‘systems’ and ‘goals’ – the goal being weight loss, but the system being eating healthfully and working out.
In my experience, that kind of system-focused thinking is far more effective, because it’s much more self-reinforcing. If you’re solely focused on results, in a given day, you’re unlikely to see enough physical change to feel good about yourself; but if you’re focused on process, on executing your system, every healthy meal, every trip to the gym is something about which you can pat yourself on the back.
So, if you’ve been pushing hard through January, but are feeling a dit demoralized, and on the brink of giving up, I’d strongly suggest you switch your thinking to a systems / process approach instead. Ask yourself which habits you could sustain at an 80% level or better over the balance of 2017 would make a real difference. Maybe it’s walking 10,000 steps daily, cutting out refined carbs, or hitting a gym class three times a week. Then start evaluating yourself, day by day, just on how well you hit those habits. Maybe even buy a calendar, and draw in a smiley face for each day you pull them off.
In all honesty, that still won’t move you faster along the slow path to weight loss, fitness, or health; but it will hugely increase the odds that you keep going throughout the balance of the year, in a way that will allow you, one cumulative step at a time, to actually reach those goals in the end.
Amazing, vintage Jewish sci-fi: On Venus, have we got a rabbi!
Running might actually be good for your knees.