I have compiled below some of the writing that particularly appealed to me.
-Sunil
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On Family:

“Here, in the heady bouquet of Nature’s pantry, your father smells only mortality.”

“Your mother and grandmother play a waiting game. The older woman waits for the younger one to age, and the younger woman waits for the older one to die. It is a game both will inevitably win.”

“Third also means you are not, like the fourth of your three surviving siblings, a tiny skeleton in a small grave at the base of a tree.”

“In the history of the evolution of the family, you and the millions of other migrants like you represent an ongoing proliferation of the nuclear. It is an explosive transformation, the supportive, stifling, stabilizing bonds of extended relationships weakening and giving way, leaving in their wake insecurity, anxiety, productivity, and potential.”

“In the moment she ceases to live, your sister is holding your mother’s hands, your mother like an infant struggling to take its first breath as it transitions from aquatic life to terrestrial, but in reverse, with her lungs filling with water, and the breath never coming.”

On Love:

“The pursuit of love and the pursuit of wealth have much in common, Both have the potential to inspire, motivate, uplift, and kill.”

“You are a door to an existence she does not desire, but even if the room beyond is repugnant, that door has won a portion of her affection.”

“You think the first woman you make love to should also be the last. Fortunately for you…she thinks of her second man as the one between her first and her third.”

“As the pretty girl rejoins her world, she finds her poise somewhat undermined by your encounter. You are like a living memory, and she, who is implacably resistant to remembering, is unsettled by you. Your manner of speech…still carries the cadences of how she once spoke, more than the cadences, the perspectives, the outlook of the neighborhood she once belonged to, a neighborhood she is glad to have fled and to which she does not want to return, even for a moment, even in passing.”

“…and for her home carries with it connotations of sorrow and brutality, connotations that elicit signals from her to you to be punishing, but these you misinterpret, and so they remain unacted upon.”

“Lying beside her in bed, untouching…it does not occur to you that your wife’s love might be slipping from your grasp, or that once it is gone, you will miss it.”

“She sees how you diminish her solitude, and more meaningfully, she sees you seeing, which sparks in her that oddest of desires an I can have for a you, the desire that you be less lonely.”

On Life, and Death:

“And in any case over sufficiently long a term, as everyone knows, there is nothing that does not have as its consequence death.”

“He fears death, but not terribly so, and he awaits the opportunity to be reunited with his beloved much as certain young girls await, with a trepidation that does not quite exceed their longing, the loss of their virginity.”

“Death in the village, being common, is handled in a matter-of-fact manner, and after the first few days you witness no wailing, even if a tear is shed by your eldest niece when she bends to allow you to place a palm on her head as you depart.”

“To be a man whose life requires being plugged into machines…is to experience the shock of an unseen network suddenly made physical, as a fly experiences a cobweb…the inanimate strands that cling to your still-animate form themselves connect to other strands…mirroring in stark reality preexisting and mercifully unconsidered systems within, the veins and nerves and sinews and lymph nodes without which there is no you.”

On Business:

“…harnessing the state’s might for personal gain is a much more sensible approach. Two related categories of actor have long understood this. Bureaucrats, who wear state uniforms while secretly backing their private interests. And bankers, who wear private uniforms while secretly being backed by the state.”

“Distasteful though it may be, it was inevitable…that we would eventually find ourselves broaching the topic of violence. Becoming filthy rich requires a degree of unsqueamishness, whether in rising Asia or anywhere else. For wealth comes from capital, and capital comes from labor, and labor comes from equilibrium, from calories in chasing calories out, an inherent, built-in leanness, the leanness of biological machines that must be bent to your will with some force if you are to loosen your own financial belt and, sighingly, expand.”

“Over the coming months your business is quantified, digitized, and jacked into a global network of finance, your activities subsumed with a barely a ripple in a collective mathematical pool of ever-changing current and future cash flows.”

“You are caught up in one of the cynical accountability campaigns periodically launched by your city’s establishment, tossed to the wolf pack of public opinion, unsubstantiated rumors of your shady dealings receiving scandalized attention in the newspapers. You have always been an outsider, and finally you have been wounded. It is only natural that you be sacrificed so that the rest of the herd may prance on.”

