Recently re-watched Sherlock Holmes, the first of the two Guy Ritchie movies with Robert Downey, Jr as the famous fictional detective. I’ve seen both movies multiple times, but on this re-watch several things struck me that I hadn’t noticed before:

• Rachel McAdams' Irene Adler is the weakest part of the movie. Her acting doesn't hold up very well - especially compared to the actress who played Irene Adler for the recent Sherlock TV series - but within the film itself she seems stiff and dull compared to the performers around her. I came away with a greater feel for Mary - Watson's fiancée - as a character than Adler, which is perhaps why McAdams was dropped so early in the sequel, while Kelly Reilly's Mary got a larger role.
• The villain is entirely wrong. He was cast incorrectly, coming off as cartoonish and silly rather than threatening. The whole occult mis-drection angle is outside the mood of a Sherlock mystery, and clashes with the otherwise steampunk-lite industrial trappings of the movie. It's a constant distraction to be rolling my eyes every time the villain shows up and starts mumbling about hexes and spells.
• The action sequences where we see Holmes calculate each move in advance are still amazing. They make what would be standard - and therefore boring - fight sequences interesting again, giving us insight into how much calculation Holmes puts into every part of his life, and completely justifying the film's emphasis on more physical roles for both Holmes and Watson.
• In comparison, the extended action scenes toward the end of the movie - shots fired, martial arts employed, multiple fights going on at once - just seem busy, and not that interesting. They don't have any of the comedy or setting interest that the first fight sequence between Holmes and Dredger has, nor do they use the Holmes-fight-calculation technique that made the other fights interesting to watch (would it have been so bad to show Adler or Watson trying to do the same fight planning during this sequence?).

Novel broke 79,000 words this morning. That’s 5,000 more words than last week, putting me back on my desired schedule.

So waking up that half-hour earlier has been worth it. I’ve been getting in 250-400 words in that extra 30 minutes, making it a lot easier for me to hit 1,000 words by the end of the day.

Writing at lunch hasn’t worked out as well for me. I’ve often got errands to run and chores to do in that hour, and even if I try to carve out 30 min for writing, my mind’s so busy with other things that I end up just staring at the page.

Fortunately, I’ve done much better with writing at the end of the day, especially since I’ve got the morning kick-start to relieve some of the pressure.

So, I’ll keep up the new habit next week, and try to use the weekend to catch up from the week I lost to flu. My goal is still to finish by the end of this month, so I’ve got some cranking to do.

True, it’s up for several Academy Awards. And yes, it’s an ambitious project, to film a single set of actors each year for twelve years and splice the scenes together into a growing-up story.

Except that it’s a boring movie. We spend three hours watching short scenes that for the most part have no drama, no conflict, no plot at all. On top of that, the two main characters we see through most scenes - the kid and his sister - are both incredibly boring. Neither of them seems to care about anything, greeting most of their parent’s concern and anger with a shrug. 

The movie seems designed to coast by on its premise alone. And, seeing as it’s gotten several Academy Award nominations, that seems to have worked for it.

Unfortunately, I’ve seen child actors grow up before (Harry Potter, anyone?) and I’ve seen shaggy, low-plot stories done well before (Dazed and Confused, remarkably from the same director as Boyhood). So neither of Boyhood’s gimmicks are enough for me.

Fixing it is simple: make it interesting. Keep the actors, keep the concept, keep the low-plot nature of things. But make each scene (or set of scenes) picked from a time period be some conflict, something dramatic that seems very important to the boy (and therefore us) at the time. This will get us involved in the kid’s life, show them as actually giving a damn about something, and draw us in to the movie.

You don’t have to tie each of the conflicts together. You don’t even have to make them about the big, cliché events (first kiss, first date, etc). So you can keep the shaggy-dog nature of the story, just showing a kid growing up, but by picking out conflicts involving things the kid cares about, you draw the audience in. They care, because the kid cares.

Over multiple segments, this structure would drive home the concept of the passage of time, and how much we change without realizing it growing up. Mason’s boyhood concerns and conflicts would fade and eventually be forgotten, replaced with new cares and concerns.

