Quote of the day
We pay for our sins, to be sure. But even for our virtues there is sometimes a price. I think that everyone who has learned courage from football has got to recognize what it may cost, no matter what the coaches and the boosters say. Character costs something; courage can come with a price.
~MARK EDMUNDSON, author of Why Football Matters
CREATIVITY
Elizabeth Gilbert’s next book will be a how-to on creativity [Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
], LA Times | Tweet
Elizabeth Gilbert has put creativity under the microscope. As the author of the runaway bestselling memoir Eat, Pray, Love
, the writer wrestled with how to follow up her biggest hit. For years she wrestled with what to write next, and how to be happy with her work as a writer.
EXERCISE
How to Think About Exercise, Charles Darwin’s Daily Walks, Psychology Today | Tweet
Charles Darwin: barnacle aficionado, intrepid scholar, cautious iconoclast – and dogged, daily walker. The grandfather of modern evolutionary theory walked in rain and sunshine, in youth and age, in company and solitude. This constitutional was not just for cardiovascular fitness, or to post his thousands of letters. It was a vital part of his intellectual routine.
SPORTS
What does football really teach us? [Why Football Matters]
, Big Think | Tweet
Football replaced baseball as the “national pastime” long ago (despite some arguments to the contrary). The hoopla surrounding the upcoming secular American holiday of Super Bowl XLIX Sunday testifies conclusively to that fact. The trickle down effect of that passion inspires younger and younger people to put on the pads and crash into one another as well as make parents shuttle their charges to practices and games and witness the conflict—all in the name of football’s educational benefits of perseverance, courage, and teamwork.
MARKETING
How to dominate content marketing in 2015, Forbes | Tweet
Create content with users in mind. Content is for users. It’s not for search engines or crawlers. It’s all about the users.
ENTERTAINMENT
Woody Allen is going to make his first TV show–for Amazon
, Quartz | Tweet
Amazon just upped the ante in the streaming television wars. The e-commerce colossus announced this morning it has signed acclaimed—and controversial—writer and director Woody Allen to create an original series for its Prime Instant Video service. Details remain scant, but Amazon said in a statement that it has ordered a full season of the show, which will involve an undisclosed number of half-hour episodes. It will be available in the US, UK, and Germany.
RELATIONSHIPS
Same sex-couples may have more egalitarian relationships, NPR | Tweet
A little more than 10 years ago gay marriage was not an option for same-sex couples anywhere in the U.S. Now it’s legal in the majority of the country, and so we wondered what research can tell us about these couples and their marriages. Robert-Jay Green is the founder of the Rockway Institute for Research in LGBT Psychology, and he’s been studying same-sex couples since 1975. Welcome to the program.
TIME MANAGEMENT
How to get organized [The Distraction Trap]
, Forbes | Tweet
January is the perfect time of year to get organized, and set yourself up for a productive year ahead. Many of us want to be more organized, but that’s a fairly general aim. We’re unlikely to achieve such a broad aim unless we break it down and get specific about what being more organized means in our individual case.
SOCIAL SCIENCES
Racial bias, even when we have good intentions, NYT | Tweet
The deaths of African-Americans at the hands of the police in Ferguson, Mo., in Cleveland and on Staten Island have reignited a debate about race. Some argue that these events are isolated and that racism is a thing of the past. Others contend that they are merely the tip of the iceberg, highlighting that skin color still has a huge effect on how people are treated.
WRITING
See how easily you can track your character’s emotional arc in a scene [Book on Acting
], Helping Writers Become Authors | Tweet
Most authors try to understand what a character is feeling at a particular moment: He’s angry here. He’s happy there. Many authors alsoconsider how the character’s emotional arc changes over the course of the entire story: He begins insecure. He ends confident. But few think about how the character’s emotional arc develops over the course of a single scene.
Yet another reason why you should plan before you write [Creative On Command
], Jennifer Blanchard | Tweet
When it comes to writing a novel, there are always two options available to you–you can come up with a story idea, sit down and start writing. Or you can take the time to plan and develop your story, in full, before you write a single word. (And there’s also the third hybrid option of planning some of it and then sitting down to write. But if you’re going to plan, you may as well just go for it and plan the whole thing.)