“…the majority of your limited savings remains untouched…and it seems not improbable that in the race between death and destitution, you can look forward to the former emerging victorious.”

“Meanwhile similar attempts…seem to be under way to try to desiccate society itself…those widening fissures evident between young people who appear to you divided as never before, split into myriad, incomprehensible tribes, signaling their affiliations with an automobile sticker, a bare shoulder, or some arcane permutation in the possibilities of facial hair.”

And Finally, On Writing:

“And what of other novels…surely those too are versions of self-help. At the very least, they help you pass the time, and time is the stuff of which a self is made. The same is true for narrative nonfiction, and doubly so for non-narrative nonfiction.”

“Surely ideals, transcending as they do puny humans and positing meaning in vast abstract concepts instead, are by their very nature anti-self? It follows therefore that any self-help book advocating allegiance to an ideal is likely to be a sham. Yes, such self-help books are numerous, and yes, it’s possible some of them do help a self, but more often than not, the self they help is the writer’s self, not yours.”

“…when you read a book, what you see are black squiggles on pulped wood, or increasingly, dark pixels on a pale screen. To transform these icons into characters or events, you must imagine. And when you imagine, you create. It’s in being read that a book becomes a book…readers don’t work for writers. They work for themselves. Therein, if you’ll excuse the admittedly biased tone, lies the richness of reading. And therein, as well, lies a pointer to richness elsewhere. Because if you truly want to become filthy rich in rising Asia…then sooner or later you must work for yourself.”

“We are all refugees from our childhoods. And so we turn, among other things, to stories. To write a story, to read a story, is to be a refugee from the state of refugees. Writers and readers seek a solution to the problem that time passes, that those who have gone are gone, and those who will go, which is to say every one of us, will go. For there was a moment when anything was possible. And there will be a moment when nothing is possible. But in between we can create.”

Often used to describe depression in psychological disorders, dysphoria is general state of sadness that includes restlessness, lack of energy, anxiety, and vague irritation. It is the opposite of euphoria, and is different from typical sadness because it often includes a kind of jumpiness and some anger. You have probably experienced it when coming down from a stimulant like chocolate, coffee, or something stronger. Or you may have felt it in response to a distressing situation, extreme boredom, or depression.

2. Enthrallment
Psychology professor W. Gerrod Parrott has broken down human emotions into subcategories, which themselves have their own subcategories. Most of the emotions he identifies, like joy and anger, are pretty recognizable. But one subset of joy, “enthrallment,” you may not have heard of before. Unlike the perkier subcategories of joy like cheerfulness, zest, and relief, enthrallment is a state of intense rapture. It is not the same as love or lust. You might experience it when you see an incredible spectacle — a concert, a movie, a rocket taking off — that captures all your attention and elevates your mood to tremendous heights.

3. Normopathy
Psychiatric theorist Christopher Bollas invented the idea of normopathy to describe people who are so focused on blending in and conforming to social norms that it becomes a kind of mania. A person who is normotic is often unhealthily fixated on having no personality at all, and only doing exactly what is expected by society. Extreme normopathy is punctuated by breaks from the norm, where normotic person cracks under the pressure of conforming and becomes violent or does something very dangerous. Many people experience mild normopathy at different times in their lives, especially when trying to fit into a new social situation, or when trying to hide behaviors they believe other people would condemn.

4. Abjection
There are a few ways to define abjection, but French philosopher Julia Kristeva (literally) wrote the book on what it means to experience abjection. She suggests that every human goes through a period of abjection as tiny children when we first realize that our bodies are separate from our parents’ bodies — this sense of separation causes a feeling of extreme horror we carry with us throughout our lives. That feeling of abjection gets re-activated when we experience events that, however briefly, cause us to question the boundaries of our sense of self. Often, abjection is what you are feeling when you witness or experience something so horrific that it causes you to throw up. A classic example is seeing a corpse, but abjection can also be caused by seeing shit or open wounds. These visions all remind us, at some level, that our selfhood is contained in what Star Trek aliens would call “ugly bags of mostly water.” The only thing separating you from being a dead body is . . . almost nothing. When you feel the full weight of that sentence, or are confronted by its reality in the form of a corpse, your nausea is abjection.