Perhaps one or two would survive into young adulthood - a childhood wish to be an astronaut surving as a hobby of stargazing - to give us some continuity, but the rest of the movie can be about the changes we go through, the many different skins we shed on the way to adulthood. That would certainly hold my attention over three hours, and fufill the potential of Boyhood’s premise.

Repetitive in places and oddly self-promoting. Farrell adopts the grade-school method of writing: tell them what you’re going to tell them, tell them, then tell them what you’ve told them. After reading other financial advice books (Personal Finance for Dummies, Pound Foolish) that use a more modern and adult style, his was frustrating and a little off-putting.

That said, the advice itself is interesting and logical. Three things I learned:

• 401K contributions are taken out pre-tax, and are tax free until you take them out. This means contributing to your 401K is an easy way to both save for retirement and lower your tax bill (since those contributions don't count toward your income for the year).
• Social Security is solvent now and will probably remain so, though benefit payouts might be reduced over time to keep it that way. Still, you can include it in your retirement planning, lowering the target amount you'll need to save.
• Splitting your retirement savings between stocks and bonds protects you from some of the down swings the stock market will experience over the years you'll be saving for retirement, allowing you to confidently adopt a long-term perspective for your investments.

Novel stands at almost 74,000 words as of today. That means I only got 3,000 words written this week, instead of the 5,000 I wanted, and the 10,000 I needed to write to catch up with losing last week to the flu.

So what happened? Looking back, all I can see is excuses: I’ve only got 30 minutes to write, and that’s not enough time to do anything good (never mind that this is the first draft, so the good or bad doesn’t matter so much now as simply getting it done); or I can’t write today, I’ve got to make dinner before my wife comes home (even though my wife is awesome, and would totally understand if dinner were a little late because I took time to write); or I’ve got too much else going on to write (bills, chores, etc).

I think part of my problem is that I don’t have a set-aside writing time. Currently it’s catch-as-catch-can, with me snatching time away from other activities (like making dinner) to get some writing done.

I also still have trouble letting go of my inner editor. This makes even the time I do take to write less productive than it could be, with me second- and triple-guessing each word, each line, before I write it.

So, new strategy for next week: get up thirty minutes earlier, and dedicate that time to writing. Then pull a half-hour from my lunch break and use that, as well. That’ll give me an hour of writing time, which should be about a thousand words, which will keep me from falling further behind (if not exactly back on track to meet my writing goal for the month).

Also: spike my inner editor’s morning coffee, so when I’m gearing up to write he’s passed out on the couch, dreaming in red ink.

Picked it up because of Schneier’s awesome columns in Wired and his generally great blog posts. Glad I did, though it wasn’t what I expected.

It turns out to be less of a book with new information and more of one that organizes the things we already know about trust from game theory, anthropology, and neuroscience. It’s well written, and focused on building a framework with which to understand problems of rule making and rule breaking in modern society.

Three connections I hadn’t made before:

• Corporations cannot be punished like individuals, which makes it harder to force them into compliance, and increases their tendency to defect. The harshest punishment any corporation undergoes is fines, converting a decision that should be affected by moral considerations into a simple question of dollars and cents (and turns the fine into just one more cost of doing business).
• One potential downside to increasing diversity in a neighborhood: as the number of different standards of what's fair and what's polite multiplies, your chances of unknowingly offending someone with your "normal" behavior increases; thus trust in general in the neighborhod declines.
• Facebook is becoming an institution, setting norms for social behavior, and yet it is a for-profit company, with conflicting interests between its profit motive and society as a whole.

For me, the real sign that Apple might be in trouble was when my wife upgraded her phone, and decided against getting a new iPhone.

Understand, my wife’s the reason we’re an Apple family. She convinced me to try out a Mac way back in 1999, in the days of Bondi Blue iMacs and OS 9. The experience hooked me, but the seed planted was hers.

16 years later, everything about Apple frustrates her. She couldn’t organize her photos on her iPhone, couldn’t even access them all without third-party software. Her last iPad update wiped out all the iMovie videos she’d created over the last six months. Apple Maps always led her astray, and Siri never helped.

So she went Android for her last phone. That’s the Apple warning bell for me: my wife is Apple’s target market - smart but non-technical, creative and needing things to just work - and she doesn’t want what they’re selling anymore.

