January 2012
Direct response advertising to strangers is demanding. You pay for your click or you pay for your stamp and then you get a shot at making a sale. No sale, no revenue, no revenue, no more stamps. As a result, direct marketers sometimes race to the bottom. They sell what sells the first time, and use the words that work right now. If the largest conversion rate is for a flat belly diet, then...
How many debut novels get sold to a publisher for reportedly almost $700,000, stay on the bestseller list for weeks, receive lengthy blurbs from Jonathan Franzen and James Patterson, are the subject of a lengthy Vanity Fair piece describing how the book got written, have its film rights optioned to HBO, and on and on and on? I’d love to signal independent-mindedness by saying Chad...
Today on the Dish, Andrew assessed Ron Paul’s scrambling effect on America’s left/right binary, heaved at extended exposure to Santorum, worried that the Christianist par excellence would blunt Paul’s impact on the GOP, and was sure that he would almost certainly take America to war with Iran. We kept up on the latest Iowa polls (a state that matters, though South Carolina...
To quote Merlin Mann, “You don’t let the guy with the broom control how many elephants are in the parade.” Harsh to say, but the fact is that great storytellers and artists and ruckus makers manage to insulate themselves from the people they’re going to hassle. And the job of those that are being hassled by the commotion is to be hassled by the commotion. No commotion, no...
Richard Marshall reviews Alex Rosenberg’s new book, The Atheist’s Guide To Reality:
Rosenberg talks about having fun. Nice nihilism implies that attributing meaning to our lives is just an introspective illusion selected by blind evolutionary processes, caused by photons and fermions blindly operating, working in real time in our brains, that has helped us survive. We attach meaning...
December 2011
Teenagers are less eager to get behind the wheel than ever before. In 1983, 46% of 16-year-olds had a driver’s license. That figure dropped to 31% by 2008:
The decline in driving by younger Americans is fed by many factors: the high cost of gas and insurance at a time of economic insecurity; tighter restrictions on teen drivers in many states; and roads that are more congested than ever,...
GTD, 18 minute plans, organized folders… none of them work as well as you’d like. The reason is simple: you don’t want to get more done. You’re afraid. Getting more done would mean exposing yourself to considerable risk, to crossing bridges, to putting things into the world. Which means failure. The leap the lizard brain takes when confronting the opportunity is a simple...
It is fashionable these days to decry “food miles.” The longer food has spent traveling to your plate, the more oil has been burnt and the more peace has been shattered along the way. But why single out food? Should we not protest against T-shirt miles, too, and laptop miles? After all, fruits and vegetables account for more than 20 percent of all exports from poor countries,...
“I voted for Obama in 2008 but we need a change. Dr Paul is consistent and honest, which is very hard to find. He is not just telling us what we have heard before,” - Samantha Dunn, a 28-year-old teacher in Iowa, to the Daily Telegraph.
The only standard is impermanence. It’s very easy to believe that the world we live in has always been this way. Your ethnic group has always had a similar standing. Technology has always permitted certain kinds of interactions and is always improving. Real estate values always rise from decade to decade. (Until they don’t). A job has always been the standard way to make a living....
I think it comes down to one or the other: How little can I get away with? vs. How much can I do? Surprisingly, they both take a lot of work. The closer you get to either edge, the more it takes. That’s why most people settle for the simplest path, which is do just enough to remain unnoticed. No one can maximize on every engagement, every project, every customer and every opportunity. The...
From all of us to all of you.
Sam Biddle captions this government PSA:
As you know, Christmas trees are made out of tree, and trees, like all plants, can dry out. Most plants, however, don’t have an enormous string of cheap Chinese electrical wiring draped around them—so the Christmas tree is a hidden bomb inside your house. Do you hear it? Tick. Tick. Tick. The CPSC recommends having a designated “tree...
You can’t be merry by yourself. Sure, you can be content, happy, possibly even delirious. But merriment requires a group, and that group is almost always a group you can see and touch, one that’s sharing the same molecules of air, face to face. The digital revolution continues to get deeper, wider and more important. But it has made no progress at all at increasing merriment....
Today on the Dish, the economy exacted enormous strain on the middle class, Andrew put the Ron Paul newsletters in perspective, and he took on the larger issue of bigotry in the GOP. Michael Dougherty offered a short history of the newsletters, readers stormed the in-tray, and Neil Cavuto urged the Republican media to take Ron Paul seriously. WFB would not have disqualified the congressman based...
Someone at LessWrong transcribed Tyler Cowen’s TEDx talk on the problem with stories and narrative—and how we let ourselves be governed by them. It’s a good one, and faster to read than listen. I think of a few major problems when we think too much in terms of narrative. First, narratives tend to be too simple. The point of a narrative is to strip it away, not just into 18...
One of the advantages of having put your soul on eBay is that it frees you up. You can say anything to anyone, and feel no consequences. You can go from promising to be more pro-gay than Ted Kennedy to backing an amendment to the Constitution permanently putting gays into second class status. You can go from calling yourself “progressive” to “the most conservative candidate in...