5. Sublimation
If you’ve ever taken a class where you learned about Sigmund Freud’s theories about sex, you probably have heard of sublimation. Freud believed that human emotions were sort of like a steam engine, and sexual desire was the steam. If you blocked the steam from coming out of one valve, pressure would build up and force it out of another. Sublimation is the process of redirecting your steamy desires from having naughty sex, to doing something socially productive like writing an article about psychology or fixing the lawnmower or developing a software program. If you’ve ever gotten your frustrations out by building something, or gotten a weirdly intense pleasure from creating an art project, you’re sublimating. Other psychiatrists have refined the idea of sublimation, however. Following French theorist Jacques Lacan, they say that sublimation doesn’t have to mean converting sexual desire into another activity like building a house. It could just mean transferring sexual desire from one object to another — moving your affections from your boyfriend to your neighbor, for example.

6. Repetition compulsion
Ah, Freud. You gave us so many new feelings and psychological states to explore! The repetition compulsion is a bit more complicated than Freud’s famous definition — “the desire to return to an earlier state of things.” On the surface, a repetition compulsion is something you experience fairly often. It’s the urge to do something again and again. Maybe you feel compelled to always order the same thing at your favorite restaurant, or always take the same route home, even though there are other yummy foods and other easy ways to get home. Maybe your repetition compulsion is a bit more sinister, and you always feel the urge to date people who treat you like crap, over and over, even though you know in advance it will turn out badly (just like the last ten times). Freud was fascinated by this sinister side of the repetition compulsion, which is why he ultimately decided that the cause of our urge to repeat was directly linked to what he called “the death drive,” or the urge to cease existing. After all, he reasoned, the ultimate “earlier state of things” is a state of non-existence before we were born. With each repetition, we act out our desire to go back to a pre-living state. Maybe that’s why so many people have the urge to repeat actions that are destructive, or unproductive.

7. Repressive desublimation
Political theorist Herbert Marcuse was a big fan of Freud and lived through the social upheavals of the 1960s. He wanted to explain how societies could go through periods of social liberation, like the countercultures and revolutions of the mid-twentieth century, and yet still remain under the (often strict) control of governments and corporations. How could the U.S. have gone through all those protests in the 60s but never actually overthrown the government? The answer, he decided, was a peculiar emotional state known as “repressive desublimation.” Remember, Freud said sublimation is when you route your sexual energies into something non-sexual. But Marcuse lived during a time when people were very much routing their sexual energies into sex — it was the sexual liberation era, when free love reigned. People were desublimating. And yet they continued to be repressed by many other social strictures, coming from corporate life, the military, and the government. Marcuse suggested that desublimation can actually help to solidify repression. It acts as an escape valve for our desires so that we don’t attempt to liberate ourselves from other social restrictions. A good example of repressive desublimation is the intense partying that takes place in college. Often, people in college do a lot of drinking, drugging and hooking up — while at the same time studying very hard and trying to get ready for jobs. Instead of questioning why we have to pay tons of money to engage in rote learning and get corporate jobs, we just obey the rules and have crazy drunken sex every weekend. Repressive desublimation!

8. Aporia
You know that feeling of crazy emptiness you get when you realize that something you believed isn’t actually true? And then things feel even more weird when you realize that actually, the thing you believed might be true and might not — and you’ll never really know? That’s aporia. The term comes from ancient Greek, but is also beloved of post-structuralist theorists like Jacques Derrida and Gayatri Spivak. The reason modern theorists love the idea of aporia is that it helps to describe the feeling people have in a world of information overload, where you are often bombarded with contradictory messages that seem equally true.

9. Compersion
We’ve gotten into some pretty philosophical territory, so now it’s time to return to some good, old-fashioned internet memes. The word compersion was popularized by people in online communites devoted to polyamory and open relationships, in order to describe the opposite of feeling jealous when your partner dates somebody else. Though a monogamous person would feel jealous seeing their partner kiss another person, a non-monogamous person could feel compersion, a sense of joy in seeing their partner happy with another person. But monogamous people can feel compersion, too, if we extend the definition out to mean any situation where you feel the opposite of jealous. If a friend wins an award you hoped to win, you can still feel compersion (though you might be a little jealous too).