When I finished NaNoWriMo, I was 50,000 words deep into the novel, but it wasn’t done. I decided to keep setting word goals for December and January, in the spirit of NaNoWriMo: 1,000 words per day, excluding weekends, or 20,000 words per month.

I managed to hit that target for December, crossing 70,000 words on New Year’s Eve.

Work on the novel has suffered since then. I came down with the flu on Sunday, wiping out my chance of making progress for most of this week. I’m hoping to make up some words this weekend, but I’ll still need to crank up my average if I’m going to hit 90K by the end of this month.

Fortunately, I feel like I’ve turned a corner in terms of the writing itself. The end of the novel is close, close enough for me to start seeing it pretty clearly.

My main problem at the moment - other than the daily battle at starting to write, which always seems harder than it should be - is wanting to rushing toward the conclusion, skipping details and plotlines just to reach the end.

To help combat this tendency, I’ve been using the day’s word count as both motivator - get those words down, or else - and forced breather, a way to trick myself into writing a lot more than I want about scenes that I’m itching to skip over, scenes that often turn out to be very important.

My hope - my goal, rather - is that this month’s 20,000 words are the novel’s last, and that I’ll be able to write THE END by Jan 31st. that way I can use February to work on something else, and gain enough distance from this novel to come back to it in March and edit it into something worth reading.

Oddly inspiring. Martin doesn’t seem to take any joy in this retelling, which only covers his years as a stand-up comic. He seems to look back on his early performing days not with nostalgia, but with a wonder that he persisted so long in doing such poor material.

But it’s that story of persistence that makes the book inspiring, of the decades of work behind his overnight success.

Three things I learned about Martin:

• He worked at performing for 18 years (!) before becoming a success
• Had a long stint writing for TV. While many people would consider that a career, and good enough, for Martin it was just a way to pay the bills while he worked on his act.
• He grew up in Orange County, California, and got his early stage experience at theme parks: Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm

Light and breezy, but not the puff book I cynically thought this would be. Instead, Cary’s joy (and the joy of almost everyone else involved in making the film) and fond memories shine through. Made me want to watch the Princess Bride all over again (not that I need much of an excuse).

Three things that stood out:

• Cary got the gig partially on his ability to do impressions. He showed this off at the signing my wife and I went to, doing impressions of Rob Reiner, Miracle Max, and André the Giant.
• Mandy Patinkin and Cary trained with fencing experts for months to be able to perform their sword fight without resorting to stunt doubles.
• Wallace Shawn (the actor playing Vizzini) thought he was going to be fired at any moment and replaced with Danny DeVito

Now that my traditional New Year’s Day Hangover has come and gone, it’s time to set goals and plans for the future. What do I think I should be working toward in 2015?

1. Submit my NaNoWriMo novel to agents: This is actually several goals in one. I'll need to finish the first draft of the novel, then do a revision or two, then get feedback from beta readers, do a few more revisions, and do another round of reader reviews and revisions before it'll be ready to submit. It might take me the rest of the year to get it ready, so there's also the patience I'll need to cultivate to see it through.
2. Write another novel: Because you can't stop with just one.
3. Sell one short story: This one's been on my lists for several years now, but I'm not giving up on it just yet. I am broadening its scope, though: I'll count the goal as met if I make a sale for a story as a self-published ebook. I've got a good backlog of unsold stories that I think there's a market for, if I put in the time to find it.
4. Open retirement account: I'm getting too old to not have one of these. Unfortunately, between doing freelance work and working for small companies for the last few years, I don't have a 401K or IRA setup to stash money in for the day that I (maybe) retire.
5. Double meetup group regular attendance: I've been running the San Diego Functional Programming Group for 4 years now, and we've never gotten above half a dozen or so regular attendees. For 2015, we're narrowing the group's focus from functional programming in general to specifically programming in Clojure. I think it'll give the group a cohesion it hasn't had previously, and I'm lining up talks months in advance so more people can plan to attend the ones they're interested in.
6. Build a machine-learning tool worth talking about: Could be a toy system, or a little open-source library, or even a production-ready deployed demo, but it needs to be something that applies machine learning techniques to a real problem, and solves it. Something I wouldn't be embarrassed about giving a talk on at the local meetup.