We’re all looking for someone to trust. People and institutions that will do what they say and say what they mean. Banks used to use marble pillars and armed guards to make it clear that our money was safe. Doctors put diplomas on the wall and wear white smocks. Institutions and relationships don’t work without trust. It’s not an accident that a gold standard in business is...
When journalism was local, the math of reporting was pretty simple: you found a trend, an event or an issue that was important and you wrote about it. After all, you were the voice to your readers. Being in sync with a hundred or a thousand print journalists around the world was important, otherwise your readers woul’d be left out of a story everyone else knew about. And being in sync let...
Statistics and data collection could help predict student success:
In April, Austin Peay debuted software that recommends courses based on a student’s major, academic record, and how similar students fared in that class. Some professors fretted about students misinterpreting the Netflix-like tips as commands, but the Gates Foundation quickly ponied up $1-million to refine the software so...
The purpose of an elevator pitch isn’t to close the sale. The goal isn’t even to give a short, accurate, Wikipedia-standard description of you or your project. And the idea of using vacuous, vague words to craft a bland mission statement is dumb. No, the purpose of an elevator pitch is to describe a situation or solution so compelling that the person you’re with wants to hear...
brightcove.createExperiences(); Question? askandrew@thedailybeast.com
Video archive here.
A failure is a project that doesn’t work, an initiative that teaches you something at the same time the outcome doesn’t move you directly closer to your goal. A mistake is either a failure repeated, doing something for the second time when you should have known better, or a misguided attempt (because of carelessness, selfishness or hubris) that hindsight reminds you is worth...
Ashley Fetters wonders:
Indiana University sex researchers Debby Herbenick and Vanessa Schick found in a recent study that nearly 60 percent of American women between 18 and 24 are sometimes or always completely bare down there, while almost half of women in the U.S. between 25 and 29 reported similar habits. Herbenick’s numbers show a clear-cut trend: More women lack pubic hair than...
Not a secret, often overlooked: “Keep your promises.” If you say you’ll show up every day at 8 am, do so. Every day. If you say your service is excellent, make it so. If circumstances or priorities change, well then, invest to change them back. Or tell the truth, and mean it. If traffic might be bad, plan for it. Is there actually unusually heavy call volume? Really? Want a...
A Tumblr post with life advice got sent around to several people I know, via retweets and shares. Key excerpts: This is the thing: When you hit 28 or 30, everything begins to divide. You can see very clearly two kinds of people. On one side, people who have used their 20s to learn and grow, to find … themselves and their dreams, people who know what works and what doesn’t, who have pushed...
Today on the Dish, Andrew eulogized his friend Hitch, and we assembled remembrances here, here, and here. Peter Hitchens remembered his brother’s courage, we revisited his final interview, and in our AAA video, Andrew recounted a night with Hitch. Hitchens ranted against Mother Teresa and Princess Diana, he flourished in the aftermath of Jerry Falwell’s death, and Sullivan...
There are only three kinds of sales: Buying a refill, another unit of a service or product you’ve already purchased before Switching to a new model/brand/style Buying something for the first time Here’s an overlooked truth: until quite recently, buying something for the first time was a very rare and almost revolutionary act. In fact, more than a billion people on Earth don’t...
I could sense it coming. But I couldn’t write anything beforehand and I cannot write anything worthy of him now. So I just sat down an hour ago when I heard the news - Aaron told me as he clicked on Gawker - and sat a while and got up to write and then blubbered a bit and, staring at the screen, read through some emails from him.
I’d asked him last year to write a letter to the...
Richard Haass summarizes a new report [pdf] by F. Gregory Gause on the US-Saudi relationship:
He recommends that the United States reimagine the relationship as simply transactional, based on cooperation when interests—rather than habit—dictate. Prioritizing those interests will therefore be critical. Rather than pressuring Riyadh for domestic political reform, or asking it to reduce global oil...
A reader writes:
DOMA is a tax nightmare. If you want to simplify people’s taxes, repeal it and let states define marriage as they always have in the past.
The article you linked to did not mention that some businesses now keep two sets of books: one for state taxes, the other for federal taxes. The companies need to keep track of which deductions they can take in the state that are not...
from anonymous angry people Expose yourself to art you don’t yet understand Precisely measure the results that are important to you Stay blind to the metrics that don’t matter Fail often Ship Lead, don’t manage so much Seek out uncomfortable situations Make an impact on the people who matter to you Be better at your baseline skills than anyone else Copyedit less, invent more...
Whether you think of Nietzsche or Kanye West when you hear the line “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”—you probably think of it as true. Or at least I did. Short term struggle builds long term strength. Even life’s toughest experiences have a redeeming quality inasmuch as it instructs or inspires or hardens or softens a person in the right away. Etc....
The internet is an engine of connection. It has been from the start (email, chat, forums, blogs, social media…) One reason that so many of the most popular sites online are those that permit people to express and expose their ideas is that those are the pages we care most about. We go back to see how people responded, how the traffic is, what we can do to improve the page. Lifestyle media...
