Let the archives run free

The ever fascinating Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media (see my previous post here), had an intriguing post on his Web log recently about newspaper archives.
As I'm sure you've noticed, links to some newspaper articles expire after a certain period. This is usually because a newspaper has moved the article from its free site to its paid site after a given time period, anywhere from three days to two weeks. Then you have to pay a fee to see the article. It's usually not a large fee -- maybe $3 -- but it's large enough that I can count on one hand the number of times I've paid for articles.
Gillmor suggests that papers open up their archives and make their money off of keyword-coded advertising. He has in mind something highly similar to the Google model, of small ads that appear along the side of the screen. So if you typed in "John Doe obituary", an advertisement for a local florist might pop up. Other upsides for the paper would be community goodwill and wider dissemination of its articles.
Gillmor's post original post is well worth reading; you can find it here.

The Clearing

In the mood for some literary fiction that's not too long? Check out The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux. My book group recently read this.
Two brothers from Pittsburgh manage a cypress mill in the swamps of Louisiana and tangle with the mafia. One of the brothers can't forget his terrible memories of World War I.

I won't say anymore, because it's a good read and beautifully written. Thematically, it's somewhat dark, but it has moments of redemption.

You can find a good interview with Gautreaux here.

Blink!

One of my favorite writers, Malcolm Gladwell, has a new book out. It's called Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. It's about snap judgments -- Glad well believes split-second decisions often can be startlingly accurate. Gladwell writes that his book tackles the questions, "What is going on in inside our heads when we engage in rapid cognition? When are snap judgments good and when are they not? What kinds of things can we do to make our powers of rapid cognition better?"
I expect Gladwell will be including some of his wonderful reporting from The New Yorker in the new book. One of my favorite articles of his was about an expert on facial expressions. We are all remarkably good at analyzing facial expressions quickly. But the expert Paul Ekman breaks it down to a science, especially looking for facial expressions that reveal deception. Here's an excerpt from that article. (Read the whole article at Gladwell's web site here.)

Ekman recalls the first time he saw Bill Clinton, during the 1992 Democratic primaries. "I was watching his facial expressions, and I said to my wife, 'This is Peck's Bad Boy,' " Ekman says. "This is a guy who wants to be caught with his hand in the cookie jar, and have us love him for it anyway. There was this expression that's one of his favorites. It's that hand-in-the-cookie-jar, love-me-Mommy-because-I'm-a-rascal look. It's A.U. twelve, fifteen, seventeen, and twenty-four, with an eye roll." Ekman paused, then reconstructed that particular sequence of expressions on his face. He contracted his zygomatic major, A.U. twelve, in a classic smile, then tugged the corners of his lips down with his triangularis, A.U. fifteen. He flexed the mentalis, A.U. seventeen, which raises the chin, slightly pressed his lips together in A.U. twenty-four, and finally rolled his eyes—and it was as if Slick Willie himself were suddenly in the room. "I knew someone who was on his communications staff. So I contacted him. I said, 'Look, Clinton's got this way of rolling his eyes along with a certain expression, and what it conveys is "I'm a bad boy." I don't think it's a good thing. I could teach him how not to do that in two to three hours.' And he said, 'Well, we can't take the risk that he's known to be seeing an expert on lying.' I think it's a great tragedy, because . . ." Ekman's voice trailed off. It was clear that he rather liked Clinton, and that he wanted Clinton's trademark expression to have been no more than a meaningless facial tic. Ekman shrugged. "Unfortunately, I guess, he needed to get caught—and he got caught."

Question of the Year

"What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?"

That's the question of the year for 2005, posed by Edge, a literary/philosophical Web site the focuses on the world of science.

The answers, all from scientists and researchers, are fascinating. Read an excerpt from The New York Times' Science section here, or go to the Edge's site and read all 119 (!) answers here.

Here's just a bit from some of the answers:

... I believe that microbial life exists elsewhere in our galaxy....

... I believe, but cannot prove, that babies and young children are actually more conscious, more vividly aware of their external world and internal life, than adults are. ...

...I believe that consciousness and its contents are all that exists. ... The world of our daily experience - the world of tables, chairs, stars and people, with their attendant shapes, smells, feels and sounds - is a species-specific user interface to a realm far more complex, a realm whose essential character is conscious. ...

