Links

Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits – NYTimes.com

~ Mark

Learn in different locations. Mixing related skills in one study session makes them easier to learn. Spread your study sessions and testing/reviews over time for best retention. Highly-focused immersion is not always better than a more eclectic approach. I think the overarching theme here is that making it easier for yourself isn’t always the wisest thing. If you give the brain some variety it will do remarkable job of pulling things together.

Forget What You Know About Good Study Habits – NYTimes.com

A Cruel Country by Roland Barthes : The New Yorker

~ Mark

“Journal excerpts by Roland Barthes about mourning his mother, Henriette, who died at eighty-four, in October, 1977.” It’s a real shame this one is behind a paywall. Favorite bits:

What I find utterly terrifying is mourning’s discontinuous character.

And:

Mourning: not a crushing oppression, a jamming (which would suppose a “refill”), but a painful availability: I am vigilant, expectant, awaiting the onset of a “sense of life”.

And also:

1st mourning
false liberty
2nd mourning
desolate liberty
deadly, without
worthy occupation

A Cruel Country by Roland Barthes : The New Yorker

Vanity sizing for men < PopMatters

~ Mark

On the recent Esquire pants-size exposé:

Retailers’ facilitating the illusion that we are thinner than we are is a by-product of their chief goal, which is to force us to try on every item of clothing we are considering buying and let the endowment effect work its behavioral magic. Trying something on invests us in completing the purchase to a much greater degree—we’ve gone to all that trouble already and want something to show for our effort—and it also habituates us to the idea that we already own the thing we put on, and to not buy it feels as though we have lost something or had something taken away from us. So the sizes are just very vague guidelines to help us know which items to take to the fitting rooms.

Come to think of it, the endowment effect is probably another reason smart parents tell kids not to touch anything when they go in the store.
Vanity sizing for men < PopMatters

Adam Phillips on the happiness myth | Books | The Guardian

~ Mark

Happiness and the right to pursue it are sometimes wildly unrealistic as ideals; and, because wildly unrealistic, unconsciously self-destructive.

Interesting essay with some good tidbits. This bit on pathologies could also apply, more mildly, to how we react to differing opinions:

We tend to pathologise the forms of happiness we cannot bear.

And on education:

There are, for example, only two reasons for children to go to school – apart, that is, from acquiring the werewithal to earn a living: to make friends, and to see if they can find something of absorbing interest to themselves.

Adam Phillips on the happiness myth | Books | The Guardian

Interview with William Gibson – Viceland Today

~ Mark

What we call terrorism is always asymmetric warfare. 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.

Interview with William Gibson – Viceland Today

The 72-Hour Expert

~ Mark

P.J. O’Rourke goes to Afghanistan.

A Pashtun tribal leader told me that a “problem among Afghan politicians is that they do not tell the truth.” It’s a political system so new that that needed to be said out loud.

The 72-Hour Expert

TMR: An Interview with George Saunders

~ Mark

meaghano:

George Saunders in a wonderful, wonderful interview.

Success is nice because then you don’t have to worry so much about having been unfairly robbed of your very richly deserved success. Success is bad because momentary good fortune can temporarily hide the fact that you are still, despite your success, full of shit.

So much good stuff here:

Interviewer: So much of your fiction is charged with social import. Given our recent political upheavals, have you ever thought of writing overt political satire?

Saunders: I’m not very interested in that kind of satire because it works on the assumption that They Are Assholes. Fiction works on the assumption that They Are Us, on a Different Day.

And:

Any mastery you can achieve in writing is totally personal and incredibly nuanced. It’s a sort of antimastery, feeling comfortable with being unsure.

And also:

One of the wonderful benefits of energetically pursuing a writing career is that I’ve come to understand the staggering limitations of my abilities. […] So one way I cope with this humbling state of affairs is via a little mantra: If I just stay fully engaged in whatever has presented itself, things will be fine. That is, I try not to think about things like: Next, I begin MY NOVEL!

TMR: An Interview with George Saunders