At the end of each year for the past five or so, I’ve written up a set of goals for the coming year. Not resolutions, or habits I want to establish that might help me achieve some vague goal, but concrete targets to aim for over the next twelve months.

Here’s what I wrote down as my goals for 2014:

• Get 100 regular users for Rewryte.com
• Find a permanent place to settle
• Live abroad for the summer
• Have one short story published
• Post to the blog on a weekly basis
• Keep the same job through the year
• Open a retirement savings account
• Learn Haskell

It’s a mixed bag: definite success for three of the goals, complete failure for the other five.

In the success column, we can put “find a permanent place to settle” (my wife and I bought a house in April), “post to the blog on a weekly basis” (with the exception of the holidays and NaNoWriMo, I’ve been posting thrice weekly for a good while now), and “keep the same job through the year” (I was developing a bad habit of switching companies every year or so, making our taxes more complicated and my resume look like I’d been playing employment hopscotch; this year I stayed with the same employer the whole way through).

I failed at everything else, though.

For a few, it was because my goals changed: rather than open a retirement account, we opted to payoff the credit card; instead of pushing for more users of rewryte.com, my business partner and I shuttered the site this summer to work on smaller projects.

Sometimes accomplishing one goal conflicted with another: buying a house meant we didn’t have the cash to try living abroad for the summer, and focusing on work-related skills while I stayed with my employer for the full year meant not spending time learning a new programming language (Haskell).

And for the last, I simply couldn’t do it. I submitted several short stories to be published, yielding a nice collection of rejection letters, but no sales.

So: 3/8 or, a 37.5% success rate. That’s a fine batting average, but doesn’t say much about my ability to set and accomplish goals.

Of course, not everything I ended up striving for is captured in that list: holding our monthly spending to a budget, winning NaNoWriMo, paying off the debt incurred from the sale of our previous house, taking ASL classes, taking cooking classes. So priorities shifted, and goals were pushed back or shelved.

Perhaps what this really reflects is poor judgement on my part at the beginning of the year about what will be important to me over the course of it?

Simply fantastic. Houston writes incredibly well and has done his research, teasing out the true history of a dozen different typographical marks out of a mess of false leads and myths.

Three of the many things I learned:

• Punctuation was invented by the Greeks as guide for how a text should be read aloud. Before that, they wrote everything as a single stream of capital letters.
• The asterisk and dagger marks got their start as part of literary criticism: either marking out questionable text or calling attention to something interesting in it
• The original typewriter keyboard did not have an exclamation point. You had to construct it manually using a period and an apostrophe.

The novel I started for NaNoWriMo is now at 62,000 words, and I’m perhaps 2/3 of the way through it. My current goal is to have the first draft complete before the end of January, so I can spend February and March editing it down.

But I thought now was a good time to reflect on those first 50,000 words, written in a frenzy in November, and put together a few things I learned by going through NaNoWriMo:

• I'm not just a short-story writer. True, I have no idea how good the final draft of this novel will turn out to be. But for a few years now I've been thinking of myself as a short-form author, so focused on brevity and quick pacing that I didn't think I had any novel-sized ideas in me. That turns out to be completely false.
• My inner editor has been holding me back. All that concentration on being brief, on using just the barest of brush strokes to convey action, hasn't necessarily made my writing any stronger. Instead, it made me so scared of messing up the first draft that I didn't get much writing done. Being forced to ignore that editorial voice has made me realize how much I've been self-censoring.
• I can write 4,000 words in a day. I know because I did it, once, mid-month, to catch up to where I needed to be to finish on time. Previously I'd sometimes struggled to write 250 words in a single day, and 1,000 words was a great writing day. Now I know I can get 2,000 words down in a couple of hours, and push out twice that if I do two writing sessions in the day.

Incredibly well-written. Covers nearly 600 years of European (and world) history without oversimplifying or tipping over into names-and-dates territory. Digs deep into the conflicts of those years to show how the Holy Roman Empire, and then Germany, was at the heart of most of them.