10. Group feelings
Some psychologists argue that there are some feelings we can only have as members of a group — these are called intergroup and intragroup feelings. Often you notice them when they are in contradiction with your personal feelings. For example, many people feel intergroup pride and guilt for things that their countries have done, even if they weren’t born when their countries did those things. Though you did not fight in a war, and are therefore not personally responsible for what happened, you share in an intergroup feeling of pride or guilt. Group feelings often cause painful contradictions. A person may have an intragroup feeling (from one group to another) that homosexuality is morally wrong. But that person may personally have homosexual feelings. Likewise, a person may have an intragroup feeling that certain races or religions are inferior to those of their group. And yet they may personally know very honorable, good people from those races and religions whom they consider friends. A group feeling can only come about through membership in a group, and isn’t something that you would ever have on your own. But that doesn’t mean group feelings are any less powerful than personal ones.

from: http://downtownproject.com

We’ve allocated $350 million to aid in the revitalization of Downtown Las Vegas. We’re investing $200 million in real estate, $50 million in small businesses, $50 million in education, and $50 million in tech startups through the VegasTech Fund.

We aim to:

BRING TOGETHER COMMUNITIES OF PASSION.

Community development is more about the people than real estate, so physical spaces should reflect the community’s values. By catalyzing community efforts, we hope to inspire people to follow their passions. And by doing so, we’re helping to build the most community-focused large city in the world…in the city where you would least expect it.

CREATE RESIDENTIAL DENSITY OF GREATER THAN 100 PEOPLE PER ACRE.

When people live closely with one another, the opportunities to interact serendipitously increase which increases the sharing of knowledge, ideas, and improves productivity.

ADD DENSITY OF GROUND LEVEL ACTIVITIES, SPACES, AND BUSINESSES.

Urban residential density of at least 100 people per acre combined with ground-level gathering places such as cafes, interesting small businesses, and public spaces increases economic output and happiness.

CREATE THE COWORKING CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.

We’re working with communities including technology, fashion, music, art, and more. Bringing together passionate people with shared interests creates collaboration, innovation, opportunities to share resources, and accelerates learning.

CREATE THE SHIPPING CONTAINER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD.

Most urban revitalization efforts are centered in cities with vacant, crumbling buildings. Our Downtown doesn’t have those. To quickly create spaces for new businesses here requires innovative thinking, so we’re using repurposed shipping containers as places for entrepreneurs to follow their passions.

DO IT IN LESS THAN FIVE YEARS.

To make those goals happen, we’re focusing on:

ARTS, MUSIC & CULTURE

At the very heart of a great city is an active and thriving art, music, and creative culture. As a global entertainment capital Las Vegas has more artists per capita than New York but lacks the connectedness that allows artists of all types to follow their personal passions. We aim to be a part of changing that.

By investing in events like First Friday, spaces for creative people to connect, and projects and organizations that help people follow their passion, we aim to make the arts a core part of our community.

We’re inspired by the great work of organizations like Sprout Fund that help empower creative people to do amazing things. We are inspired by the thriving music culture of cities like Austin, Texas where everyone has the opportunity to follow their musical passions and the community has the opportunity to experience new things.

COMMUNITY & COWORKING

The foundation of our mission is to help to create the most community-focused large city in the world. Las Vegas is home to as many creative thinkers as New York but often lacks the call and spaces that encourage people to gather around common passions.

Through deliberate seeding of community gatherings, we’re helping to provide the spaces and reasons for people to come together and inspire each other to follow their passions. We’re initially focused on communities like:

• Technology
• Fashion
• Photography
• Art
• Music

Often communities need space to gather for events and sometimes as a space to work. Our goal to create the coworking capital of the world aims to empower communities of passionate people to build spaces that allow them to follow their passions.

EDUCATION

Education is the bedrock on which a truly great city is built. We believe a rock-solid education system builds community by helping intelligent people to do amazing things. It creates opportunities for people to explore new ideas and develop new passions.

For our city to thrive, families must not only aspire to live here but also to educate their children here. Investment in public and private education programs is critical to the community as a whole.

