Archive
Prestige
…if your goal is to leverage the degree into a high-paying corporate job, then the “brand name” truly matters. The idea of putting yourself into debt can be intimidating, especially if you’re not from a wealthy family. But the extra expense of a prestigious school will usually pay off
…Alumni network. Most high-powered executives simply won’t make time for an ambitious young professional—unless he or she is a student at his alma mater.
…Peer network. The best schools usually attract motivated, ambitious students—so if you attend one, in 10 or 15 years your peer network is likely to be orders of magnitude better than it would otherwise be.
…Recruiters. Finding excellent job candidates can be hard—therefore, many top firms take the short cut of recruiting from a limited number of high-calibre schools, which have essentially done the screening for them.
…Turbocharging your resume. There are certain powerful signals of professional accomplishment. If you become a Rhodes Scholar or attend Harvard or an IIM, that’s a permanent fact that most people will remember—and it will influence their perception of you. For the rest of your life, you’ll be marked as exceptional, because a high-quality brand has embraced you as one of its own. That alone is often worth the price of admission.
The Sad State of Friendship
As Brian and his wife wandered off toward the No. 2 train afterward, it crossed my mind that he was the kind of guy who might have ended up a groomsman at my wedding if we had met in college.
That was four years ago. We’ve seen each other four times since. We are “friends,” but not quite friends. We keep trying to get over the hump, but life gets in the way.
Our story is not unusual. In your 30s and 40s, plenty of new people enter your life, through work, children’s play dates and, of course, Facebook. But actual close friends — the kind you make in college, the kind you call in a crisis — those are in shorter supply.
As people approach midlife, the days of youthful exploration, when life felt like one big blind date, are fading. Schedules compress, priorities change and people often become pickier in what they want in their friends.
No matter how many friends you make, a sense of fatalism can creep in: the period for making B.F.F.’s, the way you did in your teens or early 20s, is pretty much over. It’s time to resign yourself to situational friends: K.O.F.’s (kind of friends) — for now…
As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added.
Quote of the Day
If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
~ Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
The Summer Day
by Mary Oliver
From The Truro Bear and Other Adventures: Poems and Essays
Stupid Smart People
Here’s a simple arithmetic question: A bat and ball cost a dollar and ten cents. The bat costs a dollar more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs ten cents. This answer is both obvious and wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and a dollar and five cents for the bat.)
For more than five decades, Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this and analyzing our answers. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists, and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents—reason was our Promethean gift—Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.
When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on a long list of mental shortcuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. These shortcuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether. Asked about the bat and the ball, we forget our arithmetic lessons and instead default to the answer that requires the least mental effort…
Via Why Smart People are Stupid
Be honest: Did you answer the simple arithmetic question above correctly?
Scenes from My Upcoming Music Video, Part IV
Scenes from My Upcoming Music Video, Part I
Scenes from My Upcoming Music Video, Part II
Scenes from My Upcoming Music Video, Part III
Scenes from My Upcoming Music Video, Part III
Look there She Blogs, the Girl is Strange, No Question
Look, there she goes, that girl is so peculiar
I wonder if she’s feeling well
With a dreamy, far-off look
And her nose stuck in [the web]
What a puzzle to the rest of us is [Green]…I’m afraid she’s rather odd
Very different from the rest of us
She’s nothing like the rest of us
Yes, different from the rest of us is [Green]…Look there she goes, that girl is strange but special
A most peculiar mademoiselle
It’s a pity and a sin
She doesn’t quite fit in
‘Cause she really is a funny girl
A beauty but a funny girl
She really is a funny girl that [Green].
;D
Scenes from My Upcoming Music Video, Part II
What the World is In/directly Teaching Children
The VIP Room at the Middle School Dance
a Los Angeles area charter school where students are receiving a lesson in the politics of rich and poor straight out of a third world country.
As Magiera recounts on her blog BellaNoise, her son’s junior high decided to add to the school’s traditional spring dance. Tickets to the event would be $15 — for the mere peons, that is. For the more well-to-do — or simply socially desperate — the school decided to charge an extra $5 for admission to a “VIP Lounge,” where, among other things, students would receive special access to a dessert bar and a swag bag. Magiera was horrified, and forbid her son from buying his way into special privileges…
winners of the lucky sperm and egg club raffle get to buy their way into the VIP Lounge while those with less in the way of funds get an early lesson in how they will likely spend their lives on the wrong side of the red velvet line, courtesy of their own school. And no, this is not just an ”only in LA” story. Such situations are becoming increasingly common…
The school gives kids eligible for free school lunches extra spins in the school lottery used to determine admissions, which means there is likely a decent population of children in attendance who lack the $5 to separate themselves from the mass of their fellow students.
New West principal Sharon Weir did not respond to emails or telephone calls seeking comment. So instead I turned to Madeline Levine, the author of the soon to be published Teach Your Children Well, for clarification. ”Frankly, this VIP idea reflects badly on kids, but even worse on the adults,” she told me. ”No one gains from making some kids more ‘special’ than others, especially when special is based on having a few extra bucks.”
I Need to be on this List. Seriously.
However, I’d like to be known for creating my own wealth.
5. Birgit Rausing
Rausing, who inherited her father-in-law’s Swiss packaging company when her husband died in 2000, is worth an estimated $13.8 billion, according to Wealth-X.
3. Christy Walton
Walton inherited her share of the Walmart fortune after the passing of her husband John and is currently worth $28.2 billion, according to Wealth-X. In addition to her Walmart stake, Walton netted big bucks from a smart bet her husband made on First Solar, according to Forbes.
2. Gina Rinehart
Judged by some indexes to be the world’s richest woman, Rinehart made her billions as daughter of an Australian mining magnate. She’s worth $29.1 billion, according to Wealth-X.
1. Alice Walton
Walton was able to push her way to the top of the list at $29.8 billion thanks to Walmart stock trading at a 12-year high, according to Wealth-X. The daughter of Walmart founder Sam Walton established an art museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, the town that’s home to Walmart’s (sic)
The Making of a Music Video
I spent 3+ hours rehearsing. 10+ hours filming. 12+ hours working on pulling film stills.
My friend will be editing the final video. Hopefully, it will be completed in time for a 1 June group screening of student films.
Lisa Green
GothamGreen212 