This was a serious corrective for me, since when I was growing up Germany meant Nazis and Nazis were the Last Great Bad Guys (the Soviets were more sympathetic when I was little) so Germany was the country we didn’t talk about much in history class, save to point out all the ways in which Germany had effed things up for the rest of the world.

But leaving Germany out meant a lot of European history and strategy didn’t make sense to me. Why would Britain want to defend Belgian neutrality in WWI? Why did Germany talk so much about encirclement? Why did anyone care that Charles V held both the crowns of Spain and the Holy Roman Empire?

Simms' book finally filled those gaps in my understanding, and also taught me:

• During World War I, sauerkraut was renamed "victory cabbage" in the U.S.
• Spain, as the last fascist power left in Europe at the end of WWII, was singled out as being banned from the UN until it had become a democracy, and was hated by both the US and the Soviets.
• The experiences of Germany and Poland with weak central governments were used as examples in the Federalist Papers for why the new United States needed a stronger central government.

How can we tell genre fiction from literary fiction? It’s not enough to add some spaceships and call it science fiction. Nor does putting it in a medieval setting automatically make it fantasy.

I think one part of the difference is that genre fiction seems mainly concerned with jobs, and exciting things happening while people are working those jobs: noble, soldier, scientist, private eye.

Literary fiction is less concerned with jobs, and more concerned with life outside of work: families, holidays, dating. Work is implicitly boring, an obstacle to be overcome.

It’s two polar views of the human condition. In one, work is a calling, and the moral questions revolve around what kind of people get called and how they respond to their calling. In the other, work is background. It’s something that may create conflict, but it’s not usually central to the story.

In other words, fiction written in genre circumstances that doesn’t revolve around work as a calling feels literary, even if it’s set in a far-off alien landscape.

Hence Ian McEwan’s novel Solar, which could have been written as genre fiction, following the career of a scientist toward a breakthrough in cheap solar power, but instead is written in a literary style, more concerned with his life outside of his work and what that says about him.

There’s also Ken Follet’s The Pillars of the Earth, which is sold as literary fiction but to me reads like genre: the central plot-line is the construction of the cathedral, and those called to build it. Characters move in and out of the narrative according to their impact on the cathedral’s construction, and there’s a lot of science-fiction-style description of building techniques.

An uneven but interesting short book about the history of ninjas. I like that he spends time dispelling most of the myths about ninjas and tries to get back to their real historical role in Japanese warfare. Towards the end, though, he stretches to try to attach the ninja ethos to the Japanese Intelligence officers of World War II, and ends up sounding like an apologist for actions that all too recently propped up a racist, genocidal regime.

Still, I did learn a few things:

• Ninjas were basically mercenaries, and they could be samurai or peasants.
• Ninjas were mostly used as scouts or spies (to find/count enemy troops, discover the weaknesses in a castle, etc) and occasionally hired as a strike force to sneak into a castle and raise hell (or the gate).
• When ninjas did fight regular troops, it was usually as locals defending their homes from marauding armies.

An amazingly good book on writing, being a writer, and what it means to write fantasy in general (and children’s fantasy, in particular). Her voice is so strong, it sounds like she’s sitting next to you on the train, telling you these stories about her life and her writing process to while away the time.

Three things I learned about writing:

• Care about all your characters, even the very minor ones with hardly any speaking role at all
• It's ok to start the journey without knowing where you're going, so long as you see it through
• Don't let yourself be boxed in by others expectations. Write the best story you can, while you can, that you yourself enjoy.

…is the novel I started for NaNoWriMo this year.

I say started because while I reached the 50,000-word goal for the month (despite illness, and traveling for two weeks), the novel isn’t done. It’s over 50,000 words long, the longest thing I’ve ever written in my life (my previous attempt at a novel was only 40K), and I’m only a third of the way through the story.

So, I’m going to keep working on it through December (and probably January). My goal is to get through 1,000 words a day, or 30K for each month. Hopefully by Feb 1st I’ll have the first draft of my second novel wrapped up and done.

Incidentally, this is why I didn’t post anything through November. Writing the novel soaked up all my free time, and then some (I was churning out 3,000 words a day toward the end to make up for the time I lost while traveling). Things should settle out now that I’m back to a more sustainable pace, and I’ll get back to the regular M-W-F posting schedule.