For us, that means investing in the Clark County School District through our partnership with Teach for America, by exploring innovative ideas and techniques in teaching, and in our planned investment in a private or charter school in Downtown Las Vegas.

ENTREPRENEURSHIP

We are helping to build a community-focused, dense urban core made up of high-density residential and a multitude of spaces to gather, most of them powered by passionate entrepreneurs. We believe that most successful entrepreneurs are people who are passionate about their craft and believe in building community.

We believe that people shouldn’t have to wait forty years to retire and follow their passion. Our goal is to support entrepreneurs who meet a basic set of criteria:

• Are you passionate about the idea?
• Are you capable of executing it?
• Does it help build community?
• Is it sustainable?
• Unique or the best–what makes your business unique or the best at what you do?
• Story worth–what about your business would be worthy of a story in a major publication or national news outlet?

We aim to invest in 100-200 entrepreneurs who meet that criteria, build programs to help them avoid many of the basic mistakes new entrepreneurs make, and, combined with our urban development plans, help them to build the perfect space to follow their passion.

TECHNOLOGY

A vibrant technology and startup community creates opportunities for all types of people, not only technologists, to rapidly follow their passions and tackle interesting problems. The VegasTech community is a collaborative, supportive group of creative technologists, designers, and entrepreneurs.

A balance of startup and mature technology companies in a city creates a cycle that fuels the spirit of innovation, fuels the spirits of the companies, and fuels the spirits of those who are able to find a culture-match for themselves in a workplace that they love.

We believe in investing in programs, entrepreneurs, and spaces (such as /usr/lib) that help accelerate learning, encourage collaboration, and elevate Las Vegas as a renowned startup hub. We believe that you can change the world with a laptop.

URBAN DEVELOPMENT

Inspired by the book Triumph of the City and thinkers like Richard Florida, we aim to create a dense urban core with residential density of at least 100 people per acre and ample ground level spaces to gather. Interlaced in every project we envision is a respect for the environment, opportunities to connect with nature, and connectivity infrastructure that reduces the need to use a car.

Our primary goal is to help to create an environment that encourages serendipity…the opportunity to unexpectedly collide with people from different backgrounds. Serendipity encourages people to connect with each other, exchange ideas, and accelerates learning. This means that a community must remain accessible to people from all economic backgrounds.

A truly great city must not only be financially sustainable, but also environmentally sustainable. With that in mind, we’re planning green roofs, urban gardens and parks to enrich the lives of the passionate people who call Downtown home.

Connectivity is key to sustaining a vibrant community, so we’re partnering with the Regional Transportation Commission and others to make it easier to walk, bike, and take public transit—building a community where people can live, work, and play without needing a car.

A few of our ideas:

• Parks with cafes and other businesses. This approach helps to offset the cost of maintaining a park and encourages more people to visit the space.
• Adaptable buildings. Our plans to invest in small businesses and other community spaces are based on the community’s needs as they exist today. We aim to design buildings and spaces that can easily adapt as those needs evolve.
• Residential. Not only do we aim to create dense residential that’s accessible to all types of people but we intend to design spaces that encourage communities to gather in central spaces, green spaces, and more.

Quinoa, which is native to the Andes, comes in red and white. It is one of the only plant foods that is a complete protein, meaning it has balanced quantities of 9 essential amino acids

Cornmeal

The cradle of corn is southern Mexico, where scientists found milling tools with maize residue dating back almost 9,000 years. Cornmeal, which has a fraction of the calories of other grains, is also sometimes labeled “polenta.” 

Wild Rice

Chewy and nutty wild rice, which has fewer carbs and more protein than brown rice, is actually not a rice, but an aquatic grass grown extensively in the Midwest around the Great Lakes.

 Amaranth

Grown as an ornamental for its pretty blooms as well as for its grains, amaranth is a boon for vegetarians because it’s high in both iron and zinc, nutrients that can be tough to get in a vegetarian diet.

 SCARF

S – Status

C – Certainty

A – Autonomy

R – Relatedness

F – Fairness

Consider a manager walking into a room full of her subordinates. Within the first second, they have already made subconscious evaluations on:

Status – subordinates are reminded that they report to someone higher than them in the organization

Certainty – A degree of uncertainty has arisen based upon their expectation of what their boss might say to them

Autonomy – Subordinates are no longer sure if the work they are doing is appropriate or if they are going to be asked to do something different

Relatedness – They are uncertain if they are all still part of the team or if one or other of them is to be singled out for praise or criticism

Fairness – They are worried that they may no longer be treated in the same way as their peers.