If I were to answer the question of the year, I would say something sappy about the power of love. The scientists would likely snort in derision. Except for one, who said he believes without proof in true love.

How would you answer?

Celebrity Q and A

If you like the question-and-answer format for celebrity interviews, you might want to check out, All I Did Was Ask: Conversations with Writers, Actors, Musicians and Artists, by Terry Gross.
Gross hosts "Fresh Air," a wonderful radio show on National Public Radio, where she interviews whoever she likes, typically in an hour-long format. Her choice of topics pretty much defines eclectic: comedians to politicians to religious leaders to jazz musicians.
In this book, published in September, her interview subjects include Michael Caine, Isabella Rossellini, Conan O'Brien, Chris Rock, Jodie Foster, John Updike, Mary Karr, George Clinton, Nick Hornby, Mario Puzo, Chuck Close, Samuel L. Jackson, and Johnny Cash, among others.
Her book is OK, not great. I've listened to a lot of the interviews she included in the book, and it's so much nicer to hear the people talk on the radio. Inflection and tone from the human voice can add an entirely different shade of meaning to a sentence. It really hits home the fact that as magnificently expressive as the written language is, it still takes second place to the vividness of spoken language. The written word requires parsing. That's why it's so important to read carefully and critically. I remind myself of that, because I like to speed through some books like a locomotive barreling down the tracks. Slow down there, I tell myself.

Self-Help Secrets

I have a furtive fascination with self-help books. It's true. In stereotypical self-help tradition, I'll go ahead and blame it on my parents. They were big fans of Co-Dependent No More and various other tomes during the genre's heyday, the 1980s.
So on my bookshelf you will find the following books (and I include their solicitous subtitles):
Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus: A Practical Guide for Improving Communication and Getting What You Want in Your Relationships, by John Gray.
The Five Love Languages: How to Express Heartfelt Commitment to Your Mate, by Gary Chapman.
Life Strategies: Doing What Works, Doing What Matters, by Phillip C. McGraw (this last one by Dr. Phil of Oprah fame).

There's something self-absorbed and almost goofy about these books. But, in the spirit of taking a tentative step out of the self-help closet, I'm recommending a new book, Too Soon Old, Too Late Smart: Thirty True Things You Need to Know Now.

First off, I love the title. I'm a sucker for a good title. Second off, it's not so much a self-help book as it is a collection of thoughtful essays on important spiritual truths. Each chapter tackles one maxim. Some of my favorites were "The statute of limitations has expired on most of our childhood traumas," "Nobody likes to be told what to do," and "It's a poor idea to lie to oneself." Then there are the ones that elicited a sardonic grin from me: "The problems of the elderly are frequently serious but seldom interesting," and "Parents have a limited ability to shape children's behavior, except for the worse."

The author is psychiatrist Gordon Livingston. The foreword is by Elizabeth Edwards, wife of vice presidential candidate John Edwards. They got to know each other through a bereaved parents' online community; both have children who have died, in Dr. Livingston's case, he lost two children. So he has some actual hard life experience from which to base his advice. I seems so unfair that tragedy gives him more authority to speak, but to me it certainly does.

Here's an excerpt to give you a sense of Livingston's writing, from the chapter "The most secure prisons are the ones we construct for ourselves":

Probably the single most confusing thing that people tell each other is "I love you." We long to hear this powerful and reassuring message. Taken alone, however, unsupported by consistently loving behavior, this is frequently a lie -- or, more charitably, a promise unlikely to be fulfilled.
The disconnect between what we say and what we do is not merely a measure of hypocrisy, since we usually believe our statements of good intent. We simply pay too much attention to words -- ours and others' -- and not enough to the actions that really define us. The walls of our self-constructed prisons are made up in equal parts of our fear of risk and our dream that the world and the people in it will conform to our fondest wishes. It is hard to let go of a comforting illusion, but harder still to construct a happy life out of perceptions and beliefs that do not correspond to the world around us.

I somewhat hesitate to call this book a self-help book, even though that was the section where it was shelved in the bookstore where I bought it. A label on the back of the book says, "Personal Growth/Psychology." This book takes up an interesting space -- it seems much more serious and world-weary than the average pop psychology book. Yet it contains spiritual truths likely accessible to people of different faiths or of none.