In honor of Halloween, three personal ads with a horror twist:

Missed connection: Saw you making dinner last night, that blouse really brought out your eyes. I’m a secret Billy Joel fan, too. If you can tell me which album you were listening to, drop me a line, let me watch you have coffee?

DWF seeks M for night of debauchery followed by dinner. Must have nicely-shaped head. No beards.

Where are you, my sweet Rose? We danced while Nero played fiddle, we smuggled rats to Constantinople, we kissed by the light of Giodarno Bruno’s torch. We had a date for five years later, November 5th, but you never showed. Have you forgotten me? Hope to see you in Chicago next year.

I’ve wanted to finish a second novel for a few years now, and never found the time to do it.

This year, I’m forcing myself to find the time by doing NaNoWriMo. I’m going to start something new, and push every day until I reach the 50K word mark (or beyond).

The novel itself is going to be my take on a sword-and-sorcery fantasy, with a working title of The Hungry Cold.

Here’s the synopsis:

When a sudden blizzard closes the mountain road out of Skallfast, Siobhan and Alastair settle in for days of boredom. But the storm brought something else with it: something that starts killing the townsfolk, one by one, leaving nothing but their bones behind. Can they discover what’s behind the killings, and how to stop it, before the hungry cold claims them as well?

Wish me luck!

Inspired by the tv show Review, today’s flash fiction entry is a critic’s review of my day yesterday, if my life were a television series:

While no doubt the height of neo-realism, the fact remains that in yesterday’s episode our beloved protagonist again spent most of his waking hours sitting at a desk and typing. Where are the coffee shop visits and meeting friends for lunch of past episodes?

And don’t get me started on how little variety this entire season has had compared to the show’s peak (seasons 21 through 25, if you must know. Those seasons had everything: Space! Lasers! Training Montages! Romance! A far cry from the wilderness wandering seasons that followed). Are the writers completely out of new ideas?

Granted, I was intrigued by the homebrewing subplot. There were several different ways they could have gone with that one: a Breaking-Bad type descent into chemistry obsession and bootlegging, or a slow spin into self-enabled alcoholism, the worm eating its own tail so to speak. Of course, head writer Diego Byte couldn’t let anything that interesting happen. We got one party - one! - without any drunken hijinks, and that’s it.

This show desperately needs a return to the glory days of showrunners like D.C. Nassau, or even Phil Conway. They knew how to mix multiple sub-plots while still giving us a visible character arc over the course of the season. As it is, this show still occasionally has a spark of life, but its best years seem to be behind it. 2 stars.

Conservatives who want to make hay about the religion (or lack thereof) of the President or members of Congress should re-read the Constitution. Toleration of other religions was so important the Founders included it in the original text. Article VI, paragraph 3 says: “…no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

This was a huge step at the time, a deliberate slap in the face of the laws of Great Britain, which barred office holders (and the king!) from being Catholic.

If the Founders intended us to be a Christian nation, they had their chance. They could easily have written a requirement that anyone elected to the government be a Christian, just as they required them to be a certain age, and required the President to have been born a US citizen. The fact that they not only didn’t require it, but specifically forbade any such requirement, means they deliberately built religious toleration into the foundation of the new country.

Another controversial book that turns out to be full of bad reasoning.

The central thesis is that certain minority groups do well financially in America, and the reason they do is because of a trio of cultural attitudes: a feeling of group superiority, coupled with a sense of individual insecurity, mixed with strict impulse control. These traits help them succeed because America’s dominant culture is one of instant gratification and personal self-esteem.

The implication is that these minority groups are hard-working go-getters, while the rest of us are lazy coke-heads waiting for our next welfare check.

Unfortunately, the authors have no evidence for either the Triple Package in their minority cultures, or for the dominant lazy culture they insist the rest of America has. They do have hard numbers that certain minority groups, after immigrating to the US, have higher median incomes than the rest of the country. But that’s it. All their cultural evidence is anecdotal, the sole exception being a survey that showed Asian Americans tend to spend more time studying than others.

