My intent with this series of posts was to go through all the principles from Dale Carnegie‘s book and discuss how each one might apply to the improv world. But as I have been thinking about this topic, I have been tempted to wander down a different path. I may still return to the original ...
I just finished The End of Overeating by David Kessler, former head of the FDA in the first Bush and Clinton administrations. In it he argues that the primary driver of our current obesity epidemic is the ubiquitous availability of large portions of hyperpalatable foods. What are hyperpalatable foods? Open a Chili’s menu or visit ...
Recently, I finished a fascinating book called, The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature by Geoffrey Miller. In it, Miller makes the case that many of the things that make us human are the result of sexual selection, not natural selection. Our capacity for language, music, art, kindness, intelligence and ...
I tend to have about 60-70 podcasts on my iPod these days waiting for me to listen to them. One of the happy accidents of this is that I often hear interviews about movies after I’ve actually seen a film (instead of during the promotional run up to the film). So this morning, as I ...
It’s been a while since I have talked about my book club. For those who might not know, I’ve been running a book club for almost a year and a half. I think we have done 15 books so far. On Monday night we discussed Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee. It may have been our ...
Tomorrow night is book club night for me. It’s probably the night each month I most look forward to these days. I’m a little shocked how much I enjoy it to be honest. In college I was an English major, but I never loved literature back then. I had a great class my Freshman year ...
I just saw this announced on the forums of Two Plus Two Publishing by Mason Malmuth: We have just given Amazon permission to create kindle-books from Hold ‘em Poker for Advanced Players and The Theory of Poker. We’ll see how these do and then decide if we should do any more. Finally some decent quality ...
The Kindle is really handy for checking out a lot of books in an efficient manner. You can quickly download samples from several books and then take your time reading through them. The sample is usually about 5-10% of the book. That’s usually enough of a book to get a good feel whether or not ...
How often have you heard some variation to, “There’s no secret to weight loss, you just have to exercise and eat less.” The implications are clear, if you are fat, it’s because you are lazy (you don’t exercise enough) or you are slovenly (you eat too much). Obesity and the associated diseases are the wages ...
I started a book club through meetup.com. If anyone has some recommendations for good contemporary fiction, please let me know. I’d like to work out my list for the first few months. What are the requirements for inclusion on my list? Books must be in paperback and ubiquitous enough to be found in a local ...