A TV episode produced inexpensively and restricted in scope to use as few non-regular cast members, effects, and sets as possible. Most bottle episodes are shot on sets already built for other episodes, frequently the main interior sets for a series, and consist largely of dialogue or scenes for which no special preparations are needed.
Links
How to Avoid Burnout: Marissa Mayer – Businessweek
I have a theory that burnout is about resentment. And you beat it by knowing what it is you’re giving up that makes you resentful.
That’s so incisive. It’s not about the work, it’s about what you’re giving up that you’d rather not. I love when I find ideas that take things up one level of thinking, like a psychological heuristic. Burnout is about resentment, boredom indicates a gap between your interests and your current environment; unrealistic expecations have their roots in denial; when you talk to someone, you’re talking to their agent, etc.
Metaphors We Live By – George Lakoff and Mark Johnson [pdf]
Lots of great examples here. E.g., ideas are food (raw facts; a half-baked theory; let an idea percolate; devouring a book) and theories are buildings (ideas need a foundation and support; construct a theoretical framework; buttress an argument), etc. (via). Makes me think of George Saunders:
When we get better at expressiveness, we get better at understanding, better at sympathy, better at bullshit-detection, better at experiencing pleasure, better at true engagement (with others, with the world, with ourselves).
Update: I think this is one reason I love learning about the history of a word. Like when I learned the word raga is related to the Sanskrit word for dye (the musical form colors your mood!), or when I was reading The Gift of Fear recently and learned that intuition has roots in a word meaning protection, defense, guardianship (you trust it because it has your interests at heart). Learning where a word comes from, like metaphors, has a way of changing your perspective or giving you another lens to see language through. And yeah, I just used two metaphors to explain how etymology is like a metaphor. Boom!
Los Angeles Review of Books – Life Is Short; Art Is Shorter
Life is interesting all over. Every life, properly understood, is compelling. Anyone aspiring to be an artist knows there’s no such thing as why-bother or nothing-to-see.
Your biggest career decision is who you marry | Penelope Trunk Blog
You have to be really clear on what you are not willing to give up—because you’ll probably be giving up everything else.
Your biggest career decision is who you marry | Penelope Trunk Blog
Six Rules for Dining Out – Magazine – The Atlantic
The laughing and the smiling will set in. Beware! That’s when you need to stop going.
The Top Idea in Your Mind
I’ve found there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding—thoughts like the Nile Perch in the way they push out more interesting ideas. One I’ve already mentioned: thoughts about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention sink. The other is disputes. These too are engaging in the wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely interesting ideas, but without the substance. So avoid disputes if you want to get real work done. Corollary: Avoid becoming an administrator, or your job will consist of dealing with money and disputes.
When to leave grad school off your resume | Penelope Trunk Blog
People who have excitement about deciding for themselves what to read and what to learn are people who stop going to school and join the workforce. The workplace, done right, is a place for self-directed learning.
When to leave grad school off your resume | Penelope Trunk Blog
Joe Posnanski » Posts Bubbas and Goodbyes
What, after all, are reality TV shows except an effort to reproduce the drama and unexpected turns of sports?
Eternal Vigilance « Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello
@jennylish: “The price of accurately sourcing quotations is also eternal vigilance! (via)
Thomas Jefferson didn’t say this. But strangely enough, I’ve discovered a whole string of quite famous people who did say this, which makes it seem even odder that the attribution got pinned on a relatively obscure figure like [Wendell] Phillips.
Art for Everybody by Susan Orlean
From an October 15, 2001 profile of Thomas Kinkade in The New Yorker:
We believe that the walls of the home are the new frontier for branding.
The New Kendrick Lamar/Dr. Dre Song, and Other Examples of Egregiously Obvious Ghostwriting – Grantland
How Do You Make Life-Changing Decisions? | RyanHoliday.net
Books. Books. Books. People have been doing [whatever it is your deciding about] for a while now. They’ve been moving West, leaving school, investing their savings, getting dumped or filing for divorce, starting businesses, quitting their jobs, fighting, dying and fucking for thousands of years. This is all written down, often in the first person. Read it. Stop pretending you’re breaking new ground.
Shame: A Durkheimian Take – The New Inquiry
The fact that addiction is a clinical condition that is straying into more and more areas of life is itself an interesting sociological phenomenon. It’s not that the field of psychology does not or should not exist, but efforts to cram more and more into this field represents a form of societal dishonesty that rivals the psychic dishonesty of addicts refusing to come clean.
Why I Hate The ‘Goldberg Variations’ : NPR
[Bach] says, in effect, yes this is bound to be boring but I am going to be so masterful that you will be in awe and not care even if you will be bored.
Jeremy Denk is a great writer. See also Denk on recording and photos of Glenn Gould during the March 1955 ‘Goldberg’ recording sessions collected by The Selvedge Yard.
In China, millions make themselves at home in caves – latimes.com
More than 30 million Chinese people live in caves, many of them in Shaanxi province where the Loess plateau, with its distinctive cliffs of yellow, porous soil, makes digging easy and cave dwelling a reasonable option.
Wow! 30 million.
In China, millions make themselves at home in caves – latimes.com
Seth’s Blog » More About the This American Life Retraction
If there are more stories about this, in-depth ones, I am afraid Glass is going to conclude We wanted to believe. That is going to be his deepest comment on this. I hope I’m wrong. I don’t agree with that assessment. I think the real problem is We wanted things to be simple.
Rebranding is the Last Refuge of Terrorists | Mother Jones
Bin Laden’s biggest concern was al-Qaeda’s media image among Muslims. He worried that it was so tarnished that, in a draft letter probably intended for [Atiyah Abd al-Rahman], he argued that the organization should find a new name.
(via) See also William Gibson on terrorism PR:
You’re a small group with no reputation, and you start covertly blowing up or murdering the people of a big group, like a government or a nation-state or a whole race. And you can’t just do it and then go and do the next one. You have to do it, and then go and do your PR. “We just bombed your mall. It was us.” And then maybe you do it, and some other guys, these upstart assholes across town, are calling up the news and saying, “We did it! We bombed the mall!” So then you have to get your PR guy on the phone and say, “No, they’re full of shit. WE bombed the mall.” So it’s about branding to that extent.
Words to Be Aware Of – Lone Gunman
Wish. Try. Should. Deserve.
n 1: Listening to Books
The essayist Sven Birkerts claims that all good reading involves self-mediation, effort, “collaboration” between the reader and the book, whereas audio books “determine” everything—“pace, timbre, inflection”—for the “captive listener.” The blogger and critic Scott Esposito is less careful to mask his snobbery: “Don’t go pretending like you’re some kind of big-time reader because you consumed the complete works of Balzac via mp3. No, you’re some guy who listened to an iPod while cooking dinner.” And when a New York Times reporter asked Harold Bloom a couple of years ago what he thought of audio books, the great Yale humanist told her that “deep reading really demands the inner ear as well as the outer ear.” It requires, he continued, the use of “that part of you which is open to wisdom. You need the text in front of you.” This sounds to me somewhat peculiar, but a lot of people basically agree with it. They believe that whatever part of you is “open to wisdom” is a part that can be activated only through the eyes.
Unless, of course, you are blind. In which case everything is obviously completely totally different.
Mark Larson 