They use this anecdotal evidence to sweep away the numerous studies that show a slowdown in American social mobility (the rich are staying rich while the poor are having a harder time climbing up into the middle class) and a decline in the share of national income going to lower income tiers (the vanishing of the middle class). There are children of poor immigrants that end up running multi-national corporations, they say, so surely we could all do the same if we just adopted the Triple Package? That these children are the exception, and not the rule, doesn’t seem to bother them.

Perhaps, if pressed, the authors would blame the recent hardening of class boundaries on the success of the self-esteem movement. After all, they lay numerous other social ills at its feet, including the Great Recession of 2008, the increase of US public debt, and the decline of American “soft power” in the early 21st century. Never mind that all of the above were created by leaders raised long before the self-esteem movement took hold, nor that these leaders often came from the very minority groups the authors want to praise.

Refreshingly, the authors acknowledge that the traits they want the rest of America to adopt often lead to psychological problems. A sense that your ethnic group is superior is the basis for every form of racism. A sense that you can never be good enough drains all the happiness you might feel from your accomplishments. And extreme impulse control can drive you to never relax, never take time to enjoy the fruits of your labor.

After acknowledging these problems, though, the authors sweep them under the rug. To them, such psychological problems are simply the price of success. If you’re not willing to pay it, it’s because you don’t want to be successful enough.

The idea that you can be successful without these traits never occurs to the authors.

I was raised to value education and hard work, too, but without the punishing complexes the authors praise. That seems to be the real lesson of their research: that investing in education, coupled with ambition (to set lofty long-term goals) and patience (the ability to perservere in the achievement of those goals) can still be a formula for success in America. Unfortunately, that would have made the book much less controversial, so they had to focus on the cultural elements they see producing those traits.

In truth, there’s no need for the psychological complexes the authors think so highly of. Confidence can naturally come from accomplishment, and parents that are consistent with rewards and punishments can help instill discipline in their children. With those two traits, and a lot of luck, you can push through the obstacles between yourself and your goals. No chip on the shoulder, no crippling sense of insecurity required.

I did learn one thing, though: they recently did a follow-up study to the famous Marshmallow Test that showed that children who were primed to distrust the adult were less likely to wait for the second marshmallow.

Congratulations on the purchase of your new Samsung by GE™ Instant-Cook Oven™! We hope you’ll agree it’s the best way to prepare hot, healthy meals for you and your family! Please remember us when replacing your unit after its beta-decay period of 6 months is up!

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For example, to cook a perfect turkey for Thanksgiving dinner, simply:

• Press POWER to turn the Instant-Cook Oven™ on
• Press DOWNLOAD to start the recipe selection process
• Use the Ultra-Sensitive Keypad™ arrows to navigate through the recipes and choose the one you like best
• When you've found a recipe, press SELECT to select it
• Hit YES to confirm the download
• Scroll through the Terms of Service and Licensing info for the recipe you've selected (read carefully! some recipes have unverified nutritional information) and hit YES to accept
• Wait for the download to complete, then hit INSTALL to save it to the Instant-Cook Oven™'s recipe book (myRecipes™)
• Hit MENU to go back to the main menu, then hit RECIPES to find the new recipe in myRecipes™
• Use the Ultra-Sensitive Keypad™ arrows to select the recipe you downloaded, then hit SELECT
• Hit YES to confirm your selection
• Press COOK. Use the Ultra-Sensitive Keypad™ to enter the number of guests, their religio-ethnic background, current Vegan status, and country of citizenship. You may use the GuestBook™ (see page 1,337) to select from previous guests, so you don't have to enter their information again.
• Have each guest complete a retinal scan to confirm identity, and verbally accept the recipe's Terms of Service and Licensing Agreement. If your guests have not yet arrived, you may send a TastyInvite™ (see page 442) to them so they can confirm and accept at their convenience.
• Once all your guests have confirmed, you're ready to COOK!
• Open the Raw hatch (see page 921) on your Instant Cook Oven™ and check your Corn Pellet level. It should be above the Minimum Level Bar (see page 145) to continue. WARNING: cooking a recipe without adequate Corn Pellets can result in fire.
• Close the Raw hatch, and press COOK
• Press YES to confirm cooking
• Wait for the ChowAlarm™ to sound, letting you know your food is ready!