Charles Simic hasn’t found it, even in his seventies:
I’m having trouble deciding whether I understand the world better now that I’m in my seventies than I did when I was younger, or whether I’m becoming more and more clueless every day. The truth is somewhere in between, I suspect, but that doesn’t make me rest any easier at night. Like others growing old, I had expected that after...
If we put a number on it, people will try to make the number go up. Now that everyone is a marketer, many people are looking for a louder megaphone, a chance to talk about their work, their career, their product… and social media looks like the ideal soapbox, a free opportunity to shout to the masses. But first, we’re told to make that number go up. Increase the number of fans,...
Stores went from being buildings to becoming websites… and now to devices. But Mr. Gimbel and Mr. Macy would be amazed and probably peturbed if they had to use an iPhone for more than a few minutes. Some easily answered requests: Why can’t I see my apps in alphabetical order? Or in the order they are most used? Why can’t I list the apps in text form, putting 80 on a page in two...
All dating compatability tests end up testing for a simple question: “Will we laugh at the same shit?” That’s one nugget among many from the relatively recent New Yorker article on online dating. Another nugget: the answer to the question “Do you like the taste of beer?” is more predictive than any other of whether you’re willing to have sex on a first date.
...
Photo by Carl Court/AFP/Getty
Today on the Dish, Andrew addressed David Cameron’s refusal to cave to Merkozy, the GOP front-runners joined forces with Netanyahu, and we and collected reax to the euro deal here. Gingrich’s delusions were forged by science fiction, we’re skeptical of his “emergency readiness,” and Newt’s surge benefited from impeccable timing....
The Daily Show Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook
Today on the Dish, Jon Stewart marked the end of America, Andrew took stock of Perry’s Christianism, and the Texas governor’s campaign committed yet another amusing, unforced error. Gingrich embraced an anti-conservative and openly hostile foreign policy, he dangled...
Ben Mathis-Lilley isn’t concerned about the career of Miley Cyrus following a leaked video of her copping to her weed habit:
For one, hard drugs aren’t something “accessible” celebrities do. “I bet if we met we would really get along, just talking and smoking meth and getting arrested” is not a thing people think about their favorite singer or actor. Furthermore,...
“I had no choice, I just couldn’t get out of bed.” “I had no choice, it was the best program I could get into.” “I had no choice, he told me to do it…” Really? It’s probably more accurate to say, “the short-term benefit/satisfaction/risk avoidance was a lot higher than anything else, so I chose to do what I did.” Remarkable work...
A reader writes:
This has been an issue in the civil aviation industry for decades. There’s an old joke, “Future planes will have two pilots: a human and a Doberman. The dog’s job is to bite the pilot if he tries to touch anything.”
And to some extent that is becoming true. Every airline has standards about how much of a given flight can be flown by the pilot in...
Showing up matters more than ever, particularly if you promised you would. Not just showing up in person, but showing up emotionally, or with support, or with a resource that was inconvenient for you to produce. We’re no longer judging you by what sort of widgets your factory makes. We’re judging you by what we can expect from you in the future.
Some need to moonlight as rappers, apparently:
A reader writes:
About the decline of “law” as an industry: I’d guess that the advent of computer technologies hit law offices harder than most. In college I worked at a law firm that handled paper-intensive asbestos litigation. The firm of 60 attorneys employed over 150 paralegals and file clerks, most of whom simply handled...
Why bother buying them, putting them up, electrifying them and then taking them down again? After all, the economist wonders, what’s in it for you? The very same non-economic contribution is going on online, every single day. More and more of the content we consume was made by our peers, for free. My take: People like the way it feels to live in a community filled with decorated houses....
Since the invention of media (the book, the record, the movie…), there’s been a pyramid of value and pricing delivered by those that create it: Starting from the bottom: Free content is delivered to anyone who is willing to consume it, usually as a way of engaging attention and leading to sales of content down the road. This is the movie trailer, the guest on Oprah, the free...
Is very much intact. Spare R.M. at DiA on the doomsday hysteria:
[T]he defence budget was slated to increase some 23% between 2012 and 2021. Now, according to Veronique de Rugy, the Pentagon will have to make do with a 16% boost. … Or to put it another way, as Lawrence Korb does, the “sequestration will return defense spending in real terms to its FY 2007 level, the next to last...
The secret of good reviews and positive word of mouth is simple: if people get the joke, feel like insiders, finish the book, grow, learn, and are part of what you make, you win. If they don’t, if your product or service makes them feel dumb or poor or excluded, they won’t talk about you the same way. You don’t need everyone to talk about you. But obsessing about making a...
Benjamin Schwarz comments on John Updike’s writing at the end of his life, and says: Above all, and most poignantly, this collection highlights Updike’s evaluation of the slackening of his own mental and athletic prowess… A generous and companionable critic and an avowed Christian, Updike met the decline of his powers with courage and good humor, but also with a clear-eyed...