All of this has happened before the manager has uttered a single word! Understanding these subliminal issues and addressing them explicitly is the key to positive neuroleadership.

2. Do the hardest work first: We all move instinctively toward pleasure and away from pain.Most great performers delay gratification and take on the difficult work of practice in the mornings, before they do anything else. That’s when most of us have the most energy and the fewest distractions.

3. Practice intensely: Practice intensely, without interruption for short periods of no longer than 90 minutes and then take a break. Ninety minutes appears to be the maximum amount of time that we can bring the highest level of focus to any given activity. The evidence is equally strong that great performers practice no more than 4 ½ hours a day.

4. Seek expert feedback, intermittently: The simpler and more precise the feedback, the more equipped you are to make adjustments.Too much feedback, too continuously, however, can create cognitive overload, increase anxiety, and interfere with learning.

6. Ritualize practice: Will and discipline are wildly overrated. As the researcher Roy Baumeister has found, none of us have very much of it.The best way to insure you’ll take on difficult tasks is to ritualize them — build specific, inviolable times at which you do them, so that over time you do them without having to squander energy thinking about them.

Then, on Saturday, a Louisiana man celebrating his birthday was arrested for “simple battery of the infirmed” after he smashed a cookie cake over the head of his father. Just as with the chips and dip and the burrito incidents, the victim was “covered in the cookie cake” when the sheriff’s deputy arrived on the scene.” from Law.com Legal Blog Watch.

That’s it! Why does this work? Because each day you are focusing on the HABIT (exercising more), not the GOAL (running a marathon), and therefore are far more likely to continue performing the habit. The key is to do it EVERY DAY, and take great joy and satisfaction from doing as little as possible (based on your own assessment of your “minimum viable habit”) so that you can check off your calendar. Watching the checks accrue on the calendar serves as immediate positive feedback and encourages you to maintain the habit. (This is known as “not breaking the chain”.) 

Once you have created the habit you desire (this takes a month minimum, and can take as much as three to six months), then and ONLY then should you start setting some goals (e.g. running 5 minutes more each day then the previous day.) They key is to separate HABIT-FORMING from GOAL-SETTING – something that many people confuse, ending up achieving neither.

(Note: This article was written to be habit-forming, so hopefully you made it to the end and agree with its recommendations. Now go make a new habit!)

Thursday’s Three Burning Legal Questions

Here are today’s three burning legal questions, along with the answers provided by the blogosphere.

1. Question: My dumbass roommate (aka “Florida Man“) stashed four live rounds of ammunition in our oven without my knowledge. When I preheated the oven today to cook myself a snack, the bullets exploded and I was sprayed in the chest and the leg with shrapnel. Can Florida Man be charged with a crime here? Please?

Answer: Sorry, It looks like Florida Man will not be charged. (Daily Mail, Woman ‘shot’ and wounded as she cooks a snack after bullets left in her OVEN explode)

2. Question: I work at the DMV taking driver’s license photos. We have a firm rule that head coverings can’t be worn in license photos unless it’s for religious reasons. A man who claims he is a practicing “Pastafarian” is adamant about wearing a pasta strainer on his head when I take his driver’s license photo, but I am quite dubious. Is this a real thing?

Answer: Pastafarianism, or the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is a movement opposing teaching in schools of intelligent design and creationism. Other Pastafarians have tried (and sometimes succeeded) to wear pasta strainers on their heads in driver’s license photos, as well. (NJ.com, ‘Pastafarian’ refuses to take spaghetti strainer off his head for license photo, South Brunswick cops say)

3. Question: I live in Tulsa County, Okla., and I simply cannot find a meth lab for the life of me. Are there any meth labs in my town?

Answer: Open your eyes, man! At last count, Tulsa County police had identified 979 contaminated meth lab sites in the county — the most of any county in the nation. (CNN Money, Do you live near a meth lab?) (via Constitutional Daily)